A collection of political thoughts and responses to political statements in the news and on the web. Progressive politics, LGBTQ politics, environmental politics, &c.
Cape Hatteras lighthouse being moved inland due to rising sea levels, 2000.
One of the long anticipated results of climate change is change in sea level. This is understood by scientists and discussed at the website of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Sea level is rising along most of the U.S. coast, and around the world. In the last century, sea level rose 5 to 6 inches more than the global average along the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, because coastal lands there are subsiding.
Higher temperatures are expected to further raise sea level by expanding ocean water, melting mountain glaciers and small ice caps, and causing portions of Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets to melt. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the global average sea level will rise between 0.6 and 2 feet (0.18 to 0.59 meters) in the next century (IPCC, 2007).
The range reflects uncertainty about global temperature projections and how rapidly ice sheets will melt or slide into the ocean in response to the warmer temperatures. Furthermore, some processes affecting sea level have long (centuries and longer) time-scales, so that current sea level change is also related to past climate change, and some relevant processes are not determined solely by climate. Climate models, satellite data and hydrographic observations demonstrate that sea level is not rising uniformly around the world. Depending on the region, sea level has risen several times the global mean rise, or has actually fallen (IPCC, 2007). While current model projections indicate substantial variability in future sea level rise at regional and local scales, the IPCC has concluded that the impacts are “virtually certain to be overwhelmingly negative” (IPCC, 2007).
Rising sea levels inundate wetlands and other low-lying lands, erode beaches, intensify flooding, and increase the salinity of rivers, bays, and groundwater tables. Some of these effects may be further compounded by other effects of a changing climate. Additionally, measures that people take to protect private property from rising sea level may have adverse effects on the environment and on public uses of beaches and waterways. Some property owners and state and local governments are already starting to take measures to prepare for the consequences of rising sea level.
Among those Mid-Atlantic states that are expected to be most affected is North Carolina. But, the House of the North Carolina General Assembly has passed HB 819, legislation that is now under consideration by their Senate, to ban consideration of science in planning for sea level rise. Here is the germane section of that legislation:
"§ 113A-107.1. Sea-level policy restrictions; calculation of rate of sea-level rise.
(a) No State agency, board, commission, institution, or other public entity thereof shall adopt any rule, policy, or planning guideline addressing sea-level rise, unless authorized to do so under this Article.
(b) No county, municipality, or other local public body shall adopt any rule, ordinance, policy, or planning guideline addressing sea-level rise, unless it is a coastal-area county or is located within a coastal-area county.
(c) No rule, ordinance, policy, or planning guideline that defines the rate of sea-level rise shall be adopted except as provided by this section.
(d) The General Assembly does not intend to mandate the development of sea-level rise policy or rates of sea-level rise. If, however, the Coastal Resources Commission decides to develop rates of sea-level rise, the Commission may do so, but only by instructing the Division of Coastal Management to calculate the rates.
(e) The Division of Coastal Management shall be the only State agency authorized to develop rates of sea-level rise and shall do so only at the request of the Commission. These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of sea-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise. Rates of sea-level rise shall not be one rate for the entire coast but, rather, the Division shall consider separately oceanfront and estuarine shorelines. For oceanfront shorelines, the Division shall use no fewer than the four regions defined in the April 2011 report entitled "North Carolina Beach and Inlet Management Plan" published by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. The oceanfront regions are: Region 1 (Brunswick County), Region 2 (New Hanover, Pender, and Onslow Counties and a portion of Carteret County), Region 3 (a portion of Carteret County and Hyde County), and Region 4 (Dare and Currituck Counties). For estuarine shorelines, the Division shall consider no fewer than two separate regions defined as those north of Cape Lookout and those south of Cape Lookout.
(f) Any State agency, board, commission, institution, or other public entity thereof and any county, municipality, or other local public body that develops a policy addressing sea-level rise that includes a rate of sea-level rise shall use only the rates of sea-level rise developed by the Division of Coastal Management as approved by the Commission. If the Commission has not approved a sea-level rise rate, then the sea-level rise policy shall not use a rate of sea-level rise.
(g) If the Commission chooses to adopt rates of sea-level rise for the coastal area as developed by the Division, all rates shall be adopted as rules that are subject to Chapter 150B of the General Statutes."
I have enlarged and emboldened the sentence which effectively states that modern scientific models may not be considered. Discussion of this on the blogs at Scientific American is appropriate titled, NC Considers Making Sea Level Rise Illegal. Perhaps we should get legislation going to outlaw ignorance....
This very careful report comes to some conclusions that environmental groups have shied away from for far too long. The report has the following Key Recommendations.
The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today. This will require focused efforts in key policy areas including economic development, education, family planning and health.
The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels through: dramatic improvements in resource use efficiency, including: reducing waste; investment in sustainable resources, technologies and infrastructures; and systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact.
Reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally. This is needed to continue the downward trajectory of fertility rates, especially in countries where the unmet need for contraception is high.
Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues. Demographic changes, and the influences on them, should be factored into economic and environmental debate and planning at international meetings, such as the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development and subsequent meetings.
These recommendations are common sense if one has not been involved in politics, either within the environmental movement or government. The politics of "population control" is a bit complicated and, sadly, was embraced by racists as well as scientists. As an example, the Sierra Club members voted in 1998 against consideration of immigration as part of population control and a squabble over control of the board of directors in 2004, which ended up steering that core environmental group away from consideration of population impact on our environment. They were arguing over a single precondition to the causal end of the problem and ended up running from that larger cause to address symptoms.
The problem is that our population has continued growing despite human politics (and sometimes because of political decisions) and our population has a huge impact on our environment. Yes, human migration affects our population growth in addition to affecting locations of population, but the degree of affect of migration is not sufficient to address our planet's burgeoning population. The new report from the Royal Society does so.
One thing that gives this report some additional credibility is that it was not written in isolation. Among the authors are biologists, climatologists, ecologists, economists, environmentalists, ethologists, sociologists, theologists, and zoologists. There are professors and scientsts from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Regarding the Sierra Club controversy, the report addresses migration in a way that makes sense from all of the included fields; from the Summary on page 7:
Population is not only about the growing numbers of people: changes in age structure, migration, urbanisation and population decline present both opportunities and challenges to human health, wellbeing and the environment. Migrants often provide benefits to their countries of origin, through remittances, and to their host countries by helping to offset a workforce gap in ageing populations. Current and future migration will be affected by environmental change, although lack of resources may mean that the most vulnerable to these changes are the least able to migrate. Policy makers should prepare for international migration and its consequences, for integration of migrants and for protection of their human rights.
Here are the nine Recommendations, as summarized on page 9 (all highlighting as in the original).
Recommendation 1
The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today. This will require focused efforts in key policy areas including economic development, education, family planning and health.
Recommendation 2
The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels through: dramatic improvements in resource use efficiency, including: reducing waste; investment in sustainable resources, technologies and infrastructures; and systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact.
Recommendation 3
Reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally. This is needed to continue the downward trajectory of fertility rates, especially in countries where the unmet need for contraception is high.
Recommendation 4
Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues. Demographic changes, and the influences on them, should be factored into economic and environmental debate and planning at international meetings, such as the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development and subsequent meetings.
Recommendation 5
Governments should realise the potential of urbanisation to reduce material consumption and environmental impact through efficiency measures. The well planned provision of water supply, waste disposal, power and other services will avoid slum conditions and increase the welfare of inhabitants.
Recommendation 6
In order to meet previously agreed goals for universal education, policy makers in countries with low school attendance need to work with international funders and organisations, such as UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF, IMF, World Bank and Education for All. Financial and non-financial barriers must be overcome to achieve high-quality primary and secondary education for all the world’s young, ensuring equal opportunities for girls and boys.
Recommendation 7
Natural and social scientists need to increase their research efforts on the interactions between consumption, demographic change and environmental impact. They have a unique and vital role in developing a fuller picture of the problems, the uncertainties found in all such analyses, the efficacy of potential solutions, and providing an open, trusted source of information for policy makers and the public.
Recommendation 8
National Governments should accelerate the development of comprehensive wealth measures. This should include reforms to the system of national accounts, and improvement in natural asset accounting.
Recommendation 9
Collaboration between National Governments is needed to develop socio-economic systems and institutions that are not dependent on continued material consumption growth. This will inform the development and implementation of policies that allow both people and the planet to flourish.
The report sees and addresses "two critical issues" (page 11), increasing human population and increasing per capita consumption. Again, the impact of each on our environment should be obvious. The combined impact is disastrous. We need to move beyond debates over racism and over Rev. Malthus and focus on the science of what we are doing to our world.
For example, historically (at least since the writings of Rev. Mathus) we have been concerned with having sufficient food to sustain our growing population. As it turns out, food has not been an insurmountable problem (the report does address food in Chapter 3 starting on page 52), although the politics of food distribution has resulted in large numbers of people suffering and starving. Water, however, particularly fresh water, is a problem that we are going to face as our population continues to grow. From page 49,
Over the last few centuries global aggregate water use has grown exponentially (MA 2005a) and has been closely linked to economic development and population growth. A fifteen-fold increase in global water withdrawals occurred between 1800 and 1980 (Lvovich and White 1990) when population increased by a factor of four (Haub 1994): a 3.5 fold increase in average per capita consumption. Since 1980 per capita water use rate has dropped a little from 700 to 600 cubic meters per year although the aggregate global withdrawal continues to increase (Shiklomanov and Rodda 2003). Between 1960 and 2000 world water use doubled from about 1800 to 3600 km3 per year (MA 2005a). Water use is dominated by agriculture (roughly 70% of withdrawals are for agricultural use (FAO 2010b), followed by industrial (19%) and then municipal (including domestic) applications (11%).
A child born in the developed world consumes 30 to 50 times as much water as one born in the developing world (UNESCO 2003). In 2008 it was estimated that 884 million people were still without access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion were without access to basic sanitation (WHO and UNESCO 2006) exposing them to preventable infectious diseases. The fresh water requirements for meeting basic human needs gives a total demand of 50 litres per day, which equals 18 m3 per capita per year (Gleick 1996). This is based on a minimum drinking water requirement, basic requirements for sanitation, bathing and food preparation (Gleick 1996).
The world’s natural water resources are distributed unevenly around the world. Among inhabited areas, at the continental level America has the largest share of the world’s total freshwater resources with 45%, followed by Asia with 28%, Europe with 15.5% and Africa with 9% (FAO 2003). Central Asia has just 0.6% of the world’s total freshwater resources. There is therefore wide variability in the total renewable freshwater resources available between countries; for example Kuwait has 10m3 per inhabitant while Canada has more than 100,000m3 per inhabitant (FAO 2003).
Even where the phrase "renewable freshwater resources" is used, it should be kept in mind that our aquifers require time to generate fresh water. In many cases we are depleting our aquifers faster than they can recharge. We are polluting our groundwater. The number of superfund sites in the United States is appalling.
There is an explanation of some of the debates over population and consumption on page 60.
The sustainable development debate has, over recent years, been typified by those who argue that population growth is the source of current unsustainable trends, and those who believe that consumption is the primary culprit. This artificial distinction is unhelpful as it can lead to argument over whether policy should focus on reducing population growth or on improving the sustainability of consumption, while both are clearly important.
Continuing on page 62.
Consumption and demography are closely inter-twined. Every person must consume, and each additional person on the planet will add to total consumption levels. Other than population size, demographic factors such as ageing or urbanisation can also influence consumption levels. Policies should not treat population and consumption as separate issues.
The nature of our closed ecosphere is discussed quite well in chapter 4, including a discussion of how finite our resources are in section 4.5. This should be required reading for students. The politics of healthcare, currently a huge issue in the United States, is part of the discussion in 5.4. Family planning is crucial to getting human population under control. A bit from chapter 6, page 101:
[H]uman impact on the earth raises serious concerns. This report has explored the interactions between population, consumption and the environment. Humans are consuming resources and producing waste at an unprecedented rate. Population and consumption are both important: what matters is the combination of increasing population and increasing per capita consumption. Both global population and global consumption continue to rise and signs of unwanted impacts, interactions and feedback are growing – for example climate change reducing crop yields in some areas – and of irreversible changes – for example the increased rate of species extinction.
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has been among the more vicious Republicans in denial of climate change. (Readers of this blog may recall Mr. Cuccinelli trying to change Virginia primary election rules). Vicious because instead of merely using climate change as campaign rhetoric, he has pursued legal action against a University of Virginia Professor who researched climate change. That pursuit ended last week when the Virginia Supreme Court terminated Attorney General Cuccinelli's investigation of climate scientist Michael E. Mann. As reported in the Washington Post
This month, after nearly two years of legal proceedings, the Virginia Supreme Court halted the attorney general’s investigation of Mr. Mann, who used to teach at the University of Virginia. Twisting a law designed to root out embezzlement of state funds and the like, the attorney general had demanded oceans of documents — including Mr. Mann’s e-mail correspondence — from U-Va. But, along with some technical legal problems with his demand, Mr. Cuccinelli didn’t offer any reasonable suspicion that Mr. Mann had committed anything resembling fraud — even as the attorney general proposed violating scientists’ sacrosanct freedom to conduct research without political pressure. Multiple independent reviews of Mr. Mann’s record have found that the professor did little more than participate in the normal push-and-pull of scientific inquiry.
Mr. Cuccinelli’s inspiration appears to have been the conspiracy theorizing that emerged from the so-called Climategate scandal, in which global-warming opponents stole scientists’ e-mails — including a few of Mr. Mann’s — and then misinterpreted them to justify their activism.
Now that the Supreme Court has shut Mr. Cuccinelli down, what’s left is a range of consequences that can only hurt the commonwealth. The university had to raise nearly $600,000 for legal fees — money the cash-strapped university should have been able to use for something productive. On top of that are the public resources of the attorney general’s office that Mr. Cuccinelli wasted. Scientists in Virginia now have reason to wonder whether they will suffer similar pressure if they publish research government officials don’t like. And, because of some of the Supreme Court’s legal findings, the powers of the attorney general to pursue actual fraud have been clipped.
According to the Guardian, Dr. Mann, now at Penn State University, will be publishing a book next month that goes over some of the tactics used against him.
In his book, Mann warns that "public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation – not just with climate change but with a host of health, environmental and societal threats." The implications for the planet are grim, he adds.
Mann became a target of climate deniers' hate because his research revealed there has been a recent increase of almost 1°C across the globe, a rise that was unprecedented "during at least the last 1,000 years" and which has been linked to rising emissions of carbon dioxide from cars, factories and power plants. Many other studies have since supported this finding although climate change deniers still reject his conclusions.
Even this blog has seen claims that climate change is not real, notably comments from Dan Pangburn in FollowUp 9. Rather than pretend to be a climate scientist myself, I try to learn from the experts in the field. Reputable scientists are clear in their message. Posted a few days ago, last month there was a TED Talk by James Hansen, another leading climate change scientist, which is worth the eighteen minutes to watch.
The Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, William D. Nordhaus, who specializes in the economics of climate change, has an article in the New York Review of Books that refutes the Wall Street Journal op-ed that purported to debunk climate change. Dr. Nordhaus attacks six points that he finds incorrect or misleading.
The first point he refutes is a claim that global temperature is not rising. Dr. Nordhaus provides this graph:
The full article goes into considerably more detail, including information on the three sources of data for his graph.
The second point is a question over the accuracy of the warming models. Dr. Nordhaus' analysis is sound and I encourage you to read it. I would simply suggest that my education in modeling is that it is a technique for using existing data to predict future events, something which can never be done with precision. Modeling is useful to provide guidance in decision making and when forecasts prove inaccurate the new data can be used to modify the model and should not be seen as absolute disproof.
The third point regards whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant. Dr. Nordhaus concludes
In short, the contention that CO2 is not a pollutant is a rhetorical device and is not supported by US law or by economic theory or studies.
The fourth point is about the allegation that climate change scientists are creating a fuss to create material for a publish or perish vocation. In short, this is absurd. I have gone through the peer review process and know first hand that, in the sciences, rigor is demanded for peer review publication.
The Wall Street Journal op-ed had compared modern climate change scientists with Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, a Stalin-era scientist who did research that is now considered fraudulent.
The idea that skeptical climate scientists are being treated like Soviet geneticists in the Stalinist period has no basis in fact. There are no political or scientific dictators in the US. No climate scientist has been expelled from the US National Academy of Sciences. No skeptics have been arrested or banished to gulags or the modern equivalents of Siberia. Indeed, the dissenting authors are at the world’s greatest universities, including Princeton, MIT, Rockefeller, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Paris.
The fifth point is "follow the money". I find it interesting that both sides make the same allegation. We know that the energy corporations are funding a lot of the climate change denial propaganda.
There is a suggestion that standard theories about global warming have been put together by the scientific equivalent of Madison Avenue to raise funds from government agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF). The fact is that the first precise calculations about the impact of increased CO2 concentrations on the earth’s surface temperature were made by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, more than five decades before the NSF was founded.
Please pardon me for including a larger quote from Dr. Nordhaus, but I think that this is particularly important to understanding the money issue.
In fact, the argument about the venality of the academy is largely a diversion. The big money in climate change involves firms, industries, and individuals who worry that their economic interests will be harmed by policies to slow climate change. The attacks on the science of global warming are reminiscent of the well-documented resistance by cigarette companies to scientific findings on the dangers of smoking. Beginning in 1953, the largest tobacco companies launched a public relations campaign to convince the public and the government that there was no sound scientific basis for the claim that cigarette smoking was dangerous. The most devious part of the campaign was the underwriting of researchers who would support the industry’s claim. The approach was aptly described by one tobacco company executive: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”9
One of the worrisome features of the distortion of climate science is that the stakes are huge here—even larger than the economic stakes for keeping the cigarette industry alive. Tobacco sales in the United States today are under $100 billion. By contrast, expenditures on all energy goods and services are close to $1,000 billion. Restrictions on CO2 emissions large enough to bend downward the temperature curve from its current trajectory to a maximum of 2 or 3 degrees Centigrade would have large economic effects on many businesses. Scientists, citizens, and our leaders will need to be extremely vigilant to prevent pollution of the scientific process by the merchants of doubt.
The final point regards economic analysis of climate change. The Wall Street Journal op-ed quoted Dr. Nordhaus and, in his words, they misread the results of his study.
Please consider taking the time to read the full article by Dr. Nordhaus. I found it fascinating.
