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What you should know about El Niño and La Niña

by JacelynPfaff77 Posted on April 9, 2016

What you should know about El Niño and La Niña

By on 9 Apr 2016 7:00 amcomments

Cross-posted from

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Back in November, El Niño reached a fever pitch, vaulting into the ranks of the strongest events on record and wreaking havoc on weather patterns around the world. Now it is beginning to wane as the ocean cools, so what comes next?

It’s possible that by next fall, the tropical Pacific Ocean could seesaw into a state that is roughly El Niño’s opposite, forecasters say. Called La Niña, this climate state comes with its own set of global impacts, including higher chances of a dry winter in drought-plagued California and warm, wet weather in Southeast Asia.

But El Niños and La Niñas are particularly difficult to predict at this time of year, so exactly what happens remains to be seen.

Warm-cool cycle

El Niño and La Niña are part of a cycle that runs over the course of three to seven years. While El Niño features warmer-than-normal ocean waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific — much warmer in the case of this exceptional El Niño — La Niña features colder-than-normal waters in the same region.

Those changes in ocean temperatures are accompanied by changes in the atmosphere: During El Niño, convection and rains shift eastward and the normal east-to-west trade winds weaken or even reverse, while during La Niña, the normal dry state of the eastern Pacific intensifies along with the trade winds. Those atmospheric effects set off a domino effect around the world that can shift normal weather patterns.

This El Niño reached a peak in ocean temperatures in November and those waters have been cooling off ever since, following the normal progression. That decline means “it’s almost a certainty that [the tropical Pacific Ocean is] going to go back to neutral in about two months,” Anthony Barnston, chief forecaster at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, said.

What’s still up in the air is whether it stays neutral or continues to cool until it reaches a La Niña state.

El Niño’s self-sabotage

La Niña’s don’t always follow after El Niños, but seem more likely to do so after a strong El Niño, based on the historical record. That record is quite short, though, which makes it hard to draw firm conclusions from it.

But the underlying physics of the El Niño cycle offers some reason to think that strong El Niños do tend to lead to La Niñas.

How La Niña impacts global weather patterns.

NOAA

The other, called Rossby waves, travel in the opposite direction until they reach Indonesia, where they bounce off the landmass and head back east. Eventually, the Rossby waves catch up to the El Niño and cause cooling, in something of an act of self-sabotage.

“The El Niño sort of kills itself,” Barnston said.

The stronger the El Niño, the stronger the Rossby waves it generates. If those waves are strong enough, they can not only kill off the El Niño, but “overshoot” in the other direction, driving the system towards a La Niña state, Barnston said.

Current cooling

The Rossby waves usually disrupt the El Niño pattern about six months after it peaks, or, right about now. Indeed, forecasters have noted a cool down below the surface of the eastern tropical Pacific in recent weeks, though surface water temperatures are still firmly in El Niño territory. They will gradually follow the subsurface cool-off, though, likely reaching neutral territory by late spring.

If a La Niña is in the offing, those waters should be cooling further by mid-summer, though, like El Niño, it wouldn’t peak until late fall or early winter.

Right now Barnston puts the odds at slightly better than 50 percent that a La Niña does develop.

What is very unlikely to happen is a return to El Niño conditions, which almost never occur in back-to-back years because of that self-sabotage mechanism. (It only tends to happen when there is an unusually late-developing El Niño that can then persist and peak again the following year.)

The current El Niño-La Niña forecast from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center and Columbia University’s International Research Institute.

NOAA/IRI

La Niña, on the other hand, can last for two to three years because the large-scale waves it generates aren’t as well-defined. “It’s not equal and opposite to what you get during El Niño,” Barnston said, so La Niña doesn’t tend to undercut itself the way El Niño does.

It’s far too early to tell how strong any La Niña that does develop might be, forecasters say.

“It’s difficult to forecast strength of events. An added difficulty is that things change pretty quickly when an event is decaying — this is the time of year when the accuracy of forecasts is lower,” Catherine Ganter, a senior climatologist with Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, said in an email.

Barnston said they should have a better idea of the potential strength by August, possibly a bit sooner if there is a very sharp cool down in Pacific Ocean temperatures.

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What you should know about El Niño and La Niña

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Food waste is already a big problem — but it could get even bigger

by RoccoOldfield Posted on April 7, 2016

Food waste is already a big problem — but it could get even bigger

By on 7 Apr 2016commentsShare

We all know that food waste is a huge problem. The world squanders about one-third of its food supply, even though 800 million people are currently undernourished. And since agriculture is responsible for between 22 and 24 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, that means we’re pumping loads of climate-altering chemicals into the atmosphere for absolutely no reason.

And according to a new study published in the latest issue of Environmental Science & Technology, the situation is bound to get a lot worse if the rest of the world continues to shift toward a meat-heavy Western diet. Here’s what we’re looking at:

Hic Et al. 2016 American Chemical Society

In 2010, we ended up with 20 percent more food than we needed. That meant a jump in GHG emissions from that surplus of about 300 percent from 50 years ago. Looking forward, those emission could increase another 2.6 to 3.6 times by 2050 thanks to dietary changes, according to the study.

So far, so apocalyptic. But things get more complicated on a country-by-country basis. That’s because every country has its own appetite, depending on its population’s activity level, average body weight, and the age and sex breakdown of its people. Countries like the U.S. and Australia that tend to be heavier, for example, demand more calories per person that China or India.

So looking forward, the researchers mapped out three potential trajectories for each country that they analyzed. The population’s weight could either remain the same, become more Japan-ish (i.e. thinner), or more U.S.-ish (i.e. heaver). And what they found was that if the world started to look more Japan-ish, global demand could be 0.9 percent less than the amount of food available in 2010. If the world started to look more U.S.-ish, demand could be 73 percent more than the 2010 supply. And if the world maintained its figure, we’re looking at between between 2 and 20 percent higher demand than the 2010 supply.

The problem is, it’s very fun to eat like an American. So other countries are likely to spiral into obesity like the rest of us, if they get the chance. In fact, this is already happening. And it’s bad news not only for the health of these growing populations, but also for the health of the planet, since the Western diet is very meat heavy.

In China alone the amount of animal products in the food supply increased by 138 percent over the last 30 years, the researchers report. At the same time, the country experienced a 13-fold increase in emissions from surplus food. Looking ahead, China and other countries that are experiencing swift economic development are likely to be the world’s next “food waste hot-spots” by mid-century, the researchers report, and emissions from surplus food are likely to be highest in South Asia, East Africa, and South America.

That said, we can actually do something about this. Grist’s own Nathanael Johnson outlined a plan of action here, so hopefully we’ll have this all worked out before Antarctica melts. In the meantime, enjoy the dumpster diving while it’s still good.

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Netflix and Grill: Michael Pollan Takes His Food Evangelism to the Small Screen

by DanaOFerrall Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Fire,” the first episode of a new docuseries called Cooked, opens with sweeping shots of a barren landscape in western Australia, dotted with huge, roaring fires. At dusk, Aborigine families gather around the flames to roast bush turkeys and goannas—a large Australian lizard—beneath the glowing embers. A mother baptizes her toddler in the smoke as it rises.

The four-part docuseries that premiered on Friday is based on the New York Times best-selling book Cooked. Its author, science writer Michael Pollan, has built an empire writing books (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Food Rules) that argue Americans should eat simple, home-cooked foods. Each episode in the Netflix series is inspired by the four elements used to transform raw ingredients into food—fire (barbeque), water (braising), air (bread making), and earth (fermentation). Each episode has a different director and follows the everyday cooks profiled in Pollan’s book, as well as the writer’s own culinary quests.

In “Fire” we meet Ed Mitchell, the pit master from North Carolina who grills hogs on the barbeque with techniques passed down from his great-grandfather, and we watch Pollan attempt to create a whole-hog cookout himself. Later, in the Earth episode, Noella Marcellino, a nun in Connecticut with a doctorate in microbiology, separates curds and whey in a large wooden barrel to make cheese.

Pollan’s prolific body of work asks readers to question what and how much they eat. (On an Inquiring Minds podcast in 2014, he argued that the Paleo diet is nowhere near how hunter-gatherers actually ate.)

But Cooked is different. Instead of evangelizing about which foods to eat, Pollan urges us to prepare our own.

“I’m hopeful that there will be a renaissance in cooking,” Pollan says in the series. “If we’re going to cook, it’s going to be because we decide we want to, that it is important enough to us, pleasurable enough to us, necessary enough to our health and our happiness.”

“Cooked” premiers on Netflix February 19. Photo courtesy of Netflix

Much of the information presented in the Cooked Netflix series won’t be new to foodies who follow Pollan’s work. It touches on the rise of industrialization and processed food, the beneficial gut microbes that thrive when we eat fermented food, and the importance of eating meat that came from ethically treated animals. However, even viewers obsessed with health food trends will be seduced by the series’ vibrant scenes, which provide a glimpse of how cultures around the world make—and break—their proverbial bread.

We’re told that the United States spends less time on cooking than any other nation in the world, and Pollan stresses that “time is the missing ingredient in our recipes and in our lives.” Yet the series doesn’t offer viewers detailed advice about how to increase how much they cook. Cooked offers only a few general tips, such as doing meal prep on Sundays.

Pollan got blowback for an essay he wrote in the New York Times in 2009 that suggested that Betty Friedman’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique got women out of the kitchen and was linked to the decline of home cooking. In Water, the episode that addresses the realities of processed foods and the restaurant industry, Pollan and director Caroline Suh said they were careful how they approached the issue.

“The collapse of cooking can be interpreted as a byproduct of feminism, but it’s a lot more complicated and a lot more interesting than that,” Pollan said in an interview. “Getting it right in the film took some time, but it was important to tell the story of the insinuation of industry into our kitchens, and show how the decline of cooking was a supply-driven phenomenon.”

Richard Bourdon makes his sourdough with three ingredients: wheat, water, and salt. Photo courtesy of Netflix.

Whether it’s men or women who wear the apron, the message of Cooked is clear—we should make home-cooked meals a habit, for our bodies and for our souls.

Jessica Prentice, author of Full Moon Feast and coiner of the term “locavore,” once wrote that if someone cannot drive we find it incomprehensible, yet if someone admits to not knowing how to cook, we see it as normal.

Cooked aims to get us back in the driver’s seat.

“Is there any practice less selfish,” Pollan asks in Cooked, “any time less wasted than preparing something nourishing and delicious for the people you love?”

The series premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 16 and on Netflix on February 19.

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Netflix and Grill: Michael Pollan Takes His Food Evangelism to the Small Screen

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Trilobites: Acidic Ocean Leads to Warped Skeletons for Young Coral

by Myrna Posted on February 19, 2016

A study found that oceans that had absorbed more atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to young corals with serious skeletal deformities in subtropical waters. View original article –  Trilobites: Acidic Ocean Leads to Warped Skeletons for Young Coral ; ; ;

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Trilobites: Acidic Ocean Leads to Warped Skeletons for Young Coral

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Late Night Miscellany—Powered by Dexamethasone!

by IrwinKDIDa Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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I am currently taking a drug that appears to be supercharging my brain. I even almost got into a Twitter argument today, which is surely the biggest waste of gray matter known to man. But I was full of energy, so off I went. I was also full of energy all last night, and I have to say you guys are all a bunch of slackers. At 3 am there were no new blog posts, no one making clever remarks on Twitter, no new email, no nothing. I was reduced to reading a book. If this keeps up, I’m going to have to make more friends in Australia and Europe to pick up the slack.

So anyway, let’s see what’s going on right now. First off, here is Donald Trump explaining how politics works:

At a meeting with The Times’s editorial writers, Mr. Trump talked about the art of applause lines. “You know,” he said of his events, “if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts.”

The charming thing is that he’s willing to admit this on the record to a bunch of reporters. He just doesn’t care, and he knows his supporters don’t care either. Basically, they’re all in on the con and enjoying themselves, so a little peek behind the scenes—”The Making of the Trump Campaign”—just piques their interest rather than disillusioning them. Not that they read the Times in the first place, so it probably doesn’t matter much what he says to their editorial board anyway.

And speaking of Trump, here is Thoreau explaining that he loves the guy because he’s smashing the Republican Party for us:

Some of you might doubt that Trump is deliberately doing good, and you’re probably right. But, hell, when the Hulk is smashing bad guys, do we really know for sure that he’s acting on his good side rather than just smashing for fun? Still, he’s smashing what we need him to smash. Well, same for Trump. I mean, FFS, he already dashed Scott Walker’s hopes of ever having a political career in Washington. That alone should make him the greatest liberal hero of the 21st century thus far.

What else? Gallup is always good for a laugh. They report this weekend that 50 percent of Americans think they’re better off economically today than they were eight years ago. But wait. Here’s how it breaks down by party affiliation:

In other words, this poll result is completely meaningless. I think it’s safe to say that both Democrats and Republicans have done about equally well over the past eight years, and Gallup even presents some more detailed polling results that pretty much prove this. But when you ask a very general question, even if it’s on a specific topic, what people hear is “Do you like President Obama?” And that’s the question they’re answering. It’s all pure affinity mongering, and I’m sure the results would have been the mirror opposite if the question were asked in 2008 instead of 2016.

And as long as we’re at the Gallup site, here are the top ten results for economic confidence by state in 2015. I’m showing them to you for two reasons. First, California handily beat Texas. Hah! Second, Washington DC is simply on another planet—with Beltway neighbors Virginia and Maryland also doing pretty well, though in a more earthbound way. Conservatives are always griping about the way that folks who feed at the federal trough always manage to do great no matter how poorly the rest of the country is doing, and it seems like they might have a point.

And now I’m off to bed. Whether I’m also off to sleep remains an open question. I’ll let you know Monday morning.

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Late Night Miscellany—Powered by Dexamethasone!

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Ted Cruz’s New Anti-Choice Group Is Headed by a Guy Who Thinks Abortion Caused the Drought

by MelindaWest07 Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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During a campaign stop in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said he’s created an anti-abortion group that will “champion every child, born and unborn.” The Pro-Lifers for Cruz coalition already has more than 17,000 members, according to a press release, and will be chaired by Tony Perkins, the anti-LGBT president of the Family Research Council who recently said same-sex marriage is responsible for “havoc in our homes and blood in our streets.” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has also created a committee, but Cruz has cornered some of the more extreme members of the anti-abortion movement.

Also heading up the coalition are 11 anti-abortion co-chairs “representing virtually every perspective on the pro-life spectrum.” One of those perspectives is that of Troy Newman, the president of Operation Rescue and a board member of the Center for Medical Progress, the group behind the debunked Planned Parenthood videos, whose founder David Daleiden was recently indicted for alleged crimes in connection to the videos. In his announcement on Wednesday, Cruz called Newman’s group “one of the leading pro-life Christian activist organizations in the nation.”

Newman has been involved in anti-abortion organizing for decades, and in 1999 he became the president of Operation Rescue, a group with a long history devoted to shuttering abortion clinics. In 2000 he published the book Their Blood Cries Out, in which he calls abortion doctors “blood-guilty.” In a passage of the book, which is now out of print, Newman wrote that “the United States government has abrogated its responsibility to properly deal with the blood-guilty. This responsibility rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes in order to expunge bloodguilt sic from the land and people.”

In 2002, Newman moved Operation Rescue headquarters from Southern California to Wichita, Kansas, the home of Dr. George Tiller, one of the only later-term abortion providers in the country at the time. Tiller was shot to death while volunteering as an usher for his church. Scott Roeder, 51, who participated in Operation Rescue events and protests in Wichita, was eventually sentenced to 50 years in prison for the murder. Newman immediately distanced himself from Roeder following Tiller’s death. Operation Rescue’s senior vice president is Cheryl Sullenger, who in the late 1980s served two years in federal prison for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic.

A year after moving to Wichita, Newman commented on the state execution of Paul Hill, a man convicted of murdering a Florida-based abortion provider and his volunteer escort. In a joint press release, Newman’s Operation Rescue and another pro-life organization wrote that Hill’s execution was unjust because “there are many examples where taking the life in defense of innocent human beings is legally justified and permissible under the law…Execution under these circumstances is nothing less than murder of a political prisoner.”

Last October, Newman, who had been scheduled to speak at an anti-abortion event, was deported from Australia because government officials thought he would be “a threat to good order” and that his views on abortion could compromise the safety and well-being of women seeking abortions. Newman has recently claimed that the ongoing drought in California is caused by abortion: “Is it no wonder that California is experiencing the worst drought in history when it is the largest child-killer in all of the United States?”

Ken Cuccinelli, the former state senator and attorney general of Virginia who has said he opposes abortion even when the pregnancy is a health risk to the woman, is another co-chair of the committee. So is Gianna Jessen, who calls herself an “abortion survivor” because she was born after her mother failed an attempted saline abortion. A disability activist, she testified against Planned Parenthood during the House’s investigation last year.

“I always say that men are born to defend women and children, not sit idly by, or be passive when they are being harmed,” Jessen is quoted as saying on Cruz’s website. “Senator Cruz has been absolutely courageous in his defense of the unborn, and willing to stand alone.”

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Ted Cruz’s New Anti-Choice Group Is Headed by a Guy Who Thinks Abortion Caused the Drought

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The Island of Nauru Could Live or Die at the Hands of COP21

by Myrna Posted on December 11, 2015

Over the years, this tiny Pacific island has been devastated by war, phosphate mining, and now climate change. Years of strip-mining have left three-quarters of Nauru’s land useless. Sosrodjojo/JiwaFoto/ZUMA You’ve probably never heard of Nauru. But you might want to learn its name. It may not be around much longer. Nauru is a speck in the South Pacific. It’s the tiniest island nation and the third smallest nation in the world. At roughly 8 square miles and with just over 10,000 residents, Nauru isn’t exactly a political heavyweight on the world stage. But Nauru is sinking, drying out, and generally in peril due to the ever-accelerating effects of climate change. And it may spark a debate at the Paris climate talks currently underway about what to do with populations on the verge of becoming climate refugees with literally nowhere to go. Nauru is not your typical drowning-island scenario. What used to be a Pacific island oasis is now, by many accounts, a physical example of how quickly paradise can be destroyed. In the early 1900s, a German company began strip-mining the interior of the island for phosphate, the main component of agricultural fertilizer. Then came Japan, which occupied the country during World War II, and continued the phosphate mining. The U.S. bombed Japan’s airstrip on Nauru in 1943, preventing food supplies from entering the island. Less than a year later, Japan deported 1,200 Nauruans to work as forced laborers on a nearby island—only 737 of them survived the ordeal to be repatriated after the war just three years later. After the war, Australia took control of the country, and phosphate mining resumed as an Australian enterprise, before mining rights were transferred to Nauru when the nation became independent in 1968. Read the rest at Newsweek. More:   The Island of Nauru Could Live or Die at the Hands of COP21 ; ; ;

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The Island of Nauru Could Live or Die at the Hands of COP21

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Would you prefer your meat well-traveled or cloned, China?

by Ahmad6486yebta Posted on December 3, 2015

Would you prefer your meat well-traveled or cloned, China?

By on 3 Dec 2015commentsShare

Remember when eating sustainably meant just having to choose between a local, non-organic tomato and an organic one flown in from Chile? Well, those were the good ole days.

Now, thanks to advances in genetic engineering, our food choices are about to get a lot more complicated. Take China, for example. Instead of debating the merits of a pesticide-free Caprese salad over a low-emission salsa, Chinese consumers might soon have to choose between cows flown in from Australia and ones grown in a cloning facility in the northern city of Tianjin.

As Bloomberg noted last month, China recently received a shipment of 150 live Australian cattle via 747 — the first of many shipments to come, as the country struggles to meet its citizens’ growing demand for beef:

China will eat an extra 2.2 million tons of beef a year by 2025, according to Rabobank — enough to make 19 billion quarter-pounders. The demand pushed up Chinese prices fourfold since 2000 to about $10 a kilogram in
June — making them among the most expensive in the world and more than double the benchmark rate in Australia.

… Part of the reason for growth is a change in diet. For centuries, China’s favored meat has been pork, partly because backyard pigs not only supplied meat, but were good at turning waste into manure. Until recently, beef — once known as “millionaire’s meat” — was very rare. With China’s recent rapid urbanization and the rise of a middle class, that’s changing.

And because of beef’s demotion from “millionaire’s meat,” in addition to importing both live cattle and frozen, ready-to-eat beef from the Aussies, China is also gearing up to start mass producing cloned cattle, The Washington Post reports:

The commercial cloning project is a joint venture between Sinica (a subsidiary of Boyalife Group), Peking University’s Institute of Molecular Medicine, the Tianjin International Joint Academy of Biomedicine, and South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. The plan is to finish completion of the $31 million commercial cloning facility in the first half of 2016, and then start production of 100,000 cattle per year. Within five years, the facility plans to ramp up to 1 million cattle a year.

If you’re someone who likes to buy grass-fed beef from an independent farmer at your local farmer’s market, then chances are, you’re not gonna like airborne beef or cattle clones. But as our own Nathanael Johnson pointed out earlier this summer in our Meat: What’s smart, what’s right, what’s next series, those quaint ranchers aren’t going to cut it when it comes to feeding a growing world population.

So the question is: Would you opt for a farm-raised cow that just endured a 13-hour flight standing in its own feces, or a local cow that came from a lab? Think carefully, because China isn’t the only country starting to merge farm and laboratory. Last month, the FDA declared a salmon genetically modified to grow to market size in half the time of regular salmon safe for human consumption. The fish will be the first genetically engineered animal to hit U.S. markets and will no doubt spawn a lot of debate over what we should be eating.

And it’s probably best to get that debate rolling sooner rather than later. Because as silly as agonizing over local vs. organic tomatoes might seem now, agonizing over air-lifted vs. cloned cattle might not be far behind as we hone our ability to manipulate genes.

Just this week, in fact, a bunch of scientists and ethicists met in Washington, DC., to discuss the prospect of genetically engineering humans. Crazy, right? Actually, China already tried to do something like that earlier this year. And according to The Washington Post, the country is similarly nonchalant about cloning humans:

According to Boyalife’s chief executive, Xu Xiaochun, the plan is to move on from cloning cattle for food purposes to cloning primates for research purposes. And from primates, guess what the next step would be? Yep, humans. “The technology is already there,” Xu says. “If this is allowed, I don’t think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology.” Right now, the company is just being “self-restrained” about cloning humans until all those bothersome moral and ethical questions go away.

Oy. If we’re gonna start talking about genetically engineered humans, I’m gonna need to fuel up. Should I get the cloned cattle steak or the GM-salmon burger?

Source:

What happens when Chinese supermarkets start selling beef from a test tube

, The Washington Post.

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China Will Pony Up $3.1 Billion to Help Poor Countries Fight Climate Change

by JuanW19aoss Posted on September 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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China followed up its promise Friday to create the world’s largest cap-and-trade program with yet another significant climate policy announcement: It will commit to spending $3.1 billion to help developing countries slash their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change. China’s financial commitment, along with its new carbon market, are part of a comprehensive package of climate measures to be announced at a joint press conference featuring US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday in Washington, DC.

The new pledge, emerging from high-profile bilateral talks between the two countries, “is a game changer in international climate politics,” says Li Shuo, a climate policy analyst for Greenpeace. “It is a drastic increase from China’s previous finance commitments.”

“In terms of scale, 3.1 billion USD could even surpass the US pledge to the Green Climate Fund, which still faces a significant battle in the US Congress,” Li said in an email.

Last year, Obama pledged $3 billion to the United Nation’s Green Climate Fund during a G20 meeting in Brisbane, Australia. That pledge followed a landmark climate deal forged last year between the United States and China that set the stage for today’s agreement.

But Obama’s commitment to the Green Climate Fund still faces stiff opposition at home from congressional Republicans who have vowed to block the White House’s first funding request of $500 million. Sen. James Inhofe, who chairs the committee on the environment and public works, has said he will do everything in his power “to prevent $3 billion in taxpayer dollars from going to the Green Climate Fund, where the money will be spent by unelected UN bureaucrats to dictate U.S. policy and hinder developing countries’ ability to aggressively address the economics of poverty.”

On Friday, China will also commit to controlling public investment flowing into high-polluting industries, both domestically and internationally, according to the briefings received by Greenpeace, signaling a top-down response in a country that exerts an enormous influence over the direction of markets.

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You owe the world $12,000 for burning all those fossil fuels

by FelishaLawton Posted on September 8, 2015

Climate finance

You owe the world $12,000 for burning all those fossil fuels

By on 8 Sep 2015commentsShare

In the event those student loans weren’t enough to bring you down, a new study adds a hefty new bill to the ledger — and it’s of atmospheric proportions.

Writing in Nature Climate Change, H. Damon Matthews from Concordia University in Montreal argues that the fairest way to deal with climate finance (that is, of equitably balancing the international books in order to pay for climate change mitigation and adaptation) is to label individual countries as debtors and creditors and to calculate relative balances given their historic CO2 emissions. If you’re living in the U.S. or Australia, you’d owe a solid $12,000 under Matthews’ scheme: the atmospheric bill for all of those Furbies and Oreos and SUVs you bought between 1990 and 2013.

Well, you as in the person whose eyes are currently glued to Grist’s effortlessly compelling prose probably don’t owe anyone $12,000 (other than that loan shark), but you as in a representative humanoid slice of your country might. By benchmarking each country against an equal per-capita share of emissions over time, Matthews was able to calculate which countries had, given a 1990 starting point, emitted more than their fair share. New Scientist details his results:

He found that the US, for example, had over-polluted by a massive 100.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 1990 and 2013 – amounting to 300 tonnes per person. That’s about as much as is produced by driving a family car from Los Angeles to New York and back about 150 times.

And according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, each tonne of carbon dioxide produced today has a social cost of about $40, so the overall debt per person is US$12,000.

That social cost, however, is a pretty arbitrary number. A social cost captures both private costs and externalities, and environmental economists still have little idea of how to price the latter when it comes to carbon emissions. While the EPA might use that $40 figure, a new study, for example, arrived at a social cost of carbon of $220 per ton, which would place the per-capita U.S. emissions debt from Matthews’ study at $66,000. Just to make sure we’re on the same page of the ol’ checkbook, that’s the difference between $3.87 trillion and $21.3 trillion. It’s this kind of variance that makes rigorously conducting (and defending) carbon pricing studies so difficult.

And while studies like Matthews’ make for clean numbers, it doesn’t mean anyone will actually take his advice. Climate negotiators like those who will be meeting in Paris later this year tend to play by their own political rules. Here’s more from New Scientist:

“Having followed the negotiations for 20 years I can tell you now the parties will not accept a neat allocation of responsibility based on this kind of metric, although I think this is one of the fairest,” says Robyn Eckersley at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Eckersley says each country pushes for a particular metric that downplays their own responsibility. But that doesn’t make the analysis pointless, she adds.

“They help society look more critically at what each country is doing and how they are hiding behind their cherry-picked metrics. That’s a really useful function,” she says. “These kinds of documents make it easier for people to judge contributions and raise these issues at a national level.”

In the meantime, the world’s developed countries still need to figure out how they intend on dumping $100 billion annually into the Green Climate Fund by 2020. As of now, we’ve reached about a tenth of that goal. Color me pessimistic, Jonathan Chait.

And as long as we’re talking debt, let this post serve as a brief reminder that you still owe me that lunch money from ’06. (Not you, Jonathan.)

Source:

Everyone in the US and Australia owes $12,000 in CO2 emissions

, New Scientist.

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You owe the world $12,000 for burning all those fossil fuels

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on You owe the world $12,000 for burning all those fossil fuels