Earth System Observer

Analysis and observations about the science of our complex planet

Climate change and debate

January 15, 2015 by Brian Magi

An interesting article about the amazing climate change humans are causing was published by the UNC Charlotte campus newspaper back in Spring 2014, but it’s worth re-visiting as our atmosphere once again reached 400 ppm CO2 concentration. The piece was published as a point-counterpoint discussion, but as many scientists (include myself) point out, science is not about considering all sides – it’s about considering what the evidence suggests. I wrote a letter in response to the viewpoint that climate change is no big deal. If the evidence from multiple experiments/studies suggests a single point is true, then that’s where the scientific community will tend towards when explaining that science. As the evidence builds and builds with no one finding counter-evidence, the conclusions become more and more robust*. If the evidence suggests mixed or nuanced results, then scientists will talk about that science as inconclusive and continue to try to design better experiments or get more data or both. Most importantly, perhaps, if counter-evidence arises repeatedly, scientific conclusions will change in response. Science is a beautiful, self-correcting process.

In Spring 2014, I sat down with a Niner Times reporter and Twitter friend Ed Averette and talked with him about how I see climate science, and how I talk about the science of climate change in my classroom (most prominently in ESCI 3101, Global Environmental Change). I had a lot to say, mostly because I had just returned from a wonderful conference called the Carolinas Climate Resilience Conference in April 2014, where I talked about Climate Change in the University Classroom (presentation here!), and I met some amazing outreach-oriented people (Kirstin Dow, Greg Carbone, Jim Gandy), and learned a climate change song that could be played on a dulcimer sung by this NPS Ranger. The article Averette wrote is available online and includes a figure I made for my class lectures.

The amazing correlation between Earth’s temperature and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, as derived from multiple ice core datasets shown in the graph itself.

Another Niner Times reporter, Louis Aiello, provided the (journalistic) opposing viewpoint that there is no need to panic when it comes to the present-day climate change and his article is available online as well. Both articles are worth reading since they echo the innate concern we have for our planet, but that at the same time, the problem can feel overwhelmingly large**. Aiello never spoke with me, or as far as I could tell, any expert in the field of climate science, so of course I agree more with the approach Averette used, and found myself strongly disagreeing with Aiello’s article. I wrote a letter to the Niner Times in response to Aiello’s article, and I wrote a shorter version of that letter as well for the print newspaper. I did this because I often think about this artificial public debate that exists in the face of a broad scientific consensus about many points regarding the present-day climate change, and I also think that scientists need to speak up when they know about a topic.

Screenshot of the print version of my letter that had a limited number of words I could include. Hence the online letter is longer.

*Gravity is a good example. Go measure the acceleration if you want, but you’re likely to find the same thing any scientist will find. Acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 meters per second every second that an object falls. Thus, this is essentially a fact in our world, but it arose from evidence, not our gut feeling.

**This philosophy of how a single person drawing from a common resource scales up to major problems is known as the Tragedy of the Commons, which has been spoken about eloquently by many many people, including wikipedia.

Tags: climate global environmental change global warming teaching

Climate change and 400 ppm carbon dioxide

January 14, 2015 by Brian Magi

In the great carbon cycle that is at work on our planet, carbon dioxide (CO2) gas concentration in our atmosphere, as measured in the most famous observation site in the world (Mauna Loa, Hawaii, home of the Keeling Curve), has risen again above 400 parts per million, or 400 ppm for short. This happened in 2014 before CO2 dipped back below 400 ppm, and while 400 ppm is an arbitrary choice to focus on, round numbers typically get more attention than, say, 397 ppm. Think about a baseball player’s batting average, which is hits divided by at bats. Somehow a 0.299 (or “299”) batting average is perceived as worse than a 0.300 (300) batting average, but really, it’s the difference of a few hits (or at bats) in the course of a season. Ted Williams hit 406 in 1941. 185 hits in 456 at bats. 3 fewer hits, and he would have hit 399, and the world would’ve sighed. 3 hits! Back to CO2. I’ll suggest, like many others, that 400 ppm is a good place to step back and think.

What is the carbon cycle?

IPCC AR5 Figure 6.1 is a nearly perfect capture (as it should be given the expertise that developed the figure!), but I boiled away the beauty to a more practical figure for my classes. carbon-cycle-boiled The reason that CO2 goes up and down in any given year is mainly because the Earth breathes in and out. When the Earth breathes in, plants draw CO2 from the air and convert it to plant carbon via photosynthesis. As a result CO2 concentration in the atmosphere goes down. When the Earth breathes out, plants release CO2 into the air via that respiration, the process of decomposition that acts in the opposite direction of photosynthesis. CO2 concentration in the atmosphere then goes up. The breath results in a steady rise in CO2 concentration from October to May, and a steady decrease from June to September. As you would expect, the rise and fall are essentially reversed in when they occur in the Southern Hemisphere, and this is evident in the data as well. As you might also surmise, in the Northern Hemisphere, the enormous number of seasonal plant growth/decay results in a bigger “breath” than in the Southern Hemisphere. Check the graph here to see that hemisphere difference.

The Keeling Curve, and CO2 concentration in general, is a way to “see” a part of the Earth’s carbon cycle, which are all the physical/chemical/biological/geological (biogeochemical, for short) processes that exchange carbon. The exchanges between carbon “reservoirs” (for example, the atmosphere and the land in the figure above) happen at different rates and magnitudes. Oceans store enormous amounts of carbon from CO2, and rocks store even more. The atmosphere is relatively carbon-free, but we are burning carbon from rock reservoirs (fossil fuels), and burning is a combustion chemical reaction that produces many carbon-containing gases and particles, but most fundamentally water vapor and CO2. This CO2 goes into the atmosphere and stays there for a long time. Water vapor goes into the atmosphere too, but leaves the atmosphere within a couple of weeks via precipitation. As a result, the year to year variability shows the Earth’s breath (land-atmosphere exchange), but the long-term trend shows that CO2 concentration itself is increasing when you compare the average from one year to one from a previous year. That long-term trend is showing how more and more carbon from CO2 is being stored in the atmosphere reservoir of the carbon cycle.

We are FORCING the carbon cycle to change by changing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That 400 ppm concentration value is a measure of how much carbon from CO2 (in units of mass, like kilograms or pounds) is in the atmosphere. The change in concentration is a measure of how much carbon from CO2 has been put into the atmosphere (again, in units of mass). The pre-industrial concentration of CO2 was about 280 ppm, so 120 ppm has been added to the atmosphere reservoir in the carbon cycle. It’s relatively easy to show that +120 ppm is equal to 284 billion tons of carbon added to our atmosphere.

Most of that 120 ppm is from human activities of fossil fuel burning (moving carbon from rock reservoir) and from deforestation (moving carbon from land reservoir), and 400 ppm is, as far as humans are concerned, completely unprecedented. At no time in the past 800,000 years, through several ice ages and enormous climate changes (figure at bottom), has the planet had concentrations of anything close to 400 ppm. Furthermore, it is quite clear from scientific and anthropologic evidence (at least!) that human civilization has evolved in a period of relative stability in Earth’s climate history. CO2 concentration has largely remained around 280 ppm until the last 100 years or so. Evidence that scientists have collected suggest that CO2 and temperature track each other. This is fundamentally why most climate scientists, and most scientists in general, are concerned about short and long term futures.

Humans can adapt and we will have to adapt to some degree, but the changes we are imposing on the planet through the carbon cycle are much faster than anything that we have an analog for in the past through naturally-driven climate changes. This is where carbon mitigation strategies are so critical, and why everyone is talking about the EPA Clean Power Plan, COP20 Lima, China-USA negotiations, and the upcoming COP21 Paris negotiations. These negotiations are about whether humans can live on the world without altering it in ways that more than likely is detrimental before being beneficial. Right now, the science says we are not very good tenants. With 400 ppm CO2, we are breathing air with more CO2 in it than any other human or proto-human has ever breathed. It’s not poisoning us directly, but the increased CO2 is changing how the Sun and Earth-Atmosphere system are interacting with each other. We are forcing the planet to warm as more electromagnetic radiation is absorbed by the unusual excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The warmth is changing everything, and it will continue.
co2-800k-present

Tags: adaptation carbon climate CO2 data analysis data visualization global warming mitigation

Call for Abstracts for Pyrogeography session at AAG 2015

October 22, 2014 by Brian Magi

This is a post that I will link via twitter. If you are interested in presenting your Pyrogeography research at the Association of American Geographers 2015 annual meeting in Chicago in late April 2015, please submit an Abstract and send your AAG PIN to me or another session organizer. AAG Abstract deadline is November 5.

Our other Pyrogeography session co-organizers include Paul Laris (CSU Long Beach), Jenn Marlon (Yale Univ), Michael Coughlan (Univ of Georgia Athens), and Leif Brottem (Grinnell College).

—————-

Call for Abstracts AAG 2015

Title: Pyrogeography

Description: Pyrogeography seeks to understand the spatio-temporal patterns of fire as a function of the complex interplay of human and environmental factors. Over the past century, there have been enormous changes in human perceptions and uses of fire around the world. Moreover, climate and fuel conditions have been rapidly changing in recent decades, further altering interactions between fire and its various controls. Fire researchers are increasingly seeking ways to integrate multiple perspectives and sources of data and information to better understand the changing dimensions of fire regimes, whether expressed through shifts in extent of area burned, fire frequency, type, severity, or seasonality. All methodological approaches are welcome and we especially welcome mixed-method research approaches. Research approaches may span local to global scales, and include diverse approaches from geography and anthropology, based on paleoecological, dendrochronological, archaeological, historical, satellite, mixed-methods, and other modern approaches, as well as global and regional fire modeling research, and fusions of these methods.

Session co-organizers include: Paul Laris [Paul.Laris at csulb.edu], Brian Magi [brian.magi at uncc.edu], Jennifer Marlon [jennmarlon at gmail.com], Michael Coughlan [coughlan at uga.edu], and Leif Brottem [brotteml at grinnell.edu]. Contact any of the co-organizers if you are interested in participating or have questions.

——————

Fires in January 2014 from NASA Rapid Response

Fires in September 2014 from NASA Rapid Response

Fire images are from NASA Rapid Response.

Tags: fire human-fire interactions interdisciplinary research pyrogeography

Robust features in the 2014 USA forecast

February 22, 2014 by Brian Magi

Building on a previous discussion about a seasonal forecast product from NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC), I am still really curious about how robust the features in the seasonal weather patterns in the USA are. “Weather” in this case is referring to temperature and precipitation (T and PCP), and features refer to 3-month boxcar averages of T and PCP anomalies compared to the corresponding 3-month climatologies. So this is not the normal day-to-day weather or even the recent weather. Here are some new figures, which I explore below in terms of features that seem to be “robust” and features that seems to be “ephemeral”.

First, temperature in two plots:

Then, precipitation in two plots:

Watch the figures carefully. All the animations start with a forecast for 3-month averaged T and PCP for March-April-May (MAM). Then, they step forward to April-May-June (AMJ)The CPC data product seems intended to provide an idea of whether T and PCP will be above or below average for the USA (including Alaska). In a previous discussion, I looked at CPC outlooks for 2014 and early 2015, and their figures and analysis were produced using actual mid-January 2014 conditions.

New data

Now another month of data is in and CPC has updated their seasonal forecast to begin with mid-February 2014 conditions. A natural expectation is that the seasonal forecast would be better earlier in the overall forecast period. In other words, as the animation above progresses, the confidence in the forecast should decrease with time. Sometimes, however, larger patterns of atmospheric variability that emerge somewhere else in the world can exert some level of control on weather patterns (T and PCP) in the USA. El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO, or sometimes just “El Nino”) is the best known example.

There could be all sorts of speculative lines of thinking in terms of causes, so for now, I’ll focus on the features that seem to hold up after another month of data. I’ll call these robust, and point out one overall theme that is worth watching as winter releases its grip on much of the USA.

Robust Features

The Southwestern USA and often the Western USA in general is facing what will likely be a warmer than average year until about October. I think this is a pretty safe prediction. There is almost no evolution after more data was considered, except perhaps that the Pacific Coast tends towards higher probability of above average warmth. Upper Alaska is also holding up to the earlier forecast of warmth, especially in the northernmnost reaches. Both these regions are well known as fire prone under unusual warmth. Uh-oh. By November-December, the above average warmth shifts to the mid-Atlantic and the Southeast USA. The Northeast USA drifts towards unusual warmth starting in the summertime, maybe July, and ending about, oh, early next calendar year. For precipitation, much of the USA seems to be a normal water year. The problem is that in the near term, California remains dryer than average. Other features in a featureless prediction are that the deep South is dry in the spring, while the Ohio River Valley is wetter than average. Northern Florida and the coastal SE USA tend towards dry late in the calendar year.*

Summary and What the AVERAGE Year Looks Like

Overall, the story remains clear: The USA should experience another warmer than average year. Warmer than average is a relative term. Remember that NOAA (and CPC) define the normal temperature and precipitation amounts by the 1981-2010 30 year average. This is a particularly irritating 30 year timeframe mainly because climate is clearly warming most rapidly during the 1970 to present day period. It is what it is, but sometimes the simpler message is lost. The CPC forecast is for a year that is warmer than the 1981-2010 average. So what is the 1981-2010 average?? This is what the 1895-2013 temperature and precipitation trends for the contiguous USA (no Alaska) from NOAA NCDC with the baseline average 1981-2010 average temperature overlaid. contiguousUSA-1895-2013-annual-T

The precipitation is not the story, in my mind. The story is that we should expect a warmer than 1981-2010 year. The average of 1981-2010, without doing any math, is clearly warmer than most of the years this past century. Quickly eyeballing this number says that 82 of the 100 years in the last century are colder than the 1981-2010 average. This is really important in terms of perception of the significance of a warmer than “average” year. 1981-2010 is not a very good choice for the “average”. Gonna be a warm year according to CPC. Nowhere is there a robust and spatially significant feature suggesting below average temperatures, by the way.

*There are a few features that are not that robust, by my admittedly weak definition. For example, it’s not that clear whether the NE USA or the NW USA will tend warmer than average in the early summer. And precipitation has about the same number of features that are robust as not robust.

Tags: climate data analysis data visualization NOAA spatiotemporal analysis USA

Forecasting the USA temperature and precipitation tendency for 2014

February 13, 2014 by Brian Magi

Where we are this calendar year

Currently, the USA as a whole and the Southeastern USA are both cooler than normal this year 2014-02-12-YearTDeptUS

and precipitation is slightly below average for the Eastern USA, above average for Colorado-Wyoming-Idaho, and well below average for the Southwestern USA. 2014-02-12-YearPNormUS

Where we are right now

Thinking about the upcoming year in weather while in the midst of a crippling snow/ice storm in the Carolinas (discussion via #NWSGSP, over 2,000 outages by end of 12 Feb 2014 mostly in Lancaster, Greenville, and Pickens Counties in SC, and Macon and Caswell Counties in NC*, flights cancelled, Rayleigh-Durham turning into a parking lot like Atlanta only two weeks ago, etc.) is the perfect time to test whether you can separate a trend from variability (teach me, dog walker).

*updated on 13 Feb 2014 midday is 36,400 outages; more than 14,000 in Mecklenburg, 4000 in Cabarrus, 2700 in Gaston, 1600 in Rowan, 1300 in Lincoln, and 1100 in Durham County, NC. About 5000 in Lancaster and 2900 in Chester County, SC. Wow. Second band of snow falling in North Mecklenburg dropped maybe another 6″ on the 5-6″ we had yesterday. Double wow. Snow and ice totals should be impressive after the analysis is complete.

Trend, variability, and perception

The temptation is that your opinion is tempered by what you are currently experiencing. The old and boring argument that “Hey, it’s cold. What’s up with global warming?” The short-story (pun intended) is that weather is always variable, and the #SEStorm snow and ice storm is no exception.

What is the trend? Globally, it’s simple. Temperature is increasing (NASA GISS, UK Met Office CRU, NOAA NCDC). For the USA, and states within the USA, it’s less simple. Variability in the weather tends to average out less and less over smaller and smaller spatial scales. What does this mean? The ups and downs we expect from weather like our February snow/ice storm and the preceding week with beautiful warm temperatures become less and less noticeable at larger spatial scales because while North Carolina might be down in temperature, somewhere else on Earth is certainly up on temperature. They average out unless there is an overriding trend, like the trend imposed by increases in greenhouse gases. That’s why the global temperature trend is so important. If something is making the entire Earth warm above what is considered a range of natural variability, then some very powerful mechanism is at work.

Where we might be this calendar year

Back to the question at hand though. Can science address near-term (say, over the next 3-12 months) temperature and precipitation? The answer is yes, and this prediction is studies using an analysis called seasonal forecasts. I was shocked by what is suggested for temperature for the rest of 2014 and slightly into the beginning of 2015. NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC) updates their seasonal forecasts about the middle of every month, and I put this animated version of their graphics together below. temperature-2014-01-16

where, once you wrap your head around what I call the “geography” of the figure, you see that NOAA CPC is predicting whether the temperature over successively farther 3-month periods (Feb-Mar-Apr, Mar-Apr-May, etc.) will be above, at, or below the average temperature for 1981-2010 (the climate normal). Clearly, NOAA CPC analysis is suggesting that the USA is due to experience an above-average year for temperature. In particular, the Southwest and Alaska are pummeled by warmer-than-average temperatures until October (a hot summer in the Southwest is not pleasant, and hot summers in Alaska may be suggestive of a bad fire year). Furthermore, by about October-November, the forecast for the Southeastern USA is to be above average temperature even after the rest of the country goes to even chances for above or below-average temperature. That translates to a nice Halloween and Thanksgiving in the short-view, and yet another warm blip on the global warming trend in the long-view.*

Precipitation seems to be less interesting in terms of climatological deviations, but the Southwest does seem to at least move away from below-normal, dry conditions that are plagueing California right now. precipitation-2014-01-16

*I’ll revisit the seasonal forecasts again in a couple of weeks after NOAA CPC updates their analysis, and then also look at how well the forecasts capture reality at the end of the year using NOAA NCDC archived temperatures. This verification is mainly because I haven’t spent much time with these seasonal forecasts, but I am always seeking out new media for the classroom. A natural question about the NOAA CPC products is: Are they any good? We’ll see.

Summary

A lot to digest, and time will tell, but don’t let this cold early part of 2014 deceive you. Global warming is a major trend that is imposed on every weather system in the world. No single weather events is very likely attributable to global warming because of the complexity in parsing out all the causes and effects that modulate a weather system as it tracks through the USA (think of how tricky the forecast of ice vs snow was for this Feb 11-13 storm, and then try to say what it was that caused that specific location of the border between the two – hard!). But the average weather is slowly changing, and the average weather is climate. In the meantime, back to staring at the sleet that is falling and wondering when UNC Charlotte will open again for classes!

Tags: climate CPC data visualization NOAA North north carolina USA

Climate in the Southeast in January 2014

February 01, 2014 by Brian Magi

Scientists studying the Earth’s climate system are supported by an immense and rich array of data. Sometimes it seems like you only have to be comfortable working with all this information. Programming languages help (matlab, R, python, NCL, for example). But even more accessible are incredible web resources. The USA High Plains Regional Climate Center updates their climate and weather relevant maps on a daily basis. Here are some figures showing where the country and the southeast USA stands. From NCDC time series plotter, the contiguous USA (no Alaska and Hawaii) was the 37th warmest year in the last 119 years, as shown in the graph below.
contiguous-USA-2013-T
In itself, 2013 wasn’t unusual. In recent memory, 2008 and 2009 were really similar to 2013. However, compared to the fanfare around the hottest year on record for the USA in 2012, it does seem different. Who can remember ought-8 and ought-9, right?

But even more to the point is what we feel where we live. Science and statistics are fine, but just like no one on Earth experiences the average global temperature, no one in the USA experiences the average USA temperature either! Let’s look at the Southeast. In 2013, drawing from the HPRCC link above for the figures below, the temperatures were cooler than average.
AnnDec13TDeptSERCC-2013-12-31
In the last 120 years, 2013 in the Southeast was about the 67th warmest. Most of the years in the past 120 years have been warmer! But this is really not that ususual. 4 of the last 10 years in the Southeast have been cooler than more than half the past 120 years. 10 years is a limited view, but I chose it because it’s a round number and because we remember the last 10 years. Going back to the USA, *none* of the last 10 years have been cooler than more than half of the past 120 years. Not really even close. You can verify this with NCDC data tools. What global warming? Well, that’s where perception matters. The Earth is warming, even if the Southeast seems to be avoiding the problem we’ve created with CO2 emissions.

Looking to the more recent period, we can also glean a little bit about our winter months with a 3 month average (Nov-Dec-Jan) using HPRCC again
Last3mTDeptSERCC-2014-01-31
We see that except for Florida, the Southeast is largely cooler than average. Here HPRCC is comparing against the 1981-2010 average temperature (temperature anomaly). Appalachia and further to the west are in a deep recession of the warmth we expect when we think of global warming.

Finally, we can look at January 2014 using HPRCC tools.
Last1mTDeptSERCC-2014-01-31
The Southeast is cold! Even poor Florida, which over the last 3 months is anomalously warm compared to the rest of the Southeast, is in a deep cold this past January. If we eyeball-average the data on the figure, we get a number of about 6-7 degrees F below the 1981-2010 average. Jeez. Where can we go for unseasonable warmth (retrospectively)? The West is certainly above average, and more importantly below average on precipitation, as the figures show below.
Last3mTDeptUS-2014-01-31
Last3mPNormUS-2014-01-31
Be thankful the Southeast is so stubbornly refusing to budge on global warming… but I worry that as a result of this stubborness, our legislators will forget this is a problem. North Carolina will be affected even if we are a hold out for now. Think global whenever you think of climate. Or, if you want, think of Bob Marley (one love, one heart). This figure from the recent IPCC report (WGIAR5-SPM_Approved27Sep2013) shows that there are only a couple of non-red areas on Earth (ie. they are not following the warming trend). The Southeast is one of them! But that is one scorched Earth otherwise.
ipcc-ar5-wg1-spm-fig1

Tags: climate data visualization NCDC NOAA north carolina USA

Voting for action on global environmental change

December 10, 2013 by Brian Magi

global-201101-201112 As real as global warming (figure above from NOAA NCDC) is, and as much as we expect that the science has done enough, one US lawmaker recently said

I am for global action on climate change. I am a proud supporter and very anxious for the U.S. to participate globally. But I think if you look at the current makeup of the U.S. Senate, it’s very difficult.

This is a quote from Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.) that I drew from a recent article that I’ll get to below. As I close off discussions with 28 undergraduate students of Earth Sciences, Geology, Meteorology, and Economics this semester in my Global Environmental Change course, the questions that permeate their responses to readings* we went over in class are

1. WHAT CAN WE DO?
2. WHY AREN’T WE DOING ANYTHING?

I bring a lot of current discussion into the classroom – more than the previous iteration of my course and I await my course reviews and student comments to better understand which materials resonated and which did not. In the meantime, my answer to the driving questions for the future of our state and country is simple: VOTE. Vote for the legislators that work on issues that you think benefit the global community.

The simplicity in my answer is partly because I don’t have a better answer, but partly because this is where the science stands. Namely, science has arrived at robust conclusions based on decades of intense research by communities of experts, most recently evidenced by the full report of the IPCC. Earth scientists keep working on issues because we are interested in what makes the physical world tick, and just like any community of professionals, the majority of us work on science that is relevant. The most relevant Earth science is climate science. I think it is safe to say that most Earth scientists want to see some actual climate action rather than the empty words that most that most of the action statements by politicians have amounted to so far. A widely-cited scientific paper about a way to visualize and break down carbon mitigation strategies into manageable parts said that the choice is simple: Act or delay.

If we want action, we cannot rely solely on science and engineering – we need policy makers. Policy makers are elected by people. So if my students want to help, vote. If citizens in general want to help, then vote. An interesting report by Lisa Friedman at Energy and Environment News included quotes from US lawmakers about the upcoming 2015 Paris climate meeting that many were hoping would be much farther along after this year’s Poland climate meeting. I’ll include several below:

It will be difficult to get a treaty passed in 2015 in the U.S. Senate as it is presently constituted

———————————–> Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)

Keep our eyes on the prize of creating an ambitious, effective and durable agreement. Insisting that only one way can work, such as an agreement that is internationally binding in all respects, could put that prize out of reach.

———————————–> U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern

[A binding agreement is] not going to go anywhere. It’s dead on arrival… [EPA limits on CO2 emissions from future power plants are] hurting our economy on a daily basis.

———————————–> Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.)

There is a lot of difference of opinion among very educated people on the science [of global warming]. [On whether a binding agreement would pass the Senate: ] I kind of doubt it. There is still a legitimate question of science, and you can’t brush that away.

———————————–> Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)

I think this [a global climate treaty] is an issue that can flip very quickly. [An EPA regulation, for example, would] put a lot of costs on polluters and cause them to rethink the wisdom of an economywide carbon fee. If we can organize the armies on our side, it’s a rout. We just haven’t bothered to organize them. [The fact that climate is back in the political discussion and may be in 2014 means] that adds up to 2015 being a pretty good year.

———————————–> Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)

This problem is global, not just related to any one country or only one region. We need an international effort, and I think there’s growing support for that in the United States.

———————————–> Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.)

We need to set a good example to the rest of the world. That way, when we call on China and India and other big emitters, we can say not only ‘Do as I say,’ but ‘Do as I do.’

———————————–> Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.)

Increasingly, the U.S. is being viewed as a leader. Especially if the administration takes action on coal-fired power plants, I think it will be very hard, then, for China and India to say the U.S. is not acting.

———————————–> Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)

[Action might require] some kind of catastrophe… I think [global warming and subsequent impacts are] real, and I think that we should continue to explore our options to reduce the effects of it. [He has not liked] anything I’ve seen lately [about how the UN climate process has influenced US lawmakers.] [Still, he conceded,] I don’t think talking hurts. It probably helps.

———————————–> Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)

Are pathways opening up? Has Obama been able to set up his position strongly enough to promote policies that are in line with the science? Well, it comes back to the simple solution: Vote for what you believe. I would argue that your political party – socially or economically – is not the relevant part of a vote that supports climate change policy.

As Professor Andrew Dessler argues in his book, and as many other climate and climate policy scientists argue, the decision to move away from energy sources with high carbon emissions is completely reversible – if the climate science summarized in the IPCC reports is entirely wrong or even partly wrong about carbon cycle science,

$Figure 2 from Chapter 6 (Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles) FAQ 6.1 of IPCC AR5 Working Group 1. Shows that some fraction of a 5000 GtC pulse of carbon emissions - on scale with a pulse from burning all fossil fuel reserves - would affect the atmosphere for 1,000s to 100,000s of years. Roughly 40% of the pulse would remain in the atmosphere even after 2000 years.$

Figure 2 from Chapter 6 (Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles) FAQ 6.1 of IPCC AR5 Working Group 1. Shows that some fraction of a 5000 GtC pulse of carbon emissions – on scale with a pulse from burning all fossil fuel reserves – would affect the atmosphere for 1,000s to 100,000s of years. Roughly 40% of the pulse would remain in the atmosphere even after 2000 years.

we can always go back to burning the least expensive energy sources without regard to the environment. But if climate science is even close to right, then we are facing irreversible changes (see the figure above) to the carbon cycle that will affect the Earth for centuries, millenia, and even further.

As I told my students, the questions that we face are civilization scale (echoing Rep. Waxman’s quote above). Human civilization emerged as a presence on Earth somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000 years ago. I’m no archaeologist, so that number isn’t particularly important. The point is that dinosaurs managed to survive for 165 million years on Earth and evolve into the Cretaceous Period species that we know and love (tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops, etc.). It sure would be nice to think that our advanced technology means we can learn to live in harmony with the planet longer than the dinosaurs! Considering that the dinosaurs were finally offed by a meteorite, I’d say we have a lot to prove still.

*readings from Elizabeth Kolbert, Andrew Dessler, IPCC AR4 and AR5, news posts from New York Times and Washington Post, and multimedia presentations such as Thin Ice, Earth The Operators Manual, and data visualizations and tools focusing on climate-relevant data like carbon emissions, temperature records, and climate model projections

Tags: carbon climate coal global environmental change global warming teaching

Human and climate connections with fire activity

November 11, 2013 by Brian Magi

Last week, I got to revisit my research in an informal UNC Charlotte CAGIS Seminar amidst the teaching responsibilities that swarm in on me during the academic year. This forced me to set aside some time to think about research, and also to prepare for an upcoming talk this Friday by an ecological anthropologist named Dr. Michael Coughlan (see below for more, or read his articles here and here). One of my research interests is studying the role that humans and climate play in determining the spatiotemporal patterns of fire activity. hobart-tasmania-ian-stewart-oct-2006 Five years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined that this research problem would be so difficult to formulate and tackle in an incremental way. My qualitative assessment is that there are some very subtle differences (and therefore difficult to disentangle) between both humans and climate as driving forces in pyrogeography. The subtlety is hard to manage because (I think) that we innately believe that humans and fire are related. Surely, that innate belief should emerge burning-sugar-cane in some form from an examination of the appropriate data, right?? My first realization that this was a challenging problem was when I was working on designing a global fire model. Humans – specifically the burning of cropland and pasture – were not following the “rules”. The physical conditions best suited to a fire often did not line up with the patterns of fire. We wrote a paper for Biogeosciences that touched on these ideas (PDF), and we’ll present updates at AGU (PDF of Abstract). How do we address this problem? I have been working with paleofire scientists (for an example of that work, read a recent Quaternary Science Review paper by Dr. Jenn Marlon (a scientist at Yale U.) and colleagues here: PDF) and my colleagues and I are working on getting a handle on defining roles and research.

In the meantime, I also invited an ecological anthropologist named Dr. Michael Coughlan to speak in our department Speaker Series. Michael and I met briefly at a fire workshop a few years ago (PDF of meeting report). He has a few recent publications that help push at, or at least explore, the boundaries of disciplinarity in fire research that we gravitate towards because of our respective intellectual training (“do what you do best”). The first publication is about linking humans and fire through what Michael and his co-author call a transdisciplinary approach (PDF of that article). In that paper, the authors argue the following:

We argue that all extant fire regimes, in a sense, are anthropogenic and understandings of human agency, knowledge and the history of social systems are essential for characterising contemporary and historical fire ecology

Whenever you see the word “all”, you know the authors are about to say something that probably will be met with skepticism! But Coughlan and Petty support their thesis with case studies (evidence) and the fact that fire research – like my own – seeks out functional dependencies of fire on amazon-deforestation-greenpeace relatively-easy-to-define physical variables (like population, temperature) rather than framing the problem in a more social/human context. Humans, in essence, use fire for cultural and practical reasons that may be related to the landscape they are in. Fire modeling certainly does not explicitly account for this human-landscape connection.

Another paper Michael published is in a journal I have never picked up before called the Journal of Ethnobiology (speaks to the massive interdisciplinarity needed to study fires, I guess!). The article is at this link as a PDF. In here, he presents the concept of “landscape memory” and how this relates to fire. This derives from the field work he did for his PhD in the Pyranees.

So, this Friday (Nov 15 2013), Dr Coughlan will talk about “Fire Use, Human Institutions, and Landscape: Ecology of an Agropastoral Fire Regime in the French Pyrenees” which derives from his recently-completed PhD research. I posted the following text to the CLAS-Exchange posting board:

Dr. Michael Coughlan will speak on “Ecology of an Agropastoral Fire Regime in the French Pyrenees” on November 15, 2013 at noon in McEniry 116.

Coughlan is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Georgia Athens in the Department of Anthropology. His research interests include historical ecology, economic anthropology, environmental justice, and emerging trans-disciplinary socioecological systems approaches.

He is currently focused on researching the links between fire ecology, agro-pastoral livelihoods, and cultural landscapes, and is interested in integrating ethnographic, archaeological, geospatial, and paleoecological theory and methods. From an applied perspective, Coughlan is interested in contributing to conservation strategies that promote both cultural and ecological diversity and sustainability. Coughlan will present the seminar as part of the Geography and Earth Sciences Department Speaker Series, and he will be hosted by GES faculty member Brian Magi. More information on Coughlan is available on his website.

Please join us.

Tags: climate-fire interactions fire GES human-fire interactions speaker series

Charlotte Citizens Hearing on EPA Proposal to Regulate Carbon Emissions

October 09, 2013 by Brian Magi

Real conversations about how we can act on climate change (#ActOnClimate) seem to be happening right now. Environment North Carolina published their tabulated emissions from state power plants, and even highlighted North Carolina’s role in this.To offer public support for the EPA proposal to limit carbon emissions from any new power plant, Clean Air Carolina and NC Conservation Network are hosting a Citizens’ Hearing in downtown Charlotte on Tuesday October 15 from 6-7:30pm (more info below). Charlotte Observer noted the event, and the general public is invited to participate. I will attend and offer brief remarks about the climate science behind the EPA proposal. Please join us and support the proposal to FINALLY regulate some of the emissions from any new power plants. This discussion will set the stage for the presumably upcoming/inevitable proposal to regulate emissions from existing power plants the EPA should have ready next year. From the Clean Air Carolina post:

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its first steps under President Obama’s Climate Action Plan to reduce carbon pollution from power plants. The EPA will soon hold hearings in various cities at which the public can comment.

For decades, public participation has become a regular and important part of how new laws are carried out. As an alternative to attending an official EPA hearing, communities across the country will hold “Citizens’ Hearings” and all comments will be recorded and sent to the agency as official public record. Clean Air Carolina and NC Conservation Network are hosting the Charlotte Citizens’ Hearing on Tuesday, October 15 to allow area residents the opportunity to provide oral testimony on the new rule.

Charlotte Citizens’ Hearing
October 15, 2013 – 6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Caldwell Presbyterian Memorial Church
1609 East 5th Street
Charlotte, NC 28204
RSVP today and let us know you’re coming!

Cleaning up power plant pollution will result in better air quality, healthier communities and a major reduction in climate changing pollution. Just today, the world’s top climate experts have announced an upper limit on carbon emissions that they warn we cannot pass if we are to avoid the most dangerous effects of a warming planet. Join us for the Charlotte Citizens’ Hearing to show your support for strong carbon rules on new and existing power plants! See below for Citizens’ Hearings scheduled in other NC cities.

Tags: carbon Charlotte coal EPA north carolina USA

Tracking and targetting emissions from power plants

September 26, 2013 by Brian Magi

Speaking as a part of a press release about power plant carbon emissions in NC.

As my students probably know by now, I think an important point when discussing or even thinking about how to deal with the combination of our hunger for energy and global warming is to remember the scales of the problem. There are two important scales to consider in every discussion of global warming: time and space. The adjectival forms would be “temporal” and “spatial”. The super-cool adjective, which I probably overuse, is “spatiotemporal”. Spatiotemporal analysis is critical to understanding global warming and what it means in any single location on Earth. The temporal scale is highlighted over and over again right now because of the global warming “pause”, which as any analysis or background research should reveal, is nothing more than a pause and that plenty of research is underway and done that helps to understand yet another small surprise in the complex Earth system. One part of the problem of climate change that is not surprising is what is the cause. Carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning are the main culprit, so the prescription is simple: Stop burning fossil fuels. Hah! This comes back to our hunger for the energy stored deep in the Earth, so the answer is definitely not as simple as the prescription.

Me talking about the state of climate science with Graham Givens of Environment NC, Ronald Ross, local resident and Vice President of Stewart Creek Environmental Association, and reporters!

I provided some scientific feedback to an effort by Environment North Carolina a few weeks ago that I neglected to highlight on my research webpage (but I did on twitter), and I will expand on this a little now. Environment NC released a report of carbon emissions from power plants across the USA. Power plants (coal, natural gas) are required to track and report these emissions, so sometimes groups just need to put forth the effort in assembling these numbers into a coherent piece of writing, which is what Environment NC did. They found that 3 of the top 50 most serious carbon emitters were in the state of NC – they are all coal plants of course. Coal is still being burned even though Natural Gas is used more and more. The key findings, as Environment NC stated on their written press release, are:

The Marshall plant, near Lake Norman, emitted 10.1 million metric tons of pollution in 2011, the equivalent of 2.09 million cars.

Three of the most polluting power plants in the country are in North Carolina: Belews, Roxboro, and Marshall.

Belews Creek Power plant near Winston-Salem was the state’s biggest global warming polluter and 16th overall, emitting 13.8 million metric tons of carbon pollution, the equivalent of 2.9 million cars.

North Carolina’s power plants are the 12th most polluting in the country, producing as much carbon each year as 15 million cars.

North Carolina’s power plants are its single largest source of carbon pollution – responsible for 51% of the carbon pollution in the state.

The press release was at their news site, and they arranged a live release for media. I went to Frazier Park near the heart of the Queen City early in Septemeber to speak about the science, essentially relying on the discussion in IPCC AR4, which is what I discuss in my classes too. I spoke from the position of scientific evidence. The press release at Frazier Park made its way through state and city news outlets, and I thought the reporters did a great job with the write-ups. Here are some links:

Charlotte Business Journal

WSOC-TV in Charlotte

NC Public News Service

Charlotte Observer

I think on the eve of the release of the first part of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, it’s important to remember that the solution to the problem of global warming, or at least the best way to mitigate the problems, begins at a local level. We have to remember that the carbon emissions in our backyard – which Environment NC highlighted – affect the entire world. CO2 lasts 100-1000 years in the atmosphere so CO2 from North Carolina will be absorbing infrared radiation for a long, long time. Maybe I’ll write an op-ed for the Observer.

Tags: carbon climate global warming north carolina

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**This philosophy of how a single person drawing from a common resource scales up to major problems is known as the Tragedy of the Commons, which has been spoken about eloquently by many many people, including wikipedia.