Category: climate change

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climate change people don't suck politics

The Long, Unforgiving Grind of Hope

Unfortunately, you usually have to be old to know that things can change. To know that the hopeless can turn hopeful.

–Lawrence O’Donnell

It’s strange, because I remember so many things changing in a positive way when I was younger. Before I turned 20, the Berlin Wall fell. Apartheid ended in South Africa. HIV went from a terrifying death sentence to something that could at least be managed with medication. CFCs were phased out in an effort to stop massive ozone depletion. The first civil unions for same-sex couples happened in America. The internet went from non-existent to bulletin boards you dialed specific numbers to reach to a single cable that opened up the floodgates.

I know that change can happen, intellectually. I’ve seen it happen for over four decades now.

Yet it can be so easy to convince yourself, even looking at the tumultuous years you’ve already lived, that nothing more is going to change for the better. Because things also change for the worse. The PATRIOT Act happens. Trump gets elected. The internet turns into anxiety-inducing shit. We keep belching endless streams of carbon into the atmosphere. And no matter how hard you try to see something good happen again, the world doesn’t move. It just grinds you down and down and down.

In my childhood, my teens, my twenties, change was a thing that just happened. Suddenly, the Berlin wall toppled and people were dancing in the streets and the USSR was over. Suddenly, we could no longer buy Aquanet hairspray, and that was good, because it meant a lack of ozone wasn’t going to let the sun cook us all like eggs in a frying pan. And now here I am in my forties, venting to one of my fellow regulators, why won’t this group just take their fucking half a cake–yes, it’s not the whole cake they wanted, but it’s half a cake they can hold on to while they keep fighting to get the other half.

Change was once a magic, instantaneous thing because I wasn’t involved in it. I wasn’t in the midst of it. I heard there was a problem, and then somehow, it wasn’t a problem any more because people just all agreed it wouldn’t be. Yet when you become one of the people who actively wants change happen instead of vaguely observing it, any movement at all feels impossible. You make calls and donate money and knock on doors and write letters and protest and give feedback on regulations and nothing changes. You compromise and compromise and compromise and feel like the ground you give gains you nothing in return. Things used to change, and now they don’t. They can’t. They never will again.

But loves, I understand now that this is exactly how the people felt, when they were staring down the Berlin Wall. It’s how they felt sixty, a hundred, a thousand years ago when they faced a mountain of human suffering that seemed immovable, a crushing and endless reality. Nothing changes. Nothing good happens.

Until it suddenly does.

In geology one of the first lessons is: the greatest mountain will one day be worn down to nothing but sand, and all it takes is the gentle fall of rain. The tiniest cracks are wedge open by frost, bit by bit by bit, until suddenly an entire cliff face gives way.

Change is not impossible, it is inevitable. All it takes is pressure and time. So fight for every crumb and then keep fighting. Turn frustration from the fuel of exhaustion and burn it to heat the fire of hope. We are the rain. We are the frost. We are the change happening, one grain of sand at a time.

We will move mountains, and the children who watch us will marvel at how easy it was.

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climate change science

Dr. Hansen’s climate change paper: scarier than any horror story I have ever read

Decided to look at this due to this NYT article: Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shift Within Decades, Not Centuries. I actually started talking about this on twitter, but decided to go with blog because it looked to be getting lengthy and I want to quote.

Bless Justin Gillis, who wrote this article, by the way. Because:

Virtually all climate scientists agree with Dr. Hansen and his co-authors that society is not moving fast enough to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, posing grave risks.

And:

Yet many of the experts remain unconvinced by some of the specific assertions that were made in the draft paper, and they have not all been persuaded by the final version.

“Some of the claims in this paper are indeed extraordinary,” said Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “They conflict with the mainstream understanding of climate change to the point where the standard of proof is quite high.”

Among Dr. Hansen’s colleagues, some of the discomfiture about the new paper stems from his dual roles as a publishing climate scientist and, in recent years, as a political activist.

Looking at the actual field controversy instead of the manufactured bullshit not-controversy presented by deniers that’s normally sought out for balance. (And also fair to note that Dr. Hansen’s activism does make him stand out. Personally, I’m all for what he does in that arena.)

And it’s fair, because Dr. Hansen is making a pretty big claim. You can get his paper here: Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous

The abstract alone is well worth reading and I think understandable by non-scientists. (Though if you’re not sure about something, feel free to ask.) The big claim he’s making is right here:

Continued high fossil fuel emissions this century are predicted to yield (1) cooling of the Southern Ocean, especially in the Western Hemisphere; (2) slowing of the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, warming of the ice shelves, and growing ice sheet mass loss; (3) slowdown and eventual shutdown of the Atlantic overturning circulation with cooling of the North Atlantic region; (4) increasingly powerful storms; and (5) nonlinearly growing sea level rise, reaching several meters over a timescale of 50–150 years.

None of the points are revolutionary in terms of current climate science, as far as I know. What makes this a big deal and controversial is the timescale that they’re citing.

Our study germinated a decade ago. Hansen (2005, 2007) argued that the modest 21st century sea level rise projected by IPCC (2001), less than a meter, was inconsistent with presumed climate forcings, which were larger than paleoclimate forcings associated with sea level rise of many meters.

That’s the rub, this disagreement with the IPCC assessments. The IPCC reports basically represent the consensus on climate change, so going outside of them is arguing with the consensus. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, just that (as Mann is quoted as saying) there’s going to be a really high standard of proof. Here’s what the most recent IPCC report (AR5) said about sea level rise:

Global mean sea level will continue to rise during the 21st century (Table 2.1, Figure 2.1). There has been significant improvement in understanding and projection of sea level change since the AR4. Under all RCP scenarios, the rate of sea level rise will very likely exceed the observed rate of 2.0 [1.7–2.3] mm/yr during 1971–2010, with the rate of rise for RCP8.5 during 2081–2100 of 8 to 16 mm/yr (medium confidence). {WGI SPM B4, SPM E.6, 13.5.1}

Sea level rise will not be uniform across regions. By the end of the 21st century, it is very likely that sea level will rise in more than about 95% of the ocean area. Sea level rise depends on the pathway of CO2 emissions, not only on the cumulative total; reducing emissions earlier rather than later, for the same cumulative total, leads to a larger mitigation of sea level rise. About 70% of the coastlines worldwide are projected to experience sea level change within ±20% of the global mean (Figure 2.2). It is very likely that there will be a significant increase in the occurrence of future sea level extremes in some regions by 2100. {WGI SPM E.6, TS 5.7.1, 12.4.1, 13.4.1, 13.5.1, 13.6.5, 13.7.2, Table 13.5}

So basically, at 8-16mm/year, the IPCC is predicting something more like +0.8-1.6m of sea level in 100 years. Dr. Hansen’s “several meters” is a big jump from this. (The findings in AR5 are generally much more moderate relative to all of Dr. Hansen’s points.)

Moving on to the rest of the paper…

Good that they used the IPCC forcing data, since that does make their simulation results much more readily comparable to prior results. The fewer factors you change between simulations, the better the comparison showing the factors that were changed.

We use these concepts in discussing evidence that most ocean models, ours included, are too diffusive. Such excessive mixing causes the Southern and North Atlantic oceans in the models to have an unrealistically slow response to surface meltwater injection. Implications include a more imminent threat of slowdowns of Antarctic Bottom Water and North Atlantic Deep Water formation than present models suggest, with regional and global climate impacts.

If true, that’s really not good. (Basically, modeling climate response is incredibly hard already because there are so many moving parts. But if this is true, that would indicate a huge inaccuracy in current models, which Dr. Hansen’s group claims means that all projected responses to factors like freshwater input are way too slow.)

Skimmed all the nitty gritty about the simulation specifications because to be honest, it went over my head.

The big driver of their conclusions is how they’re modeling meltwater:

Freshwater injection is 360 Gt year-1 (1mm sea level) in 2003–2015, then grows with 5-, 10- or 20-year doubling time (Fig. 5) and terminates when global sea level reaches 1 or 5 m. Doubling times of 10, 20 and 40 years, reaching meterscale sea level rise in 50, 100, and 200 years may be a more realistic range of timescales, but 40 years yields little effect this century, the time of most interest, so we learn more with less computing time using the 5-, 10- and 20-year doubling times. Observed ice sheet mass loss doubling rates, although records are short, are 10 years (Sect. 5.1). Our sharp cutoff of melt aids separation of immediate forcing effects and feedbacks.

We argue that such a rapid increase in meltwater is plausible if GHGs keep growing rapidly.

(Note: GHG=greenhouse gas)

There’s the rub. Buying any or all the conclusions means you have to buy the exponential meltwater projection.

Temperature change in 2065, 2080 and 2096 for 10-year doubling time (Fig. 6) should be thought of as results when sea level rise reaches 0.6, 1.7 and 5 m, because the dates depend on initial freshwater flux. Actual current freshwater flux may be about a factor of 4 higher than assumed in these initial runs, as we will discuss, and thus effects may occur 20 years earlier. A sea level rise of 5m in a century is about the most extreme in the paleo-record (Fairbanks, 1989; Deschamps et al., 2012), but the assumed 21st century climate forcing is also more rapidly growing than any known natural forcing.

Arguably not a bad assumption. I just about shit myself when I realized how much faster humans were putting carbon into the atmosphere than whatever mechanism (I’m still on #TeamGeologicalFart) caused the PETM, which is basically the geological poster child for atmospheric carbon-forced rapid climate change. (Rob did the math here, looks right to my eyeballing and I currently don’t have my papers to check.)

They did some simulations with all factors but freshwater input controlled to characterize the change. (Also to allow comparison to their Eemian dataset, since the Eemian had a steady amount of greenhouse gases.) Basically, looked at the amount of freshwater it would take to shut down the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC–that thing that helps keep the temperatures in the UK mild) and how that would effect climate once that happened.

The AMOC shuts down for Northern Hemisphere freshwater input yielding 2.5m sea level rise (Fig. 10). By year 300, more than 200 years after cessation of all freshwater input, AMOC is still far from full recovery for this large freshwater input. On the other hand, freshwater input of 0.5m does not cause full shutdown, and AMOC recovery occurs in less than a century.

And this is a very scary thought here:

A key Southern Ocean feedback is meltwater stratification effect, which reduces ventilation of ocean heat to the atmosphere and space. Our “pure freshwater” experiments show that the low-density lid causes deep-ocean warming, especially at depths of ice shelf grounding lines that provide most of the restraining force limiting ice sheet discharge (Fig. 14 of Jenkins and Doake, 1991). West Antarctica and Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica have potential to cause rapid sea level rise, because much of their ice sits on retrograde beds (beds sloping inland), a situation that can lead to unstable grounding line retreat and ice sheet disintegration (Mercer, 1978).

Basically, even though they were simulating an influx of very cold fresh water, it actually caused heating in the deep ocean due to density differences–saltwater is denser than freshwater because of the salt. And if you make the deep waters warmer this could have bad effects on the stability of the remaining ice sheets.

Moving on to the storm predictions, this too requires that you find the exponential meltwater projection to be reasonable.

Our inferences about potential storm changes from continued high growth of atmospheric GHGs are fundamentally different than modeling results described in IPCC (2013, 2014), where the latter are based on CMIP5 climate model results without substantial ice sheet melt.

The conclusion is basically if the meltwater does what Dr. Hansen thinks and shuts down the AMOC, an increase in severe weather is strongly implied.

Increased baroclinicity produced by a stronger temperature gradient provides energy for more severe weather events. Many of the most significant and devastating storms in eastern North America and western Europe, popularly known as superstorms, have been winter cyclonic storms, though sometimes occurring in late fall or early spring, that generate near-hurricane-force winds and often large amounts of snowfall (Chapter 11, Hansen, 2009). Continued warming of low-latitude oceans in coming decades will provide a larger water vapor repository that can strengthen such storms. If this tropical warming is combined with a cooler North Atlantic Ocean from AMOC slowdown and an increase in midlatitude eddy energy (Fig. 21), we can anticipate more severe baroclinic storms.

Yowza. Predicted increase in severe winter storms rather than hurricanes/cyclones, as most people probably imagine when it comes to thinking about severe weather.

Section 4 of the paper is a discussion of the Eemian climate as a dataset. The Eemian wasn’t driven by atmospheric carbon input like today; what makes it interesting is that it had very similar temperatures to our modern world, but sea levels that were at maximum 6-9m higher than those of today–rapid rise due to freshwater input from melting glaciers. The geologic record can and does preserve evidence of storms, so…

The storm activity in the Bahamas during the Eemian dropped 1000t “megaclasts” (read: boulders)  onto the landscape of the time.

…some of the largest boulders are located on MIS 5e deposits at the crest of the island’s ridge, proving that they are not karstic relicts of an ancient landscape (Mylroie, 2008).

That’s… sure something. (Though in fairness, it has been argued that these boulders might be from a tsunami deposit, though Dr. Hansen obviously disagrees with that in his paper.)

The ability of storm waves to transport large boulders is demonstrated. Storms in the North Atlantic tossed boulders as large as 80 t to a height C11m on the shore on Ireland’s Aran Islands (Cox et al., 2012), this specific storm on 5 January 1991 being driven by a low-pressure system that recorded a minimum 946 mb, producing wind gusts to 80 kn and sustained winds of 40 kn for 5 h (Cox et al., 2012). Typhoon Haiyan (8 November 2013) in the Philippines produced longshore transport of a 180 t block and lifted boulders of up to 24 t to elevations as high as 10m (May et al., 2015). May et al. (2015) conclude that these observed facts “demand a careful re-evaluation of storm-related transport where it, based on the boulder’s sheer size, has previously been ascribed to tsunamis”.

brb, shitting pants.

Late Eemian sea level rise might appear to be a paradox, because glacial–interglacial sea level change is mainly a result of the growth and decay of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets. Northern warm-season insolation anomalies were declining rapidly in the latter part of the Eemian (Fig. 26a), so Northern Hemisphere ice should have been just beginning to grow. We suggest that the explanation for a late-Eemian sea level maximum is a late-Eemian collapse of Antarctic ice facilitated by the positive warm-season insolation anomaly on Antarctica and the Southern Ocean during the late Eemian (Fig. 26b) and possibly aided by an AMOC shutdown, which would increase warming of the Southern Ocean.

Oh, that’s interesting. Basically, dating of when temperatures began to fall by looking at the “insolation anomalies”–looking at when summer insolation was no longer enough to prevent ice sheet formation, indicating the move back into a glacial time period–looks like cooling and ice sheet generation (at least in the northern hemisphere) started while sea levels were still going up. Dr. Hansen interprets this as showing that the southern hemisphere was still getting hit with positive insolation, and coupled with freshwater-induced AMOC shutdown, that would keep the ocean warm in that area and promote further ice sheet destruction and melting.

I really recommend that everyone gives section 4.2.2 of the paper a read. It’s a very well-written explanation on the role that CO2 plays in the determination of the Earth’s climate.

Section 5 is where we get to the meet of Dr. Hansen’s argument as to why we should be modeling the meltwater input as nonlinear to exponential rather than linear.

Empirical analyses are needed if we doubt the realism of ice sheet models, but semi-empirical analyses lumping multiple processes together may yield a result that is too linear. Sea level rises as a warming ocean expands, as water storage on continents changes (e.g., in aquifers and behind dams), and as glaciers, small ice caps, and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt. We must isolate the ice sheet contribution, because only the ice sheets threaten multi-meter sea level rise.

Dr. Hansen goes on to argue that we should accept the data we have for sea level rise (pre-1900 estimates of 0.1-0.2 mm year-1 rise, tidal gauges 1900-1990 indicating a 1.2+-0.2 mm year-1 rise, satellites from 1993-present indicating 3 mm year-1 rise) should be accepted as they are and understood to indicate a distinct acceleration in the rate of sea level rise. Here’s the figure from his paper:

fig29

Which is a scary looking line, to be honest, though my geologist sensibilities quail at calling anything less than a thousand years a trend. (Tough. We don’t have 1000 years.)

Dr. Hansen follows with the mass loss data for Greenland and the Antarctic, noting that both rates are accelerating as well, though noting there is currently not enough data (only 10 years worth) to infer a doubling rate or confirm exponential ice loss. (Which is what the most alarming findings of this paper hinge on.)

I’d also encourage everyone to read through the conclusions, since they act as a good summation of what Dr. Hansen’s said in the rest of the paper. But particularly chilling:

A fundamentally different climate phase, a “Hyper-Anthropocene”, began in the latter half of the 18th century as improvements of the steam engine ushered in the industrial revolution (Hills, 1993) and exponential growth of fossil fuel use. Human-made climate forcings now overwhelm natural forcings. CO2, at 400 ppm in 2015, is off the scale in Fig. 27c.

And

Our analysis paints a very different picture than IPCC (2013) for continuation of this Hyper-Anthropocene phase, if GHG emissions continue to grow. In that case, we conclude that multi-meter sea level rise would become practically unavoidable, probably within 50–150 years. Full shutdown of the North Atlantic Overturning Circulation would be likely within the next several decades in such a climate forcing scenario.

Jesus.

First, our conclusions suggest that a target of limiting global warming to 2°C, which has sometimes been discussed, does not provide safety. We cannot be certain that multi-meter sea level rise will occur if we allow global warming of 2 C. However, we know the warming would remain present for many centuries, if we allow it to occur (Solomon et al., 2010), a period exceeding the ice sheet response time implied by paleoclimate data.

And he makes a very good point here:

Second, our study suggests that global surface air temperature, although an important diagnostic, is a flawed metric of planetary “health”, because faster ice melt has a cooling effect for a substantial period.

The climate system is incredibly complex, and yeah, you could melt all the glaciers and it might actually depress global temperatures for a while, which would be a point of curiosity for everyone fleeing the drowned coastal cities, I’m sure. I suppose temperature has become the focus because it’s a solid, small, easy to understand number. (Though trust me, I’ve heard people expressing their confusion as to why 2°C is such a big deal because come on, there isn’t that much of a difference between 23°C and 25°C, etc.)

Third, not only do we see evidence of changes beginning to happen in the climate system, as discussed above, but we have also associated these changes with amplifying feedback processes. We understand that in a system that is out of equilibrium, a system in which the equilibrium is difficult to restore rapidly, a system in which major components such as the ocean and ice sheets have great inertia but are beginning to change, the existence of such amplifying feedbacks presents a situation of great concern. There is a possibility, a real danger, that we will hand young people and future generations a climate system that is practically out of their control.

Well, that paper was scarier than any horror movie I have ever seen.

I’d like to know what other objections scientists in the field have (modeling methods, maybe?), though the big sticking point is if you can buy that glacial melting is accelerating and looking to be exponential. (And if then, the big meltwater input is going to have the effect that these scientists modeled.) The biggest problem is that there isn’t enough data, and waiting around for that data would mean that by the time we have it, it’d be way too late. So that’s… great.

But it comes back to the point that we’re better off believing in this case that it could be way worse than we previously thought. I’d argue that overestimating the threat and over-responding would do less long-term harm to humanity and the planet than underestimating. We’ve already admitted that the way we keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is bad–but no one wants to do anything substantive about it. How much scarier does it have to look? How many more warnings do there need to be?

Dr. Mann, as quoted in the NYT, sums it up:

Even scientists wary of the conclusions of the new paper point out that Dr. Hansen has a long history of being ahead of the curve in climate science. As Dr. Mann put it, “I think we ignore James Hansen at our peril.”

(This was a long fucking paper and I’m a geologist with a little oceanography background, not a climate scientist. If I missed something important or got something wrong as I read, please tell me!)

Read this: Response to the paper at ICARUS. This very concisely goes over some of the major criticism.

Categories
climate change geology

Oh No, Canada: Ocean Fertilization

NK Jemisin tweeted this article this morning with an appended “Oh no:” massive (and it seems illegal) ocean fertilization project taking place off the coast of Canada. (And a little follow up here.) Oh no indeed. This is scientifically problematic for a lot of reasons, the two main ones being a) algal blooms ain’t exactly great for the surrounding waters and b) it most likely won’t have the intended effect. (And this doesn’t even touch on the grossness of the pretense used to convince the indigenous people in the area to go for it, that it was supposedly about the salmon population.)

Let me give you some background.

First off, “ocean fertilization” is the process of dumping some kind of nutrient that normally limits planktonic growth into an area of the ocean, thus letting the little guys eat their fill, have wild plankton sex, and increase their numbers rapidly. This works because basically every bit of the ocean has its planktonic growth limited by the scarcity of one or more nutrient (e.g.: Rivkin and Anderson, 1997); otherwise the oceans would be one giant algal matt. In some areas it’s nitrogen, in some it’s phosphate, in some it’s iron (because iron is necessary for photosynthesis).

Okay, so why do it?

The theory here is that the planktonic organisms (since there is more to ecosystem than algae, even if they’re the ones sucking up the iron for photosynthesis) contain carbon. Living things tend to do that. Additionally, quite a few planktonic organisms build themselves shells or internal structures from calcium carbonate, which also pulls carbon from the surrounding water. So a surge in these organisms should suck carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean waters, right? Then the organisms die, fall through the water column as marine snow, and take all the carbon with them. They get to the bottom waters, get buried, and hey presto, that carbon is now out of the short-term carbon cycle and into the long-term carbon cycle.

Because of course, the problems we are having right now are quite literally caused by us taking carbon from the long-term cycle and releasing it into the short term cycle at prodigious rates.

So why wouldn’t that work?

We actually talked about this topic when I took Oceanic Geochemistry about a year and a half ago. It sounds very simple on paper, like it really ought to work. However, recent research has shown that it might decrease planktonic populations long-term (not good) and that diatoms might suck up all the iron anyway, because diatoms are basically the freeloading college roommate of the plankton world, you know, like that guy who always drank all the beer in the fridge and never replaced it.

There’s an even more basic issue with the idea, however. In order for carbon to get into the long-term cycle, it needs to be buried, and before critters have the chance to eat it. The oceans are teeming with life, most of which are single-celled eukaryotic organisms and bacteria, who just love to eat anything organic. Even at the beginning of burial, when oxygen content is almost non-existent in the sediments, there are plenty of anaerobic bacteria who will just keep munching away and effectively poop out pyrite. (The process is far more complicated than that, of course, but there’s a reason you tend to see a lot of pyrite in super organic-rich shales. Or in shales that used to be organic-rich before the bacteria came along and ruined your life.)

For a long time the model of how sufficient carbon could be buried to give us our lovely black oil-producing shales depended on anoxic events (literally, no oxygen in the bottom waters), but it really seems to depend more on just burial rate. The way to get the carbon buried and out of the way is to inundate the bottom sediments with so much that the bacteria can’t possibly eat it all.

So then in order for this ocean fertilization idea to work, you’d have to up the productivity sufficiently and for a long enough period of time that you could provide a buffet so large for the organisms in the water column that they can’t possibly eat it all. Then

Continue reading “Oh No, Canada: Ocean Fertilization”
Categories
climate change politics

I Read the Climate Change Speech

I finally sat down and got to read the full text of President Obama’s climate change speech. Poor speech; it would have been a much bigger deal if the news cycle hadn’t just crapped all over it, what with Supreme Court rulings and most of the legislature in Texas acting like douchebags.

Quotes are from the transcript here.

So the question is not whether we need to act. The overwhelming judgment of science — of chemistry and physics and millions of measurements — has put all that to rest. Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that to rest. They’ve acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it.

I’m glad that he made the point that some opponents have since changed their minds. 97% is as close as it gets to unanimous in science, it really is.

By the way, this? Probably my favorite line:

Nobody has a monopoly on what is a very hard problem, but I don’t have much patience for anyone who denies that this challenge is real. We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.

I have no idea if he realized that the Flat Earth Society is a real thing when he mentioned them. (I’m of the opinion that they’re really just trolling the rest of us. Or at least I hope?) But it turns out that while the Flat Earth Society has no official position on the matter, their President actually does agree with Obama that climate change is real. And then suggested that Obama should take a poke at the American Enterprise Institute instead. Oof. Hey, AEI: When the guys who might be trolls only we’re never quite sure but they claim the Earth is flat are publicly dissing your understanding of modern science with good cause, it might be time to take a step back and reassess.

But anyway, it feels really good to see the President call out deniers as such.

Really, I think he spent more time calling out bullshit in this speech than I’ve ever seen him do before. Because there was this too:

Now, what you’ll hear from the special interests and their allies in Congress is that this will kill jobs and crush the economy, and basically end American free enterprise as we know it. And the reason I know you’ll hear those things is because that’s what they said every time America sets clear rules and better standards for our air and our water and our children’s health. And every time, they’ve been wrong.

Considering every response I’ve heard from the GOP to everything Obama has done has involved the phrase “job killing” in some way, I think this is a fair swipe too. Because here we go:

“Our argument with the president right now is that he is picking winners and losers, he is harming innovation, and it is going to be a direct assault on jobs,” McCarthy told reporters.

Yawn.

On to the actual policy stuff.

So today, for the sake of our children, and the health and safety of all Americans, I’m directing the Environmental Protection Agency to put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants, and complete new pollution standards for both new and existing power plants.

Optimistic about this. Of course, the question will be just where those limits end up. But the fact that there will be limits to begin with is a huge step. If it gets done. If the limits are in any way meaningful.

The net effects of the [Keystone XL] pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward. It’s relevant.

There’s been a lot of tea leaf reading on this comment already. I found his entire mention of the KXL to be incredibly non-committal when you come down to it. There’s still no concrete decision in here, at all. So you can optimistically say that he’ll realize what an environmental disaster this could be and follow through with a denial, or you can pessimistically see that he’ll probably pick the sunny side evidence–focusing on carbon emissions since that’s what he specifically mentioned–and go ahead with it. I’m honestly on the pessimist side myself. If he was going to deny the construction of the pipeline, this speech, this much-advertised, massive climate policy speech, was the place to do it. That he didn’t take that chance to really draw some lines doesn’t fill me with confidence.

But please, I would like to be surprised.

I do support the initial push to go from coal to natural gas; natural gas isn’t clean energy in the sense of zero emissions, but it’s got a smaller footprint than coal. And I do agree with the president that this is a transitional thing. If we have to be burning something while we’re trying to ramp up our renewables, better to go where there are fewer emissions.

This is the stuff I’m much more excited about:

Today, I’m directing the Interior Department to green light enough private, renewable energy capacity on public lands to power more than 6 million homes by 2020.

The Department of Defense — the biggest energy consumer in America — will install 3 gigawatts of renewable power on its bases, generating about the same amount of electricity each year as you’d get from burning 3 million tons of coal.

Though hopefully on the public lands, they’ll be keeping a weather eye on environmental impacts. But I’m pretty pumped about the DoD being directed to go onto renewable power. It’s something very concrete in the President’s purview that will have an effect. And it goes right in hand with him directing the government to get more of its electricity from renewables as well.

…my budget once again calls for Congress to end the tax breaks for big oil companies, and invest in the clean-energy companies that will fuel our future.

This gets the “you tried” gold star. Because we all know that Congress is absolutely worthless and this will never happen. Then again, it’s not like he can do anything about it himself, so he can just go on the record saying it yet again. It’s the thought that counts. I’m glossing over pretty much all of his other budget recommendations for that reason. I’m glad he’s recommending these things (like funding for projects that help states deal with climate change that’s already happening or will happen) but I have little faith in Congress actually doing anything.

The fuel standards we set over the past few years mean that by the middle of the next decade, the cars and trucks we buy will go twice as far on a gallon of gas. That means you’ll have to fill up half as often; we’ll all reduce carbon pollution.

I’m incredibly glad he made the point that people will be using less gas–and thus filling their tanks less often. There have been endless complaints about the continued rise in gas prices (cue everyone in Europe laughing bitterly at us) and I’d like to think that emphasizing how this is ultimately a concrete way for individuals to save money will get people to realize this emissions stuff is important.

Just throw in another cash for clunkers program so people can actually get their hands on these new, more fuel efficient cars, and that would be golden.

. And we’ll also open our climate data and NASA climate imagery to the public, to make sure that cities and states assess risk under different climate scenarios, so that we don’t waste money building structures that don’t withstand the next storm.

I love you, Mr. President. At least for this moment, until someone reminds me about the NSA again.

Developing countries are using more and more energy, and tens of millions of people entering a global middle class naturally want to buy cars and air-conditioners of their own, just like us. Can’t blame them for that. And when you have conversations with poor countries, they’ll say, well, you went through these stages of development — why can’t we?

Another point I’m glad he mentioned. He does go on to say later that he’s got some policies for trying to direct developing nations toward developing with cleaner energy sources. But this highlights why, even when the US is no longer the biggest producer of carbon emmissions in the world, we still need to lead on reducing. We’re in a much better position than developing nations to work on this. And if there’s a certain inevitability to the developing world kicking up carbon emmissions, we still don’t need to compound the problem.

Today, I’m calling for an end of public financing for new coal plants overseas — unless they deploy carbon-capture technologies, or there’s no other viable way for the poorest countries to generate electricity. And I urge other countries to join this effort.

And I’m directing my administration to launch negotiations toward global free trade in environmental goods and services, including clean energy technology, to help more countries skip past the dirty phase of development and join a global low-carbon economy.

I don’t really know enough about trade policy to guess how the second point would effect anything beyond, well yeah, that sounds good. And the first point sounds promising as well, though I’m left wondering–what about the coal itself? Apparently we ship a lot of coal overseas. What about that?

So I’m going to need all of you to educate your classmates, your colleagues, your parents, your friends. Tell them what’s at stake. Speak up at town halls, church groups, PTA meetings. Push back on misinformation. Speak up for the facts.

A little bit in love again. Though you know what would help this effort? Having a readily available resource (say pamphlets) that lay out all the information in laymen’s terms. Like the Skeptical Science phone app. I wonder if the President has a strategy for that, or has thought about it? Because it’s all well and good telling people to educate each other, but it’s a complex issue and deniers tend to gallop out their bullshit questions in herds. I can’t believe I’m the only one that’s thought about this, but maybe I will attempt an e-mail on this matter.

So generally, this speech has left me optimistic, and it’s worth a read. It actually fills me with a lot of joy to see the President coming down hard on the reality that climate change is happening, and that people who deny it are wrong. The policy itself? There’s some good stuff there, more details necessary as always, but you’re not going to get that in the speech.

I think the next most important point is this, though–it’s a public acknowledgment that Congress is basically worthless at this point. He’s included points about his proposed budget, but then again, he has to propose a budget. But other than that, he’s not really calling on Congress to do anything, because he knows that they won’t. It’s good to see the President trying to do as much as he can within the powers of the Executive Branch. But it’s a sad reminder that the Legislative Branch has, hopefully just temporarily, rendered itself completely dysfunctional and futile.

Categories
climate change colorado

Burning

There’s a new fire near Boulder. It’s only 300 acres, but it’s burning the flatirons, it’s heading toward NCAR, and there are evacuation notices dropping.

The High Park Fire is still burning at over 87,000 acres.

My friends Susan and Galen have been evacuated from Colorado Springs. My best friend (their daughter) just told me that the fire has burned the home of one of her former students, that it’s down the street from the school she taught at until this summer. People from my writing group have been evacuated, or we haven’t heard from them at all.

@PatrickSandusky: This is colorado springs right now. Look at this photo and be shocked. Its f’ing armageddon here

Even away from the fires the air smells like barbecue. It’s hazy. The horizon closes in, unnaturally for Colorado. Ash falls from the sky in some areas, like it did during the Hayman fire years ago. It’s the most disturbing snow imaginable, gray fluff when it’s hot and dry and you can look the sun in the eye because it’s a angry orange ball cloaked in smoke.

9 active fires are burning right now: High Park, Chimney Rock, Flagstaff, Last Chance, Little Sand, Waldo Canyon, Stateline, Treasure, Weber. These are all places I have been, mountainsides that are old friends, trails I’ve hiked.

This is all I have, a dry recounting of names and facts. I know I would feel this helpless if I was home. I will feel this helpless when I’m home over the weekend. Because what can you do against fire? It’s a force of nature. It’s unseasonably hot days, no rain, and an uncountable number of dead pine trees, killed by beetles breeding over too many mild winters. There is nothing a single human being can do about that.

Is this climate change? People arguing over that are missing the point. Climate change is not one single event. It’s the culmination of years and decades of gathering warmth and more easily attained extremes. So is this a warning? Perhaps. Years of warm winters and hot summers? Perhaps. There isn’t anything a single solitary human can do about that either.

There’s some hope that good could come from this, in the sense that this will consume the beetle-killed trees, and maybe it’ll cut down on the number of pests. What we really need are our desperately cold winters back, two in a row. But so far that hasn’t happened, and I don’t find a lot of hope that it will soon.

But now I just feel helpless, sitting 1100 miles away and clicking reload on news feeds over and over while Colorado burns.

From the Denver Post: How to help.

Categories
climate change

Republicans Attack the Obama Administration…. on science?

If you haven’t read this yet, prepare to have your brain melted.

This letter caused me a lot of incoherent sputtering this morning.

First, I’d like to address the specific claims made by Senators Inhofe and Vitter and Congressman Issa, then I’d like to say a few words about the main premise of the letter itself.

I’ll go through this section by section. What I have to say here is the result of me spending some quality time with Dr. Google. My findings are not necessarily definitive, or complete. So if you dredge up any points that I’ve missed or gotten wrong – or have arcane knowledge that I manifestly do not possess – please let me know and I’ll add any new facts to the pile and swiftly correct mistakes.

Inspector General Investigation of the National Academy of Engineers Report

The criticism here is in regards to the report Secretary Salazar used to justify the six month moratorium on deepwater drilling following the blowout at the Macondo well that ultimately spewed millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. I do not have a link to the report, but rather the Investigative Report, Federal Moratorium on Deepwater Drilling, US Department of Interior, which responds to criticism of the original report.

The Republican letter implies that there was misconduct in the report, because scientific peer review for findings was claimed where none existed.

From the IG’s report:

All DOl officials interviewed stated that it was not their intention to imply that the moratorium had been peer reviewed by the experts, and that when the experts’ concern was brought to their attention, they promptly issued an apology to the experts via conference call, letter, and personal meeting.

And:

All DOI officials interviewed stated that it was never their intention to imply the moratorium was peer reviewed by the experts, but rather rushed editing of the Executive Summary by DOI and the White House resulted in this implication. After reviewing different drafts of the Executive Summary that were exchanged between DOI and the White House prior to its final issuance, the OIG determined that the White House edit of the original DOI draft Executive Summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer reviewed by the experts.

So basically, the Inspector General’s report says that any implication that there was peer review – and it was only an implication, not a stated fact – was a mistake that the preparers of the report freely owned up to and apologized for.

Also from the IG report, in regards to the complaint that information quality assurance was violated:

While the 30-Day Report’s Executive Summary could have been more clearly worded, the Department has not definitively violated the IQA. For example, the recommendation for a moratorium is not contained in the safety report itself. Furthermore, the Executive Summary does not indicate that the peer reviewers approved any of the Report’s recommendations. The Department also appears to have adequately remedied the IQA concerns by communicating directly with the experts, offering a formal apology, and publicly clarifying the nature of the peer review.

The Republican letter also alleges blatant political influence. Having read the Inspector General’s report, that’s a baseless accusation on their part.

I will note that the Inspector General’s report was requested by Senator David Vitter (and Congressman Steve Scalise). To be honest, after reading through the entire thing, I wonder if Senator Vitter is just feeling a little aggravated that the Inspector General didn’t find the steaming heaps of politicized scientific misconduct he was desperately hoping for. What’s in the Republican letter reads like a mountain being made from a mole hill.

National Research Council Review of IRIS Formaldehyde Assessment (EPA)

The NRC’s review can be found here if you’d like to read it yourself.

This seems to be the most damning part of the NRC’s review:

The report finds that EPA supports its conclusions that formaldehyde can cause irritation to the eyes, nose, and throat; lesions in the respiratory tract; and genetic mutations at high concentrations. Furthermore, the report finds that the evidence is sufficient for EPA to conclude that formaldehyde exposures are a cause of cancers of the nose, nasal cavity, and upper throat. However, the draft assessment has not adequately supported its conclusions that formaldehyde causes other cancers of the respiratory tract, leukemia, or several other noncancer health outcomes. Also, the assessment should consider additional studies to derive noncancer reference concentrations (RfCs), which are estimates of lifetime concentrations to which someone could be exposed without appreciable risk of particular adverse health effects.

This one is a little less clear cut, I think. The NRC makes valid points about the EPA overstating the research to pin leukemia on formaldehyde, for example. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies formaldehyde in group 2A, which means “probably carcinogenic to humans.” This is generally not the same as “you will get leukemia.”

Here’s a news article that has the rainbow of reactions in black and white. The Sierra Club is disappointed. Industry groups are happy. And Senator Vitter is quoted as saying:

“I’m extremely glad I fought so hard for this review by the National Academy of Sciences, which really is the gold standard in terms of scientific assessment,” Vitter said. “It confirms what I feared — serious shortcomings and bias at the EPA. Louisiana citizens should be able to count on EPA conclusions and advice. This study shows that we can’t.”

Which I think is a very nicely crafted attack, since it implies that the EPA is completely unreliable instead of overcautious, which seems to be the case here.

Personally, I’d rather agencies were too cautious about health risks than not cautious enough. Though that is no excuse for a lack of scientific rigor.

US District Judge Oliver Wanger’s Decision Criticizing Agency Scientific Work and Testimony in Federal Court

I find it rather curious that the source cited in regards to lives and local economies being ruined is an opinion piece: California’s Man-Made Drought, The green war against San Joaquin Valley Farmers

The snide tone of that particular opinion piece notwithstanding (because hey, I’m not going to begrudge someone a bit of snideness when I revel in it myself!) the job losses seem to be more about drought than pumping restrictions. (Estimated 16,000 jobs lost due to drought, 5,000 due to the restrictions.)

However, the rest of the points in the Republican letter are a bit more difficult to tackle. If you’d like to read the entirety of the judge’s opinion here it is, and I’d recommend you put on your asbestos underwear first, because it’s a doozy. Judge Wanger has some very nasty things to say about the scientists in this case, the juiciest bits of which are cited in the letter to the Administration.

This is where it gets muddy, I think. Judge Wanger has apparently faced some criticism:

But at times, Poole said, Wanger has gone too far. “We have argued in certain cases … that he has basically made scientific calls when there’s a dispute between scientists that are improper for him to make” under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. “He shouldn’t be the arbitrator for scientific disputes. Congress has given that role to the expert agencies.”

I haven’t been able to find any detailed information about the testimony given by the two scientists. So at this point, I feel like it devolves into a he-said she-said, where Judge Wanger feels that the witnesses are not credible, and the EPA says it continues to support their findings. I’ve found several articles that have questioned Judge Wanger’s accusations that the scientists are contradictory on the grounds that he has mistaken scientific uncertainty for attempted deceit. I really can’t say one way or the other.

For more information on the issue at hand, I found this post helpful.

GAO Report on Yucca Mountain and IG Investigations into the Actions of DOE Secretary Chu and NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko

In this case, the NRC is the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, NOT the National Research Council.

The GAO report on Yucca Mountain can be found here.

I have little to say about the Yucca Mountain criticism, because FSM help me, I actually kind of agree.

The attack on Chairman Gregory Jaczko has me rather floored, though. Specifically in regard to his recommendations for evacuating Americans in a fifty mile radius around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor. The nuclear disaster at Fukushima is still really an ongoing thing, and will be for years to come. In March, radiation levels at 60km were hitting the threshold for increased cancer risk. The Japanese government has faced very strong criticism for redefining safety levels of radiation in proximity to the plant. In April, high radiation levels were being found outside the 10 km evacuation zone.

What just boggles my mind is that Chairman Jaczko is basically being attacked for taking a “better safe than sorry” approach to a nuclear disaster. One can only wonder what the reaction would have been if he’d just stuck with the evacuation zone that the Japanese government had drawn.

But really, this is all beside the point.

Public trust in federal scientific work is waning and the academic community has gone so far as to call the situation a “crisis.” Accordingly, we request that you provide us with an accounting of your activities in response to serious questions raised about the quality of science utilized by this Administration.

Looking over the list of issues in the Republican letter, one thing struck me the most – scale. They want to talk about public trust in scientific work? I’d be curious to know how many people outside of the San Jaoquin valley – and outside of those that have a serious hate on for the EPA – knew about Judge Wanger and the never-ending delta smelt war? How many people have had their trust of science scarred by the EPA overstepping and placing leukemia risk in a report about formaldehyde instead of just sticking to nasal cancer? How many people had their trust in the government shaken by Chairman Jaczka recommending Americans not remain within 50 miles of the meltdown at Fukushima instead of a more modest 20 miles?

I am not in any way saying that scientific misconduct – whether it involves overstating one’s case or acting with too much haste – is acceptable. (Though sometimes in the intersection of science and policy, haste is required and mistakes are made.) But I think I am well within my rights to talk about scale.

What hurts the public trust of science more? The DOI erroneously implying that something had been peer reviewed when it hadn’t, or Senator Inhofe calling climate change (and thus the robust science backing it), “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people“?

What hurts the public trust of science more? Judge Wanger calling Dr. Jennifer Norris a zealot, or Congressman Issa dogpiling on the Climate-gate-that-wasn’t and saying, “It’s very clear that an inconvenient truth has been replaced by a convenient lie – we’d like to get to the bottom of the lie.”?

What hurts public trust of science more? The EPA insufficiently documenting its methodology, or Senator Vitter stating, “I do not think the science clearly supports global warming theory“? Or perhaps Senator Vitter trying (and thankfully failing) to quietly earmark money for an anti-evolution group?

What hurts public trust of science more?

The hypocrisy fills me with rage.

The shear sack required for these men to continually attack biology and climate science then set themselves up as “defenders” of science to score a few cheap political points, is breathtaking.

With “friends” like these, enemies need not apply.

At Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait has previously had a lot to say about these newly-minted defenders of federal science:
Vitter: Fail
Deniers abuse power to attack climate scientists
A firehose of global warming news, both good and bad

Categories
climate change oil and gas

Two Earth Science Items

Everyone should read this post. It’s by Dr. Bailles, one of the co-discoverers of the so-called “diamond planet” that the media was having squee spasms about recently. He pointedly notes that his discovery wouldn’t have been at all gleefully received if he was, say, a climate scientist, despite the fact that the scientific process and peer review is the same.

Which I think is a really good point. Everyone loves hearing about awesome astronomy things, and you never see the media seeking “balance.” And by “balance,” I mean, “finding a dissenting voice on the fringe of the science to provide the illusion of fairness when, in fact, the dissenting voice is the minority and has often failed to address the criticism of his or her peers.”

But, you know, “balance” is way easier to type.

And Brian Dunning of Skeptoid just put an episode out about fracking. I did a couple of posts about that myself, almost two years ago. Generally, I think Brian did a good job, and the episode is worth a listen. His ending point is excellent – it’s important to separate the science from how much you loathe Halliburton, for example.

The only complaint I’ve got is for part of the episode he refers to natural gas drilling as “mining” for some reason I can’t fathom, and even refers to wells as “mines” in a couple of instances. That started driving me a little crazy after a while. But then he uses “wells” and “drilling” in other parts of the podcast, so I’m not sure what’s going on with the vocabulary choice.

Also, I would have liked to hear Brian mention that fracking fluid is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, due to a 2005 amendment. This is something I still personally think needs to be changed due to the possibility of surface contamination. There are sites like FracFocus, which sounds like it’s built on voluntary disclosure. As far as I know there’s no other federal requirement of disclosure (please, correct me if I’m wrong) though it sounds like a lot of states have laws now. Ultimately, your mileage may vary depending upon how evil you may think the various oil companies are, but I do have my doubts that fluid additives would be disclosed without a legal requirement; if nothing else, a lot of the additives are proprietary.

Anyway, good job, Brian!

Categories
bbcp climate change geology petm

I’m Going to Wyoming, for SCIENCE! (and this is why you should care)

In a few short hours, I’ll be on my way to the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming, to participate in the coring portion of the Bighorn Basin Coring Project. Things are moving much faster than expected – the rig is already at Polecat Bench, where it wasn’t planned to be until Friday, because coring went so quickly at the first location, called Basin Substation.

(All of the amazing pictures for this post taken from the BBCP Facebook page.)

This was kind of a surprise, but a good one. It also means my advisor and I are scrambling to get up to the Basin as soon as we can. And that instead of one two week stretch, I’ll be coming back to Denver with her, and then flying back out to Wyoming on July 31 to help out at the third site. (The third site, Gilmore Hill, is on BLM land and we’re literally not allowed to start until August 1.)

I’ve set up a twitter account for just BBCP-related stuff. I don’t know how many good pictures I’ll get, since I’m on the nightshift, but here’s hoping! Please follow and spread the word. It’s a chance to see some science in action.

So why should you care about this project? Two words: climate change. In geology, the present is often the key to the past – we can observe processes today and use them to figure out the how and why of ancient rocks. During the PETM, the Earth’s climate changed remarkably, and in a fairly short period of time. I’ve written about it in more detail here, and you can also get more information on the project’s website. While the Bighorn Basin Coring Project is focused on understanding the PETM and many related issues, there is also this to consider:

This will allow us to investigate, in an unprecedented way, the high-frequency climatic and biotic variability of a continental depositional system during greenhouse conditions.

There are no guarantees in science, but there’s a possibility that this time, the past might provide a key to the present. Climate change induced by a rapid influx of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? While it’s not a perfect parallel (for the PETM it was methane, rather than our own carbon dioxide), it still could be very relevant. And I would think it’s something we want to understand well before our personal contributions of carbon get anywhere close to the rather voluptuous 6800 gigatons of methane that went into the atmosphere during the PETM. (As of 2004 we were at ~500 Gt.)

One thing we’re hoping is that we’ll not only capture the PETM, we’ll also maybe get some data for the other, smaller hyperthermals in the Eocene. How much carbon input equals how much climate change? As part of a species with a vested interest in climate not changing much, that’s a question I’d personally like to examine, and I’m hoping I’ll get my chance.

(And don’t worry, Mom, I’ll watch out for snakes!)

Categories
climate change geology skepticism

Climate Change and Plate Tectonics

My awesome mom found the following article on Alternet and sent it to me, with the question “Plausible or wingnutty?” : Scientists Find Link Between Global Warming and Earthquakes

At this point, I know better than to accept at face value what an article claims that a scientific paper says, so I set out to find the paper – particularly since for once I have a chance of understanding at least some of the paper since it’s about geology! I had to comb through the RawStory article that the Alternet article links to in order to actually find the paper in question. Which is:

Giampiero Iaffaldano, Laurent Husson, Hans-Peter Bunge, Monsoon speeds up Indian plate motion, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 304, Issues 3-4, 15 April 2011, Pages 503-510, ISSN 0012-821X, DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2011.02.026.

The article is available on ScienceDirect, though you may not be able to read the whole thing for yourself if you don’t have a subscription to the service. You should be able to at least read the abstract, which should give you the gist of it.

So what does Alternet take out of this paper? “Climate change can affect plate tectonics, oh shit, that’s why we’ve got all the huge earthquakes OH MY GOD.”

I will point out that there’s one VERY salient quote from Giampiero Iaffaldano (the lead scientist) that’s in the RawStory article that Alternet leaves completely out:

Iaffaldano stressed that his study did not mean that global warming would translate to stronger earthquakes happening more often, with the relevant patterns developing over “the order of millions of years.”

“Of course earthquakes do occur at the boundaries between plates because of plate motions, but our work doesn’t imply at all that we will see an increase in these types of events,” he told AFP.

Emphasis added by me. This little omission really leaves me wondering about the motivations of the Alternet author.

As for the paper itself, what does it actually say, and is it interesting? The paper does make a reasonable case for linking climate change with an effect on plate motion and speed. However, the important part that also gets left out of the Alternet article is that this link is explored on a million year scale. It’s an examination of how the change in climate over the last 10 million years or so – the climate change in question being a strengthened Indian monsoon – has affected the erosion of the Himalayas, which ultimately lead to decreased resistance in the convergence between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates.

Now, personally, I find this fascinating, since it links relatively “fast” surface processes (eg weathering and erosion) to much slower tectonic processes. I think that opens up a lot of very interesting research questions – Iaffaldano points out that he’s curious to see if there’s a climate signature to be found in other fairly recently uplifted areas.

But I think for general interest, it’s VERY important to note that when we’re talking a scale of millions of years – which is what plate tectonics operates on – the current climate change we are inflicting on the planet is NOTHING in terms of duration. It’s not even a blip. Now, if we keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere and manage to really fuck things up in the long, long, long, long term, maybe in ten million years future humans or aliens will be using simulations to wind the tectonic clock back and say, “DAMN, look at those plates move!” But this will have no measurable effect on our short little human lives.

It really bothers me that an interesting study is being misrepresented in this way. While I appreciate wanting to add some urgency to the issue of climate change – trust me, I do, BIG TIME – this is not the way to do it. It smells like a scare tactic, and it plays into the hands of the climate change deniers.

Categories
bbcp climate change geology grad school

The Bighorn Basin Coring Project

From mid-July to the beginning of August, I’m going to be outdoors, in Wyoming. No, I’m not crazy. Yes, I have a good reason for doing this. Because in the summer, that’s when we’ll be coring through the Willwood Formation in the Bighorn Basin. And this is a big deal.

The Willwood Formation is about Eocene in age, and sits on top of the Paleocene Fort Union Formation. The Willwood Formation is mostly a lot of paleosols (lithified soils) and river sandstones. And more importantly, the sediments that form these rocks were laid down during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and then the later, smaller thermal maximums during the Eocene. As a quick summary, taken from a thesis proposal I’ve been using in order to beg for money1:

The sedimentary geologic record can be used as a window into the past conditions of the Earth, including the climate in which sediments were laid down. In the Cenozoic, there are many examples of shifts in global climate. Potentially significant to the modern climate in which humans live are the hyperthermal events that occurred during the Eocene. Hyperthermals are relatively brief (~100,000 years) warming events that coincide with the release of massive amounts of carbon from terrestrial reservoirs. The most well understood of these hyperthermals is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred 55.5 million years ago. During the PETM, 6,800 Gt of carbon were added to the shared carbon pool of the atmosphere and ocean, and global temperatures rose 5-9° C (Sluijs et al. 2006, Zachos et al. 2008). Slightly more recently (53.7 Ma), the Eocene Thermal Maximum 2 (ETM2, also called ELMO) occurred. ETM2 is about half the size of the PETM isotope excursion (Lourens et al. 2005), and generally much less well understood.

This project is a big deal, for several reasons. Just to start, coring is not a cheap process, and this project is funded by a pretty major grant from the NSF. But what’s more important is what we hope to learn from the cores. The PETM is of great interest to climate scientists and geologists right now, because it’s perhaps our best historic example of what humans are currently doing to the planet. There weren’t a bunch of little proto-horses in the Eocene burning oil so they could roar around in ridiculous cars, but it was a sudden, rapid surge of carbon being put in to the atmosphere, even if the source is being debated.

This is important because, no matter how many people2 in the world are short-sighted and basically sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting “Lalala can’t hear you” every time someone brings up this science, that doesn’t make it any less real and pressing.

The paleosols, which are what I’m mostly interested in, can tell us a lot about how the local climate shifted in response to the PETM. This is important, since most human beings have a vested interest in their local environment not suddenly changing and, say, making it impossible for them to grow food. Also, one of the cores will be through the ELMO thermal maximum, which I think will end up providing a valuable set of comparative data. There’s already some pretty robust data for the PETM in the Bighorn Basin, and the cores will give us even more. If we then compare that data to what we come up with from ELMO, that may give us a sense of just how far a local environment will shift pushed by how much carbon – because it may not need an input as big as that in the PETM to really mess things up.

Hopefully, that’s enough to get you interested! The BBCP has a facebook page now, here. When we’re actually coring during the summer, there will be a blog for the project hosted by Smithsonian, which I’ll link to when it’s up. I’ll also no doubt be blogging about it here, and I think I’m going to be responsible for tweeting about it as well.

The coring is going to run from July 13 through August 8. I’ll probably be on the rig from July 19 through the end of the project, since I’m going to try to go to TAM before I head up to Wyoming. I’ll also be on the night shift the whole time – coring is a 24/7 process – so I guess I’ll be documenting BBCP – After Dark3.

Once we’ve got our cores, we’ll actually be sending them out of the country (since this is a project with multinational investigators!) to Bremen, Germany. They’ll be living at the Marum core repository, which is also where all of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program cores go. That means in January 2012 (if I can find the funding for it!) I’ll be heading off to Bremen for three weeks of intensive core prep, description, and sampling.

And then, science! Lots of science!

Year two of grad school is looking ridiculously exciting.

1 – It’s a time-honored scientific endeavor. I wish I was joking when I say that.

2 – Here, I use the term people in place of the perhaps more true but less polite term: idiots.

3 – I actually volunteered for this. If you knew how badly I sunburn, you would understand why. I also don’t like the heat, and it’ll be much cooler at night.

References
Lourens, L. J., Sluijs, A., Kroon, D., Zachos, J. C., Thomas, E., Rohl, U., Bowles, J., and Raffi, I. 2005. Astronomical pacing of late Palaeocene to early Eocene global warming events. Nature, vol. 435, p. 1083-1087.

Sluijs, A., Schouten, S., Pagani, M., Woltering, M., Brinkhuis, H., Sinninghe Damsté, J. S., Dickens, G. R., Huber, M., Reichart, G.-J., Stein, R., Matthiessen, J., Lourens, L. J., Pedentchouk, N., Backman, J., Moran, K., and and the Expedition 302 Scientists. 2006. Subtropical Arctic Ocean temperatures during the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum. Nature, vol. 441, p. 610-613.

Zachos, J. C., Dickens, G. R., and Zeebe, R. E. 2008. An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics. Nature, vol. 451, p. 279-283.