John Kerry's Uphill Climb

 

By United States Department of State - Department of State, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24395911

Two weeks ago, President-elect Biden announced that former Secretary of State and one-time Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry will serve as Biden’s special envoy on climate. This newly-created Cabinet position will also be part of the National Security Council, indicating that Biden believes that responding to climate change is indeed a threat to American stability. Having been the leader of the American delegation to the Paris Conference in 2015, Kerry is a logical choice for the role. But Kerry has an uphill climb not only to make significant progress on the issue internationally, but also to sell serious action to combat climate change at home.

One of the first tasks of the new administration, and perhaps of Kerry in particular, will be to undo the damage done to America’s standing in the international community by our withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Five years ago the world, as it so often has on a broad range of issues in the past, looked to us for leadership on the most important long-term issue facing humanity this century. Presently, we are a non-participant. Kerry’s role in making the Paris Agreement happen allows him to command considerable respect beyond our borders, however, and I expect that restoring our reputation internationally will be the relatively easy part of his job. But President-elect Biden will need to get the American people to support action on climate change strongly enough that we will not tolerate another retreat on this issue, regardless of who succeeds him in the White House. And to do that, the Biden Administration will need to excel at salesmanship. It seems very likely at present that the most important salesman in this regard will be John Kerry.

An example of what Kerry needs to avoid can be seen in an exchange he made in Congress last year with Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. To put it mildly, Massie’s line of questioning was idiotic. He referred to political science as a “pseudoscience,” and then proceeded to ask some questions concerning geology that would be acceptable coming from somebody with a pre-middle school level of education, not a Congressman who has been tasked by voters to make serious decisions on serious issues. I need to point out here that Massie’s educational background is not the problem – he has multiple engineering degrees from MIT, so it’s not that he should know better, he does know better. But this is the country we live in right now.  A particular facet of science is overwhelmingly accepted by the people who study it the most closely – i.e., the people from whom Kerry got his data – but the public at large is confused and misled about it by people whose motivations are selfish at best and genuinely malevolent at worst. Massie’s intent that day was to rattle Kerry, and he succeeded.  Sure, Massie got skewered in the media outlets where you would expect him to get skewered, but Kerry lost his composure, and with it the chance to change even a few minds.  If and when Kerry gets the opportunity to go back to Congress in his new role, he will need to do better than that.

Unfortunately, it’s not really clear how much “better than that” Kerry needs to be to make a difference. John Holdren, the Obama Administration’s science advisor, did a superior job handling similarly cringeworthy questions in this Congressional briefing from 2014, but he does not appear to have swayed the argument any either. (The linked clip is from The Daily Show; you do not have to like Jon Stewart’s snark, but ask yourself if you really want that quality of questioning coming from the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.) Perhaps there is not much point in making a persuasive argument directly to Republicans in Congress, because it won't go anywhere. But Kerry, and obviously his boss as well, will still need to sell action on climate change to the American people. Some Americans might honestly have questions similar to the ones that these Congressmen had, because either their schools did not teach them adequately on this or because their education has been buried under misinformation coming from people who stand to further profit from inaction on global warming. 

Kerry has to be willing to patiently answer those questions. For example, carbon dioxide levels have certainly been higher in the distant past than they are now. And temperatures have gone up with carbon dioxide. And sea levels have gone up with remperatures. The last time the Earth was this warm, sea levels were 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) higher than they are now. And the last time the Earth was 3ºC warmer than pre-Industrial levels, which we’ll easily reach by 2100 if we do nothing, the Earth had sea levels 20 to 25 meters (65 to 80 feet) higher than they are now. Life existed and did well enough under those conditions, but most of humanity’s population and infrastructure can be found near the world’s coasts. Where will they go, and who will foot the bill? Furthermore, excepting occasional major volcanic eruptions which can significantly but temporarily lower temperatures globally, geology works on much greater time scales than half a century; global temperatures have risen nearly 1ºC since 1970, and the rate of increase is accelerating. Plus we can monitor the location of greenhouse gases more than well enough to isolate the major sources, so there really is no doubt where the added carbon dioxide is coming from.

In addition, Kerry needs to be willing to put himself in places where people will ask those questions. He may even need to visit communities that might be affected adversely, at least in the short term, by actions that a serious effort to combat global warming will necessitate. And he’ll need to have good answers for some harder questions when he does. 

Lent

Growing up, I had an uneasy relationship with the season of Lent.  I’ve never been really comfortable getting a black smudge on my forehead on Ash Wednesday, and the idea of giving up chocolate or something like that for six weeks just seemed kind of pointless to me.  But I think that now I have a better understanding of it, or at least what it’s supposed to be.  Pretty much every religion has some concept of self-denial — not because it’s something painful that religions make people do, but because some things in life have more value than others,  and sometimes we don’t get to choose what we give up.  There are things that we need, things we can do without, and things that we should do without.  Taking an annual inventory of which category the things we indulge in fall under has value.  Giving something up isn’t meaningful in and of itself, unless we emerge from the period of sacrifice better and spiritually healthier for it. 

When Lent began, I was working on a piece for this blog about the cost of energy.  The basic thesis of that piece, which I will eventually finish, is that creating a world where our energy is obtained without emitting greenhouse gases will come with a price, but that the price is not so big compared to the cost of doing nothing.  The sacrifice, to the extent that there is one, will be temporary.  We will emerge from it in a world where breathing is easier, people who live on the world’s coasts are not in danger of being displaced with no place to go, and fewer people will lose everything to a storm, or fire, or the kind of conflicts that arise when the things we need are hard to come by.  To get there, we will need to reconsider what we really need, and re-evaluate the difference between what we can and what we should do without.  It’s a tough sell.  But giving something up to emerge better for it is a part of the faith of most religious people, and can serve a constructive purpose regardless of what you do or don’t believe.

Of course, while I was thinking about the climate and other things like my family, my job, and the upcoming elections, something else came up.  We all wound up giving up far, far more this Lent than we intended.  Nobody is enjoying this.  And it won’t end with a big celebration on Easter, at least not for anybody with any sense of responsibility.  But we’ve got this.  It’s part of our history, our traditions, our culture.  People have endured worse than this.  We are realizing that there are more things we can do without than we thought.  And we are gaining a greater appreciation of the things we do need, and the people who provide them for us.  Plenty of us are facing or dealing with great loss right now, and that is sad and awful.  But collectively we can emerge from this better, and healthier.  And that doesn’t seem pointless to me at all.

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Thoughts on Australia

Much of the world's focus at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 was on the massive heat waves and fires that afflicted the country of Australia. Multiple reports have suggested that over 1 billion animals have died in the blazes.  Did a change in climate play a role in this?  The answer is not a simple one — it never is — because there are other factors involved that should not be overlooked.  But there is sufficient evidence to implicate a warming, drying climate in the heat waves and fires that the island continent has been experiencing.

For starters, Australia suffered from a massive heatwave.  Obviously heat waves are more likely in the warming world. But what about the fires themselves? In a warming world, wet areas tend to get wetter and dry areas tend to get dryer. A regrettably prophetic 2016 study had suggested that California was becoming more vulnerable to forest fires due to a warmer and drier climate, well before the fires that afflicted the state over the last two years. And as it turns out, a paper concerning bushfires in southeastern Australia and their connection with climate change was published in 2007.  It stated, “A study conducted in 2005 examined the potential impacts of climate change on fire-weather at 17 sites in southeast Australia. It found that the number of ‘very high’ and ‘extreme’ fire danger days could increase by 4-25% by 2020 and 15-70% by 2050.”  So the potential for fires to get worse in Australia as the climate warms has been known and documented for at least a decade.

But other factors have exacerbated the extent and damage of this summer’s fires.  One factor is natural: a periodic oscillation called the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD).  In the positive phase of the IOD, warm waters off the African coast lead to high rainfall in Africa, relatively cool and dry conditions in Indonesia, and relatively hot and dry air in Australia.  That is the present phase of the IOD, making it an important contributor to the fire season.  But there is also the factor of human carelessness and stupidity.  Much press has been devoted to the large number of fire-related arrests in Australia over the last couple of months, including over 40 deliberate fires and well over a hundred more accidental fires.  While that behavior is inexcusable, it is also not unusual; a 2009 survey by the Australian Government concluded that “between 2001–02 and 2006–07, the number of bushfires in Australia varied from approximately 46,000 to 62,000 per year, with an average of nearly 54,000 fires per year. This agrees quite closely with the average of nearly 52,000 fires per year calculated by the Australian Institute of Criminology using data from fire agencies from 1995–06 to 2005–06. It is estimated that 50 percent of fires are either deliberately lit or suspicious in origin.”  This leads to two important conclusions.  The first is that people directly affect the number of bushfires that get started, just like they played a role in the California wildfires.  The second is that a normal amount of human activity cannot begin to account for the extraordinary extent of the damage that this summer’s Australian fires have caused.

But if we are talking about the effects of a changing world on Australia, it is important to acknowledge how the politics and media of Australia are not helping the situation. This past year, the Australians held an election where climate change was very clearly on the agenda.  The party that wanted to do something about climate change lost to the party that didn’t. Why did this happen? Australian voters were more fearful of the consequences of doing something than they were the consequences of doing nothing. This happened despite the heat waves the country has recently experienced, and the Great Barrier Reef suffering massive bleaching events in the past couple of years to the point that it is in danger of dying altogether if the planet continues to warm. This fear of the cost of acting against climate change has been fueled in part by coal interests, predictably, but also the media -- especially Rupert Murdoch (the owner of News Corp. which runs Fox News in the USA), who owns 57% of the newspapers sold in Australia. (That statistic comes for a fairly old study, to be fair, but there's no reason to think that percentage has shrunk in the meantime.) That is a lot of control over a free press for one person to exert.

In 1998 the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, known for their advocacy of aboriginal land rights and their environmental activism, released a concept album called Redneck Wonderland about the state of Australia at the time. The album was prescient in many ways about how politics would change not only in Australia, but also in places like the United States and the United Kingdom, in the subsequent two decades. A song from that album called “Comfortable Place on the Couch” describes how people sit on the couch and absorb whatever their TV channel or newspaper (or website, if you bring it to the present) of choice tells them, without actually going out into the world and experiencing it for themselves. In the chorus, Peter Garrett sings “Some say the truth is what you see, I know the truth is what you feel” — predating Stephen Colbert’s more concise expression “truthiness” by a few years, and also predicting people’s stubborn indifference to what is going on right in front of their faces.  In many ways, this sums up what Australia has become today. Sydney is burning, the koalas are in danger of going extinct, the Great Barrier Reef is dying, and Australians reelected the people who want to sell a billion people in India all the coal that they can burn. As a climate scientist, I can only hope that the rest of the world doesn't wait till the change is right in front of them before they act to stop it.

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The Temperature in 2019

As is typical at the beginning of any new year, the scientific agencies responsible for global temperature records have all recently released their reports of the state of global temperatures in the year 2019.  With one exception, the agencies reported 2019 as the second warmest year on record. This is not really a surprising result; it has been clear from the middle of last year that the moderate El Niño event would make 2019 warmer than every year besides 2016 and possibly 2017.  There are a number of articles available that report on or summarize the overall findings, and I would particularly recommend the article that Zeke Hausfather published on the CarbonBrief site on Monday, but I would like to focus on one particular detail in the report that Dr. Jim Hansen published last week concerning the temperature data produced at NASA/GISS.

First, let’s give the data a little bit of context.  The IPCC reported last year that current climate models are predicting that global temperatures will rise to 3-4°C above preindustrial levels, if the status quo with regards to energy emissions continues unabated, by the end of this century.  But as Hansen and his colleagues pointed out in an excellent (and very readable) 2017 paper called Young people’s burden: requirement of negative CO2 emissions, global temperatures have been increasing at an essentially linear rate of approximately 0.18°C per decade since 1970 (see Figure 2b in that paper).  The linearity is easily observed when you average out the temperatures using a 132-month running mean; this smooths out the natural variabilities due to the El Niño cycle, the solar cycle, and other factors.  With temperatures currently at 1.2°C above the mean temperature between 1880 and 1920 (identified as a reasonable estimate of ‘pre-industrial’ temperature), the current linear trend would place global temperatures at about 2.6°C above preindustrial levels in 2100. What this tells you is that the models expect the rate of temperature increase to accelerate if global CO2 omissions are not sufficiently curtailed.

And unfortunately, this is already starting to be seen in the data (see Figure 4 from Hansen's recent report).  According to the NASA/GISS temperature record, the global mean temperatures of the last five years are all above the linear trendline from Hansen’s 2017 paper. This result was predictable for the strong El Niño years of 2015 and 2016, and even for the moderate El Niño year of 2019. But the large temperature drop in 2018, as the El Niño segued into a strong La Niña event, still produced a mean yearly temperature above what would be expected from the trend. Does this prove that the trend is no longer holding? More data from the next few years will be necessary to confirm that. But the observations are fully in line with what models have predicted, and I would argue that the best guess right now is that the rate of increase in global temperatures is indeed accelerating.

So what does that mean? A continuation of the linear trend would have global temperatures a little higher than 1.3°C above preindustrial levels by 2030. I'm beginning to think that temperatures will be closer to 1.4°C above preindustrial levels by the end of this decade, and that it will be very difficult to avoid crossing the 1.5°C threshold by 2035.  Obviously how much CO2 we collectively emit in the meantime will matter, but it will take a massive effort to change our emissions that dramatically in that small a period of time.

As for 2020, a La Niña event does not appear imminent, so this year should be mostly neutral.  This neutrality should make this year a good barometer for what the current state of the climate really is.  I would expect the mean temperature for the year to hover at or bit below 1.2°C above pre-Industrial levels, making it the third or fourth warmest year in the temperature record.  Anything more than that would be very concerning.