An open letter from 200 evangelical scientists

Two hundred US evangelical scientists write an open letter to Congress calling for meaningful climate action. Here is a taste:

The Bible tells us that "love does no harm to its neighbor" (Romans 13:10), yet the way we live now harms our neighbors, both locally and globally. For the world's poorest people, climate change means dried-up wells in Africa, floods in Asia that wash away crops and homes, wildfires in the U.S. and Russia, loss of villages and food species in the Arctic, environmental refugees, and disease. Our changing climate threatens the health, security, and well-being of millions of people who are made in God's image. The threat to future generations and global prosperity means we can no longer afford complacency and endless debate. We as a society risk being counted among "those who destroy the earth" (Revelation 11:18).

Fear and identity: the insufficiency of facts

Katharine Hayhoe - mother, evangelical Christian, pastor's wife and highly regarded professor in atmospheric physics - makes an excellent point. Climate change threatens more than ecosystems, economies and the stability of societies; it also threatens certain identities, and we often hold those even closer than our children's future.

Burden of proof

Yes, 0.1% = 1 in 1,000, not 1 in 10,000. But otherwise, amen.

Can we destroy creation? Hubris and self-destruction

We can't destroy creation. Alpha Centuri is going to be just fine, climate change or not. We can't even destroy the planet. It's survived meteors, tectonic upheavals and ice ages. It's a pretty durable lump of rock.

Nonetheless, I frequently see people claiming that it is arrogant to think that tiny little humans are having such a large impact of the functioning of planetary-scale systems as is implied by the mainstream science of climate change, ocean acidification, soil degradation, biodiversity loss and so on. Sometimes this objection has a dose of piety injected: God is in charge of the world; we can't damage it (at least, not more than superficially or locally).

But isn't it arrogant (and historically ignorant) to think that our capacity for destruction does not extend to wiping out entire ecosystems? We have done so on colossal scales in recorded history. Vast forests have disappeared in the face of the axe and bulldozer; seemingly endless prairies have all but disappeared under the plough. Haven't we grown to seven billion and rising, spreading into every continent and visibly altering huge tracts of the earth's surface? Why would we be surprised at anthropogenic climate change or ocean acidification or biodiversity decline when we consider our collective effects in a wide range of areas? Aren't our nuclear arsenals capable of obliterating the vast majority of life on earth at a moment's notice? Haven't we fundamentally altered the appearance, behaviour and distribution of species through millennia of domestication and exploration? Haven't we sent thousands of recorded species (and likely tens or hundreds of thousands of unrecorded species) extinct? Haven't we damned and/or diverted the majority of the world's great rivers, and even (almost) dried up what was previously the fourth largest lake in the world? Haven't we flung craft into orbit that can monitor many of these changes in astonishing detail?

If human civilisations (even ones who considered themselves Christian) have risen and fallen in the past, why would we assume that ours will be immortal? And if human actions have contributed to historical collapses, why would we rule out such influence today?

If we have done all this, then if we have also dug up and burned over 300 billion tonnes of fossil hydrocarbons, might not here, as in so many other places, our capacity for altering our surroundings be manifest? If we have changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans in measurable and statistically significant ways, might not these changes have far-reaching consequences and implications for life (human and otherwise) throughout the atmosphere and oceans? If we can measure the changes in radiation that occur as a result of these alterations, if we can measure shifts in the timing of flowerings, growing seasons, hibernations and migrations, observe massive and alarmingly rapid alterations to the frozen places of the planet, notice systematic and unprecedented shifts in humidity, precipitation, temperatures over land and sea (and in the waters) and rising sea levels - if we can observe these changes occurring and have an excellent theory that accounts for all the data and which has withstood every criticism levelled against it, seen off all competing explanations and gained the acceptance of every single relevant scientific body of national or international standing in the world, then what is to be gained by withholding judgement? And if we have good reason to be deeply concerned about the already manifest and likely future consequences of the observed, modelled and projected trends, if these consequences threaten the habitability of the planet and its ability to provide sufficient food for our societies and habitat for all our fellow creatures, if our neighbours are deeply vulnerable to these changes, if the most vulnerable are also those who have done least to contribute to the problem (the poor, future generations and other species), then might not Christian discipleship embrace humble acceptance of our predicament and an earnest search for responses that express repentance, care and prudence?

Furthermore, if many of the social and personal changes required are not simply consonant with, but already actively required by, Christian discipleship due to the rejection of idolatry, greed and consumerism, if the infrastructural changes are both affordable and viable, if those most vocally opposed to these changes have a history of engaging in less than honest advocacy and have a business practice that currently kills millions of people annually, then might we not have a strong case for prophetic witness in defence of the goodness of the created order, in pursuit of justice for the suffering, in the hope of wise care for our children's future?

Musical interlude: our biggest challenge

For those whose attention span does not extend to the length of the previous video.

Lines of evidence: How do we know about climate change?

For anyone still confused as to how we know that the climate is changing and that the changes are largely driven by human activities, this 26 minute video from the US National Academies gives an excellent and authoritative overview of the evidence. None of this is remotely controversial amongst the world's peak scientific bodies, despite much obfuscation and confusion through the media and blogs for political, economic and ideological purposes.

And now for the weather report

Perhaps a few more weather reporters giving this kind of context could help public understanding, since studies indicate that weather reporters remain one of the primary sources of information about climate (despite many reporters having little or background in climate themselves).

Very helpfully, the American Meteorological Society has updated its statement on climate change to reflect scientific research completed since the last one in 2007. The new statement is considerably stronger in its language than its previous one. Here are a few tastes of the new statement:

"Warming of the climate system now is unequivocal [...] many of the observed changes noted above are beyond what can be explained by the natural variability of the climate. It is clear from extensive scientific evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases [...] Since long-term measurements began in the 1950s, the atmospheric CO2 concentration has been increasing at a rate much faster than at any time in the last 800,000 years. [...] Climate is potentially predictable for much longer time scales than weather for several reasons. [...] A helpful analogy in this regard is that population averages of human mortality are predictable while life spans of individuals are not. [...] Future warming of the climate is inevitable for many years due to the greenhouse gases already added to the atmosphere and the heat that has been taken up by the oceans. [...] Global efforts to slow greenhouse gas emissions have been unsuccessful so far. However, were future technologies and policies able to achieve a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions — an approach termed “mitigation” — this would greatly lessen future global warming and its impacts. [...] In the 21st century, global sea level also will continue to rise although the rise will not be uniform at all locations. [...] Atmospheric water content will increase globally, consistent with warmer temperatures, and consequently the global hydrological cycle will continue to accelerate. [...] changes in precipitation patterns are expected to differ considerably by region and by season [...] more severe droughts and floods [...] significant regional shifts in precipitation patterns [...] heavy precipitation events will continue to become more intense and frequent [...] longer dry spells between precipitation events in the subtropics and lower-middle latitudes [...] Widespread retreat of mountain glaciers is expected to eventually lead to reduced dry season flows for glacier-fed rivers. Drought is projected to increase over Africa, Europe, and much of the North American continental interior, and particularly the southwest United States. [...] more extreme warm periods and fewer cold periods are expected [...] more severe episodes of extreme heat. Critical thresholds of daily maximum temperature, above which ecosystems and crop systems (e.g., food crops such as rice, corn, and wheat) suffer increasingly severe damage, are likely to be exceeded more frequently. [...] It is unclear if the land biosphere and oceans will be able to continue taking up carbon at their current rate into the future. [...] Another unknown is the amount of methane that will be released due to high-latitude warming. There are indications that large regions of the permafrost in parts of Alaska and other northern polar areas are already thawing, with the potential to release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere beyond those being directly added by human activity. The portion of the increased CO2 release that is absorbed by the world ocean is making the ocean more acidic, with negative implications for shell- and skeleton-forming organisms and more generally for ocean ecosystems."

If you're pressed for time, or already familiar with recent climate research, then you can just skip to the conclusion. Here it is in full:

"There is unequivocal evidence that Earth’s lower atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; sea level is rising; and snow cover, mountain glaciers, and Arctic sea ice are shrinking. The dominant cause of the warming since the 1950s is human activities. This scientific finding is based on a large and persuasive body of research. The observed warming will be irreversible for many years into the future, and even larger temperature increases will occur as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. Avoiding this future warming will require a large and rapid reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions. The ongoing warming will increase risks and stresses to human societies, economies, ecosystems, and wildlife through the 21st century and beyond, making it imperative that society respond to a changing climate. To inform decisions on adaptation and mitigation, it is critical that we improve our understanding of the global climate system and our ability to project future climate through continued and improved monitoring and research. This is especially true for smaller (seasonal and regional) scales and weather and climate extremes, and for important hydroclimatic variables such as precipitation and water availability.

Technological, economic, and policy choices in the near future will determine the extent of future impacts of climate change. Science-based decisions are seldom made in a context of absolute certainty. National and international policy discussions should include consideration of the best ways to both adapt to and mitigate climate change. Mitigation will reduce the amount of future climate change and the risk of impacts that are potentially large and dangerous. At the same time, some continued climate change is inevitable, and policy responses should include adaptation to climate change. Prudence dictates extreme care in accounting for our relationship with the only planet known to be capable of sustaining human life."

There is much to commend in this new statement. It clearly and unambiguously affirms the three basic pillars of climate science: (a) the planet is warming rapidly; (b) humans are the dominant cause; (c) the consequences are a serious threat. There is not a relevant scientific institution of national or international standing that questions any of those three claims.

At the same time, the new AMS statement acknowledges many areas of lower confidence, where research is ongoing, including: the precise sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases; the precise role of clouds and aerosol particles; the precise distribution of disruptions to the hydrological cycle; the ongoing effects of natural variation within the larger trends; the rate of ice sheet disintegration and sea level melt; the potential negative side effects of geo-engineering proposals; and perhaps most importantly the uncertainties in the human systems that cause and are impacted by climate change: how fast will we continue to modify the chemical composition of atmosphere and oceans? And how well will we respond to the risks and threats these changes will bring?

Given the uncertainties, both in the geophysical systems and especially in the human systems that drive and respond to them, the AMS statement remains agnostic about the most important debate regarding the threat of climate change: does climate change represent a level of risk that is merely disastrous or truly catastrophic?

The closest it comes to addressing this question is in the very interesting final sentence: "Prudence dictates extreme care in accounting for our relationship with the only planet known to be capable of sustaining human life." We're not talking merely about losing the polar bears, or an acceleration of species extinctions more generally, or even severe economic disruption or a rising threat of climate-related conflict. Implicitly at least, this statement acknowledges that what is at stake is the ongoing capacity of the planet to sustain human life.

UPDATE: The scriptwriter for the video above shares his thinking behind the clip.

Bauckham: Ecological hope in crisis?

A while ago I mentioned I would be attending a conference titled Communicating Hope: Hope in an age of environmental crisis. I never got around to writing a review, but it was an excellent gathering of scientists, activists and theologians chewing the fat over the nature and implications of Christian hope in a post-Copenhagen world.

There were three main talks: (i) a summary of the latest science from Dr. Martin Hodson; (ii) theological reflections from Prof. Richard Bauckham; (iii) an exploration of opportunities for action from Andy Atkins, Director of Friends of the Earth, UK.

For me, the highlight of an excellent couple of days was undoubtedly Prof Bauckham's talk, which is now available online. Here's the opening:

"The church has frequently had to think afresh about Christian hope in changing contexts. It’s not that the essence of Christian hope – the great hope, founded on Jesus Christ, for God’s redemptive and fulfilling renewal of all his creation - changes. But if Christian hope is to retain its power to be the engine of the church’s engagement with the world, if it is to be more than an ineffective private dream, hope itself needs renewal as the world changes."

Bolt vs Curiosity: it's no match

More than a few news sites this morning selected Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world, as their lead story. Bolt broke an Olympic record and ran the second fastest 100m ever recorded to win gold in London, recording a top speed of something like 45km/h.

Meanwhile, humans landed a small truck on Mars.

Every little boy (and plenty of little girls, I'm sure) dreams of running fast. And Bolt's 9.63s sprint was probably about two, three or four times as fast as most young children can run. I remember the first time I ran 100m against the clock, I came in at roughly 20s. I won't say how old I was...

Meanwhile, humans landed a small truck, weighing almost a ton, on Mars.

Bolt raced in front of a crowd of 80,000 at the stadium and hundreds of millions around the world. He is an international celebrity whose endorsement is worth millions to any brand and whose face is recognised by countless fans everywhere.

Meanwhile, humans landed a small truck, capable of finding evidence of extra-terrestrial life, on the ruddy surface of another planet.

Bolt's top speed was about 45km/h, the fastest any human has ever run. Curiosity's top speed was about 21,200 km/h. Bolt's speed was roughly double that of my boyhood efforts. Compared to my boyhood efforts at launching myself into space, Curiosity surpassed my - let's be generous and say 50cm - jump by a factor of 1.12 billion, travelling roughly 560 million kilometres from the surface of Earth to that of Mars. Bolt has trained for years in order to get every last detail correct: working on his running style, his start, his finish, his crowd-pleasing theatrics. Humans have been trying to work out whether there is or has been life on Mars for centuries and this mission has been in planning for eight years and en route for eight months, with scores of highly trained rocket scientists planning every last detail of a mission out of the Earth's gravity well, through the irradiated void of space and which culminated in seven minutes of terror, a hugely complex multi-stage precision landing procedure that had to be entirely automated, given the fact that signals from Mars to Earth take fourteen minutes and the entry only took seven. Imagine getting an almost one tonne truck to slow from over 21,000 km/h to zero in seven minutes while falling through a thin atmosphere with relatively strong gravity and landing on a precise spot on the far side of a planet without kicking up any dust or breaking billions of dollars worth of delicate scientific equipment. Wow.

So well done Mr Bolt. But what kind of planet do we live on where many of the major news organisations think that a man doing what humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years (just very marginally better than anyone else) is bigger news than landing a space laboratory capable of reconstructing the deep history of another planet and searching for evidence of extra-terrestrial life on the surface of a planet 560 million kilometres away? Well done NASA. You deserve all the gold medals today, for an achievement that leaves every olympian, no matter how awesomely superhuman, in the shade.

Knowledge is superior to strength, skill to speed, carefully planned and executed cooperation to isolated brilliance. Yet better even than knowledge is wisdom. Though don't hold your breath for the day that the pursuit of wisdom makes a news headline ahead of a photogenic man running quickly at a corporate-sponsored event. Nonetheless, if Curiosity finds what it is looking for, we'll need plenty of wisdom to grasp it.

She [Wisdom] is more precious than jewels,
    and nothing you desire can compare with her. [...]
She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her;
    those who hold her fast are called happy.

- Proverbs 3.15, 18 (NRSV).

Droughts and flooding rain

A couple of years ago, I used to notice - amongst the usual flotsam and jetsam of half-baked semi-truths, muddled confusion, conspiracy theories, ideological axes, pay-per-comment outright deception and opportunistic spin that passes for much of online climate science dissent - some commenters mocking the idea that a warming world might bring both more droughts and more floods. Now some managed to get past the initial intelligence test by realising that one location might get wetter while another becomes drier, but the second hurdle was realising that the mainstream prediction is (and has been for some time) that in some instances, increased droughts and increased flooding might be likely to occur in the same location.

But today - after the severe Australian drought of the naughties being followed by the wettest 24 months on record, a rare hosepipe ban and widespread drought in England followed by the wettest April and June on record and last year's record Mississippi floods prior to recent reports of grounded barges from river levels 15m lower than a year ago - I don't seem to hear that comment much anymore.

A warming world doesn't just mean a hotter world, but one capable of all kinds of greater extremes.
Image by JKS.

Graphs can be terrifying: Getting a grip on CO2

H/T Gareth.
This soundless little presentation from NOAA's Carbon Tracker shows atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations over time. The first half of the video shows on the left hand side the yearly rise and fall of CO₂ concentrations around the world since 1979. The various dots along the line each represent a different location around the globe, arranged by latitude, with the blue dot on the far left being the south pole and the dots at far right representing measurements in the Arctic. The dots rise and fall in a regular pattern as time passes. This is because trees "breathe in" CO2 during the northern spring/summer as leaves photosynthesise and then "breathe out" in autumn/winter as leaves decay, meaning that atmospheric concentrations rise and fall a little each year in a natural cycle. The annual variations are far more pronounced in the north hemisphere (the right end of the line that bounces up and down) since there is a much greater mass of land (and so trees) up here than in the southern hemisphere. So the concentration is never exactly the same at every point in the world or on every day of the year. And yet, along with the annual cycle there is something else happening. The overall movement is unmistakeable: up, up, up. If we look at the right hand side of the display, which shows the famous "Keeling curve" of average CO2 concentrations going back to 1958 when precise records first began to be kept (by Prof C. D. Keeling at Moana Loa in Hawaii), we can see that the annual rise and fall of the natural carbon cycle is superimposed on and ultimately dwarfed by a relentless upwards rise, which represents the human contribution to the situation. Each year we dig up literally billions of tonnes of carbon that had been safely stored for millions of years underground and burn it to power our lightbulbs and laptops, our concrete and cars, our fridges and flights.

Once the period 1979-2011 has been shown (up to about 1:40 in the video), we begin to zoom out, seeing further back in time. Initially, we are introduced to the earlier progress of the Keeling curve as it wobbles up and down back to 1958 (the green part of the cuve, spanning roughly 1:40-2:00 in the video). Then we suddenly begin zooming out much more quickly, and the green curve becomes a series of yellow dots spanning back to the time of Christ (2:00-2:20). Since the apostles were not measuring CO₂, these measurements are "proxies", reconstructions of historical concentrations from a wide range of sources that have preserved a natural record of atmospheric concentrations. From 2:20-3:00, the blue curve represents a record of pre-historic CO₂ concentrations going back 800,000 years (ka = thousand years; BCE = Before Common Era = BC) preserved in the ancient sheets of Greenland and Antarctica (Antarctica has the deepest ice and so the oldest records). The line here jumps up and down over many thousands of years as the world went into and out of glaciations (commonly, though incorrectly, known as "ice ages"). When CO₂ concentrations were low (below 200 ppm), huge sheets of ice covered vast areas of land in the northern hemisphere. We have very good reasons for believing that CO₂ concentrations played a crucial (though not exclusive) role in previous natural changes in climate.

The units used to measure CO₂ concentrations are parts per million (ppm), that is, the the y-axis (vertical axis) represents the number for CO₂ molecules for every million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, so 300 ppm means 0.03% of the atmosphere was CO₂. These seem like tiny amounts and it is true that CO₂ is a trace gas, but the effects of even small changes in some trace elements can be very large. If we were adding arsenic to a cup of coffee, then a mere 300 ppm would be sufficient to kill you. So don't be fooled by those who point to the "small" numbers involved. Changing the CO₂ concentration from 280 ppm (as it was prior to the Industrial Revolution) to today's level of approximately 395 ppm represents the addition of more than a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

So what does this all mean? This presentation very usefully shows the very large natural atmospheric changes in the earth's "recent" experience (recent by geological standards, since the earth itself is 4.5 billion years old). Notice that the difference between glaciers thousands of metres thick covering most of the UK and more temperate periods during which life can flourish on these isles was only about 100 parts per million.

Human agriculturally-based civilisation has only existed in the most recent 10,000 years (known as the "Holocene"), during which time CO₂ concentrations (and so climate) have been fairly stable. Or had been.

So what we see (or is at least hinted at) in this video is (a) the ability of relatively "small" changes in a trace gas like CO₂ to produce huge, world-changing effects on climate, (b) the relative stability (CO₂ and climate-wise) of the period during which human civilisation has developed and (c) the dramatic and very sudden jump in CO₂ concentrations during the last 150 years or so, accelerating rapidly over the last six decades. Compared to all previous changes, the rate of change we're seeing is off the charts. In comparison to even the steepest rises and falls during glaciations and de-glaciations, the last century or so has been basically a vertical rise, almost the equivalent of a de-glaciation in the blink of an eye. And we're already in uncharted waters, at concentrations not seen for at least 800,000 years (indeed other proxies that go back even further - albeit with lower levels of confidence - suggest that CO₂ concentrations have not been this high for at least 20 million years). And if you look at the numbers on the y-axis, keep in mind that our current trajectory, in the absence of either global economic collapse or a massive energy and/or cultural revolution, will take us above 800, 900 or even 1,000 ppm during my daughter's expected lifetime. We ain't seen nothing yet.

And carbon, once removed from the stability and safety of underground storage, sticks around in the oceans, atmosphere and soils (the "active carbon cycle") for a very long time. We'll see elevated levels of carbon for hundreds and even thousands of years after we reduce human emissions to zero. It's important to keep clear in your mind the difference between emissions and concentrations. Emissions are like income going into your bank account, concentrations are like your account balance. So if we get to a concentration of, say, 700 ppm and decide to go on a crash diet of zero emissions, things won't return to "normal" for tens of thousands of years.
One recent study pointed out that CO₂ released by pre-industrial deforestation continues to affect climate today, albeit on nothing like the scale of industrial activities.

Why is this a problem? Many serious and senior researchers believe that life as we know it is incompatible with CO₂ concentrations above 450 ppm. In the long run, many think that anything over 350 ppm is too high since 450 ppm could well trigger the extinction of literally millions of species, perhaps a third of all those currently on the planet. Remember, we're currently at about 395 ppm and rising by more than 2 ppm each year.

Yet the insidious thing is that the effects of elevated CO₂ concentrations are not immediately apparent. It can take decades for global temperatures to respond to shifts in atmospheric composition, centuries before the full effects are visible and millennia before sea levels will stabilise. So that means the crazy shifts we're already seeing are merely the result of where CO₂ concentrations had reached back in about 1980 or so. Even with the best efforts, things are going to get worse for some time after we start taking this problem seriously. Thus any generation that chooses to forgo the seductive and wondrous benefits of fossil fuels will not immediately reap the rewards. We can always kick the can down the road for a few more years, but in doing so, we condemn our children (and their children and as many generation as we can imagine) to an increasingly hellish existence.

People and Planet: a new report and other stories

Royal Society report (Summary and recommendations) calls for both population stabilisation and big cuts in consumption to avoid "a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills". This is a significant contribution to the discussion of the relationship between population and consumption (which I discussed back here). I haven't had a chance to read the full report yet, but the conclusions seem to be broadly consistent with the points I made: that both population and consumption need to be addressed, but the latter can be addressed faster, further and with fewer ethical conundrums and so ought to be the primary immediate focus.

Guardian: IEA warns of 6ºC rise. It is hard to get a handle on just how catastrophic 6ºC would be. Let's just say that if we get to 6ºC, I don't think we'll be doing cost-benefit analyses anymore. David Roberts reflects on whether 6ºC is alarmist or realistic and points out that science alone can't tell us how bad climate change will be - because the most important unknown is just how we are all going to act and react over the next couple of decades. Those who think that 6ºC by 2100 is entirely unrealistic implicitly assume either (a) massive global co-ordinated action to mitigate through aggressive emissions reductions across the board or (b) global and long term economic collapse arriving sooner rather than later.

Mongabay: Organic agriculture has lower yields than industrial farming, according to a new study in Nature, especially for grains, though that is not the whole story, since there are various downstream costs of industrial agriculture that reduce yields elsewhere (and elsewhen).

ScienceDaily: Plastic in ocean underestimated by at least a factor of 2.5 due to the effects of wind pushing pollution beneath the surface, rendering measurements and calculations based on skimming the surface inaccurate.

SMH: India's border fence. Not with Pakistan or China, but the 4,000 km militarised fence on the border with Bangladesh, in the face of a rising tide of people fleeing, amongst other things, a rising tide. Though speaking of that rising tide...
H/T Donna.

ABC: Australasia at hottest for (at least) 1,000 years (also in the Guardian and the original study is here). This is a significant finding since most temperature reconstructions have focused on the northern hemisphere, where a greater number of proxy records mean more data is available.

Science: Some good news from Greenland. A review of ten years of satellite data appears to indicate that we are not on track for the "worst case" (i.e. 2 metre) sea level rise by 2100. Of course, "good" is relative; even a rise of a few feet will lead to massive headaches, but multi-metre rises probably mean infrastructure vulnerabilities worth trillions. Sea level rise is one of the most serious long term effects of climate change, though I suspect that over the next few decades it is not going to dominate in comparison with, for example, concerns over food security.

Grist: What would it look like for media to take climate seriously? A very interesting conversation between two journalists about media coverage of the climate threat.

Good news, bad news

SMH: The good news is that the US National Intelligence Council thinks "a water-related, state-on-state conflict is unlikely during the next 10 years". The bad news is that after ten years, all bets are off: "as water shortages become more acute beyond the next 10 years, water in shared basi[n?]s will increasingly be used as leverage [...] The use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives also will become more likely beyond 10 years". Full report here.

CP: March Madness. The recent North American heatwave is breaking a record-breaking number of records. Between the 9th and 19th of March more than 4,000 US heat records were broken, and only something like 113 cold records, a ratio of about 35 to 1 (the average ratio since 2000 in the US is 2.04:1). Some places set March records higher than April records, some had daily low temperatures that broke previous daily highs, and some had old records broken by as much as 17ºC.

HuffPo: 21stC oil will break the bank and the planet.

Asian Development Bank Says Climate Migration Poses Growing Threat: "In a new report, the bank says more than 42 million people in the region were displaced by environmental disasters over the past two years alone. In 2010, it said, more than 30 million people were displaced, some permanently, primarily by devastating floods in Pakistan and China."

NYT: OECD warns of ever-higher greenhouse gases. This is what we're headed towards without a significant change of direction.

CP: Do trees have rights? Revisiting The Lorax.. In a certain sense, they already do, at least under US law.

SEI: Valuing the oceans: "climate change alone could reduce the economic value of key ocean services by up to 2 trillion USD a year by 2100". I'm more than a little sceptical about such attempts to place an economic value on ecological realities, since they obscure the fact that the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. The damage we are doing to the oceans is not simply to be measured in missing dollars, but in broken lives, lost species, a weeping Creator.

Wit's End: Tropospheric ozone - blighted trees, breathing difficulties and pernicious corruption of science. The atmospheric pollution you probably haven't heard much about. This is not the "ozone layer" (stratospheric ozone), in which ozone molecules are precious and save our bacon from frying, but surface level ozone, which is an altogether different and nastier beast: "health costs due to global ozone pollution above pre-industrial levels by 2050 will be US$580 billion (year 2000$) and that mortalities from acute exposure will exceed 2 million."

Dried up, drowned out

Climate change is a moral issue.

The lifestyles of (most of) the richest 10% or so of the globe comprise the vast majority of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. This includes anyone with an annual income above about £10,000. These extra emissions are raising CO₂ levels, thereby creating a dangerous, potentially catastrophic, legacy for countless generations to come. Carbon dioxide continues to affect climate for thousands of years. Our actions are significantly decreasing the habitability of the planet for humans and presently existing ecosystems. The ones who suffer the most are those who have done least to contribute: the poor, the young and unborn, and other species. Given that we've known about this issue for decades, there is really little excuse for continuing to pass the buck to those who come after or indulging in delay while we hope for a techno-fix to appear. The basic atmospheric chemistry was grasped in the 19th century; since the 1950s we've suspected a problem; since the 1970s we've had a pretty good idea that it was likely a problem; since the 1980s we've had solid evidence; since the 1990s, alarming evidence; and over the last decade the outlook has only grown bleaker.

We enjoy unnecessary luxuries at the cost of others' suffering, livelihoods and lives. That's a moral problem. Another way is possible. Let us embrace it with joy.

Is carbon dioxide a pollutant?

With all the discussion surrounding climate change and its causes, effects and responses, it has become common for people to speak of "carbon pollution". Some object to this phrase, for a variety of reasons.

First, some think that the failure to specific that we are talking about carbon dioxide makes "carbon" a highly ambiguous modifier of pollution, and so quip that if carbon is pollution, we should all be getting rid of our diamonds (not to mention the carbon in each of our body's cells). However, in the context of contemporary political debate, to speak of a "price on carbon" or "carbon pollution" is an entirely understandable and acceptable shorthand. The context makes clear that we are concerned with mitigating the deleterious effects of an enhanced greenhouse effect from rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Granted, in certain circumstances this needs to be spelt out carefully and fully to avoid confusion, but in the daily cut and thrust of political debate, "carbon" is sufficient (and also manages to include a couple of the other non-CO₂ GHGs, such as methane (CH₄), though I suspect this is more happy accident than by design).

Second, and more importantly, some reject the phrase because they do not believe carbon dioxide ought to be classified with other harmful substances. This may be (a) because they think carbon dioxide is natural and pollution is unnatural; (b) because they believe that only substances that are directly toxic to life ought to be called pollution; or (c) because they think that carbon dioxide is harmless.

Regarding (a), this common position is based on a couple of basic scientific and philosophical confusions about the nature of pollution. Many naturally-occurring substances are classified as pollutants: mercury, asbestos, arsenic, just to name a few of the better known ones. Furthermore, almost every substance can be harmful in certain doses. Pollution is a relative term. Nothing is a pollutant in itself, but substances pollute when too much of them is found in an inappropriate location. Remember, it is possible to die of water poisoning, or oxygen poisoning.

Regarding (b), critics say that calling CO₂ pollution implies that breathing ought to be regulated, as we exhale CO₂ with every breath. Defenders sometimes reply by pointing to the possibility of carbon dioxide poisoning (which has historically caused a number of deaths). Yet the direct physiological effects of elevated carbon dioxide levels can be overstated in an effort to justify the use of the term "pollutant". I have seen research (can't find the link at the moment) that suggested that there would be no observable direct effect upon human physiology until over 1,000 ppm. Pre-industrial levels were about 275ppm and we're currently at 390 ppm, with the most commonly-cited goal of aiming to stabilise at 450 ppm (though this is considered by many climate scientists to still be highly dangerous; the last time the earth had CO₂ concentrations above 400 ppm, sea levels were approximately 25 metres higher). So 1,000 ppm is a long way off and would mean we'd already burst through all kinds of very nasty threshholds (though remember that reaching 1,000 ppm by 2100 is not outside the realm of possibility if large positive feedbacks kick in). In the US, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set a permissible exposure limit (PEL) for CO₂ of 0.5% by volume, which equates to 5,000 ppm, a level of atmospheric CO2 so staggeringly high that the last time they were anywhere near there was over 400 million years ago (for reference, dinosaurs don't appear in the fossil record until 230 million years ago). Well before we got anywhere near 5,000 ppm other effects of carbon dioxide would have wiped us out, so worrying about shortness of breath from global CO₂ concentrations is a bit like worrying about how a bullet hole in your head might make it difficult to comb your hair. This is a red herring.

A better line of reply to those who believe the term "pollutant" ought to refer only to substances that are directly toxic to life is to speak of ocean acidification. Rising CO₂ levels are leading to falling oceanic pH levels as the oceans and atmosphere reach a new gas exchange equilibrium. These startlingly fast (from a geological or ecological viewpoint) changes in ocean pH are already having measurable detrimental effects on a wide variety of marine life and are projected to become much worse as concentrations rise. This is a direct physiological harm of carbon dioxide that does not rely on complex human social changes and so alone justifies calling this dangerous substance a form of pollution. Nonetheless, it is directly dangerous only to certain critical forms of marine life.

And so we reach (c), which is, I suspect, what really drives this discussion. The quibbles above are really just extra confusions muddying the waters. The truly vital issue is whether the climatic effects of rising levels of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases are on balance harmful or not. Considering all the likely indirect effects - increasing heat waves, droughts, floods, extinctions, sea level rise, habitat loss, surface ozone pollution, ocean acidification, public health problems, and so on (not to mention the likely knock-on effects of increased food stress, water stress, migration and conflict) - our present trajectory of substantially CO₂-driven climate change will almost certainly be disastrous on human health and well-being, indeed is potentially catatrophic. So I have no qualms about labelling CO₂ a pollutant when we are talking about the volumes of it currently being dumped into the atmosphere (and these enormous quantities mean it is facetious to reply with a comment about breathing or soft drinks, as some do in order to ridicule the idea of CO₂ as a pollutant). If you think these impacts are implausible, then you would obviously have a problem with calling CO₂ a pollutant. The physiological point becomes a distraction. But rather than having a conversation about definitions, it is far more honest and direct simply to have the debate about the impacts of climate change. This complex and evolving scientific debate continues with much energy in the peer-reviewed literature, though it must be acknowledged that, with the exception of a handful of fringe figures, the mainstream debate is not between those who think impacts will be bad and those who think they will be minor, but between those who think that impending climate changes spell human misery on a scale never before seen and those who think it is much worse than that. The debate is not between climate change being bad vs neutral (or even good); it is between disastrous and utterly catastrophic. There are many more publishing climatologists who are worried about the fall of civilisation and even the extinction of humanity than there are who believe the impacts will be minor or even beneficial. In this context, even if the outcomes resulting from complex causal chains involve other factors as well (not least human social, economic, political and cultural systems), nonetheless, calling carbon dioxide a pollutant is quite logical - as is taking action to slash our emissions as quickly as we can.

Climate change: what is at stake?

The more I talk with people about their attitudes towards and feelings about climate change, the more I have discovered that many (perhaps most) well-educated and socially-engaged people have only a somewhat vague idea of the nature, scale and likely timing of the various kinds of dangers we face on our current path. And so, when I came across this summary from Joe Romm, I immediately thought that many of my readers might find it a useful resource to peruse, bookmark, reflect upon and share with others. If you are not really sure what impacts mainstream scientific research currently considers likely from a middle of the road business as usual scenario (i.e. not worst case), then this post lays out many of the key issues in an accessible way.

The figure included above is from MIT research from 2009 and shows the likelihood of different temperature outcomes based on two broad scenarios. On the left is business as usual. This is not the worst case and does not include slow feedbacks. On the right is a world where we take aggressive global action to reduce carbon emissions. The temperatures are the average global difference between the world in 1990 and in 2100. Since most other discussions used pre-industrial temperatures as a baseline and the world had already warmed by about 0.5ºC by 1990, then this needs to be added to the numbers to compare with other publications. My main criticism of the image is in the choice of colour. A rise of 3.5-4.5ºC above pre-industrial temperatures can in no sense be understood as reassuringly green. Such a change in the space of a century would be unlikely to be compatible with industrial civilisation as we know it or the possibility of feeding anything like the 9-10 billion people projected to be around by then.

What has smoking got to do with climate change?

DOUBT from The Climate Reality Project on Vimeo.

Do cigarettes contribute to the warming of the planet? Not really, but the deliberate manufacturing of public doubt in the face of widespread scientific evidence has been the hallmark of industry attempts to delay regulation in both cases. Not only has big oil used the same arguments and tactics as big tobacco, but in some cases, the same individuals. Certainly many of the same anti-regulation think tanks appear as sources of claims that are subsequently picked up and repeated in the mainstream media. Numerous publications have documented the history of these groups, who act as a PR smokescreen for industries in danger of serious public backlash over the dangerous activities from which they profit (for instance, Merchants of Doubt). The goal is not refutation of the science but merely the seeding of public doubt through the appearance of ongoing controversy on topics considered resolved amongst the experts. The question is how long they will be successful. For the link between cigarettes and cancer, such tactics effectively won the tobacco industry three decades of public confusion and regulatory hiatus in which to maximise profits. We don't have three decades in which to delay over climate.

24 Hours of Climate Reality

Over the next 24 hours, Climate Reality Project is hosting twenty-four consecutive sixty-minute presentations from locations around the world highlighting the present reality of climate change as it is manifest in a wide diversity of locations. If you check out the site, you'll probably find a location near you. All the presenters are experts in their field and thus have a higher-than-average chance of being grounded in the reality of what is actually happening to our planet. Each hour will feature a presentation that addresses both the global and local picture.
Disclaimer: this is another project by Al Gore. His An Inconvenient Truth certainly helped to put the issue on the public agenda, but it also probably contributed to making it fiercely partisan in the US. Gore is far from perfect and is not himself a scientist, but he is a good communicator and worth listening to because he generally has his ear to the ground, listening to the real experts.

Evangelicals ought to be greener than the Greens

Guest post by Mick Pope

What does the gospel say about caring for creation?
Evangelicals should be at the forefront of creation care, regardless of the issue. The Bible is far greener than the Greens can ever be precisely because we don't "hate humanity" (as the Greens are sometimes accused of doing) but should have a proper biblical anthropology in which humanity is made by God from the good dirt and called by God to the noblest of tasks. However, one of the problems with some strands of Evangelicalism at various points of history is that it hasn't taken biblical anthropology seriously enough. Because we belong with the dust from which we were made and will be bodily resurrected, matter matters, including matter that isn't human.

Genesis 1 makes it clear that the Earth is the divine temple and that humans are the idols/images in that temple (interestingly, the word used for "image" in the ancient Greek translation of Genesis 1.26-27 is the same word elsewhere used for pagan idols), representing God to the rest of creation. This rules out any negative views towards the dominion mandate, since it is in God's image that we are to rule.

Psalm 104 is oft neglected and makes a couple of things clear. Firstly, God cares for creatures that (at the time) lay outside of the human economy, indeed for creatures like lions that were often harmful to the human economy, because he took delight in them for their own sake. It is a Psalm in praise of God's own creative wisdom. Notice too how the Psalmist places human economic activity alongside that of his care of the rest of creation. It is a small step to see that if God cares for and tends the wild places, we have no right to interfere with that, and as we carry out dominion in his name we should be also caring for wilderness, not to our own detriment but not to its neglect either.

The third important passage is Romans 8:19-25, which shows how intimately our future and that of the non-human creation are tied together. Creation groans for its own liberation as it has suffered under human misrule because of our idolatry. Note a solid biblical critique of materialism and paganism - we can't afford to leave creation care to atheists or pantheistic Greens since it is our calling. Still, when those groups take caring for creation more seriously than us they shame us. Note too that if creation waits for liberation we don't "save the Earth" but we do act in hope for the future. Just as when we seek to be more holy we don't save ourselves but live in hope of our final sanctification.

So caring for creation matters for Evangelicals.

What about climate change? Is it disingenuous for Christian organisations like Ethos to support the mainstream scientific view without giving equal time to those who are sceptical? As a meteorologist and a PhD who has followed the debate I'd say the science is pretty sound, and that we at Ethos are following the understanding laid down by one hundred and fifty years of direct observation of temperatures, at least a thousand years of proxy data from various independent sources, the best models of the day that can only reproduce the twentieth century trends with greenhouse gases included in the model, and a whole slew of research based on various observations of temperature extremes, changes in rainfall patterns, melting glaciers, spreading tropical diseases and so on.

Addressing climate change is part of a much larger project. Evangelicalism has much to repent of (in my opinion) and has and continues to miss its mission of creation care and opportunities to live out the gospel.

Dr Mick Pope is a meteorologist and coordinator of Ethos Environment. An earlier version of this post appeared as a comment on the Ethos site.

Rupert's pollution: What does UK phone hacking have to do with Australia's carbon debate?

Two apparently very different stories have been dominating the news in the land of my birth and where I currently live.

In the UK, the News of the World phone hacking saga continues to snowball, with more revelations promised. There are now over 4,000 targets identified (including royalty, celebrities, politicians (even Prime Minister Brown), police, as well as bereaved relatives of soldiers, homocides and terrorism victim), but the story has grown much larger as it becomes clear that the real issue is the cover up. The phone hacking itself was illegal and shockingly callous, representing an abuse of society's willingness to grant journalistic freedom in the pursuit of truth (compare the Wikileaks saga, where the revelations are of much greater social significance and the methods used by the media apparently legal). But knowing that the practice was indefensible, it is becoming clear that News of the World apparently went to great lengths to prevent the full extent of the abuse from becoming public: making payments to police, seeking to pay for silence from early victims in a way that would remove evidence from police investigations, obstructing those investigations by foot dragging, destroying evidence, making misleading statements under oath and contributing substantially to a culture of fearful self-protection amongst politicians who might speak out about the problem. It is not yet clear how far up the chain of authority blame lies, but it seems fair to say that if some of the people currently denying knowledge of what was going on are speaking the truth, then they have become immensely successful while simultaneously being willfully neglectful and culpably negligent. The relative portions of blame to be assigned to journalists, editors, owners, police, politicians and the reading public are still unclear, but the problems are systemic.

It is, however, hard to deny that a hefty portion of the culture in which such abuses can occur can be traced to a situation in which a single man owns such a large chunk of the media that he can threaten political careers and so create the complicit silence in which police corruption can flourish and his underlings feel untouchable. Numerous politicians, including Cameron himself, have been emboldened by the events of the last week to admit their fear of Murdoch had lead them to silence or a soft tread.

So my hunch is that such systemic wickedness arises not so much due to the press being under-regulated, as from its being too concentrated. The crimes and wrongdoings that occurred at News of the World (and likely at other major papers) occurred not simply through lack of oversight, but because editors felt that they were in certain senses above the law, that public figures who openly questioned their modus operandi could be crushed in the court of public opinion through the very media they would be trying to shine a light upon.

Removing that dangerous sense of invincibility includes diluting the power of any one individual through diversifying media ownership. And this, of course, is where the BSkyB deal is intimately related to the whole scandal. Not only ought it be thrown out in light of the revelations of widespread illegality and contempt of the rule of law operating within News Corp, but the appropriate response ought to include the break-up of Murdoch's existing empire into smaller pieces to prevent the kinds of concentration of power that help to generate such pervasive corruption.
And to make Murdoch and News Corp pay their taxes. They are amongst the worst offenders for tax dodging. Murdoch has personally dodged hundreds of millions of pounds of taxes, possibly billions. Of course, this doesn't stop his papers offering lectures on the need for austerity measures to balance the budget.

What does this have to do with the carbon debate in Australia? While phone hacking is getting some coverage, the antipodean front pages are filled with claim and counterclaim about atmospheric chemistry and tax reform. The link is Rupert.

Murdoch's media empire spans four continents and is, by some margin, the largest news media conglomerate in the world. And from Fox News to the Australian, from The Wall Street Journal to The Daily Telegraph (the Sydney tabloid, not the UK broadsheet), Murdoch publishes a huge share of the denial, false balance and misinformation about climate change to be found in the mainstream media (as documented here, here, here and many other places). This is not to say that he only publishes denial, but many of his organisations are the worst offenders at giving equal weight to the claims of highly reputable scientific institutions and ideological think-tanks with significant funding from major fossil fuel companies. It is clear that this is often deliberate policy in order to sow confusion and thus delay and dilute effective collective action.
Murdoch is not, of course, the only wealthy individual deliberately throwing (bull)dust into the air.

This is part of the insidious effect of hyper-capitalism upon democracy. Rather than generating competition and diversity, the concentration of extreme financial wealth in the hands of the few that defines hyper-capitalism risks enabling the further conformity of politics to the interests of the ultra-wealthy. Media plurality is a necessary condition of a free society. So is the avoidance of extreme inequality.

And a postscript: stories like this give me hope. A young TV reporter with a dream career ahead of him makes an important realisation.
H/T Rod Benson.