Gernot Wagner's Blog, page 23

Are MIT students smarter than a fifth grader?

Ask any climate scientist to explain global warming to a fifth grader, and they will pull out the bathtub analogy: The atmosphere is the tub. The level of carbon is the water standing in said tub. There's a spigot and a sink—water in and water out. For the longest time, carbon in and carbon out of the atmosphere have been in balance. Then man came along and fiddled with the spigot. Now there's an ever increasing flow of carbon in, and the level in the atmosphere keeps rising. Simple enough.

The bathtub analogy has an important conclusion: We can't just stabilize emissions at current levels. The water in the tub would keep rising and flood everything in sight. Instead, we need to turn off the spigot or do something unprecedented with the sink.

Explained like that, most fifth graders will get it—especially the ones who have ever been admonished for flooding the bathroom floor.

It turns out graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are not quite as smart. They think it's OK to leave the spigot at current levels and fail to see that we need to turn it off to get water levels down.

Granted, our MIT whiz kids didn't hear the bathtub analogy. They saw the actual data and irrevocable proof that the planet is warming, directly from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's summary for policy makers.

That makes it even scarier. Any wonder that a sufficient number of policy makers isn't convinced yet?

And if that's not scary enough, the study showing all of this came out three years ago. How have our summaries for policy makers and for the rest of us improved since?

Single-action bias

We all want to do something, anything. We don't just want to sit idle and watch events unfold around us. Call it "action bias."

Then there's "single-action bias."

We all want to do something, anything, but once we've done that one thing, we move on. For something as intractable and complex as global warming, that's a real problem.

Yes, replace your inefficient incandescent light bulb with more efficient compact fluorescent ones, but don't believe for a second that single action solved the problem.

Recycle. Just don't think it'll stop global warming. Make the planet notice.

For daily musings like these, take a look at EDF economist Gernot Wagner's personal blog.

Single-action bias

We all want to do something, anything. We don't just want to sit idle and watch events unfold around us. Call it "action bias."

Then there's "single-action bias."

We all want to do something, anything, but once we've done that one thing, we move on. For something as intractable and complex as global warming, that's a real problem.

Yes, replace your inefficient incandescent light bulb with more efficient compact fluorescent ones, but don't believe for a second that single action solved the problem.

Recycle. Just don't think it'll stop global warming. Make the planet notice.

All of the above

When most talk climate policy, they talk mitigation: decrease our ever increasing flow of carbon into the atmospheric sewer.

Another piece of the puzzle is adaptation. We are way past the point where mitigation alone will do. We know we'll feel the consequences of global warming for years, decades, and centuries to come. That's why we need to move to higher grounds and adapt to a warming world.

But adaptation is for the rich. The poor will suffer. That's not a secret either, or at least it's an open secret. For most, things won't be as simple as buying a second air conditioner—suffering will surely be part of the equation.

Lastly, there's geoengineering. It's scary, it's hubristic, it's akin to a planetary chemotherapy—or perhaps more fitting: a planetary tracheostomy. It'll surely be part of the equation as well going forward, primarily because we still haven't gotten our act together on the mitigation portion of things.

There are few certainties when it comes to global warming, but one thing is for sure: the ultimate policy response will include a combination of all four. Here's hoping it will include more of the first than of any of the others.

All polar bears gone, overnight

Temperatures are rising and doing so at increasingly faster rates.

Oceans are acidifying and doing so at increasingly faster rates.

We are literally slowing down the rotation of the globe and doing so at an increasingly faster rate.*

All are clearly linked to global warming, yet none of them are quite strong enough to spur us into action. What will it take to make that happen?

Change observable over years or decades apparently won't do, and (fortunately) the climate isn't changing over days or weeks.

But perhaps a dramatic yet not quite catastrophic event could act as a wake-up call? I'm at a loss to come up with examples that fit into that category.

Hurricanes don't. Katrina was catastrophic but apparently not dramatic enough (and, of course, no single hurricane can be linked to global warming anyway, although it's clear that their intensity goes up on a warming planet). Record droughts, floods and other catastrophes don't seem to convince the unconvincable either, largely for the same reasons.

Good old competition doesn't. Brussels, Beijing, Brasilia and others are leaving Washington in the dust with little in response.

We have already established that melting poles and glaciers attract little attention. They don't tend to melt overnight. And if they did, we would have much bigger problems than the political stalemate.

One possible candidate: a mass die-off of most polar bears.

Catastrophic? For Arctic fauna, yes; for the planet, debatable. Dramatic? Here's hoping.

 

 

* Think ice skater, whose spinning speed increases as she pulls her arms closer and slows down as she extends her arms. The same happens to the planet: As polar ice melts, water distributes to the equator, expanding the planet's bulge and slowing its rotation—by fractions of a second, but amazingly it is already measurable. And we know it's happening at an increasing rate.

Greening it alone

That's the title of a new piece by Charles Kenny in Foreign Policy, and it's worth every pixel.

From the subtitle:

The world is building a low-carbon global economy—with or without the United States.

To the conclusion:

If the United States doesn't come into line, the rest of the planet will start finding ways to encourage it. One obvious response would be taxing U.S. exports to take into account their carbon footprint—an approach the United States itself has suggested with regard to its imports if it ever got its act together to tax domestic greenhouse gas emissions. At that point, years behind in investing in energy efficiency and facing significant tariffs on exports, coddled American industries would really understand what it meant to be uncompetitive.

It used to be said that nothing works with Washington, but nothing works without it either.

Sadly for the United States—but thankfully for the planet—the second part may no longer be true.

The Economist nails it, twice

The Economist being The Economist, this was surely meant as a pun on the debt limit debate.

The Economist being The Economist, it probably didn't pass them by that it is also all too apt a description of the Tea Party hijacking the debate on global warming and planetary limits—where the planet is truly approaching a cliff.

Beautiful in and out

Are iPhone-wielding environmentalists preaching the moral high ground like the face of Olay anti-aging products talking about inner beauty?

It's tempting to make the comparison. Charges of hypocrisy are all around the environmental movement. Have you seen Al Gore's frequent flyer account?

But here's the point: We know environmental sainthood won't save the planet. You could try to mimic No-Impact Man all day long, and it wouldn't make a difference.

Yes, if you fly halfway around the world to preach to others about voluntarily flying less or composting the stems on your locally-grown, organic carrots, you may well fall into the hypocrite camp.

Activism of the kind that tells people to decrease their own carbon footprint, that gives you lists of ten things to do to save the planet, won't save the planet. It needs to be large-scale policy shifts.

Al Gore realizes that. Bill McKibben realizes that. Thandie Newton (who introduced Gore at Live Earth 2007), I hope, realizes that.

And there's no hypocrisy in flying halfway around the world to talk about wanting fundamental policy change that would make just that trip less carbon-intensive and, yes, more expensive.

So next time you see one celebrity introducing another telling us to do the right thing, remember that it's not about their or your personal footprint. It's about those footprints times a billion.

Too little, too late, still making a difference

The planet won't notice whether you or I forgo that out-of-season grape or recycle religiously. That much is clear. The answer needs to lie in changing policy.

Some of the more obstructionist forces in Washington and rich capitals elsewhere have tried to use similar logic as an excuse not to do much of anything as a country.

That may be true if you are Costa Rica or my native Austria. It doesn't fly for the United States, the European Union, or other countries that purport to be more than a cute speck on the map.

It clearly doesn't work for the developed world as a whole.

Stephanie Waldhoff and Allen Fawcett have disproven that straw man once and for all. Of course it would help to have a global deal, but developed countries acting alone now (with developing countries doing nothing for a decade) would still get us almost halfway to the goal of stabilizing the world's climate.

Sometimes the planet does notice. What are the chances of DC noticing this as well?

Spare time

If you didn't recycle,

didn't compost,

didn't turn off the water while washing the dishes,

didn't turn off the water while brushing your teeth,

didn't contemplate your choice of light bulbs for the living room,

didn't contemplate your choice of insulation for the wall,

didn't worry about ordering the steak,

didn't worry about out-of-season grapes,

didn't lug a canvas bag to the store,

didn't lug a week's worth of groceries home on your bike,

didn't walk but drive,

didn't drive but fly,

didn't tweet about your every environmental sacrifice,

didn't fret about being No-Impact Man,

what would you do with all the time you had won to actually change the world?