Idiot Tracker has a post on food security that uses food security as a means of focusing the reader on the challenges that climate change are likely to present in the near future. In short, the argument goes that climate change will negatively impact our future agricultural productivity, making it difficult to increase that productivity as our population grows. If we do hit nine billion people by mid-century (barring cataclysm this seems to be the minimum number we will hit), the author calculates that we will need to come up with 14.5 trillion calories per day, and notes that climate change is likely to present significant barriers to meeting this need.
I agree . . . in a general way. We are losing huge amounts of arable land each year to soil degradation, and we are running out of productive places in which to extend new farms that do not create really problematic ecological tradeoffs (like massive deforestation that speeds climate change). Climate change is likely to force the transformation of entire agricultural regimes in otherwise sustainable areas – for example, by changing temperatures and precipitation such that most strains of maize will have difficulty germinating in Southern Africa in a few decades. This is all a very big deal. But this post is also very, very thin on support for its argument.
As the post does not present any hard data, including how the 14.5 trillion calorie per day figure was derived, I cannot be sure if the author did any real math on our current production or the likely loss of caloric production that might occur under any number of likely climate scenarios (a problem unto itself, at global circulation models are much better for temperature than they are for rainfall, and there are few regional circulation models that can correct this problem – see the fascinating recent work of FEWS-NET on modeled versus empirically-measured patterns of precipitation in East Africa). All of these might create significant error bars around likely future caloric production. Further, I cannot tell if the author has considered whether or not crops will migrate as their ecological zones shift – surely farmers that previously could not raise a certain crop will start to take it up as the local environment allows and as other producing areas fall out of favor. We know that some ecosystems will at least start to migrate if corridors for such movement are available – and agricultural systems are just another form of (heavily managed) ecosystem. As cropping areas shift, what will the net caloric impact be? It is not enough to say that we will lose a lot of calories when maize stops germinating in southern Africa. We will need to get a net figure by calculating in all of the new areas in which maize will germinate.
Of course, such math only works at the global scale, and issues of hunger have very little to do with global production – hunger is local, shaped more by the intersection of markets, the environment, politics and society. So noting that maize will germinate in new areas does nothing for the people in southern Africa who will be without maize. However, we have to obtain another net figure: the lost calories from maize versus the new calories from new crops that people can grow, but chose not to before. This may still total a net decrease in calories (indeed, it probably will), but this is not the same as simply subtracting maize from the equation.
Finally, what of plants that are edible, but that we currently choose not to eat? The clearest analogy, to me, is the evolution of seafood here in the US. I like to explain to my students that these new, exotic fish that are showing up at restaurants are the species that no self-respecting chef would touch two decades ago. But when you wipe out the cod, you start getting creative. And don’t get me started about tilapia. It’s the rat of fish. Seriously, it likes murky, stagnant water. It will grow anywhere. There is nothing I find funnier than hearing a server say “we have a very nice tilapia today.” Yeah, I’d love to pay $20 for the swimming pigeon, thanks! That said, people do eat tilapia and all sorts of other hilarious species because they are hungry and willing to pay. So what new species of plant and animal will we be willing to eat a decade from now? Three decades from now? This is hard to predict, but I’ll bet quite a lot that we will find new species to exploit and offset even more of this caloric loss.
Despite all of this, I do think we face significant food challenges in the next three to four decades. These will be felt very unevenly around the world, but they will be felt in significant ways. To figure out what these impacts will look like, and who will experience them, requires that we carefully think through not only the exposure of crops to climate change impacts, but also the sensitivity and adaptive capacity of the agroecological system to those impacts. It is only when we understand how such systems are likely to respond that we can begin to really plan for the challenges ahead.
Tag: Climate Change
Not good enough . . . maybe worse than nothing
Well, Cancun did not totally collapse . . . but the outcome was maybe worse. What we now have is a one-year stall with very little to show for it. The targets are basically useless. The only thing this agreement has created is an excuse to keep talking without doing anything. As I argued the other day, we might be better off if the whole thing just collapsed, creating the space and urgency needed to really push forward the various state, city and local initiatives that seem to be the only effective measures that are moving us toward real emissions reductions and a sustainable future. Instead, this agreement creates a counter-argument – just hang on, don’t do anything yourselves, and the countries will figure this out soon.
First, I doubt the countries will get to a place where a real, meaningful agreement could be put in place in a timely manner. Second, as I argued in the post the other day, there is empirical evidence, via the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s Scenarios, to suggest that a global agreement isn’t the best way to get to a sustainable future anyway.
I know everyone working on this was well-intentioned, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions . . . and we’ve not yet taken the off-ramp.
If you are into climate change and the media, this is funny . . .
No, really. Realclimate cracks me up sometimes – and they have got the media response more or less down in this post.
Oh, and to save you the time: yes, I am a huge dork. As made clear by the fact I just used the word “dork”, which most people abandon in junior high.
You have to admire the rat bastards . . .
Man, do some of the Republicans have a slick noise machine – Bloomberg is reporting on a group of senators who are referring to the funds the United States committed as aid to get developing countries moving toward cleaner, more sustainable development as an international climate bailout. What a soundbite. What complete idiocy. Senators, let’s have a chat.
First, let’s consider the idea this is a bailout – what, exactly, are we bailing out? Developing countries were, by and large, consigned to their positions by the last four to five centuries of global history. Hell, a large portion of these countries had their borders drawn by other people over the last four to five centuries. Have you seen Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta)? Nobody chooses to be landlocked and primary commodity dependent, you know. So, while the bank bailout here in the US generated outrage because we were saving people from their own irresponsible behavior, to label fast start funding as a climate bailout is to blame the victims – basically, to insinuate that developing countries put themselves in that position somehow. Now, I am not denying that there have been irresponsible leaders and corruption in many developing countries that have contributed to the plight of their citizens, but most of these countries have only been under their own governments for fifty years or less – which means they arrived really, really late to the screw-things-up party. Hell, the party had ended and the house had been trashed before they got there – these guys are the governance equivalent of the idiot who shows up drunk on the doorstep, pounding on the door at three AM after everyone has gone home. No, this is not a bailout in the sense of the bank bailout.
Second, what this bunch overlooks is that this is an investment in OUR OWN FUTURE. If we do not 1) get some sort of meaningful improvement in people’s quality of live in the developing world and 2) find some means to do so that does not involve massive carbon emissions, we are looking down the barrel of a global environmental cataclysm in my lifetime. I go over this at length in my book – I would be happy to send a copy along to you and/or your staffs if you were at all interested (you’re not, I know, I know). Plain and simple, there will be nowhere to run to when it all goes bad. Yes, we in the US, Europe and the rest of the OECD have far more resources with which to cope with such challenges, but our way of life will change dramatically – and not for the better. Let me put this another way: Senators, your failure to grasp the basics of climate science, or the fundamental fact that we are all interconnected on a relatively small rock orbiting a fairly insignificant star in a mostly unimportant galaxy, leads you to believe that we can just carve off a big chunk of the (very poor) world and take care of ourselves. We cannot. You are on the wrong side of history here, and the evidence is already mounting.
Of course, what do you all care?
Sen. John Barraso (R-Wyoming): 58 years old
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma): 76 years old
Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana): 49 years old
Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio): 74 years old and retiring at the end of this term
Senator Vitter, you are the only one with a shot of being around long enough to see things go really bad.
Yep, this is about right . . .
Yeah, the level of discourse around climate-related topics is pretty low these days . . . not that it has been elevated for a very long time. Still, the folks at RealClimate hacked a political cartoon and got it right:
Yep.
And I'm back . . .
OK, page proofs are done. Index is mostly done . . . well, it is out of my hands, anyway. Jacket copy approved. Happy blurbs from Mickey Glantz and Andrew Rice secured for the jacket. Nice author photo for the jacket taken (by Scott). Yep, pretty much done here . . . which means I can now get back to hassling the internet. Wheeeee!
To celebrate, I bring you a completely unfair piece of insanity. I know I come to this late, but this is so nuts I simply could not let it go. Well, that and this may have a direct impact on my work life in the very near future . . . that’s right, it’s the battle for leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee! And why, you ask, does a fairly esoteric battle for what seems to be a marginal committee (it’s not) rise to my attention? Because one of the candidates, John Shimkus, is arguing that while climate change is real, we don’t have to do anything about it because, and I quote:
“I do believe in the Bible as the final word of God,” Shimkus said. “And I do believe that God said the Earth would not be destroyed by a flood” (via Politico)
By flood, I presume he means sea-level rise. And by Earth, I can only presume he means his great state of Illinois, which is a hell of a long way from the nearest ocean (though Great Lakes rise could cause serious problems for Chicago). I suspect there are a bunch of people in low-lying parts of Bangladesh and Vietnam, as well as a number of island states like Tuvalu, who are pretty much looking down the barrel of the world being destroyed by flood who might take issue with this particular mashup of climate science and the Bible, regardless of their religious background.
Holy crap.
This is old Bjorn Lomborg read through Genesis (new Bjorn Lomborg has reconsidered the math, and now thinks we should do something, though it is mostly adaptation) . . . and Rep. Shimkus might have some influence over the use of federal aid dollars for climate change work.
Look, it is one thing to debate those parts of the science that are not settled (a relatively small amount), and further to debate what to do about the impacts of what is already happening, and what is very likely to happen . . . but it is entirely another to announce that we don’t have to worry about such impacts at all because, even though climate change is real, God will save us. History is littered with the bodies of people who waited for God to save them. God helps those who help themselves – not those who sit around waiting for miracles . . . but it seems Rep. Shimkus’ reading of the Bible didn’t quite make it to the New Testament.
When business people assume they can do climate vulnerability analysis . . .
things often go wrong. Take, for example, the climate change vulnerability index produced by Maplecroft. At first glance, this looks interesting – a scale of risk that can be mapped to visually represent the levels of challenge presented by climate change to any particular place.
However, look more closely and it becomes clear that the product isn’t really useful at all. Anybody who takes 42 variables and aggregates them into a single category (vulnerability) has created something sort of useless. OK, so the vulnerability is high. But vulnerability to what? Flood, drought, crop failure due to temperature, coastal fisheries collapse? All of these things are problems related to climate change, but they are not present in all places at all times, and they all have different impacts on people (and Maplecroft should probably note that they have different impacts on investments) that require different interventions. So the index does not tell you anything diagnostic about this vulnerability. It is, at best, a first step to thinking about vulnerability and how to address it.
On top of overselling the product and its value, their underlying data is problematic – if you download the map you can see the size of the grid they used for the data – it is huge. This suggests that they have used global circulation models (GCMs) for their climate projection variables. The use of global scale data in local cases is highly problematic – downscaling these models to regional or even local levels has proven very difficult because the factors that most influence the global climate are not necessarily the most important factors at regional or local scales. For example, local deforestation can have a huge impact on local precipitation patterns over time without having a very large impact on global circulation as a whole – so the downscaled model (focused on global circulation) will not capture the importance of this local factor in determining local climate outcomes. Just looking at Ghana on their free map (you can download a copy from the page above), I can tell you that they have missed a really distressing trend toward the loss of the minor rainy season in the forest (Southern) areas of Ghana . . . which is going to have a massive impact on both cocoa production (national economic impact) and rain-fed agriculture. If they got this wrong, I am guessing they have missed a hell of a lot of other things.
This is what happens when the business community starts jonesing for climate change, but won’t go to the scientific community to get solid advice on how to get the information they need. Look at Maplecroft’s core team – only one of the six has really engaged with climate change or global environmental change more broadly in any meaningful way – and he is trained in Business Studies, not climatology, biogeography, ecology, anthropology, political ecology or any other number of fields that produce the people who develop basic knowledge on climate change, environmental change and their related human impacts. In short, they really don’t know what they are talking about, but they have made a nice looking product that might mislead people into thinking that they do.
What drives my concern here is not some sort of academic/governmental territoriality. When people approach the issue of climate change and its human impacts without a serious consideration of the science behind these broad issues, there is the potential for very serious problems. You should see the REDD+-related business proposals circulating out there . . . I’ve seen crazy stuff, like people wanting to plant genetically-modified super-fast-growing eucalypts in the swamps around the Amazon to enhance carbon uptake in otherwise not-so-forested areas, without the slightest consideration for the ecological impact of such a species (which would, according to my biogeography colleagues, surely go invasive immediately). Without meaning to, people might end up doing a hell of a lot more damage than good if they just run off willy-nilly.
There are a lot of us out here who would love to work with you – we want to help, and we’ve already made a lot of these mistakes. Let us save you time, and save the folks suffering these vulnerabilities a lot of unnecessary pain.
On the use and misuse of anecdotes . . .
Blog The NonSequitor has a post on the use and misuse of anecdotes in discussions of climate change. It is an interesting, well-reasoned piece that I largely agree with. However, I think the post sort of misses the point of the politics of climate change – to get anything done on this issue requires thinking very carefully about how to communicate findings and ideas with the public. While I agree, in principle, that arguing against climate change or climate change science by picking at an imperfect anecdote (i.e. Al Gore making it seem like 20 meters of sea level rise is impending) does not really address the underlying science, or the soundness of the underlying argument, the assumption that John Casey is making in this post is that science and truth are driving political decision-making. They do not.
The simple difference between politics and science: in science, there are problems and solutions (or at least means of coming to a solution). In politics, there are issues and interests that require debate, consideration and compromise. Science and data are just fodder for that process – they always have been. Scientists fundamentally fail to recognize this when they engage the political process, and tend to become frustrated when what seems self-evident to them ends up debated, and when obvious solutions get watered down or buried. Folks, we are not doing science when we engage in policy – we are doing politics. And that means accepting that people will, in fact, “weak man” your arguments by finding one imperfect anecdote and using it against the whole argument. Yes, it’s intellectually dishonest. It is also reality.
Politics does not deal in truth, it deals in tactics. And that means we have to be tactically aware of what we are doing when we lay out examples and anecdotes. It also means that we have to be aggressive in addressing efforts to “weak man” the evidence for climate change, instead of dismissing such efforts as not requiring attention (see the IPCC’s botched handling of the misrepresented melt rate of the Himalayan Glaciers). It is good to know the fallacious arguments being used against the science – but only if we are willing to address those arguments.
And people think I'm angry . . .
Er, read the NY Times editorial page today. Holy Crap.
In Climate Denial, Again
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has to be smiling. With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate — including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning — accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.
The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.
Some candidates are emphatic in their denial, like the Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, who flatly rejects “the man-caused climate change mantra of the left.” Others are merely wiggly, like California’s Carly Fiorina, who says, “I’m not sure.” Yet, over all (the exception being Mark Kirk in Illinois), the Republicans are huddled around an amazingly dismissive view of climate change.
A few may genuinely believe global warming is a left-wing plot. Others may be singing the tune of corporate benefactors. And many Republicans have seized on the cap-and-trade climate bill as another way to paint Democrats as out-of-control taxers.
In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence — or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked, destroying hopes for Congressional action while further confusing ordinary citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter. It was also remarkably heavy-handed.
According to Congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Mr. Cheney’s office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, has since described the process as “brutal.”)
The administration also sought to control or censor Congressional testimony by federal employees and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment.
Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration’s denial — not Tony Blair of Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Mrs. Whitman (who eventually quit after being undercut by Mr. Cheney, who worked for the energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists.
In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Mr. Cheney insisted that there was not enough evidence to just “sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that’s going to try to solve the problem.” To which Mrs. Whitman, by then in private life, said: “I don’t see how he can say that with a straight face anymore.”
Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.
I agree with basically everything in this editorial. And I wish more people knew about the censorship of science in the executive branch agencies under the Bush administration – it was horrible and wrong. And it really happened. But mostly I am surprised to see the mainstream media actually go after this issue with a vengeance. It’s about damn time. I feel less lonely now.
An opportunity in the challenges . . .
Via Grist:
TIANJIN, China — China will on Monday host its first U.N. climate conference as it seeks to showcase its green credentials, but hopes are dim that the event will yield major breakthroughs that environmentalists crave.
Three thousand delegates will converge on the northern port city of Tianjin for the latest round of tortured United Nations negotiations aimed at securing a post-2012 treaty on tackling global warming.
But even the most optimistic forecasts for the six days of talks foresee only incremental progress amid the continuing fallout from last year’s failure in Copenhagen by world leaders to forge a comprehensive deal.
“Our expectations are not very high, in the sense that we have not witnessed a willingness from governments to really move the negotiations forward,” Greenpeace International Climate Policy Director Wendel Trio told AFP.
Check the Oh Crap box in the right sidebar. These guys are foot-dragging, and we’re already out of what most people think is the safe range for CO2 concentrations. What do I mean by safe? Well, it comes down to the odds of catastrophic change. The concern is that, as CO2 levels inch upward, we are approaching a situation where nonlinear changes start to happen – that is, where slow, steady changes in the climate “jump” to a new state very, very rapidly (in decades or less). We can cope with slow, steady changes in rainfall in most parts of the world. That is much of what adaptation planning is about these days – adjusting livelihoods and infrastructure for expected changes in the future to minimize the negative impacts.
What worries me, however, is what I don’t know. Global climate and ecology are extraordinarily complex, linked systems that are not completely understood. Changes in some parts of these systems may have no effect at all on the larger picture. Other changes might radiate through these systems, having massive, unintended and largely unpredictable consequences. As we inch the CO2 concentrations ever upward, and we inch global temperatures upward, we create conditions in which the likelihood of this sort of non-linear change increases. The big example of this you might have heard of is the potential shutdown of the Gulf Stream, a shift in ocean circulation triggered by larger changes in oceanic circulation linked to salinity and temperature. If this happens (and it could, though I think it remains unlikely), Europe (for example) would become much, much cooler, radically altering agricultural production and the accessibility of ports from France north much faster than we could keep up with the changes.
This is an extreme example, but there are many other such shifts we worry about . . . and many, many more that we’ve not yet thought of because of the complexity of the systems with which we are engaged. It is possible to plan for adaptation to such events, though – in fact, I would argue that the idea of the discontinuous change is an opportunity for more productive adaptation and development thought than that which is practiced today. All you can do in the face of discontinuous change is make communities and countries as resilient as possible – build as much capacity for change as you can, and then let people address these changes in locally-appropriate manners as they start to happen. In other words, discontinuous change gives us the opportunity to take our hands off the wheel – to stop lying to ourselves that we can plan for everything, or that we even have all of the knowledge we need to make such plans. Instead, it encourages us to think about a more flexible, resilient world in which people are empowered to address the challenges in their lives.
In every challenge, there is an opportunity . . .