Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 98

Labor Day 2050: How Unchecked Global Warming Threatens Labor Productivity

Unchecked global warming will have a serious negative impact on labor productivity this century. Ironically, strong climate action would be a huge boost to productivity.

Here’s what we know: A 2013 NOAA study concluded that “heat-stress related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate.” If we don’t get off our current path of carbon pollution emissions, we face as much as a 50 percent drop in labor capacity in peak months by century’s end.

A number of recent studies have projected a collapse in labor productivity from business-as-usual carbon emissions and warming, with an economic cost that could exceed all other costs of climate change combined. Further, one expert reviewing recent studies warned that “national output in several [non-agricultural] industries seemed to decline with temperature in a nonlinear way, declining more rapidly at very high daily temperatures.”

Here is an important chart from a 2010 Ziven-Neidell paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Temperature and the Allocation of Time: Implications for Climate Change.” It plots “the number of minutes in a day that individuals (who work in outdoor or temperature-exposed sectors in the USA) spent working as a function of maximum temperature (in Fahrenheit) that day.”

Productivity starts to nose-dive at 90°F and falls off the cliff at 100°F.

As for the cumulative impact, here’s a key figure from the 2013 NOAA study, “Reductions in labour capacity from heat stress under climate warming.”

ndividual labor capacity (%) during annual minimum (upper lines) and maximum (lower lines) heat stress months. RCP8.5 (red lines) is our current emissions path.

CREDIT: NOAA

If carbon pollution remains unrestricted, we are risking catastrophic drops in labor productivity.

Andrew Gelman, director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University, summed up the research this way in a 2012 post: “2% per degree Celsius … the magic number for how worker productivity responds to warm/hot temperatures.” The negative impact appears to start at about 26°C (79°F).

This loss of productivity is by no means the most life-threatening of climate impacts when compared to, say, Dust-Bowlification and its impact on food security. But it is one of the most important unmodeled climate impacts that makes the likely cost of climate change far higher than standard economic models suggest.

If we stay anywhere near our current path of carbon pollution emissions, then as we move towards the middle of the century, a larger and larger fraction of our summertimes will be intolerable.

In a 2011 post, “Mother Nature is Just Getting Warmed Up,” I discussed this trend and newly-released research forecasting permanently hotter summers:

The tropics and much of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to experience an irreversible rise in summer temperatures within the next 20 to 60 years if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, according to a new climate study by Stanford University scientists…

“According to our projections, large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly that, by the middle of this century, even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years,” said the study’s lead author, Noah Diffenbaugh.

It’s worth another look at projected days above 100°F on our current emissions path, via the National Climate Assessment (NCA):

Days above 100°F in higher emissions (business as usual) scenario.

Yes, absent a sharp and deep reduction in national and global emissions, much of Kansas (!) by century’s end could well be above 100°F for nearly the whole summer. Labor Day will mean a return to those pleasant mid-to-upper 90s.

By century’s end, much of the Southern U.S. will see temperatures above 90°F for five months of the year or more, which is a stunning change from just the recent past (again via NCA):

It truly will be an endless summer over much of the South (see also NASA’s Hansen: “If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable”).

So what does this mean for productivity? Prof. Solomon M. Hsiang wrote last year:

In my 2010 PNAS paper, I found that labor-intensive sectors of national economies decreased output by roughly 2.4% per degree C and argued that this looked suspiously like it came from reductions in worker output. Using a totally different method and dataset, Matt Neidell and Josh Graff Zivin found that labor supply in micro data fell by 1.8% per degree C. Both responses kicked in at around 26C.

Here is the key chart from Hsiang’s own work, which shows “national output in several [non-agricultural] industries … declining more rapidly at very high daily temperatures.”

This is essentially adaptation: One common way that healthy people respond to high temperatures is just to work less. NOAA notes an important caveat that may mean reality will be even worse: “In focusing on the capacity of healthy, acclimated individuals, this study also severely underestimates heat stress implications for less-optimally acclimated individuals such as the young, old, and sick.”

Hsiang states the central point:

It’s worth noting that reductions in worker output have never been included in economic models of future warming (see here and here) despite the fact that experiments fifty years ago showed that temperature has a strong impact on worker output (see here and here). In my dissertation I did some back-of-the-envelope estimates using the above numbers and found that productivity impacts alone might reduce per capita output by ~9% in 2080-2099 (in the absence of strong adaptation). This cost exceeds the combined cost of all other projected economic losses combined.

So the next time you see a projection of the economic cost from climate change — and a resulting social cost of carbon — you might want to double the numbers to get a more accurate picture of what we are risking by our callous inaction.

What makes inaction doubly tragic is that a rapid transition to a clean energy economy would be a tremendous boost to worker productivity. A 232-page International Energy Agency report from 2014, “Capturing the Multiple Benefits of Energy Efficiency” found that “the uptake of economically viable energy efficiency investments has the potential to boost cumulative economic output through 2035 by USD 18 trillion,” which is larger than the current size of the U.S. economy!

[image error]

In particular, the report found that green building design can achieve health benefits — including reduced medical costs and higher worker productivity — “representing up to 75% of overall benefits.” That is, the non-energy benefits of energy efficiency upgrades can be three times the size of the energy savings.

This study also found that when the value of productivity and other benefits of industrial efficiency measures were factored into “traditional internal rate of return calculations, the payback period for energy efficiency measures dropped from 4.2 to 1.9 years.” In other words, payback time was cut in half.

So, climate inaction would severely harm labor labor productivity while strong climate action would strongly increase it. Not exactly a tough choice for policymakers to make.

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Secretary Kerry Calls For Swift Action On Climate Change, Still Defends Arctic Drilling

In a recent interview with the Huffington Post, Secretary of State John Kerry defended the Obama administration’s decision to allow Shell to drill for oil in the Arctic, pushing back against claims that such a decision is at odds with the administration’s action on climate change.

“These are leases that were granted some time ago prior to President Obama becoming president,” Kerry told Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein. “So the leases existed, and Shell and other companies are going to be drilling somewhere over the course of these next years, because we’re not going to suddenly be weaned from oil.”

Moving to a de-carbonized economy, Kerry continued, could take up to 40 years. He noted that during that transition the United States would still be dependent on oil to meet some of its energy needs.

“I’d rather have our supply come from an American-controlled source in that respect than somewhere else,” he said, adding that “in the long run, we have to wean ourselves from a carbon-based economy,” and that the country isn’t moving quickly enough toward a carbon-free economy.

“We have to do it much faster than we are right now. I think the president understands that, I understand that. We’re advocating as powerfully as we can,” Kerry said.

Kerry cited Congressional Republicans’ reluctance to act on climate change as a major obstacle toward quickly transitioning toward a carbon-free economy. Without Congress’ support, the administration is forced to enact climate policies through executive action — like the Clean Power Plan — which Kerry said slows the rate of progress.

In the interview, Kerry called reaching an international climate agreement in Paris at the end of this year the next item on his bucket list for his remaining time in office. Calling reaching a deal at the United Nations Climate Change Conference a “very, very important priority for [the administration],” he cited his trip to China two years ago as a critical moment for creating an international climate deal.

“My hope is that this began when I went to China two years ago, and we began to open up the participation with China in a historic agreement with China. And hopefully that comes together to produce something in Paris,” he said. “I mean that’s really critical.”

Kerry’s comments come just days after President Obama concluded his trip to the Arctic, where he spoke candidly on the issue of climate change. During his final stop Wednesday, he spoke to a crowd of more than 1,000 people in the Alaskan village of Kotzebue.

“If another country threatened to wipe out an American town, we’d do everything in our power to protect it,” Obama said. “What’s happening here should be America’s wake-up call. It’s the world’s wake up call.”

Activist Bill McKibben chided the president earlier this week for touting such a strong stance on climate action during his trip to the Arctic, while allowing Shell to drill in the region. Shell has been trying to obtain access to the Arctic for years — in 2012, its first attempt ended in disaster when dangerous ice conditions and equipment failures forced the company to abandon its efforts. Earlier this year, the Obama administration gave Shell the green light to begin drilling up to six wells approximately 70 miles northwest of Wainwright, Alaska in the Chukchi Sea. Environmentalists were outraged, citing Shell’s history of failure in the Arctic, the area’s remote and dangerous conditions, and an analysis by the the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) that showed a 75 percent chance of a large-scale oil spill if Shell’s current plans were carried out to completion.

Despite an ongoing chorus of criticism, the Obama administration has defended its decision at every turn. During a May Twitter chat, Obama said that he chose to approve Shell’s proposal because “we can’t prevent oil exploration completely in region,” and that allowing Shell to drill under his administration would ensure that the company followed the highest possibly standards.

Technically, Obama could prevent Shell — or any other oil company — from drilling in the Arctic, either by canceling Shell’s lease or attempting to name the area a marine sanctuary, the aquatic equivalent of a wilderness area. But as Vox’s Dave Roberts argued on Twitter, it might be that allowing Shell to drill in the Arctic really is part of his climate plan: by allowing Shell to drill in the Arctic, he ensures the production of a (cleaner) fossil fuel while supporting policies that ultimately reduce demand for that fuel.

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Boat Crash Causes 120,000 Gallons Of Oil To Spill Into The Mississippi River

More than 120,000 gallons of oil spilled into the Mississippi River Wednesday evening after two tow boats collided, causing damage to a barge.

The spill, which occurred near Columbus, Kentucky, prompted the Coast Guard to shut down the section of the Mississippi River from mile marker 938 to 922.

“We are working diligently to try to restore our marine transportation system,” Coast Guard spokesperson Lt. Takila Powell said. “We understand that it is vital.”

The substance that spilled into the river was “clarified slurry oil,” which is heavier than typical crude oil. To move the oil, Powell told the AP, it needs to be heated.

“How this type of product typically would react is that when it reaches the water that is of a lower temperature, it would solidify and sink,” she said Thursday. “But one of the things that we will be doing tomorrow is trying to determine where that oil has migrated to, to try to determine whether or not it has moved down the river or if it’s still in the vicinity of where the collision occurred.”

Some of the oil has been cleaned up from the site, and clean-up crews have put a boom around the barge to make sure no additional oil leaks into the river. Officials say that the spill won’t have an effect on water supplies, because wells provide the water in the region. So far, there haven’t been any reports of fish kills.

Oil spills have shut down portions of the Mississippi River before. Last February, about 31,500 gallons of oil spilled into the river after a barge carrying oil crashed into a tugboat. In 2013, a barge hit a railroad bridge in Mississippi and spilled light crude oil into the river, closing a 16-mile stretch of the waterway. And in 2008, a collision that broke a barge in half spilled 282,000 gallons of heavy oil into the river. That spill caused oil to coat the riverbanks, and was one of the worst New Orleans-area spills in recent history.

And, unfortunately, the Mississippi River is far from the only iconic U.S. waterway to be hit by spills. The Missouri, Ohio, and Yellowstone Rivers have all seen their share of oil and other contaminants, and just last month, millions of gallons of toxic mine water spilled into the Animas River in Colorado.

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Countries’ U.N. Climate Pledges Aren’t Enough To Keep Warming To 2 Degrees. That’s Ok.

The targets countries have set so far to limit their contribution to climate change over the next several years won’t do enough to keep global warming below the 2°C threshold, according to a new report.

The report, published Wednesday by the Climate Action Tracker, analyzed the 29 “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs) — or countries’ goals for limiting warming post-2020 — submitted to the United Nations so far. The researchers found that, if countries stick to these commitments for 2030 and don’t take additional action against climate change, keeping warming below 2°C — the level that many scientists say is the highest warming the Earth can tolerate without major catastrophic effects (though others say 2 degrees is too high) — would become nearly impossible.

“It is clear that if the Paris meeting locks in present climate commitments for 2030, holding warming below 2°C could essentially become infeasible, and 1.5°C beyond reach. Given the present level of pledged climate action, commitments should only be made until 2025,” Bill Hare, a co-author of the report and founder and CEO of Climate Analytics, said in a statement. “The INDCs therefore need to be considerably strengthened for the period 2020-2025.”

This isn’t a surprise for many following the lead-up to Paris, however. As Climate Progress’ Joe Romm has pointed out, experts have long known that the commitments made in Paris likely won’t keep warming to 2°C — Paris is necessary for getting the country on track to 2°C, but it isn’t the end-all-be-all of climate action.

“Paris is focused on stanching the bleeding with a tourniquet,” Romm wrote in July. “The goal has always been to get firm global commitments from the big emitters to meet serious targets in the 2025-2030 timeframe so we can get off our current emissions pathway — a pathway that would blow past 4°C (7°F) warming, ruin a livable climate for centuries and make feeding 9 billion people post-2050 an unimaginably difficult task.”

Countries would have to make much more drastic cuts if the Paris climate talks are to achieve the goal of keeping warming to 2°C — cuts along the lines of getting to zero emissions in the next 85 or so years. Those types of commitments weren’t ever a consideration for Paris.

“The idea is that the Paris agreement will put us not on an emissions trajectory for 2 degrees, but on an institutional trajectory that allows us to try to meet that goal,” Alex Hanafi, climate strategist at the Environmental Defense Fund, told Climate Central in February.

U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres agrees.

“It is a fundamental misinterpretation or misunderstanding of the complexity of what we’re dealing with to even imagine that an agreement in Paris would in and of itself, at the turn of a dime, miraculously solve climate change,” she said in February. “What Paris does is to chart the course toward that long-term destination.”

Figueres also said last December that the U.N. knows that “the sum total of efforts (in Paris) will not be able to put us on the path for two degrees,” but said the world “will get there over time.”

The report lays out some general ways that countries could stick to the 2°C pathway. According to the report, countries need to plan to reduce emissions by 12 to 15 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2025 and 17 to 21 gigatons by 2030 if they’re serious about staying under 2 degrees. And it does note that limiting warming to 2°C could still be possible, as long as more action is taken after Paris.

“While the projected emission levels for 2025 resulting from INDCs are above the published least-cost pathways, limiting warming below 2˚C is still likely to be feasible,” the report states.

The report also found that some countries, including Canada and Australia, don’t yet have legislation in place that would allow them reach the goals set out in the INDCs.

[image error]

CREDIT: climate action tracker

The report looked specifically at 16 of the INDCs, categorizing them in terms of their effectiveness. It found the commitments of seven countries — Russia, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea — to be “inadequate,” meaning that they don’t do their “fair share” to limit warming to 2°C. Six of the commitments were “medium” — the United States, China, EU, Mexico, Norway, and Switzerland’s commitments all “rely on others to have more ambitious targets in order for the world to hold warming to 2˚C.” Only two countries — Ethiopia and Morocco — had “sufficient” goals, and none had “role model” goals. The report notes, however, that 140 countries have yet to submit commitments to the U.N., including heavy-emitters like India, Brazil, and Indonesia.

The report’s authors recommend that the countries that have already submitted commitments review them and, if necessary, make their targets more stringent.

It’s true that some countries have been criticized for not going far enough with their pledges. Canada, for instance, was criticized by some environmental groups after it announced its goal of reducing its emissions by 30 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2030. The Natural Resources Defense Council called the pledge “less-than-meets-the-eye” and “another disappointing sign of [Canada’s] reluctance to fight climate change.” The group also said Canada’s commitment was “significantly weaker” than that of the United States, which aims to reduce emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

Critics have also said Australia’s commitment, which aims to reduce emissions 26 and 28 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2030, doesn’t go far enough.

“These targets are vastly inadequate to protect Australians from the impacts of climate change and do not represent a fair contribution to the world effort to bring climate change under control,” Tim Flannery of Australia’s Climate Council said in August.

The ideal thing would be for these countries to submit more aggressive commitments, the report states. But short of that, the report’s authors write that the Paris Agreement should include “ramped up” efforts to “encourage greater policy action.”

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A Major International Climate Meeting Is Wrapping Up Today. What Does It Mean For The Paris Talks?

As far as international climate agreements go, this year has the potential to be a historic one. In December, more than 190 countries — along with representatives from cities, companies, NGOs, and other actors — will descend on Paris in the hopes of emerging with a new international agreement to tackle climate change.

But before countries can come together in Paris, there are still a number of meetings to be had and issues to be resolved — including a week-long negotiating session in Bonn held this week.

The Bonn negotiations are the second-to-last in a series of intentional negotiating sessions meant to lay the groundwork for Paris, and they’re an extremely important stop on the road to a strong international climate agreement. As Robert Orr, longtime climate adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon who now works at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, told Politico, the Bonn talks are crucial for tying up loose ends before heading into Paris.

“We can’t end up in Paris with a lot of open issues,” Orr said. “These Bonn meetings are critical to ensure that a lot of the key issues get resolved — not all of them, but a lot of the key issues.”

Where Were We Before Bonn?

Bonn isn’t the first international negotiation meant to pave the way toward Paris — there’s been a lot of action leading up to the U.N. Climate Conference in December. Attempts to get countries to sign a binding, international agreement on climate change have been happening for decades — the last big one happened in Copenhagen in 2009 and was largely deemed a failure.

In the run-up to Paris, many countries — as well as cities and private companies — have been submitting individual climate pledges to the United Nations. The United States, for example, submitted commitments back in April pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent by 2025. China has committed to peak its CO2 emissions before 2030. The European Union collectively pledged to cut its emissions at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, a goal the World Resources Institute called “strong,” but noted that it still has the potential to be even stronger.

Canada and Australia — countries whose leaders have notoriously bad records on climate — have also submitted commitments, though both were met with sharp criticism from environmental groups for not going far enough.

In June, G7 leaders announced that they had reached a nonbinding agreement to limit global warming to 2°C.

What Are The Issues Negotiators Are Talking About In Bonn?

One of the biggest issues negotiators are hoping to tackle during the current round of Bonn talks is whether an international climate agreement will set a long term goal for emissions reductions — something that goes beyond the international agreement to limit the impacts of global warming to below 2°C.

“Right now all parties agreed to keep global emissions from rising 2 degrees, but that doesn’t really explain how they’re going to do it,” Kyle Ash, Senior Legislative Representative for Greenpeace, told ThinkProgress. Ash said that Greenpeace — as well as others present at the Bonn negotiations — are pushing countries to outline specific emission reduction commitments that go beyond the shorter-term, 2025 commitments. Such a commitment might look like promising to phase out fossil fuels 100 percent by 2050, though Ash notes that this is a parcitularly strong commitment, and other weaker forms are also on the table.

Many at the Bonn meetings also hope that the week-long session will provide clarity on the legal nature of any international agreement decided in Paris. Some countries — like the United States — want only certain parts of a climate agreement to be legally binding, something that Ash says could undercut the international agreements ability to influence domestic laws.

“If you don’t have international law it’s a lot less likely to result in domestic law,” Ash said. The United States negotiators could be worried that a legally binding international agreement would be politically unpopular — especially with Republicans at the helm of Congress — but Ash argues that such a view is an outdated vestige of an old political atmosphere.

“It’s not the case anymore that pushing for action on climate is a political liability, but they’re still operating under that assumption,” he said.

There’s also the question of whether countries will agree to meet at specific intervals after Paris in order to reaffirm or strengthen climate commitments. Some countries, like the United States, are pushing for international meetings every five years in order to monitor international progress. But others, like the European Union, are arguing for lengthier intervals or every 10 years — a time-scale that worries environmentalists calling for immediate action on climate.

“Every time the IPCC comes out with a report, it’s worse,” Ash said. “It would be good to have shorter commitment periods.”

Negotiators in Bonn are also grappling with the issue of transparency and accountability — how nations will share emissions reduction information and how they’ll make sure that information is credible. This means coming to an agreement about how countries measure greenhouse gas emissions — the United States counts all greenhouse gases as part of its individual emissions, but some countries either lack the capacity to calculate all greenhouse gas emissions, or simply choose not to.

So What Comes After Bonn?

Bonn is the second-to-last negotiating session before the Paris climate talks — the final session, also in Bonn, will be held in October. But even if all of the issues outlined above — as well as a number of others still up in the air — aren’t solidified after this session, that doesn’t necessarily mean Paris is doomed to failure.

In September, leaders from both China and India will meet with President Obama, and international climate issues will almost certainly be on the agenda. From there, the three leaders will head to New York to meet with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. There’s also talk of another international negotiation session being scheduled before Paris, though nothing has been solidified yet, according to Ash.

Still, David Waskow, director of the International Climate Initiative at the World Resources Institute, seemed optimistic that this week’s Bonn talks were beginning to set the stage for a successful meeting in Paris.

“We have a situation where there really is momentum toward reaching an agreement. The arrows are all pointed in the right direction, in a general sense,” he told reporters on a press call Thursday, adding that “on specific issues, there’s still much that’s still important that’s yet to be determined.”

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The Nation’s Most Populous State Just Voted To Divest From Coal

The California Assembly passed a bill Wednesday that prompts the state’s public employee pension funds to divest from coal.

The bill passed the Assemby with a vote of 43 to 27, and will require the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) — which combined are responsible for $476 billion in assets — to remove all holdings in companies that get at least half of their revenue from coal mining. The divestment would have to be completed by July 2017. If signed into law, the measure would be the first of its kind in the United States.

“Coal is the fuel of the past and it’s no longer a wise investment for our pensioners,” California assemblyman Rob Bonta, who presented the bill, said in a statement. “I’m pleased that my colleagues agree: it’s time to move on from this dirty energy source.”

California’s Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, who introduced the bill, also praised its passage.

“Coal is losing value quickly and investing in coal is a losing proposition for our retirees; it’s a nuisance to public health; and it’s inconsistent with our values as a state on the forefront of efforts to address global climate change,” de León said. “California’s utilities are phasing out coal, and it’s time our pension funds did the same.”

The bill now heads to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk. The governor has been vocal about the need to act on climate change — he said in June that, when talking about climate action, “we are talking about extinction. We are talking about climate regimes that have not been seen for tens of millions of years. We’re not there yet, but we’re on our way.” The governor is expected to sign the divestment bill.

The bill’s passage comes soon before the expected Assembly vote on a broader package of climate bills. One of the four bills — SB 350, which was also introduced by de León — calls for a 50 percent reduction in petroleum use in the state’s cars and trucks, a 50 percent increase in energy efficiency in buildings, and a goal of 50 percent of state utilities’ power coming from renewable energy by 2030. Another, SB 32, would build on California’s climate change law by locking the state into a goal of reducing its emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. These bills, which have gained praise from the White House as well as from economists and scientists, were passed by the Senate in June and are expected to be voted on by the Assembly in the coming weeks.

The signing of the divestment bill would also make California the latest state to acknowledge the claim that divesting from fossil fuels is an important part of addressing climate change. The divestment movement has been pushing schools, cities, states, and companies to purge their holdings of coal and other fossil fuels. So far, according to 350.org’s divestment project, nearly 400 institutions have committed to some form of divestment. Coal, however, tends to be easier to divest from than fossil fuels in general, because the coal market is struggling and because it makes up a smaller chunk of the market than oil and gas does.

“This is a big moment for California, and for everyone around the world standing up to the most powerful and destructive industry in history,” May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, told RTCC on Wednesday. “Today’s vote is so meaningful because it sends a strong message: political leadership on climate change means being willing to stand up to powerful moneyed interests, and call out the destructive practices of the companies causing the climate crisis.”

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New Study Shows How Climate Change Is Already Reshaping The Earth

A landmark study in the journal Nature documents an expansion of the world’s dry and semi-arid climate regions since 1950 — and attributes it to human-caused global warming.

This expansion of the world’s dry zones is a basic prediction of climate science. The fact it is so broadly observable now means we must take seriously the current projections of widespread global Dust-Bowlification in the coming decades on our current CO2 emissions pathway — including the U.S.’s own breadbasket.

The new study, “Significant anthropogenic-induced changes of climate classes since 1950,” looks at multiple datasets of monthly temperature and precipitation over time. The main finding:

About 5.7% of the global total land area has shifted toward warmer and drier climate types from 1950–2010, and significant changes include expansion of arid and high-latitude continental climate zones, shrinkage in polar and midlatitude continental climates….

As for the cause, “we find that these changes of climate types since 1950 cannot be explained as natural variations but are driven by anthropogenic factors.”

In short, humans are causing the world’s arid and semi-arid climate zones to expand into the highly populated mid-latitude continental climates (where, for instance, most Americans live) — and causing the high-latitude climates to expand into the polar zones. Of course, the polar zones are precisely where the carbon-rich frozen tundra is and the land-locked ice of the world’s biggest ice sheets and glaciers.

These are stunning changes when you consider the fact that the world has only warmed about 1°F since 1950, and we are on track to warm 5 times that much (or more) this century alone. Multiple climate studies project continued climate inaction will put some one-third of the currently-habited and arable landmass of the planet into a state of near permanent drought post-2050. This new study finds that we are well on our way.

The study uses the Köppen–Geiger climate classification system:

A: Tropical/megathermal climates

B: Dry (arid and semiarid) climates

C: Temperate/mesothermal climates

D: Continental/microthermal climates

E: Polar and alpine climates

This map shows how the world is broken down by climate and sub-climate regime (click here for large version):

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Map of the world’s climate regimes. A new study finds the dry zones (B) are expanding while the polar/tundra zones (E) are shrinking. University of Melbourne via Wikipedia.

The study looks at changes in temperature and precipitation to determine changes to the various climate zones over time. A region can shift to a drier B climate zone if precipitation drops — or if temperature rises. Higher temperatures cause more evaporation and dry out soil.

The authors note that of all their results, “the most conspicuous feature is a worldwide expansion of B climate (mainly semiarid) at the expense of C and midlatitude D climate” (see figure below):

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Linear trends in areas of 5 major climate types for 1950–2003; asterisks denote significant trends at the 5% level. A positive trend of high-latitude (north of 55°N) D climate and a negative midlatitude (south of 55°N) D climate are over-plotted in blue with the net negative trend of D climate in dark blue

In particular, the researchers found that “rising temperature and decreasing precipitation are about equally important in causing the expansion of semiarid climate in Asia and western North America, while the contribution of decreasing precipitation to the increasing semiarid climate is much larger than that of temperature over North Africa, South Africa and South America.”

The only one way to prevent the irreversible Dust-Bowlification of large parts of the land is to keep total warming as low as possible.

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A Whole Lot Of California Farmworkers Are Landing In The Hospital. Why?

A 17-year-old pregnant farmworker died in a vineyard of heat exhaustion in the summer of 2008 in triple-digit temperatures. The nearest water cooler was a 10-minute walk and a foreman allegedly wouldn’t let her take a break to get a drink of water. She arrived in a coma at the hospital with a body temperature of 108 degrees. She later died of heat exhaustion, three years after California issued groundbreaking heat illness regulations for employers to provide shade and water for farmworkers.

As the west coast grapples with a mixture of drought and heat waves, heat-related illnesses among farm workers has continued to persist. Particularly in Caifornia where 70 percent of the state is classified in a state of “exceptional” or “extreme” drought, heat waves are becoming more severe due to higher humidity and warmer nighttime temperatures, with the hottest summer days twice as likely to occur in the state’s Central Valley due to climate change.

But a decade after California implemented the heat illness emergency resolutions, some growers in one of the most agriculturally-rich parts of the country still have yet to ensure protections for farmworkers who work prolonged hours during peak heat times. The prolonged drought has thrown farms into crisis mode and sent temperatures soaring. At least 28 farmworkers have died since the regulations were passed, according to the United Farm Workers union.

In June 2015, two families settled their lawsuits separately filed in 2009 and 2012, with the hope that California would improve on-site inspections and punish violators. Under the terms of the settlement, the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, better known as Cal/OSHA, agreed to improve enforcement standards in outdoor work spaces by requiring employers to provide shade when temperatures rise above 80 degrees and to provide 10-minute breaks every two hours when temperatures rise above 95 degrees.

The other half had no idea that these regulations were in existence or had to be enforced.

Employers must provide enough water so that employees can have about one quart of water, or four eight-ounce cups, per hour. Even though adequate water “must be located as close as it is feasible to place it to the areas where employees are working,” that doesn’t mean it’s convenient. One worker who went to the hospital for a heat illness told the Los Angeles Times that he didn’t stop to drink water because the water station was a mile away. What’s more, many employees are paid piecemeal by bucket and not by hour, so a loss of time to drink water could mean a loss of income.

Of all the racial groups surveyed for a 2014 University of Southern California and Los Angeles Times poll, Latinos making less than $50,000 are the ones hardest hit by drought, a phenomenon that has been linked to climate change. Some of California’s poorest Latinos are farmworkers, with median annual family earnings averaging $15,000 to $17,000 per year.

About 14 workers died from heat illnesses in California between 2005 and 2013, but it’s possible that the figure is closer to 30, the United Farm Workers labor union told Al Jazeera America. Among the heat illness victims include a 38-year-old man whose body temperature was recorded at 109.9 degrees. During the 2006 heat wave, Latinos had the most hospital visits. While the number of heat-related deaths have dropped since the regulations went into effect, the number of reported heat illnesses are remaining steady, Capital Public Radio reported earlier this month.

“Unfortunately we have to experience something like those deaths that were made very public [for regulations to be issued], but since then, Cal/OSHA has pursued very aggressive education outreach and tools to educate in various languages and definitely in Spanish,” Suguet Lopez told ThinkProgress. Lopez is the executive director of Lideres Campesinas, a grassroots advocacy group that primarily educates and empowers female farmworkers. She noted that her organization steps in to help workers who only speak indigenous languages.

“Frankly not everyone knows how to read and write, so we use theater [re-enactments] to do presentations, like ‘this is what you might experience if you’re exposed to hot weather.’ They might not connect it to heat illnesses so we give them advice based on what we have learned from the way they should dress to if they experience this, they should do this type of follow-up [treatment].”

The heat can have devastating impacts on physical and mental health. A 2014 American Meteorogical Society study found that hospital admissions in California went up on average 7 percent during peak heat wave days, putting people the risk of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, dehydration, acute renal failure, heat illness, and mental health issues. Almost 70 percent of farmworkers have no health insurance, an issue that challenges undocumented farmworkers who cannot access some health insurance programs. By some estimates, about six out of ten farmworkers working in the country are undocumented. The vast majority are also Latino.

It’s possible that some farmworkers in California may not even know that regulations are in place to keep them safe while working in hot temperatures. Maria Jimenez, the Ventura Chapter Representative of Lideres Campesinas, told ThinkProgress that about half of the workers she talks to had no idea the regulations were in existence or had to be enforced. “They told me some incidents where they weren’t given water or breaks,” Jimenez said in Spanish. Lopez translated on her behalf.

Jimenez estimated that about 70 percent of her 500-member organization are also undocumented. Because they don’t have health insurance and live in fear of deportation, these vulnerable workers tend to ignore the warning signs and work through illness.

If they speak up and nothing is done about it, they’ll suck it up because they need the income.

“The norm has been that if they experience some sort of illness in the work place, if they speak up and nothing is done about it, they’ll suck it up because they need the income,” Lopez said.

The drought in California is also decimating farmworker jobs. When 400,000 acres of farmland went fallow last year because of drought, more than 17,000 farmworker jobs were cut at a loss of $1.5 billion, California Department of Food & Agriculture Secretary Karen Ross said. The job cuts forced many farmworkers to line up for emergency food assistance in Mendota, CA, where the majority of residents work in the agricultural section and 50 percent of residents were expected to be jobless last year. According to Lopez, “farmworkers are being rotated so that no one is left without income. In terms of the crops, every crop has different needs so farmworkers are seeing a tendency to move towards planting and harvesting water-resistant plants like tomatoes instead of a lemon grove or strawberries.”

Jimenez’s son picks from lemon groves and is a firsthand observer to the drought and its impact to his livelihood. “In the past, farmworkers would get five to six boxes of lemons a day,” Jimenez said about her son, nervous that the diminished harvest, a result of growers conserving water for more water-resistant plants, could take away his job. “Today, it’s only a box or one-and-a-half boxes.”

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Climate Denier Marco Rubio Says Energy Policy Should Be Left To Scientists And Businesses

Ending the Clean Power Plan, lifting America’s crude oil export ban, and allowing states — not the federal government — to regulate fracking would be some of Marco Rubio’s top energy priorities if he becomes president. That’s according to a preview of his energy plan released Wednesday, ahead of a speech in front of the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association.

“Our outdated government continues to make energy one of the most politicized and regulated aspects of our economy,” Rubio said in an email previewing his comprehensive energy plan, which he said he’ll roll out sometime this fall. “America’s energy future must be entrusted to our businesses and scientists, not our bureaucrats.”

One of the first things Rubio would do as president, according to his previewed plan, would be to lift the current ban on crude oil exports, which has been in place since the 1970s. Rubio called the ban “a perfect example of just how outdated Washington has become,” arguing that “lifting the crude oil export ban would be an immediate boon to our economy” that would “create hundreds of thousands of American jobs” and “make American a net energy exporter within a few years.”

But lifting America’s crude oil export ban could also come at a cost to the environment. A recent study conducted by the Center for American Progress estimated that, if the crude oil export ban were to be lifted, 7,600 more oil wells would be drilled each year than if the ban stayed in place. This would mean a huge amount of land — an area larger than Utah’s Arches National Park — would be turned over to oil development each year.

Lifting the export ban would also have climate ramifications, as lifting the ban would likely ramp up oil production, encouraging producers to flood the market with crude oil. According to the high-end estimates produced by the CAP study, lifting the crude export ban could add more than 515 million metric tons of carbon pollution each year — the equivalent of adding 108 million passenger vehicles to roads.

Rubio’s proposed energy plan would also target the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which Rubio called “one of the most expensive and costly regulations ever created.” His opposition to the plan is no surprise: during a campaign stop in Ohio earlier this summer, he argued that the Clean Power Plan would do nothing for the environment while drastically increasing the cost of living across the country.

That’s a line — little benefit to the economy, high cost to the consumer — that Rubio has used before. In August, at a the Koch-organized Freedom Partners Policy Leaders Forum, Rubio argued that places like China and India will continue to burn fossil fuels, rendering the environmental impact of the Clean Power Plan negligible. “And so the bottom line is, as a policy maker, we just balance our interest in ecology, which is legitimate, with our interest for the economy,” Rubio said. “And the bottom line is that American energy will allow millions of people to improve their standard of living, just the way it’s eradicated poverty for millions of people around the world.”

Several studies, however, have found that under the Clean Power Plan, utility bills would likely decrease, as it encourages energy to be used more efficiently.

Rubio’s final point in his energy preview highlights his intention, if elected, to give states a large amount of leeway in how they regulate energy production with their borders — namely, he would let states decide whether or not to regulate or restrict fracking.

“State and local governments are far better equipped than Washington to oversee energy production and balance environmental concerns,” Rubio said in the preview.

The previewed plan said nothing about encouraging renewable energy, and did not mention climate change, a subject on which Rubio has become a staunch denier. In his presidential campaign announcement, Rubio said that he didn’t believe that mankind was contributing in any way to climate change.

“I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it … and I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy,” he said.

Rubio is not the first Republican presidential candidate to release a plan regarding energy — Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, and Lindsey Graham have all released full or partial plans describing how their administration would handle United States energy policy.

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Scientists Discovered High Levels Of Radioactivity In A Common Form Of Waste

Scientists have known for years that coal — and its burned byproduct, coal ash — contains radioactive elements. In 2009, for example, a group of researchers at Duke University — including Avner Vengosh, professor of earth and ocean sciences — measured high levels of radioactivity in coal ash from a spill at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston power plant.

But they lacked a complete picture of radioactivity in coal ash — the second-largest form of waste generated in the United States. So, Vengosh and a group of researchers at Duke set out to complete the first systematic study of radioactivity in coal and coal ash from all three of the United States’ major coal producing basins.

The results of that study, published Wednesday in Environmental Science & Technology, show that radioactive elements are present in both coal and coal ash from all three major coal basins — the Illinois, Appalachian and Power River basins. The levels of radioactivity in the coal ash were also up to five times higher than levels in normal soil and up to 10 times higher than in the parent coal itself.

“We found that the radium in coal ash is concentrated during the combustion process, because of the combustion and losing of carbon from coal,” Vengosh told ThinkProgress.

Along with toxic contaminants, like arsenic, selenium, and mercury, coal contains naturally occurring radioactive elements like uranium and thorium, which, when they decay, form chemical by-products like radium. Currently, toxic contaminants have been of the most concern to those monitoring coal ash disposal sites — disposal sites aren’t monitored for radioactivity.

But Vengosh and his colleagues found that when coal is burned, radioactive elements become concentrated in the residual fly ash — particles that, though incredibly small individually, comprise the largest volume of coal ash waste at disposal sites.

That kind of concentration of radioactive particles could have two ramifications, Vengosh told ThinkProgress.

The first is air-borne pollution from fly ash particles. This isn’t really a problem for the United States, Vengosh said, because U.S. power plants have smokestack scrubbers that keep fly ash particles out of the air. But for places like China, where residents are exposed to high levels of coal ash in the air, the radioactivity of the coal ash could pose a threat to public health.

“Once those very tiny particles are being inhaled, they could expose some additional risk of radioactivity,” Vengosh said.

The other ramification of radioactivity in coal ash could come from improper disposal of the coal ash, both abroad and within the United States. Although the disposal of coal ash in the United States is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, with the agency’s first-ever regulations on coal ash disposal set to go into effect in October, the ash is often dumped into ditches — sometimes unlined — where it can easily come into direct contact with the environment. Under the EPA’s forthcoming regulations, all new coal ash pits must be lined — but existing pits only need to be cleaned up when they’ve been shown to be actively polluting the environment. And while companies must monitor levels of contaminants in coal ash ponds and nearby groundwater, they aren’t required to monitor radioactivity.

“We have seen evidence that [coal ash disposal] systems are not really closed and protected to the environment, and there is some leeching of other contaminants,” Vengosh said. “Our study suggests that maybe we need to look and do monitoring of radioactivity as well.”

In late July, the House passed a bill aimed at significantly undercutting the amount of federal regulation required for coal ash disposal. Under H.R. 1734, dubbed the “Improving Coal Combustion Residuals Regulation Act,” coal companies could dispose of coal ash directly into water supplies. The bill is currently in the Senate, awaiting action.

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