The MGH Report

Michael G. Haran, Proprietor

DEMOCRACY AS WE KNOW IT

Posted by on Jan 7, 2024

DEMOCRACY AS WE KNOW IT

I was listening to MSNBC when Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale, was talking about how German society was stolen by the Nazis. The German narrative in the 1930’s should have been about how the county was economically coming back from WWI when it was highjacked by Hitler and his crony Nazis using the fear of returning to the depression of the 1920s. The same thing is currently happening in America. The country should be celebrating the rebound from the pandemic and the positive economy we are all now experiencing. Like Hitler, Trump is a mesmerizer. Because his MAGA base is so enthralled with him lies cannot be seen for what they are, plus, as Dilbert Cartoonist Scott Adams once said “Never underestimate the stupidity of the general public,” the MAGA base is so uninformed that they wouldn’t know a Trump lie from a Lincoln truth.

Since anyone born in the U.S. has never lived under any other political system than representative Democracy, it’s hard to understand how some people can be so caviler about losing it.  They don’t understand that their individual voice would be lost and they would be subjected to a form of social slavery where their opinion would never again matter.

Now, I still believe that the mass majority of American voters see Trump for what he is and want nothing to do with him. It’s the same vibe that beat him in 2020. But what’s unnerving is the fact that here are so many people that believe the economy is terrible simply because Trump says it is. These people think that the growing economy, high employment, low unemployment, and falling inflation is all a lie created by left-wing elitists.

Living where we do it’s frustrating that our voices can’t reach more people in middle America. But as Snyder said we have to work on the small stuff. Talk the truth to small groups and individuals; write meaningful letters to the editor of your local newspapers, knock on doors and put time into Democratic Club phone banks. Even though I don’t think Trump has a snowballs chance in hell of winning, just the thought of what could happen to America and the only political system most of us have ever known scares the bajebbers out of me and it should you too.

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IT’S THE ENVIRONMENT – CLIMATE PRIMER #2

Posted by on Sep 25, 2021

IT’S THE ENVIRONMENT – CLIMATE PRIMER #2

It’s The Environment

Edition #1 – Climate Primer

With the planet under severe stress in no small part to human activity, our environmental podcast topics will focus how humans can both repair and prevent further damage before natures decided it’s had enough and eliminated the earth major polluter and killer of plants and animals – namely us. Many of earth’s historic extensions have been unavoidable as the planet has stabilized to what it is today. If humans don’t change our ways, we may be the first of earth’s creature cause our own extinction.

With a new climate report just released by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I thought it would be a good time to update our Climate Primer. This edition we will take a look at how the Earth’s climate works, what’s causing global warming and how dangerous is it for life on the planet.

The 4,000 page report, which drew more than 700,000 viewers to a virtual, predawn press conference, is the first installment of the latest climate change assessment by the IPCC. It focuses on the physical science of climate change, and reports on the current state of the climate, possible climate futures, risk assessment and limiting future climate change.

Two other reports due out next year will assess impacts to society and ecosystems and strategies to adapt to and mitigate further changes.

Written by more than 200 of the world’s leading climate scientists, the report synthesizes the best available climate science information from more than 14,000 studies, this report is the most dire yet.

The report shows that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue at the same levels or are only slightly reduced, the outcome will be continued warming and worsening effects for at least the rest of the century. But if governments make immediate, drastic cuts in emissions, they can stabilize the climate at about 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming compared to preindustrial levels.

The West’s Megadrought

The West is currently in a megadrought as California and the southwest face soring temperatures. In a study published last year in the journal Science, researchers determined that climate change made drought conditions 46 percent worse between 2000 and 2018. We’re “living in a new climate,” said Stanford University climatologist Noah Diffenbaugh, “in which these water deficits primarily result from the influence of warming temperature.”

With 92% of the West under “severe” or “exceptional” drought according to the U.S. Drought Monitor and recent record-breaking temperatures of 107 degrees in Utah, 116 in Las Vegas, and 118 in Phoenix, I wanted to take a look back several years when the climate debate was raging in no small part to Donald Trump.

It’s about the weather

As the old saying goes, “If you want to know what the weather is look out your window.” When we talk about weather, we mean local and short-term. On one hand, when it rains or snows where you live, that’s weather. Climate, on the other hand, is long-term and regional. The climate of an area is the average weather conditions in a region over a long period of time. When we talk about climate being long-term, we mean really long-term. Even a few hundred years is pretty short-term when it comes to climate.

In fact, changes in climate sometimes take tens of thousands of years. That means if you happen to have a winter that isn’t as cold as usual, with not very much snow — or even two or three such winters in a row — that isn’t a change in climate. That’s just an anomaly — an event that falls outside of the usual statistical range but doesn’t represent any permanent, long-term change.

However, even small changes in climate can have major effects. When scientists talk about “the Ice Age,” you probably envision the world frozen, covered with snow and suffering from frigid temperatures. In fact, during the last ice age (ice ages recur roughly every 50,000 to 100,000 years), the earth’s average temperature was only 5 Celsius degrees cooler than modern temperature averages [Source: NASA].

 Climate Deniers

On the deniers’ side climate is always changing. The earth warms and cools about every ten thousand years. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen (Spitz-ber-gan). Ice ages have occurred in a hundred-thousand-year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age.

Eventually we will once again have glaciers in the middle of North America. In pre-historic times we had forest fires that burned from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and at one time the earth was covered in volcanos spewing tons of magma gases into the atmosphere. Humans have only been spewing for about a hundred years and affecting the climate for even less than that.

Research published in the journal “Science” on September 8, 2013 stated “Abrupt climate change has been a systemic feature of Earth’s climate for hundreds of thousands of years and may play an active role in longer term climate variability through its influence on ice age terminations.”

 Climate Believers

On the believers’ side, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of over 2,500 scientists from countries across the world, warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the climate changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.

During those “hundreds of thousands of years” climate anthropologists have been able to identify six major species die-offs most likely caused by CO2. This is probably what killed off the dinosaurs some 60 million years ago and let’s hope that we’re not the next species to go considering the amount of CO2 humans are currently releasing into the atmosphere.

In its 2001 Third Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) foresaw that global warming would lead to increasingly deadly heatwaves. “More hot days and heatwaves are very likely over nearly all land areas,” the world’s top climate scientists warned. “These increases are projected to be largest mainly in areas where temperature induced soil moisture decreases occur.”

Twenty years later, it seems as though these climate scientists were gazing into a crystal ball rather than computer monitors. At the end of June 2021, the normally temperate Pacific Northwest experienced a record-shattering heatwave. The village of Lytton, in British Columbia, set a new all-time Canadian temperature record of 121.3 degrees (49.6 Celsius) just before it burned to the ground.  Quillayute in the northwest corner of Washington, shattered its previous high temperature record by a full 11 degrees.

Climate Change

Climate change is happening very quickly compared to changes that occurred in the past: “As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.”

“According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by scientists at NASA the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 1.4°Fahrenheit since 1880. Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975.”

Before the industrial revolution, the CO2 content in the air remained quite steady for thousands of years. Natural CO2 is not static, however as it is generated by natural processes, and absorbed by others. Natural land and ocean carbon remains roughly in balance and have done so for a long time – and we know this because we can measure historic levels of CO2 in the atmosphere directly from artic ice cores.

Although human output of 29 gigatons of CO2 is tiny compared to the 750 gigatons moving through the carbon cycle each year, it adds up when more CO2 is released from outside of the natural carbon cycle by burning fossil fuels because the land and ocean cannot absorb the extra CO2. Although about 40% of this additional CO2 is absorbed, the rest remains in the atmosphere, and as a consequence, atmospheric CO2 is at its highest level in 15 to 20 million years. A natural change of 100ppm normally takes 5,000 to 20,000 years. The recent increase of 100ppm has taken just 120 years).

Human CO2 emissions upset the natural balance of the carbon cycle. Man-made CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by a third since the pre-industrial era, creating an artificial forcing of global temperatures which is warming the planet. As stated, while fossil-fuel derived CO2 is a very small component of the global carbon cycle, the extra CO2 is cumulative because the natural carbon exchange cannot absorb all the additional CO2. This accumulation of atmospheric CO2 is building up, the additional CO2 is being produced by burning fossil fuels, and that build up is accelerating.

Life flourished in the Eocene, the Cretaceous and other times of high COin the atmosphere because the greenhouse gasses were in balance with the carbon in the oceans and the weathering of rocks. Life, ocean chemistry, and atmospheric gasses had millions of years to adjust to those levels.

But there have been several times in Earth’s past when Earth’s temperature jumped abruptly, in much the same way as they are doing today. Those times were caused by large and rapid greenhouse gas emissions, just like humans are now causing.

Those abrupt global warming events were almost always highly destructive for life, causing mass extinctions such as at the end of the Permian, Triassic, or even mid-Cambrian periods. The symptoms from those events (a big, rapid jump in global temperatures, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification) are all happening today with human-caused climate change.

So yes, the climate has changed before humans, and in most cases scientists know why. In all cases we see the same association between CO2 levels and global temperatures. And past examples of rapid carbon emissions (just like today) were generally highly destructive to life on Earth.

Global warming

The Earth’s greenhouse gasses, principally CO2, but also methane, have controlled most ancient climate changes. When they were reduced, the global climate became colder. When they were increased, the global climate became warmer. When CO2 levels jumped rapidly, the global warming that resulted was highly disruptive and sometimes caused mass extinctions.

The Earth’s global warming is cyclical. When it happens naturally, it can take the Earth thousands of years to warm up or cool down just 1 degree. In addition to recurring ice-age cycles, the Earth’s climate can change due to volcanic activity, differences in plant life, changes in the amount of radiation from the sun, and natural changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere but time around humans are the cause, mainly by our CO2 emissions as we are emitting prodigious quantities of CO2, at a rate faster than even the most destructive climate changing events in earth’s past.

In specific terms, an increase of 1.0 or more Celsius degrees in a period of 100 to 200 hundred years would be considered global warming. Over the course of 100 years, an increase of even 0.4 degrees Celsius would be significant. At their 2007 Paris conference to compare and advance climate research, the IPCC scientists determined that the Earth has warmed .6 degrees Celsius between 1901 and 2000. When the timeframe is advanced by five years, from 1906 to 2006, the scientists found that the temperature increase was .74 degrees Celsius.

The report concluded that essentially all of the rise in global average temperatures since the 19th century has been driven by humans burning fossil fuels, clearing forests and loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that trap heat. The IPCC used computer models to simulate climate change and discovered that only models that included human contributions to global warming portrayed an accurate representation of today’s climate. When the models did not include human activity, the climates they simulated did not resemble our own.

Other observations from the IPCC include:

  • Of the last 12 years, 11 have ranked among the warmest years since 1850.
  • The warming trend of the last 50 years is nearly double that of the last 100 years, meaning that the rate of warming is increasing.
  • The ocean’s temperature has increased at least to depths of 3,000 meters (over 9,800 feet); the ocean absorbs more than 80 percent of all heat added to the climate system.
  • Glaciers and snow cover have decreased in regions both in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, which has contributed to the rise of sea levels.
  • Average Arctic temperatures have increased by nearly twice the global average rate over the last 100 years (the IPCC also noted that Arctic temperatures are highly variable from decade to decade).
  • The area covered by frozen ground in the Arctic has decreased by approximately 7 percent since 1900, with seasonal decreases of up to 15 percent.
  • Precipitation has increased in the eastern regions of the Americas, northern Europe and parts of Asia; other regions such as the Mediterranean and southern Africa have experienced drying trends.
  • Westerly winds have been growing stronger.
  • Droughts are more intense, have lasted longer and covered larger areas than in the past.
  • There have been significant changes in extreme temperatures — hot days and heat waves have become more frequent while cold days and nights have become less frequent.
  • While scientists have not observed an increase in the number of tropical storms, they have observed an increase in the intensity of such storms in the Atlantic correlated with a rise in ocean surface temperatures.

 The Greenhouse Effect

Global warming is caused by an increase in the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is not a bad thing by itself — it’s what allows Earth to stay warm enough for life to survive.

The greenhouse effect takes place when the sun’s rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface of the Earth, approximately 70 percent of the energy stays on the planet, absorbed by land, oceans, plants and other things. The other 30 percent is reflected into space by clouds, snow fields and other reflective surfaces [Source: NASA]. The earth would burn up if that 30% that gets through didn’t get radiated back out.

The Earth’s oceans and land masses eventually radiate that heat back out. Some of this heat makes it into space. The rest of it ends up getting absorbed when it hits certain things in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, methane gas and water vapor. Greenhouse gases consist of approximately 95% water vapor, 3% is CO2 and 2% methane.  After these components in our atmosphere absorb all this heat, they emit energy (also in the form of heat). The heat that doesn’t make it out through Earth’s atmosphere keeps the planet warmer than it is in outer space, because more energy is coming in through the atmosphere than is going out. This is all part of the greenhouse effect that keeps the Earth warm. The question is what percentage of that 3% is man-made and is that man-made portion really effecting climate change or is there a natural cycle at play here?

Earth Without the Greenhouse Effect

Without the greenhouse effect Earth would probably look a lot like Mars. Mars doesn’t have a thick enough atmosphere to reflect enough heat back to the planet, so it gets very cold there. Some scientists have suggested that we could terraform the surface of Mars by sending “factories” that would spew water vapor and carbon dioxide into the air. If enough material could be generated, the atmosphere might start to thicken enough to retain more heat and allow plants to live on the surface. Once plants spread across Mars, they would start producing oxygen. After a few hundred or thousand years, Mars might actually have an environment that humans could simply walk around in — all thanks to the greenhouse effect.

Global Warming: What’s Happening?

The greenhouse effect happens because of certain naturally occurring substances in the atmosphere. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been pouring huge amounts of those substances into the air.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a colorless gas that is a by-product of the combustion of organic matter. It makes up less than 0.04 percent of Earth’s atmosphere, most of which was put there by volcanic activity very early in the planet’s life. Today, according climate scientists, human activities are pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, resulting in an overall increase in carbon dioxide concentrations [Source: Keeling, C.D. and T.P. Whorf].

These increased concentrations are considered the primary factor in global warming, because carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation. Most of the energy that escapes Earth’s atmosphere comes in this form, so extra CO2 means more energy absorption and an overall increase in the planet’s temperature.

Although human output of 29 gigatons of CO2 is tiny compared to the 750 gigatons moving through the carbon cycle each year, it adds up when more CO2 is released from outside of the natural carbon cycle by burning fossil fuels because the land and ocean cannot absorb the extra CO2. Although about 40% of this additional CO2 is absorbed, the rest remains in the atmosphere, and as a consequence, atmospheric CO2 is at its highest level in 15 to 20 million years. A natural change of 100ppm normally takes 5,000 to 20,000 years. The recent increase of 100ppm has taken just 120 years).

The IPCC says that the pre-industrial amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere was about 280 parts per million (ppm), meaning that for every million molecules of dry air, 280 of them were CO2. In contrast, today’s levels of CO2 were measured at 413 parts per million. The last time global carbon dioxide levels were consistently at or above 400 ppm was at least 2 million years ago when humans didn’t exist. The Institute also notes that the average surface temperature of Earth has gone from 14.5 degrees C in 1860 to 15.3 degrees C in 1980 (a 2 degrees Fahrenheit increase) and the past decade was likely the hottest the planet has been in 125,000 years.

Scientists concluded that because nations have waited so long to curb emissions, average global temperatures will rise 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next 20 years due to the emissions already swirling in the atmosphere, bringing even more wildfires, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, floods, sea level rise and famine resulting from reduced agricultural yields and collapsing ecosystems and fisheries. Many of these disasters have been on full display this summer here in California and around the world.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is another important greenhouse gas. Although the amounts being released by human activities are not as great as the amounts of CO2, nitrous oxide absorbs much more energy than CO2 (about 270 times as much). For this reason, efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions have focused on N2O as well [Source: Soil Conservation Council of Canada]. The use of large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer on crops releases nitrous oxide in great quantities, and it is also a by-product of combustion.

Methane is a combustible gas, and it is the main component of natural gas. Methane occurs naturally through the decomposition of organic material and is often encountered in the form of “swamp gas.” Man-made processes produce methane in several ways:

  • By extracting it from coal
  • From large herds of livestock (i.e., digestive gases)
  • From the bacteria in rice paddies
  • Decomposition of garbage in landfills

Methane acts much like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, absorbing infrared energy and keeping heat energy on Earth. The IPCC says that methane’s concentration in the atmosphere in 2005 was 1,774 parts per billion (ppb). While there isn’t as much methane as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, methane can absorb and emit twenty times more heat than CO2 [Source: Hopwood, Nick and Cohen, Jordan]. According to Discover Magazine some scientists even speculate that a large-scale venting of methane into the atmosphere (such as from the release of huge chunks of methane ice locked under the oceans) could have created brief periods of intense global warming that led to some of the mass extinctions in the planet’s distant past.

Carbon dioxide and methane concentrations in 2005 exceeded their natural ranges of the last 650,000 years. Much of this increase in concentration is due to burning fossil fuels

What will actually happen if the entire planet warms up a few degrees?

We have seen that an average drop of just 5 degrees Celsius over thousands of years can cause an ice age; so what will happen if the Earth’s average temperature increases a few degrees in just a few hundred years? There is no clear answer. Even short-term weather predictions are never perfectly accurate because weather is a complex phenomenon. (As Bill Murry once said, “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me, fool me 350,000 times shame on the weather man). When it comes to long-term climate predictions, all we can manage are educated guesses based on our knowledge of climate patterns through history.

Glaciers and ice shelves around the world are melting [Source: Guardian Unlimited]. The loss of large areas of ice on the surface could accelerate global warming because less of the sun’s energy would be reflected away from Earth to begin with as in the greenhouse effect. An immediate result of melting glaciers would be a rise in sea levels. Initially, the rise in sea level would only be an inch or two. Even a modest rise in sea levels could cause flooding problems for low-lying coastal areas. However, if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to melt and collapse into the sea, it would push sea levels up 10 meters (more than 32 feet), and many coastal areas would completely disappear beneath the ocean [Source: NASA].

The IPCC estimates that sea levels rose 17 centimeters (or about 6.7 inches) in the 20th century. Scientists project rising sea levels to continue through the 21st century, with levels increasing between 7 and 22 inches by 2100. The IPCC did not consider changes in ice flow in these projections due to a lack of scientific data. Sea levels will likely be greater than the range of projections, but we can’t be sure by how much until more data can be gathered about the effect of global warming on ice flows.

With a rise in the overall temperature of the ocean, ocean-borne storms such as tropical storms and hurricanes, which get their fierce and destructive energy from the warm waters they pass over, could increase in force.

If the rising temperature affects glaciers and ice shelves, the polar ice caps could be in danger of melting and causing the oceans to rise.

Water Vapor, The Other Greenhouse Gas

Water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas, but it is more often than not a result of climate changes rather than man-made emissions. Water or moisture on the Earth’s surface absorbs heat from the sun and the surroundings. When enough heat has been absorbed, some of the liquid’s molecules may have enough energy to escape from the liquid and begin to rise into the atmosphere as a vapor. As the vapor rises higher and higher, the temperature of the surrounding air becomes lower and lower. Eventually, the vapor loses enough heat to the surrounding air to allow it to turn back into a liquid. Earth’s gravitational pull then causes the liquid to “fall” back down, completing the cycle. This cycle is also called a “positive feedback loop.”

Water vapor is more difficult to measure than the other greenhouse gases and scientists are uncertain as to the exact part that it plays in global warming. Scientists believe there is a correlation between the increase of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and the increase of water vapor. The NOAA Web site has this to say:

As water vapor increases in the atmosphere, more of it will eventually also condense into clouds, which are more able to reflect incoming solar radiation (thus allowing less energy to reach the Earth’s surface and heat it up).

If the Polar Ice Caps Melt

The polar ice caps could be in danger of melting and causing the oceans to rise, but no one knows when it might happen.

The Earth’s main ice-covered landmass is Antarctica at the South Pole, with about 90 percent of the world’s ice (and 70 percent of its fresh water). Antarctica is covered with ice an average of 2,133 meters (7,000 feet) thick. If all of the Antarctic ice melted, sea levels around the world would rise about 61 meters (200 feet). But the average temperature in Antarctica is -37°C, so the ice there is in no danger of melting.

In fact, in most parts of the continent it never gets above freezing.

At the other end of the world, the North Pole, the ice is not nearly as thick as at the South Pole. The ice floats on the Arctic Ocean. If it melted, sea levels would not rise.

 

There is a significant amount of ice covering Greenland, which would add another 7 meters (20 feet) to the oceans if it melted. Because Greenland is closer to the equator than Antarctica, the temperatures there are higher, so the ice is more likely to melt. Scientists from the Universities of London and Edinburgh say that ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland together contribute approximately 12 percent of the rise in sea levels [Source: Science Daily].

But there might be a different reason than polar ice melting for the higher ocean level – the weight of the water. The higher temperature of the water the water occupies a bigger space. Water is most dense at 4 degrees Celsius and above and below this temperature, the density of water decreases. So as the overall temperature of the water increases it naturally expands a little bit making the oceans rise.

 Effects of Global Warming: Seasons and Ecosystems

Interesting enough less abrupt changes would occur around the world as average temperatures increased. In temperate areas with four seasons, the growing season would be longer with more precipitation. This could be beneficial in many ways for these areas. However, less temperate parts of the world would likely see an increase in temperature and a sharp decrease in precipitation, causing long droughts and potentially creating deserts like what is now happening in the American West.

Because the Earth’s climate is so complex, no one is really sure how much a change to one region’s climate will affect other regions. For example, scientists at the University of Colorado theorize that the decrease in sea ice in the Arctic could reduce snowfall in Colorado because Arctic cold fronts would be less intense. This could impact everything from farmlands to the ski industry.

The most devastating effects, and also the hardest to predict, are the effects on the world’s living ecosystems. Many ecosystems are very delicate, and the slightest change can kill off several species as well as any other species that depend on them. Most ecosystems are interconnected, so the chain reaction of effects could be immeasurable. The results could be something like a forest gradually dying off and turning to grassland or entire coral reefs dying. Many species of plants and animals would adapt or move to deal with the shift in climate, but many would become extinct.

Some ecosystems are already changing drastically due to a shift in climate. The University of Alberta reports that much of what once was tundra in northern Canada is turning into forests. They also noticed that the change from tundra to forest isn’t linear; instead, it seems that the change happens in sudden spurts.

The human cost of global warming is hard to quantify. Thousands of lives per year could be lost as the elderly or ill suffer from heat stroke and other heat-related trauma. Poor and underdeveloped nations would suffer the worst effects, since they would not have the financial resources to deal with the problems that come with an increase in temperature. Huge numbers of people could die from starvation if a decrease in precipitation limits crop growth and from disease if coastal flooding leads to widespread water-borne illness.

The Carnegie Institution estimates that around $5 billion in crop losses per year are due to global warming. Farmers see a decrease of about 40 million metric tons of cereal grains like wheat, barley and corn each year. Science Daily found that scientists discovered that an increase of only 1 degree Fahrenheit in average temperature results in a 3 to 5 percent drop in crop yields.

Is Global Warming a Real Problem?

Despite a scientific consensus on the subject, some people don’t think global warming is happening at all. There are several reasons for this:

  • They don’t think the data show a measurable upward trend in global temperatures, either because we don’t have enough long-term historical climate data or because the data we do have isn’t clear enough.
  • A few scientists think that data is being interpreted incorrectly by people who are already worried about global warming. That is, these people are looking for evidence of global warming in the statistics, instead of looking at the evidence objectively and trying to figure out what it means.
  • Some argue any increase in global temperatures we are seeing could be a natural climate shift, or it could be due to other factors than greenhouse gases.

Most scientists recognize that global warming does seem to be happening, but a few don’t believe that it is anything to be worried about. These scientists say that the Earth is more resistant to climate changes on this scale than we think. Plants and animals will adapt to subtle shifts in weather patterns, and it is unlikely anything catastrophic will happen as a result of global warming. Slightly longer growing seasons, changes in precipitation levels and stronger weather, in their opinion, are not generally disastrous. They also argue that the economic damage caused by cutting down on the emission of greenhouse gases will be far more damaging to humans than any of the effects of global warming.

In a way, the scientific consensus may be a moot point. The real power to enact significant change rests in the hands of those who make national and global policy. Some policymakers in the United States are reluctant to propose and enact changes because they feel the costs may outweigh any risks global warming poses. Some common concerns, claims and complaints include:

  • A change in the United States’ policies in emissions and carbon production could result in a loss of jobs.
  • India and China, both of which continue to rely heavily on coal for their main source of energy, will continue to cause environmental problems even if the United States changes its energy policies (critics of these policymakers point out that this approach employs the tu quoque (quo-qua – you too)logical fallacy).
  • Since scientific evidence is about probabilities rather than certainties, we can’t be certain that human behavior is contributing to global warming, that our contribution is significant, or that we can do anything to fix it.
  • Technology will find a way to get us out of the global warming mess, so any change in our policies will ultimately be unnecessary and cause more harm than good.

What’s the correct answer? It can be hard to figure out. Most scientists will tell you that global warming is real and that it is likely to do some kind of harm, but the extent of the problem and the danger posed by its effects are wide open for debate.

Preventing Global Warming

An Economist’s Take

In Science Daily, Dr. Peter Tsigaris, an economist at Thompson Rivers University, says that taking steps to curb global warming makes sense from both an environmental and an economic standpoint. He estimates that addressing global warming by changing our dependency on fossil fuels and other behavior would cost an estimated one percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per year, while taking no action could cost 5 percent of global GDP each year. Extreme climate change could result in a cost of 20 percent GDP or greater. [Source: Science Daily]

Can We Stop Global Warming?

Though scientists warn that global warming will likely continue for centuries because of the long natural processes involved, there are a few things we can do to decrease the effects. Basically, they all boil down to this: Don’t use as much of the stuff that creates greenhouse gases. On a local level, you can help by using less energy. The electricity that operates many of the devices in our homes comes from a power plant, and most power plants burn fossil fuels to generate that power. Turn off lights when they’re not in use. Take shorter showers to use less hot water. Use a fan instead of an air conditioner on a warm day.

On a personal level here are some other specific ways you can help decrease greenhouse-gas emissions:

  • Change to electric appliances, electric cars, and electricity from 100% renewable sources. Older appliances could be costing you — and the planet. Old fridges are “energy hogs” and could be costing you around $100 a year in wasted energy, according to the NRDC, as reported in the New York Times. Check for an Energy Star symbol on any new appliances you buy, which signals that the model is energy-efficient.
  • Turn lights and other appliances off when you’re not using them. Even though a light bulb doesn’t generate greenhouse gas, the power plant that generates the electricity used by the light bulb probably does. Switch from incandescent light bulbs to fluorescent bulbs, which use 80% less energy and last longer.
  • Make sure your car is properly tuned up. This allows it to run more efficiently and generate fewer harmful gases. use the cruise control to save gas or just turn your air conditioning down,
  • Walk or ride your bike if possible, or carpool on your way to work. Cars burn fossil fuel, so smaller, more fuel-efficient cars emit less CO2, particularly hybrid cars. Going a year without a car could save around 2.6 tons of carbon dioxide from being released, according to a 2017 study from researchers at Lund University and the University of British Columbia.
  • try to limit frequent airplane trips which cause huge emissions.
  • Dress for the occasion: Try to switch out your shopping habits for a more sustainable approach. Don’t buy clothing you won’t wear, try to purchase secondhand items and consider the environmental impact of which type of fabric the garment is made of, the World Resources Institute suggests as reported in the New York Times. Also, donate old clothes or make unwearable pieces into reusable cloth rags.
  • Change your diet to one with less meat
  • Overbuying food and food waste contributes to climate change. The UN’s report discovered that the energy that goes into production, harvesting and transporting wasted food generates around 3.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. If you can, try and draft a grocery shopping list and think through how much food you’re buying to avoid wasting excess food.
  • Garbage that doesn’t get recycled ends up in a landfill, generating methane. Recycled goods also require less energy to produce than products made from scratch.
  • Plant trees and other plants where you can. Plants take carbon dioxide out of the air and release oxygen.
  • Don’t burn garbage. This releases carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.
  • Get involvedReach out to your representatives and vote for policies that will reduce carbon emissions and support environmentally-friendly movements. Encourage your friends and family to do the same, recommends Blue Habits.

At the international level, the Kyoto treaty was written to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Thirty-five industrialized nations have committed to reducing their output of those gases to varying degrees. Unfortunately, the United States, the world’s primary producer of greenhouse gases, did not sign the treaty. Some very challenging changes in global policy include:

  • Freeze carbon production at the current level and create programs to reduce carbon production by 90 percent by 2050
  • Scali up nature-based carbon sequestration techniques and protecting vital ecosystems like forests and wetlands that begin to draw down some of the carbon already in the atmosphere.
  • Shift taxation from employment and production to a taxation upon pollution
  • Create an international treaty that would effectively comply with the Kyoto treaty without carrying the same perceived political baggage
  • Halt the construction of all new coal-based power facilities unless they comply with restrictions on carbon production
  • Increase emission standards across the board for both the automobile industry and power facilities
  • Ban incandescent light bulbs

To really stem the emission of greenhouse gases, we need to develop non-fossil fuel energy sources. Hydro-electric power, solar power, hydrogen engines and fuel cells could all create big cuts in greenhouse gases if they were to become more common.

So, no matter whether climate warming is real or not (it is), oil is a foul, dirty energy source that pollutes our streets, water-ways and air so we should just ban it as soon as we can. Most products that are petroleum based can be made with synthetic alternatives and that $5 billion a year we give to the oil industry, for whatever reason, would go a long way in improving human health and quality of life.

Current Conditions

Some of the biggest polluters, including China and the United States, were unlikely to make the kind of immediate cuts to fossil fuels that are needed to hold the rise in global average temperatures to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius, the higher limit set by the 2015 IPCC Paris climate accord. Nearly every nation that signed the accord is far off track to meet its commitment.

The United States, which historically has pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country, in April pledged to roughly halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Although, current U.S. laws and regulations are insufficient to meet that goal. While that is an ambitious goal, it is slightly below the law set by the European Union and significantly below that of Britain.

China, the world’s biggest current producer of greenhouse gases (United States is second and India is third), is still increasing its emissions from power plants, transportation and industry. It plans to hit peak emissions by 2030 before starting to cut back until it no longer produces a net increase of carbon dioxide by 2060.

China and India missed a U.N. deadline to submit new plans for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions in time for the global body to include their pledges in a report for governments at this year’s global climate summit, officials said Saturday.

The world’s two most populous countries are among dozens that failed to provide an update on their targets for curbing the release of planet-warming gases to the U.N. climate change agency by July 31.

U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa welcomed that 110 signatories of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change had met the cut-off date, which was extended from the end of 2020 due to the pandemic. But she said it was “far from satisfactory” that only 58% had submitted their new targets in time.

Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Syria and 82 other nations also failed to update their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) in time to include them in a report Espinosa’s office is preparing for the U.N. climate change conference in November.

The big picture:

Global power sector emissions bounced back strongly from lows seen during the first half of 2020 to a level about 5% higher than the first half of 2019, the report finds.

The data shows that while 57% of the growth in electricity demand came from wind and solar power, a large fraction — 43% — has been met by firing up carbon-intensive coal power plants, especially in China, Bangladesh, Mongolia and Vietnam.

No single country out of the 63 nations analysts examined has achieved a “green recovery” for the electricity sector, which features higher electricity demand and lower emissions.

Context:

When compared to the International Energy Agency’s roadmap for bringing global emissions to net zero by 2050, power sector emissions would have to decline by 57% by 2030 while energy demand grows by 50%.

Most of the emissions cuts prior to 2030 in the IEA’s modeling would come from ending coal power, the Ember report notes, bluntly stating: “Coal power is rising when it needs to be rapidly falling.”

China, for example, had a 14% increase in electricity demand compared to 2019. A large addition of clean energy couldn’t keep pace with such a sharp uptick, with more than two-thirds of the increase in demand met with coal power.

Threat level:

By the end of the year, power sector carbon dioxide emissions could be even higher, given that such emissions were 7% higher in June 2021 compared to the same month in 2019, Ember found.

What they’re saying:

“We need to go hell for leather on the electricity sector and we’re nowhere close at the moment,” Dave Jones, Ember’s global lead, told Axios in an interview.

Axios Generate – By Ben Geman and Andrew Freedman ·Aug 25, 2021

The U.S. Is Starting to Get Specific About Its 2030 Paris Agreement Goal

Robinson Meyer wrote an article in The Atlantic (8/24/21) that tries to shed light on one of the biggest questions in American climate policy. Back in April, soon after joining the Paris Agreement, President Joe Biden committed the United States to cutting its pollution by 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

The White House promised that “a careful interagency process” had produced that goal, and at least a dozen reports from outside scholars and nonprofits argued that such an ambitious cut could be done. As a candidate, Biden had no shortage of plans for each sector of the economy. But the White House never actually said how those proposals aligned with actual reductions and how it planned to meet that 2030 goal.

It’s now starting to put some flesh on the bones. This morning, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office released the top-line results of an internal analysis showing that the two infrastructure bills—the bipartisan infrastructure deal and the partisan reconciliation bill—could combine to reduce U.S. emissions 45 percent by 2030.

But that analysis doesn’t go into much detail, so Meyer’s story also walked through where experts think that those cuts may come from. In short, most of the reductions must come from the power sector, but that gets only about a third of the way there. The transportation sector could also contribute a few percentage points of reductions, but according to current models, the bulk of its decarbonization won’t happen until the 2030s. So, many smaller changes in the rest of the economy, especially the industrial sector, need to be made to meet the 2050 goal.

Meyer’s thinks that these emission estimates might seem like a mere intellectual exercise, but they have stratospheric stakes for the Biden administration. At home, Biden’s allies need these analyses to show that the reconciliation package, which now totals $3.5 trillion, cannot be shrunk any further without endangering its ability to fight climate change.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema has warned that she will not vote for a $3.5 trillion package. But “the smaller the package gets, the less likely it is to do the work necessary to reduce global warming,” Christy Goldfuss, who helped write President Barack Obama’s climate policies and is now a senior vice president for energy and environmental policy at the Center for American Progress, told Meyer.

“There isn’t a lot of room for error,” she said. “When you address climate change with investment primarily, it means the cost is pretty high.”

But the estimates may matter even more abroad, where American negotiators need something to prove to the world—especially to their European counterparts—that the U.S. can meet its 2030 commitment. The alternative to all this would be a carbon price similar to the European Union’s, but neither Biden nor Congress is pushing one right now. In the past 40 years, an edifice of economic wisdom and policy analysis has sprung up demonstrating how carbon taxes can decarbonize the energy system.

Far less work has been done on the sector-by-sector approach that America is now pursuing. “If we were focused on a carbon tax, we would have ample studies to point to,” Goldfuss said. “There is a lot less known on the investment side.” (For what it’s worth, models suggest that a carbon price of $55 a ton, rising 5 percent each year, would meet Biden’s 2030 goal by itself.)

Say all this works, though. Even after meeting the 2030 goal, the U.S. would then need to rush to eliminate another 3.35 billion tons in annual emissions to meet its further goal of achieving net zero by 2050. And even under that optimistic scenario, we are talking about annual emissions, not total emissions. Under Biden’s plan, we will still be adding more climate pollution to the atmosphere every year for decades to come.

And yet. Canada, the European Union, South Korea, and Japan have also set net-zero-by-2050 goals; China is aiming for 2060. Those countries and the U.S. emit about 58 percent of the planet’s climate pollution. If China moved up its goal and the rest of the world joined us in hitting net zero by 2050, humanity would likely stave off a permanent increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius in global temperature, according to this month’s landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

It can be done, in other words. But first we need to do it.

Sources

Sixth Assessment Report; Working Group One; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

NOAA: Global Warming http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html

Strickland J., Grabianowski E. (2021) How Global Warming Works; https://science.howstuffworks.com/ environmental/green-science/global-warming.htm

RealClimate http://www.realclimate.org

Science Daily: Earth and Climate http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/earth_climate

Singer, S. Fred. “Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate.” The Independent Institute, 1998. ISBN 0-945999-78-x.

Tesar, Jenny. “Global Warming.” Facts On File, 1991. ISBN 0-8160-2490-1.1

Geman B., Freedman A. (8/25/2021) Axios Generate

Borenstein, S. (8/10/2021) ‘Code red’: UN scientists warn of worsening global warminghttps://apnews.com/article/ asia-pacific-latin-america-middle-east-africa-europe-1d89d5183583718ad4ad311fa2ee7d83

Lisa Friedman L., Tabuchi, H., Choi-Schagrin, W. (8/10/21) Report Sounds the Alarm on Climate Change; New York Times

Walsh, B (8/14/210) How climate change kills the future;

https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-future-eadd8c0e-e74d-4ba6-8ab2-3c180c87e8b2.html?chunk=0&utm_term=emshare#story0

Hernandez, J (8/13/2021) July was the Hottest Month on Recorded Human History

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/13/1027521725/july-hottest-month-in-recorded-human-history

Worland, J; (8/20/2021) An American Emergency; Time; https://time.com/extreme-heat-climate-change/

 

 

 

 

 

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