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Republicans Beg Their Party to Finally Do Something About Global Warming

by tfem31x Posted on February 8, 2017

Mother Jones

You wouldn’t know it by looking at Congress or the White House, but the GOP isn’t in complete lockstep when it comes to climate change denial. The deniers just happen to be the ones who hold all the political power within the party. They drown out the other side—the conservatives who are urging their party to actually do something about global warming.

The contrast was especially clear this week. Just a day after Republicans on the House science committee accused government scientists of fabricating climate research, a group of Republican luminaries who don’t currently hold public office held a press conference calling for climate action. Specifically, they released a report—titled “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends“—in which they advocated a tax on carbon emissions.

The report, which was published by the Climate Leadership Council, calls for a tax on carbon starting at $40 per ton and rising over time, with revenue returned to taxpayers in the form of quarterly Social Security dividends. The authors include James Baker, who served as secretary of state and secretary of the treasury in the Reagan and first Bush administrations; Henry Paulson, who served as treasury secretary in the second Bush administration; Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz; and Martin Feldstein and Gregory Mankiw, who chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Reagan and George W. Bush, respectively. They see the tax as a replacement for the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations on greenhouse gases, including the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The proposal would also include a border adjustment designed to tax products from countries that do not have a similar carbon price.

For these conservatives, a carbon tax would be like insuring against the worst risks of climate change—and they see it as a more efficient solution than EPA regulations. They describe their plan as “win-win”—even if some of them still claim to quibble with the science.

“For too long, we Republicans and conservatives haven’t occupied a real place at the table during the debate about global climate change,” Baker said at a Wednesday press conference. “Instead, we have tended to dispute the fact of climate change and particularly the extent to which man is responsible for any changes in the Earth’s climate. Now I need, in the interest of full disclosure, to tell you that I was and remain somewhat of a skeptic about the extent to which man is responsible for climate change. But I do think that…the risks are too great to ignore, and that we need some sort of insurance policy.”

None of the report’s authors currently hold public office. But Baker was scheduled to meet Wednesday with Vice President Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner (who serves as a presidential adviser), and Trump adviser Gary Cohn to discuss the recommendations.

There’s a very different conversation underway in the House, where Republicans are obsessed with finding a smoking gun that would expose global warming as a myth. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who chairs the science committee, held a hearing yesterday titled “Making EPA Great Again,” during which he and his colleagues accused federal agencies of falsifying data and pushing a climate hoax.

Smith cited allegations made by former NOAA data scientist John Bates that the agency mishandled data used in a 2015 study challenging the belief that global warming had “paused” in recent years.

“Everything I have read suggests that NOAA cheated and got caught,” Smith said. At another point, he said NOAA scientists wanted to “falsify data to exaggerate global warming.” (Bates, for the record, told the Associated Press that his concerns don’t undermine the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet and that his NOAA colleagues had done “nothing malicious.” He said the controversy is “really a story of not disclosing what you did. It’s not trumped up data in any way shape or form.”)

For the conservatives behind the Climate Leadership Council report, the debate about science isn’t the point. Benefits of a carbon tax “accrue regardless of one’s views on climate science,” the paper’s authors write.

But this message has hardly gotten anywhere with GOP politicians in the past. And even Baker cautioned against optimism that Trump’s White House will reverse course. “We have no assurance at all that this is going to be something that the administration will grab hold of,” he said. “We happen to believe that this will help make America great again, but that’s our view.”

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Republicans Beg Their Party to Finally Do Something About Global Warming

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Here Are 7 Terrifying Charts That Show Exactly What We’re Doing to the Planet

by Myrna Posted on August 2, 2016

Scientists have some bad news for Earth. Bernhard Staehli/Shutterstock This story was originally published by the Guardian. The world is careening towards an environment never experienced before by humans, with the temperature of the air and oceans breaking records, sea levels reaching historic highs and carbon dioxide surpassing a key milestone, a major international report has found. The “state of the climate” report, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with input from hundreds of scientists from 62 countries, confirmed there was a “toppling of several symbolic mileposts” in heat, sea level rise and extreme weather in 2015. “The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle,” Michael Mann, a leading climatologist at Penn State, told the Guardian. “They are playing out before us, in real time. The 2015 numbers drive that home.” Last year was the warmest on record, with the annual surface temperature beating the previous mark set in 2014 by 0.1 degrees Celsius (0.18 degrees Fahrenheit). This means that the world is now 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) warmer than it was in pre-industrial times, largely due to a huge escalation in the production of greenhouse gases. The United Nations has already said that 2016 is highly likely to break the annual record again, after 14 straight months of extreme heat aided by a hefty El Niño climatic event, a weather event that typically raises temperatures around the world. The oceans, which absorb more than 90 percent of the extra CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, also reached a new record temperature, with sharp spikes in the El Niño-dominated eastern Pacific, which was 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) warmer than the long-term average, and the Arctic, where the temperature in August hit a dizzying 8 degrees C (14.4 degrees F) above average. The thermal expansion of the oceans, compounded by melting glaciers, resulted in the highest global sea level on record in 2015. The oceans are around 70 millimeters higher than the 1993 average, which is when comprehensive satellite measurements of sea levels began. The seas are rising at an average rate of 3.3 millimeters a year, with the western Pacific and Indian Oceans experiencing the fastest increases. These changes are being driven by a CO2 concentration that surpassed the symbolic 400 parts per million mark at the Mauna Loa research station in Hawaii last year. The NOAA report states that the global CO2 level was a touch under this, at 399.4 ppm, an increase of 2.2 ppm compared to 2014. NOAA said other “remarkable” changes in 2015 include the Arctic’s lowest maximum sea ice extent in the 37-year satellite record, recorded in February 2015. The world’s alpine glaciers recorded a net annual loss of ice for the 36th consecutive year and the Greenland ice sheet, which would balloon sea levels by around 7 meters should it disintegrate, experienced melting over more than 50 percent of its surface. The rapid changes in the climate may have profound consequences for humans and other species. In June last year, a severe heat wave claimed over 1,000 lives in Karachi, Pakistan. Severe drought caused food shortages for millions of people in Ethiopia, with a lack of rainfall resulting in “intense and widespread” forest fires in Indonesia that belched out a vast quantity of greenhouse gas. Diminishing sea ice is causing major walrus herds to haul themselves out on to land. Arctic marine species, such as snailfish and polar cod, are being pushed out of the region by species coming from further south, attracted to the warming waters. A huge algal bloom off the west coast of North America harmed marine life and fisheries. Scientists have said there were underlying climate change trends at play but last year was also influenced by the strong El Niño event, which is when equatorial Pacific waters warm, leading to an array of weather effects around the world. El Niño has also helped spur searing heat in 2016 but has now petered out. Thomas Karl, director of NOAA national centers for environmental information, said that last year’s climate “was shaped both by long-term change and an El Niño event. When we think about being climate resilient, both of these time scales are important to consider. “Last year’s El Niño was a clear reminder of how short-term events can amplify the relative influence and impacts stemming from longer-term warming trends.” Kate Willett, a senior scientist at Britain’s Met Office, said that there was a 75 percent annual increase in the amount of land that experienced severe drought last year. “Looking at a range of climate measurements, 2015 was yet another highly significant year,” she said. “Not only was 2015 the warmest year on record by a large margin, it was also another year when the levels of dominant greenhouse gases reached new peaks.” The state of the climate report is now in its 26th year. The peer-reviewed series is published annually by the American Meteorological Society. Read more:  Here Are 7 Terrifying Charts That Show Exactly What We’re Doing to the Planet ; ; ;

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Here Are 7 Terrifying Charts That Show Exactly What We’re Doing to the Planet

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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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Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks

by Myrna Posted on December 8, 2015

The GOP is making its presence felt at the conference. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP LE BOURGET, France—Monday began what’s supposed to be the final week of the climate talks, the one where top-level negotiators hammer out an accord to stop the deadly march of global warming. To troll this momentous event, the climate change deniers at the Heartland Institute came all the way from Chicago to stage a “counter-conference” at a central Paris venue called, seriously, the Hotel California. I don’t know much about what happened on that dark desert highway, in part because journalists with the climate advocacy site DeSmogBlog were kicked out before the session began. Heartland’s Jim Lakely told me DeSmogBlog engaged in “overt advocacy.” Kyla Mandel, one of the two bloggers booted, responded that he’s probably referring to them having told other journalists that Heartland has received funding from ExxonMobil. (Lakely didn’t elaborate.) A few reporters briefly noted the “counter-conference” and moved on, which is the attention it deserved. While there are intense arguments about how to address climate change, there is no real debate among scientists about the core facts: Human contributions to the greenhouse effect are making the Earth hotter, which is bad for life. We can already see it happening, and pretty much the only people still clinging to denial live in well-off, English-speaking countries, primarily the United States. Which is probably why the denial event drew such a paltry crowd—organizers say a multiple of 20—compared to the thousands at anti-carbon emissions protests in the city and tens of thousands at the 196-party United Nations conference here. And yet, at the real conference on Monday, it became clear that there are important reasons not to ignore that small, well-funded American faction entirely. For all the worldwide agreement on global warming, this week’s negotiators are hashing out the thorny issues of what should be done, by whom and when. Big fights include who will pay for existing and future damage and how to make sure that countries live up to all the promises they’ve made and will make this week. Read the rest at The New Republic. Read article here:  Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks ; ; ;

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Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks

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Earth Doesn’t Have Be Doomed Like Atlantis — We Can Change Course

by Riley32J04 Posted on November 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When it comes to confronting global climate change, we don’t have much experience to draw on. As world leaders prepare to meet in Paris starting on November 30 to hash out a binding international agreement to limit greenhouse gases, it appears that we are in new and frightening territory, without the past as a reliable guide.

History, however, can offer some important lessons. Archaeologists in recent years have discovered that dramatic weather events helped lay the foundations for our very civilization. Climate calamities, in fact, may have sparked the urban revolution that continues to alter the planet.

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Earth Doesn’t Have Be Doomed Like Atlantis — We Can Change Course

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This Could Be the Worst Climate Crisis in the World Right Now

by RockyHTUNv Posted on October 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday afternoon, Indonesian President Joko Widodo cut short a visit to the United States and headed home to oversee efforts to extinguish a rash of epic wildfires that have engulfed his country.

Joko was in Washington, DC, for a photo op with President Barack Obama, to talk about climate change, and to promote Indonesia as a choice venue for foreign investors. His trip was also supposed to include a stopover in San Francisco for meetings with tech industry executives. But Joko’s decision to return to Indonesia early underscores the challenges his country faces in stopping the worst deforestation on Earth—deforestation that is playing a critical role in global climate change.

There’s more to global warming than pollution from cars and power plants. In the United States, coal-fired power plants are the No. 1 source of carbon dioxide emissions, followed by tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. That’s why the Obama administration has focused its climate policies on those sources; Obama’s signature plan aims to reduce power-sector emissions by one-third by 2030. Those policies get some natural help from the ecosystem, as trees and soil soak up carbon out of the atmosphere. In the United States, thanks to forest conservation and climate-friendly farming practices, land use (a term climate wonks use to describe emissions that come from the land rather than from man-made infrastructure and vehicles) actually offsets about 13 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from the rest of the economy.

But on a global scale, land use is a source of greenhouse gas emissions, rather than a sink. The biggest culprit is deforestation: Living trees store carbon; dead trees release it back into the atmosphere as they decompose. Emissions from crop soil, fertilizer, and livestock also play a major role. Overall, land use accounts for about one-quarter of the world’s total greenhouse gas footprint.

In Indonesia, the situation is even more dire. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), land use represents 61 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. That means deforestation causes far more climate pollution than all of the country’s cars and power plants combined.

In fact, Indonesia has the world’s highest rate of deforestation, even higher than Brazil, which contains most of the Amazon rainforest. From 2000 to 2012, according to research published in Nature, Indonesia lost more than 23,000 square miles of forest to logging, agriculture, and other uses. That’s roughly the size of West Virginia. In 2010, the government attempted to put the brakes on deforestation by exchanging a two-year moratorium on new logging permits for $1 billion in aid from Norway and the United States. But according to Susan Minnemeyer, a forest analyst at the WRI, that policy appears to have had the “perverse impact of accelerating deforestation, because those with permits felt that they had to take action quickly or they would no longer be able to.”

This all adds up to global-scale pollution: Indonesia is the world’s fifth-ranking greenhouse gas emitter, coming in just behind Russia and India. In other words, we can’t stop climate change without saving Indonesia’s rainforests.

Indonesia is in the middle of a public health crisis from forest fire haze. The problem isn’t just deforestation, but how that deforestation is happening. In Indonesia, forests are often cleared out with fire. This can be done legally with a permit, but it’s often carried out illegally as well. This year, forest fires are also being fueled by El Niño-related weather patterns. The combination of El Niño and intentional deforestation has proven incredibly dangerous: The country has experienced nearly 100,000 fires so far this year, the worst since the last major El Niño in 1997. Fire activity typically ramps up in September and October, the end of the dry season, and over the last couple of weeks the conflagrations have grown to crisis proportions—hence Joko’s hasty return. The fires are so big they can be seen from space.

The greenhouse impact from those fires is staggering: On several days over the last month, emissions from Indonesian forest fires have exceeded all emissions from the US economy:

World Resources Institute

To make matters worse, more than half of those fires occur on land made of peat, the thick, soil-like material made from decomposed plant matter. Peat is packed with carbon, and fires that occur on peatland can have a global warming impact 200 times greater than fires on normal soil, according to the WRI. Last week, Joko said the government would stop issuing new permits for commercial development on peatland, but that won’t stop the fires that are already burning.

Climate pollution is just part of the problem. Firefighting costs are pushing $50 million per week. The impact of this fire season on Indonesia’s economy could reach $14 billion. And the thick blanket of haze that is stretching from the country across Southeast Asia has caused at least 10 deaths from haze-related illness and 500,000 cases of acute respiratory illness.

Your snacks and makeup are part of the problem. Of course, Indonesians aren’t just chopping and burning down trees for fun. Besides logging, one of the main uses for cleared land is to plant African oil palm, the fruits of which are used to produce palm oil. Palm oil is the world’s most popular form of vegetable oil, and half of it comes from Indonesia. It’s also found in about half the processed food you encounter in a grocery store (as well as many cosmetics).

Palm oil has some advantages over other oils: It’s cheap to produce and doesn’t contain trans fats, and the trees yield far more oil in the same land area—using fewer chemical fertilizers—than soybeans or sunflowers. According to the World Bank, the increase in global demand for cooking oil by 2020 could be met with palm oil using one-seventh the land area that would be required to fill that demand using soybeans. For that reason, it could actually have many environmental advantages over other types of oil.

Unfortunately, much palm oil production now happens in highly vulnerable ecosystems, often in the former habitats of endangered animals such as tigers and orangutans. Pressure is growing on Indonesia’s palm oil producers to stop deforestation and stay out of sensitive areas. A handful of major US food processors, including Nestlé and PepsiCo, have adopted commitments to rid their supply chains of palm oil linked to deforestation, according to a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. But that report also that found many fast-food chains are lagging behind. Last year, an Indonesian court ordered the first-ever major fine—$30 million—for a palm oil company found to have cleared forest in protected orangutan habitat.

Indonesia’s climate test. For the international climate negotiations coming up soon in Paris, Indonesia has pledged to increase its emissions over the next 25 years by 29 percent less than it would have under a “business as usual” scenario. That won’t be possible without curbing forest fires and deforestation. So for Indonesia, getting a grip on palm oil producers will be even more important than going after power plants, as Obama is doing. Joko has been moving in the right direction, Minnemeyer said, but it’s unclear how his promises will hold up.

“Across the board, there has been very weak enforcement of Indonesia’s environmental laws,” she said. If they’re going to meet their climate target, “the fires are going to be a key part.”

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This Could Be the Worst Climate Crisis in the World Right Now

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Australia files joke of a climate pledge to the U.N.

by KamDennison87 Posted on August 11, 2015

Australia files joke of a climate pledge to the U.N.

By on 11 Aug 2015commentsShare

To raucous applause of denialists everywhere, Australia submitted its climate pledge to the U.N. on Tuesday. The plan — immediately and nearly universally hailed as weak by climate hawks, climatologists, and most other reasonable people — is one of twenty-six voluntary greenhouse gas emission reduction pledges, covering more than fifty countries, filed in the run-up to the climate negotiations in Paris this December. While currently non-binding, these Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) are considered indicative of countries’ levels of ambition in responding to the global climate change dilemma.

Australia committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26–28 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. Compare this target to the European Union’s: 40 percent of 1990 levels — when global emissions were much lower — by 2030. While Australia’s pledge may look similar to that of the United States, which committed to a cut of 26–28 percent of 2005 levels by 2025, analysts at Australia’s Climate Institute project that the U.S.’s pledge will amount to a 41 percent reduction on 2005 levels by 2030. Canberra’s five years of wiggle room make for a significant break for fossil fuel companies.

Weak target aside, “even worse is the lack of policy instruments outlined to get us there,” argued Yannick Spencer, an Australian Master of Public Policy candidate at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, in an email to Grist. “In fact the policy instruments in place will get us nowhere near there, while being highly economically inefficient.”

The Australian INDC leans heavily on the government’s US$1.86 billion Emissions Reduction Fund, the country’s main climate strategy, even though analysts expect it to be “fully eroded” (read: out of money) by next year. The fund operates via a reverse auction, in which companies offer to undertake emissions-cutting projects and bid for taxpayer dollars to fund those projects. Not only is the fund running out of money, but its impact is dubious. The policy suite will allow Australia’s top 20 polluters to actually “increase their carbon emissions without penalties,” reported the Australian Financial Review.

Despite the backlash, the Australian government stuck to its coal-fired guns. “Australia is making a strong and credible contribution to the international effort to tackle climate change,” said Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a statement. “We are committed to tackling climate change without a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme that will hike up power bills for families, pensioners and businesses.”

Ignoring the fact that the INDC is neither strong nor credible, the position is at least a step up for Abbott, who previously called climate change “absolute crap.” (The PM also notably said, “I won’t be rushing out to get my daughters vaccinated,” but we’ve only got time to cover one type of denialism today.)

Coal made up more than 60 percent of Australia’s energy mix in 2014. Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest private-sector coal company, quoted Abbott in a recent submission to the White House Council on Environmental Quality protesting the inclusion of greenhouse gases in National Environmental Policy Act analyses:

As Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently explained, … “Coal is good for humanity. Coal is good for prosperity. Coal is an essential part of our economic future here in Australia.”

The same can’t be said for the rest of the South Pacific. “If the rest of the world followed Australia’s lead, the Great Barrier Reef would disappear,” said Tony de Brum, foreign minister for the Marshall Islands, in a statement addressing Australia’s INDC. “So would my country, and the other vulnerable atoll nations on Australia’s doorstep.”

Source:
Australia Sets Emissions Goal, but Climate Scientists Say It Falls Short

, The New York Times.

Anger as Australia unveils ‘weak’ climate pledge

, RTCC.

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The whole world is breaking the law by ignoring climate change

by ErnestShinn Posted on March 30, 2015

The whole world is breaking the law by ignoring climate change

By on 30 Mar 2015commentsShare

The countries of the world are violating national and international law by polluting the atmosphere and heating up the planet, according to a group of respected lawyers. Regardless of what kind of climate deal the U.N. comes up with in Paris later this year, governments already have a legal responsibility to take action, the jurists argued today in London as they launched what they’re calling the Oslo Principles on Global Climate Change Obligations.

From a Guardian column by two legal experts:

What the Oslo principles offer is a solution to our infuriating impasse in which governments — especially those from developed nations, responsible for 70% of the world’s emissions between 1890 and 2007 — are in effect saying: “We all agree that something needs to be done, but we cannot agree on who has to do what and how much. In the absence of any such agreement, we have no obligation to do anything.” The Oslo principles bring a battery of legal arguments to dispute and disarm that second claim. In essence, the working group asserts that governments are violating their legal duties if they each act in a way that, collectively, is known to lead to grave harms.

Governments will retort that they cannot know their obligations to reduce emissions in the absence of an international agreement. The working group’s response is that they can know this, already, and with sufficient precision.

The Oslo Principles’ signatories include legal experts from around the world. The project was spearheaded by Yale University professor Thomas Pogge and the advocate-general of the Netherlands’ Supreme Court, Jaap Spier.

The lawyers point to the idea of common but differentiated responsibility, a concept first outlined by the U.N. in its 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change. It notes that each nation should be tasked with cutting climate-changing gases, but the level of cuts should be determined by taking into account both the country’s historic responsibility for causing climate change — i.e., how much has the country been polluting, and for how long? — and how the country’s economy would be affected. Rich countries that have been polluting for years, like the U.S. and many European nations, have a higher responsibility to cut emissions. For developing countries, like India, the responsibility is lower.

In addition to calling for mitigation, the experts suggest that governments have a legal duty to work on climate change adaptation, and to educate their citizens about the threats they face.

From the Oslo Principles:

No single source of law alone requires States and enterprises to fulfil these Principles. Rather, a network of intersecting sources provides States and enterprises with obligations to respond urgently and effectively to climate change in a manner that respects, protects, and fulfils the basic dignity and human rights of the world’s people and the safety and integrity of the biosphere. These sources are local, national, regional, and international and derive from diverse substantive canons, including, inter alia, international human rights law, environmental law and tort law.

The hope, it seems, is that governments around the world will consider these legal responsibilities as they make policy going forward. In the U.S., where some leaders are throwing snowballs to suggest climate change isn’t happening, that seems like a long shot — at least at the moment. But the Oslo Principles are yet another compelling argument that our political leaders need to get moving, now.

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We Could Stop Global Warming With This Fix—But It’s Probably a Terrible Idea

by LorrieDarley Posted on March 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mount Pinatubo erupting in 1991 Bullit Marquez/AP

Back in the late 1990s, Ken Caldeira set out to disprove the “ludicrous” idea that we could reverse global warming by filling the sky with chemicals that would partially block the sun. A few years earlier, Mount Pinatubo had erupted in the Philippines, sending tiny sulfate particles—known as aerosols—into the stratosphere, where they reflected sunlight back into space and temporarily cooled the planet. Some scientists believed that an artificial version of this process could be used to cancel out the warming effect of greenhouse gases.

“Our original goal was to show that it was a crazy idea and wouldn’t work,” says Caldeira, who at the time was a climate scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. But when Caldeira and a colleague ran a model to test out this geoengineering scenario, they were shocked by what they found. “Much to our surprise, it worked really well,” he recalls. “Our results indicate that geoengineering schemes could markedly diminish regional and seasonal climate change from increased atmospheric CO2,” they wrote in a 2000 paper.

You might think that the volume of aerosols needed to increase the Earth’s reflectivity (known as albedo) enough to halt global climate change would be enormous. But speaking to Kishore Hari on this week’s Inquiring Minds podcast, Caldeira explains that “if you had just one firehose-worth of material constantly spraying into the stratosphere, that would be enough to offset all of the global warming anticipated for the rest of this century.”

So does Caldeira think it’s time to start blasting aerosols into the air? Nope. “It’s a funny situation that I feel like I’m in,” he says. “Most of our published results show that it would actually work quite well, but personally I think it would be a crazy thing to do.” He thinks there’s just too much risk.

Caldeira, now a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, recently contributed to a massive National Academy of Sciences report examining various geoengineering proposals. The report concluded that technologies to block solar radiation “should not be deployed at this time” and warned that “there is significant potential for unanticipated, unmanageable, and regrettable consequences in multiple human dimensions…including political, social, legal, economic, and ethical dimensions.” As my colleague Tim McDonnell explained back when the NAS study was released:

Albedo modification would use airplanes or rockets to deliver loads of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, where they would bounce sunlight back into space. But if the technology is straightforward, the consequences are anything but.

The aerosols fall out of the air after a matter of years, so they would need to be continually replaced. And if we continued to burn fossil fuels, ever more aerosols would be needed to offset the warming from the additional CO2. University of California, San Diego, scientist Lynn Russell said that artificially blocking sunlight would have unknown consequences for photosynthesis by plants and phytoplankton, and that high concentrations of sulfate aerosols could produce acid rain. Moreover, if we one day suddenly ceased an albedo modification program, it could cause rapid global warming as the climate adjusts to all the built-up CO2. For these reasons, the report warns that it would be “irrational and irresponsible to implement sustained albedo modification without also pursuing emissions mitigation, carbon dioxide removal, or both.”

Still, the NAS report called for further research into albedo modification, just in case we one day reach a point where we seriously consider it.

Caldeira hopes it never comes to that. Like most other advocates of geoengineering research, he’d much rather stave off global warming by drastically cutting carbon emissions. In fact, he calls for a target of zero emissions. But he doesn’t have much faith in politicians or in legislative fixes like carbon taxes or cap and trade. “The only way it’s really going to happen,” he says, “is if there’s a change in the social norms.” Caldeira envisions a world in which it’s socially unacceptable for power companies to “use the sky as a waste dump.”

And if that doesn’t work out?

Caldeira points out that if we keep emitting huge amounts of CO2, temperatures are going to keep rising. That could lead to increased crop failures and possibly even “widespread famines with millions of people dying.” In that type of hypothetical crisis, he says, “there’s really only one way known to cool the planet on a politically relevant timescale”—aerosols. “So I think it’s worth understanding it now,” he adds. “At some point in the future it could make sense to do. I hope we don’t get to that state, but it’s possible.”

To hear the full interview with Ken Caldeira, stream below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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We Could Stop Global Warming With This Fix—But It’s Probably a Terrible Idea

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Obama’s Budget Calls for Billions in Climate Funding

by JasperCottman Posted on February 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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In yet another sign President Barack Obama is making climate change a big theme of his final two years in office, the White House today released its proposed $3.99 trillion budget, and it contains a slew of programs designed to fight global warming. It’s important to note that this budget is the president’s proposal—a blueprint—given to Congress to be fought over or blatantly ignored; it’s not law. So, this is first-and-foremost a political document used to outline the president’s vision and define his terms of engagement with Congress. Most of these measures, to use the language of the moment, will likely be “dead on arrival,” given that both the House and Senate are now under Republican control.

Having said that, the document is useful in showing which tools Obama wants to use in fighting climate change—a kind of “would if he could” laundry list of desires. Here’s what you need to know:

1. Increased spending on renewable energy research and development

The budget proposes $7.4 billion for programs designed to stimulate the development of clean energy technology, mainly through the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Agriculture, and the National Science Foundation. That number is an increase from the $6.5 billion Congress enacted for this year, according to Reuters.

The budget outlines some of these activities, including fixing the energy grid to be able to use more renewable energy, reducing the costs of clean energy, finding cheaper solutions for carbon capture and storage from fossil fuels, and doing research to measure methane emissions that leak from natural gas operations.

2. Extended tax credits for wind and solar

The budget also calls for the permanent extension of tax incentives used by the solar and wind industries. Supporters of the wind industry say the Production Tax Credit is an important lifeline to help wind compete against heavily-subsidized fossil fuel power sources; when it was in effect, it provided developers a tax break of 2.3 cents per kilowatt hour of energy their turbines produce for the first 10 years of operation. But the credit expired, and the Senate recently voted down a nonbinding measure calling for a five-year extension, continuing a kind of boom-and-bust cycle in the fortunes of the wind industry dictated by whether the tax credit is currently in effect.

A separate provision, the Investment Tax Credit, provides an important incentive for solar development. It offers a 30 percent federal tax credit for solar systems on residential and commercial properties. The ITC is set to expire at the end of 2016.

3. A new fund to help states cut emissions

The budget calls for a $4 billion fund designed to encourage states to make faster and deeper cuts to power plant emissions than would be required under the rules proposed by Obama’s EPA last year. In other words, the budget would give states a financial incentive to do even more to clean up their energy sectors. States can get these incentives by, among other things, working together in regional partnerships to cut greenhouse gases. There’s unlikely to be much love for this measure in Congress: The EPA’s proposed regulations have been met by intense opposition in coal-producing states, and Republicans have labeled them a job-killer.

4. Being more prepared for natural disasters

The budget contains a range of proposals designed to help vulnerable parts of America prepare for natural disasters, including an increase of $184 million in the National Flood Insurance Program Risk Mapping efforts—historically beleaguered by debt and deficit—to $400 million. There is also additional money to tackle drought, wildfires, and coastal flooding.

5. International efforts to fight climate change

The White House wants to provide $1.29 billion to advance its Global Climate Change Initiative, which includes $500 million for US contributions to the UN’s Green Climate Fund—the first installment of the $3 billion pledged by the US last November. “The United States expects that the GCF will become a preeminent, effective, and efficient channel for climate finance,” the budget states. But the measure is likely to hit stiff opposition in Congress, where Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), now chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has vowed to fight it. “The president’s climate change agenda has only siphoned precious taxpayer dollars away from the real problems facing the American people,” he said in November.

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Obama’s Budget Calls for Billions in Climate Funding

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