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Revkin has leading system dynamics expert Sterman on NOAA's 1,000-years-of-hell paper

I am a big fan of MIT's John Sterman, one of the world's leading experts on systems thinking.

In a post on "The Greenhouse Effect and the Bathtub Effect," Andrew Revkin notes that Sterman's work trying to reduce the biggest source of climate confusion is related to the new NOAA-led paper that I discussed here: Climate change "largely irreversible for 1000 years," with permanent Dust Bowls in the Southwest and around the globe.

The bathtub analogy is that while atmospheric concentrations (the total stock of CO2 already in the air) might be thought of as the water level in the bathtub, emissions (the yearly new flow into the air) are the rate of water flowing into a bathtub. We need to lower the level, not just the flow. A great video clarifying the issue is here. It is narrated by my friend Andrew Jones. If you want to play the simulation itself, go here.

Revkin got Sterman's comments on the paper, which I am reposting below:

Holmes Hummel on climate policy design

Holmes Hummel is a "Lecturer and Policy Specialist at the UC-Berkeley Energy Resources Group, and previously served as a Congressional Science Fellow focused on energy and climate policy development." That's from her bio. What's not on her bio is the fact that she's smarter than you and 10 of your smartest friends, combined.

She's put together a PowerPoint slideshow and taped a lecture titled, "U.S. Energy and Climate Policy on the Road Ahead," and it's worth your while to give it a read/listen. Find it under the "Recent Posts" section, here.

U.N. climate official clarifies remarks about near-term summit

Monday, U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer sounded an awful lot like he was making a major announcement about a newly planned international summit on climate change. As the Financial Times reported, the U.N.'s top climate official said a meeting was necessary to lay groundwork before the international climate conference in Copenhagen this December. De Boer's remarks indicated that U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon felt the same way and was looking to call a summit in February or March.

But the secretary-general's office was mum on the matter when contacted by Grist yesterday. Today, de Boer's office confirmed that nothing is planned as of yet.

"The Secretary General is planning to organize a High Level Event with Heads of State and Government for all Members States in the margins of the General Assembly in September," John Hay, a spokesperson for de Boer, wrote in an e-mail. "He is also exploring other avenues to galvanize Heads of State and Government and support high level political engagement throughout the next 11 months. No specifics, however, are confirmed at this time."

The possibility of 30 to 40 heads of state meeting as early as February or March was a "personal hope" on de Boer's part, not a concrete plan, Hay said. One of the newest heads of state, President Barack Obama, is likely to have a big say in the timing.

"Obviously, this is designed to get the U.S. back in play," said John Anthony, communications director for climate and energy for the United Nations Foundation. "[But] just look at what's happening domestically. It's a real crowded calendar on many fronts."

Reuters has more on what de Boer wants to accomplish before Copenhagen.

NYT gets schooled by readers on efficiency

Last week The New York Times had an editorial singing the praises of energy efficiency. It wasn't bad, nor particularly great -- mixing up conservation with efficiency, focusing too much on oil/transportation, and never giving a decent sense of scale.

On Sunday, however, came a battery of letters in response to the editorial, all of which are excellent and all of which expand the focus in new ways. One of them is from Tom Casten, father of our own Sean and champion of recycled energy. Another emphasizes steady long-term research; several praise solar power's potential; another notes the key role of walkable communities and transit; another mentions meat consumption.

There's a lot of untapped, unaggregated expertise out there on this. I hope the NYT notices the great feedback and pursues the issue further. Imagine how much efficiency we could wring out of our economy if we had the whole culture focused on it.

Can Congress be trusted to get necessary GHG legislation right?

We need an economy-wide greenhouse gas bill that puts a price on GHG emissions and allows reallocation of capital in response. Congress increasingly appears unable to produce such a bill.

First came the fiasco of Lieberman-Warner, wherein it became quite apparent that the route to Congressional approval was paved with district-directed pork, stealing money out of CO2-reduction efforts and distributing it to any number of pet projects. Thankfully, that failed.

Then last week, Speaker Pelosi suggested that the great thing about cap-and-trade is that it gives Congress money to dole out to favored interests:

I believe we have to [implement cap and trade] because we see that as a source of revenue ...

Again, the idea that the purpose of a GHG bill is to reduce CO2 emissions is completely subsumed by salivation over the potential grab bag.

Now comes this, from E&E Daily ($ub. req'd), noting that given the choice between a California waiver and cap-and-trade, legislators from the rust belt prefer cap-and-trade. Why? Because it might give them a chance to throw some money back at their districts:

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), for example, pointed to the large new revenue stream often linked to a cap-and-trade system, saying that the money would help domestic automakers retool their plants to meet a tighter suite of emission standards.

"I think that ultimately this gets addressed in the energy bill to slash cap and trade," Stabenow said. "It's not enough just to talk about the regulations. If we want to have a domestic auto industry, we have to be provided support, particularly in the middle of this global credit crisis where we have to invest massive amounts of money and aren't able to get credit."

Is the purpose of a cap-and-trade bill really to provide bailout dollars to the auto industry?

OIRA chief on making the invisible visible

In a post on Cass Sunstein (new head of OIRA) I mentioned his work with behavioral economics and his book Nudge and wondered, "What other unobtrusive-but-effective green policy tweaks could be made to nudge people toward greener behavior?"

Clearly Sunstein is reading Grist, as he responded a few days later with a piece in the Chicago Tribune: "A gentle prod to go green." After some throat-clearing (and tangential carbon tax shilling) he gets to examples:

Summers doesn't advocate for climate solutions, but Obama's climate team makes up for it

Yes and no.

Larry Summers is widely regarded as a very brilliant economist. I can't dispute that. He was also the lead horse among the economists in the Clinton administration who were using every trick they knew to undermine any serious effort toward negotiating an international agreement on restricting greenhouse gases in Kyoto, Japan (see here and below).

He appears to remain firmly in the camp of most MEOWs (Mainstream Economists who Opine on Weather) in that he

• Doesn't understand climate science enough to realize how dire the situation is
• Doesn't propose remedies that would avert the irreversible catastrophe we face.

That seems clear from his two-part series on climate in the Financial Times in 2007 (Part 1 and Part 2). By his own admission, he proposes polices that are "less dramatic in their immediate claims for emissions reductions" than what the world has been considering. These include more R&D, of course, and an end to energy subsidies, plus:

The US must engage in an energy efficiency programme that takes effect without delay and has meaningful bite. As long as developing countries can point to the US as a free rider there will not be serious dialogue about what they are willing to do. I prefer carbon and/or gasoline tax measures to permit systems or heavy regulatory approaches because the latter are more likely to be economically inefficient and to be regressive

First off, the "and/or" is odd, since the "or" undermines the whole message. A gasoline tax is obviously not going to touch coal, and it is obviously not "economically efficient" if your goal is carbon reductions.

Second, it is odd economics to described an "energy efficiency" program as being driven by price, when high carbon prices primarily drive fuel switching. You would need incredibly high CO2 prices to drive efficiency in transportation (see "Why a carbon cap won't solve our oil addiction"), something Summers has never endorsed as far as I've seen. Also, even his new boss knows a gas tax is a politically dubious strategy for pushing efficiency (see Obama is right: Higher gasoline taxes to boost efficiency would be "a mistake"). Fortunately, his boss also understands that smart regulations make more sense in the transportation sector (see "Obama to push for California waiver that mandates cut in auto CO2 emissions").

In any case, if Summers won't specify a domestic emissions target, let alone a global one -- and won't specify how high a carbon or gasoline tax he has in mind, then it is impossible to view his policies as a serious addition to the debate or know if he is really serious at all. He is just another mainstream economist opining on a subject that he has not bothered to become knowledgeable enough on to make a useful contribution.

But does it matter that a MEOW, in this case a very clever kitty, is the head of the president's powerful National Economic Council? The New York Times says it does matter a lot in "In Obama's Team, Two Camps on Climate," which pits Summers against Carol Browner, who will oversee Obama's energy and climate policy, and which ignores the rest of his amazing Cabinet.

As evidence mounts of deadly bacteria from CAFO pigs, will the FDA and the USDA act?

Last June, Iowa State researcher Tara Smith delivered preliminary results of a study linking the deadly, antibiotic-resistant pathogen MRSA to pigs in concentrated animal feedlot operations. Despite mounting evidence of the link from Canada and Europe, U.S. public-health officials had never formally studied the issue, even though MRSA kills something close to 20,000 Americans every year -- more than AIDS.

In a must-read blog post at the time, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's ace health reporter Andrew Schneider documents the craven inaction of the FDA and the USDA as this public-health menace gained force. (I weighed in here.) As Schneider wrote:

An effective way to say there isn't a problem is never to look. That seems to be precisely what most U.S. government food-safety agencies are doing when it comes to determining whether the livestock in our food supply is contaminated with MRSA and if so, whether the often-fatal bacterium is being passed on to consumers who buy and consume that meat

Now Smith's research has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Examining CAFOs scattered in Iowa and Illinois, Smith and her team found the MRSA strain in 49 percent of pigs and 45 percent of the workers who tend them. The sample size is small; more study must be done. Will the government undertake it?

A real reckoning with the MRSA-CAFO link could deliver a devastating blow to the meat industry. To keep animals alive while stuffed together by the thousands, standing in their own collected waste, it's evidently necessary to dose them with lots of antibiotics. CAFO conditions destroy animal's immune systems; antibiotics pick up the slack. Take them away, and the CAFO model might crumble.

That, presumably, is why the Bush agencies so studiously ignored the problem. Let's hope the Obama FDA and USDA do better.

Update [2009-1-28 8:40:10 by Tom Philpott]:

The Seattle PI's indispensable Schneider reacts to the publication of Smith's findings:

So I called some disease detectives and food safety specialists in agencies responsible for ensuring that our food supply is safe. You could almost hear them cringe over the phone. And, no, to the best of their knowledge, neither the FDA, USDA nor CDC had launched systematic testing of the U.S. meat supply for MRSA. One physician said that a study was being done on the MRSA strain (ST398) that Smith had found on the pigs but added, "I don't think it has anything to do with meat."

NOAA stunner: Climate change 'largely irreversible for 1,000 years'

Important new research led by NOAA scientists, "Irreversible climate change because of carbon dioxide emissions," finds:

... the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop ... Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450-600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the "dust bowl" era and inexorable sea level rise.

I guess this is what President Obama meant when he warned today of "irreversible catastrophe" from climate change. The NOAA press release is here. An excellent video interview of the lead author is here.

The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science paper gives the lie to the notion that it is a moral choice not to do everything humanly possible to prevent this tragedy, a lie to the notion that we can "adapt" to climate change, unless by "adapt" you mean "force the next 50 generations to endure endless misery because we were too damn greedy to give up 0.1 percent of our GDP each year" (see, for instance, McKinsey: Stabilizing at 450 ppm has a net cost near zero or the 2007 IPCC report).

The most important finding concerns the irreversible precipitation changes we will be forcing on the next 50 generations in the U.S. Southwest, Southeast Asia, Eastern South America, Western Australia, Southern Europe, Southern Africa, and northern Africa.

Here is the key figure (click to enlarge):

Toymakers bank on kids' love of trash

Announcement: you can now buy toys made from recycled items like water bottles and Styrofoam cups. Or you could ... give your kids water bottles and Styrofoam cups to play with.