Climate ‘whitewash’ to the rescue

Posted on May 28, 2009 by ovehblog

untitled-2

You might think that this idea sounds a little crazy but I urge you to read on. Here’s the idea: Everyone paints the roof of their house white and the rate of global warming will be radically reduced!

Insane? Well, this idea does have some sense and logic to it. I recently discussed this with my friend Ken Caldeira at Stanford University. Over some monstrously huge American sandwiches, our discussions eventually came round to the amazing impact that losing the reflectivity of Arctic summer ice would have on the rate of global warming. A few back of the envelope calculations by Ken soon convinced the people around the lunch table that changing the reflectivity of an even 1% of the Earth’s surface could have a major impact on the amount of trapped radiation solar. Flip side? Essentially, losing the albedo of the Artic sea ice is like piling massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Back at Ken’s lab, discussions with Long Cao (one of Ken’s postdoctoral fellows) turned to whether or not one could influence this effect by manipulating the reflectivity of the earth through other means – What about doing a Christo? What about covering large areas with white chalk or mirrors? What about inventing a highly reflective plant that would spread out across arid areas and change the reflectivity of desert regions? Interestingly, the quick search of the literature revealed that this latter idea is being actively explored by scientists:

Andy Ridgwell and colleagues at the University of Bristol in England have another idea, one they call bio-geoengineering. Rather than developing infrastructure to help cool the planet, they propose using an existing one: agriculture. Their calculations, published in Current Biology, suggest that by planting crop varieties that reflect more sunlight, summertime cooling of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit could be obtained across central North America and a wide band of Europe and Asia. Plants reflect slightly different amounts of light depending on factors like how waxy the leaves are. Even differences in growth patterns between two varieties of a crop — the way leaves are arranged — can affect reflectivity. (Read More)

Now, Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as Energy Secretary, has proposed that we seriously explore this idea. Rather than use the rather challenging (from all aspects!) idea of engineering plants, Steven would like to whitewash the world – to initiate a global initiative to change the colour of roofs, roads and pavements so that they reflect more sun?

As a weapon against global warming, it sounds so simple and low-tech that it could not possibly work. But the idea of using millions of buckets of whitewash to avert climate catastrophe has won the backing of one of the world’s most influential scientists.

Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white. A global initiative to change the colour of roofs, roads and pavements so that they reflect more sunlight and heat could play a big part in containing global warming, he said yesterday. By lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the colour of cement, it would be possible to cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world’s cars off the roads for 11 years, he said. (Read More)

Not a bad idea at all – and one that would be achievable in a short-period of time. It would work like this: basically, governments would institute the painting of the tops of roofs and buildings (traditionally black tar, slate, or grey colours) white, this would alter the albedo (surface reflectivity of the sun’s radiation), effectively reducing the amount of heat trapped by the Earth’s surface to offset projected increases from global warming.

As a weapon against global warming, this idea sounds so simple and low-tech that it just might work. It could be used to reduce warming associated risks and buy some important time as we struggle to bring emissions down. As with all of these ideas, however, we must also be cautious not to use them as an excuse for not dealing with the problem of rising atmospheric CO2. These measures will only offset part of the problem and certainly will be exceeded in time. And, clearly, reducing global temperature in this way will do nothing for problems like those assoociated with ocean acidification.

US ‘global warming bill’ one step closer?

Posted on May 23, 2009 by ovehblog

cloud2

“House Panel Passes Limit on Greenhouse-Gas Emissions” – Washington Post, 22nd May 2009
A bill to create the first national limit on greenhouse-gas emissions was approved by a House committee yesterday after a week of late-night debates that cemented the shift of climate change from rhetorical jousting to a subject of serious, if messy, Washington policymaking.

The legislation would create a cap-and-trade system: Over the next decades, power plants, oil refineries and manufacturers would be required to obtain allowances for the pollution they emit. Those who need more or less could turn to a Wall-Street-like market in the allowances. The 33 to 25 vote was a major victory for House Democrats, who had softened and jury-rigged the bill to reassure manufacturers and utilities — and members of their own party from the South and Midwest — that they would not suffer greatly.

The vote gives this bill more momentum than any previous legislation to reduce greenhouse gases, but it faces hurdles. In the House, Rep. Collin C. Peterson (D-Minn.) has said he wants to take up the bill in his Agriculture Committee, seeking to change rules for those who raise corn for ethanol. The Senate has shot down previous cap-and-trade plans.

President Obama supports the bill, an aide said yesterday, though some provisions are weaker than what he advocated during the presidential campaign. In particular, Obama called for all pollution credits to be auctioned off by the government, but the House bill would give away about 85 percent of them.
(Read more at Washington Post)

Climate change – is the ‘missing science’ really missing?

Posted on April 27, 2009 by ovehblog

The now infamous skeptic Professor Ian Plimer launched his seventh book last week, titled “Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science“. Apparently Plimer, a Professor of Mining and Geology from the University of Adelaide is aiming to ‘refute every scientific argument that humans are responsible for global warming’. Remember that this is the same Professor who believes that “… the Great Barrier Reef will benefit from rising seas, that there is no correlation between carbon dioxide levels and temperature, that only 0.1 % of carbon dioxide emissions are due to human activities, and that 96% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapour.”

Professor Plimer said his book would “knock out every single argument we hear about climate change”, to prove that global warming is a cycle of the Earth.

“It’s got nothing to do with the atmosphere, it’s about what happens in the galaxy.

“You’ve got to look at the whole solar system and, most importantly, we look back in time.

“There’s a lot of talk out there that there isn’t any science that supports my view, but I have 2111 scientific references in this book.”

Following the booklaunch, the Australian newspaper published an entertaining read titled ‘Climate sceptics ready to storm heaven with earth’s geological history‘, detailing the plight of Dr Barry Brook, who as the head of Adelaide University’s Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability is at the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to academic debate (apparently Dr Brook is ill-fated enough to share a hallway just metres away from the good Professor Plimer)

Defending climatologists and thousands of other scientists, Barry Brook, who heads Adelaide University’s Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability, poured cold water on Professor Plimer’s book and said his colleague had only used “selective evidence” when quoting more than 200 scientists and from peer-reviewed papers.

Professor Plimer’s “stated view of climate science is that a vast number of extremely well respected scientists and a whole range of specialist disciplines have fallen prey to delusional self-interest and become nothing more than unthinking ideologues”, he said.

“Plausible to conspiracy theorists, perhaps, but hardly a sane world view, and insulting to all those genuinely committed to real science.”

Is the ‘missing science’ really missing? Over at Brave New Climate, Professor Brook systematically dismantles Plimer’s arguments:

Ian Plimer’s book is a case study in how not to be objective. Decide on your position from the outset, and then seek out all the facts that apparently support your case, and discard or ignore all of those that contravene it. He quotes a couple of thousand peer-reviewed scientific papers when mounting specific arguments. What Ian doesn’t say is that the vast majority of these authors have considered the totality of evidence on the topic of human-induced global warming and conclude that it is real and a problem. Some researchers have show that the Earth has been hotter before, and that more CO2 has been present in the atmosphere in past ages. Yes, quite — this is an entirely uncontroversial viewpoint. What is relevant now is the rate of climate change, the specific causes, and its impact on modern civilisation that is dependent, for agricultural and societal security, a relatively stable climate. Ian pushes mainstream science far out of context, again and again.

Perhaps most telling is the following ABC radio interview with Kurt Lambeck, Professor of Geophysics at Australian National University, and the President of the Australian Academy of Science. Lambeck was extensively cited by Plimer in one of the chapters of “Heaven and Earth, Global Warming”, and he doesn’t appear to be very happy at how Plimer has interpreted his work:

[audio:http://67.220.225.10/~clim2165/cs/audio/plimer.mp3]

Seems like Plimer has adopted the Bob Carter obfuscation approach to climate skepticism. I’m surprised that his words carry so much weight, and echo Lambeck’s concern that “Heaven and Earth, Global Warming” has ‘… the potential to derail any political commitment to action on climate change in Australia’.

New evidence from coral reefs suggest sea level rise occurs over ecological time scales

Posted on April 18, 2009 by ovehblog

Paul Blanchon and his team have uncovered evidence of extremely rapid sealevel rise 121,000 years ago in one of the warm interglacial periods. Basically by dating coral skeletons at a place called Xcaret (the beautiful place where a fossil Reef lies exposed), Paul was able to document an abrupt reef crest “back stepping” (essentially the reef crest suddenly appearing landward in a very short time). The abrupt loss of the lower reef crest growth but continued growth between the lower and upper reef crests has allowed these paleobiologist to draw the conclusion that this occurred due to a 2-3 m sea level rise. What is the big news, is that it happened over decades. Measurements of the upward growth of some corals at the “ocean surface” occurred at about 36 mm per year!

Paul is scientist who is characterised by rigour and excellence. He is based at Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology (ICML) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Puerto Morelos on the Yucatan Peninsula. As a paleobiologist, he is interested in how the world has changed over thousands of years. For a long time now, Paul has been gathering evidence the great ice sheets the world can break up suddenly over very short period of times. This latest paper is further evidence of the veracity of this idea – follow this link to see the article in Nature.

Editor’s Summary
16 April 2009

An interglacial jump in sea level

The potential for future rapid sea-level rise is perhaps the greatest threat from global warming. But the question of whether recent ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica is the first indication of such a rise is difficult to answer given the limited duration of the instrumental record. New evidence from an exceptionally exposed fossil reef in the Xcaret theme park in Mexico provides a detailed picture of the development of reef terraces, erosion surfaces and sea-level excursions in the region during the last interglacial. A combination of precise uranium-series dating and stratigraphic analysis, together with comparison with coral ages elsewhere, suggests that a sea-level jump of 2 to 3 metres occurred about 121,000 years ago, consistent with an episode of ice-sheet instability towards the end of the last interglacial. On that evidence, sustained rapid ice loss and sea-level rise in the near future are possible.

“What will global warming look like? Scientists point to Australia”

Posted on April 9, 2009 by ovehblog

http://video.latimes.com/global/video/flash/widgets/WNVideoCanvas.swf

Los Angeles Times Online (April 9th 2008): They call Australia the Lucky Country, with good reason. Generations of hardy castoffs tamed the world’s driest inhabited continent, created a robust economy and cultivated an image of irresistibly resilient people who can’t be held down. Australia exports itself as a place of captivating landscapes, brilliant sunshine, glittering beaches and an enviable lifestyle.

Look again. Climate scientists say Australia — beset by prolonged drought and deadly bush fires in the south, monsoon flooding and mosquito-borne fevers in the north, widespread wildlife decline, economic collapse in agriculture and killer heat waves — epitomizes the “accelerated climate crisis” that global warming models have forecast.

With few skeptics among them, Australians appear to be coming to an awakening: Adapt to a rapidly shifting climate, and soon. Scientists here warn that the experience of this island continent is an early cautionary tale for the rest of the world.” (Link to full article)

The other CO2 problem – animated adventures into ocean acidification

Posted on April 2, 2009 by ovehblog

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55D8TGRsl4k&hl=en&fs=1&w=425&h=344]

Take a look at this light-hearted video on a serious subject. This animation on ocean acidification was made by students from the Ridgeway School (Plymouth, UK) and the Plymouth Marine Laboratory – an excellent production!

Ridgeway students have made a short animated film which is being used internationally to highlight the acidification of the world’s seas. Called ‘The Other CO2 Problem’, the film was commissioned by Dr Carol Turley from Plymouth Marine Laboratory, a leading authority on ocean acidification who had seen a previous film (which won a Europe wide film making competition held by Euroceans) made by the students which highlighted the problem of pollution in the seas.

Sixteen students drew up the storyline, designed and made the starring characters from plasticine then filmed the stop frame animation. Seventy other students composed and played the accompanying music

“Hungry Crustaceans Eat Climate Change Experiment”

Posted on April 1, 2009 by ovehblog

copepods The ‘seeding of the oceans’ with iron as a ‘quick fix’ to climate change has been the subject of much debate over recent years, with some companies going as far as commercialising the selling the concept in exchange for carbon credits. The idea – to seed the surface of the oceans with iron (a trace element essential to photosynthesis that is often a limiting factor in the marine world) in order to stimulate phytoplankton growth, in turn sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – isn’t entirely new. Over thirteen research groups have trialled iron fertilisation since 1993 to varying degrees of success, although most of these projects have fallen short of the dream of the late oceanographer John Martin back in the late 80’s: “Give me a half a tanker of iron and I will give you another ice age”

After a series of moderate succeses onver the past decade, it seems that the idea of sequestering CO2 in the oceans might truely be dead and buried. Project LOHAFEX, a joint Indo-German group, succeeded in seeding an area of 300km2 with over 6 tonnes of iron, resulting in a doubling of plankton biomass in just two weeks. What the team didn’t factor was the power of the oceans food web. Instead of the plankton bloom undergoing a natural death and sinking to the ocean floor (along with the sequestered CO2), the phytoplankton became an instant food source for hungry copepods, who in turn were consumed by a swarm of larger crustaceans (amphipods – see inset picture).

This ‘grazing effect’ was apparently absent from previous experiments, which instead stimulated the growth of diatoms. Diatoms differ from most phytoplankton in that they are protected from being eaten by protective shells made of silica. Whilst the experiment did succeed in providing new insights into the dynamics and ecology of plankton, to quote Ken Caldiera “I think we are seeing the last gasps of ocean iron fertilisation as a carbon storage strategy”.

“Climate change: a self-fulfilling prophecy” – Monbiot

Posted on March 26, 2009 by ovehblog

After reading that Barack Obama may be forced to delay signing the Copenhagen climate change deal due to the scale of opposition in the US Congress, I can only conclude that ignorance and complacency in our policy makers continues to reign supreme. When will we wake up to the fact that tweaking the business-as-usual approach will do nothing to prevent the catastrophes that loom? Without a directed and massive reorganization of the way we generate energy, we are headed for disaster. Despite this, many policy makers pretend that there are good reasons for delaying action. As George Monbiot reiterates yet again, the cost of doing nothing is far less than the costs that will swamp our societies if climate change continues to run out of control.

Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.

This, at any rate, was the repeated whisper at the climate change conference in Copenhagen last week. It’s more or less what Bob Watson, the environment department’s chief scientific adviser, has been telling the British government. It is the obvious if unspoken conclusion of scores of scientific papers. Recent work by scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for example, suggests that even global cuts of 3% a year, starting in 2020, could leave us with four degrees of warming by the end of the century. At the moment emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate. If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten degrees? Who knows?

Faced with such figures, I can’t blame anyone for throwing up his hands. But before you succumb to this fatalism, let me talk you through the options. (Read More)

Climate Change Myths and Facts

Posted on March 23, 2009 by ovehblog

There is a great article in the WaPost by Chris Mooney author of the book The Republican War on Science about some of the misleading arguments made by the conservative columnist George Will in his recent editorial about climate change.

Consider a few of Will’s claims from his Feb. 15 column, “Dark Green Doomsayers“: In a long paragraph quoting press sources from the 1970s, Will suggested that widespread scientific agreement existed at the time that the world faced potentially catastrophic cooling. Today, most climate scientists and climate journalists consider this a timeworn myth. Just last year, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a peer-reviewed study examining media coverage at the time and the contemporary scientific literature. While some media accounts did hype a cooling scare, others suggested more reasons to be concerned about warming. As for the published science? Reviewing studies between 1965 and 1979, the authors found that “emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then.”

Chris also addressed the common tactic of climate change skeptics to conflate climate and weather and cherry pick short term trends that agree with their points.

Will also wrote that “according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.” … Will probably meant that since 1998 was the warmest year on record according to the WMO — NASA, in contrast, believes that that honor goes to 2005 — we haven’t had any global warming since. Yet such sleight of hand would lead to the conclusion that “global cooling” sets in immediately after every new record temperature year, no matter how frequently those hot years arrive or the hotness of the years surrounding them. Climate scientists, knowing that any single year may trend warmer or cooler for a variety of reasons — 1998, for instance, featured an extremely strong El Niño — study globally averaged temperatures over time. To them, it’s far more relevant that out of the 10 warmest years on record, at least seven have occurred in the 2000s — again, according to the WMO.

See the full article here

Climate Shifts

Life in a rapidly changing climate

Category Archives: Climate Change