A Survey Of Economists On Global Warming

This is very interesting: on another issue I know no “economist treehuggers” but I have met more than my fair share of economists who I deem as right on global warming. Please read this article!!!!!!

Matt

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Researchers who deal in cold numbers rather than warming climates believe the “significant benefits from curbing greenhouse-gas emissions would justify the costs of action,” a new survey finds.In fact, the survey of economists finds 94% believe the U.S. should join climate agreements to limit global warming. CLIMATE CHANGE: Mount Kilimanjaro’s famous icy peaks are thawing fast INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC: What causes global warmingThe survey results to be released today come as debate over the economics of global warming moves center stage in Washington, D.C. Republican senators boycotted a hearing Tuesday over an Environmental Protection Agency analysis about the costs of a clean-energy bill. In addition, the United States and European Union are preparing for a December meeting in Copenhagen to discuss a climate treaty.  “An economist tree hugger is an imaginary creature,” says Michael Livermore of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, which conducted the survey. “But we found that economists really see climate change poses a lot of risk to the economy. “The survey approached the 289 economists who had published climate-related studies in the top 25 economics journals in the past 15 years. About half, 144, responded, and 75% agreed or strongly agreed on the “value” of greenhouse-gas controls. In 2006, the British government found that charging industries a fee for greenhouse-gas emissions would reduce gross domestic product globally about 1% by 2050. Last month, a National Research Council report found that burning fossil fuels, which release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, exerts a hidden $120 billion cost on the U.S. economy because of higher health costs, leaving aside climate damage. Greenhouse gases are transparent to sunlight but retain heat, warming the atmosphere. Industrial greenhouse-gas emissions have raised global average temperatures about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1905, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and will likely increase them from 3 to 7 degrees more by 2100.  “Many observers look at economists as skeptics of the need for (climate) mitigation,” says economist Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. But “most accept the unquestionable consensus from the natural scientist that the planet is warming and humans are to blame.”In the survey of economists:

•91.6% wanted a tax or “cap and trade” system, where polluters buy and sell emission permits, instead of regulation, to cut greenhouse gases.

 •84% agreed the effects of global warming “create significant risks” to the economy, particularly to agriculture, fishing, insurance and health.

•Of the 94.3% who favor the U.S. joining climate agreements to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, 57% say greenhouse-gas cuts should come “regardless of the actions of other countries.”

 Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which opposes limits to greenhouse gases, says the economists polled “vastly exaggerate the potential damages and vastly understate the costs of reducing emissions.”

Global Warming On Merkel’s Mind and Gore’s New Book

Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel,  is speaking historically to both houses of congress and she is visiting Obama. All good and foremost on her mind is what is the US doing to mitigate global climate change in it’s backyard. That is also all good. Merkel has been very strong advocate on climate change and her words and presence is just the nudge that Obama needs on a critical subject where Obama already has good instincts.

Al Gore was interviewed twice this morning about his new book, Our Choice. This is Gore’s latest book on global climate change. Gore’s book is a must read for me. If it is anything like An Inconveniant Truth it should be a good read for folks like me.

Matt

Follow The Science On Climate Change

Published: November 1 2009 17:30 | Last updated: November 1 2009 17:30

More on the skepticizm about global warming. Please read.

Matt

As next month’s Copenhagen conference approaches, politicians should not be distracted by the apparently growing volume of sceptical voices challenging the need for global action against climate change. Some of the sceptics may have scientific backgrounds but they are not in the mainstream of contemporary climate research. The real experts – hundreds of scientists worldwide who are examining the link between climate and carbon dioxide emissions – have no doubt that man-made global warming is a real crisis that must be addressed urgently.

When science and politics mix, scientists have to simplify their arguments to enable politicians to grapple with the issues. The sheer complexity of climate science, from atmospheric physics to polar glaciology, makes it harder to convey than some other science-based issues such as space policy, stem cells or HIV/Aids. And there has inevitably been oversimplification – sometimes amplified by environmental groups keen to present the threat of global warming in the starkest terms.

The most important point to grasp about global warming is that it has not proceeded and will not continue at anything like a uniform, predictable pace around the world. As sceptics like to point out, 1998 was the warmest year on record globally (because of a particularly intense El Niño event in the Pacific Ocean) but locally things have heated up considerably since then – especially in the Arctic, where summer sea ice has shrunk alarmingly over the past five years.

A common mistake is to try to draw a clear distinction between “man-made” and “natural” change. The real climate results from an incredibly complex interplay between natural variation and the increasingly important human influence.

The geological record shows that natural change can happen extremely fast – on several occasions within the past 20,000 years global temperatures have risen or fallen by several degrees over a century. Sceptics sometimes seem to draw comfort from this natural variability but, to a climatologist with a sense of history, the wild swings in the past are anything but comforting. They suggest a real (though probably small) risk that, by pumping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to levels not seen for millions of years, we could trigger catastrophic, runaway global warming.

Future climate is intrinsically unpredictable. For planning purposes policymakers need projections of changes decades ahead, and scientists oblige by issuing consensus forecasts through bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Remember that the figures are not firm predictions. If climate is less sensitive to increasing carbon dioxide than the models suggest – or if unexpected natural events, such as a slight dimming of the sun or exceptional volcanic activity, intervene – then we may get away with little warming. The most likely rise in global temperature is somewhere between a just manageable 2°C and potentially catastrophic 4°C, depending on how quickly the world gets a grip on emissions. It could be even worse than that.

Ultimately, when all the uncertainties are combined with the scientists’ view that we are doing something significant to the global climate, a good reason why the world should invest hundreds of billions of dollars in cutting carbon emissions is to insure against truly cataclysmic climate change that might destroy industrial civilisation – a case made persuasively by Martin Weitzman, the Harvard economist.

Fortunately the science becomes much clearer when we move from predicting the climate itself to assessing how best to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Forget about esoteric “geo-engineering” proposals to cool the earth. Technology that already exists (or is in development) can do the job perfectly well by increasing the efficiency with which we use carbon-based energy.

The least glamorous forms of energy conservation, such as insulating buildings properly and making transport more efficient, still have a huge contribution to make. So do nuclear power and the various forms of renewable energy from sun to wind and waves, though it will be essential to invest heavily in “smart grid” technology to make the best use of them. As the final pre-Copenhagen negotiations begin in Barcelona, an editorial in Tuesday’s FT will outline the policies that can make a real difference to climate change without causing unacceptable disruption to the global economy.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

Trivia: Large and Fast Past and Present Animals

The largest current terrestrial predacious mammal is the Kodiak Island brown bear. Perhaps the same size is the polar bear. They swim for food but I do not consider them a marine mammal. African elephants are the largest land mammal. Orcas are predacious marine mammals and they are the largest of all predators. I have seen them throw a 1,000 pound fur sea lion into the air like a soccer ball. I do not think a swimming polar bear has a chance against a pack of orcas intent on killing it.

There were many predators in our past. One that I have noted on this blog before was the giant short faced bear. This was a large and fast tremarctine bear of the Pleistocene. At the time this was the largest terrestrial mammal predator. There were large toothed Oligocene whales, like the Basilosaurus, that may have been the largest predators of their time.

Rhino like large mammals of the Oligocene were mammals like Balucotherium, which may have been larger than a wooly mammoth and Titanotherium, a three tonner whose skull and bones can be found in the central rockies. these were truely huge mammals of the past that easily outsised current mammals.

Just some more trivia, did you know the land mammal cheetah can run 70 mph and that peregrine falcons can stoop (dive) at 200 mph. These two are fauna with blazing speeds when you consider that the worlds fastest humans run about 20 mph. Trivia is just what the doctor orders on Sundays.

Matt

About Living In Southwest USA

I just heard on telivision a person say he would never live in Phoenix, Arizona because of the ravages of global warming will be felt there first. I have heard that before. Most recently in the global warming lecture series that I am attending. Ernie Niemi said water problems will shape the western USA soon and he would not live in cities like Phoenix, Arizona where these water problems would show up first. He would advise his children to stear clear of cities like Phoenix but he will not be around long enough to wag a finger at places like Phoenix but he is not going to spend time in places that are still over 100 degrees in late October.

I know really nice people who live in Pnoenix but for reasons simular to Neimi I will stear clear and I hope my children do so.

The interesting thing about Neimi’s data (at least I thought so) was that one of the scenario’s he is modelling shows what he calls an ecosystem “collapse”at + 9% celsius. I would say that in that temperature range we are seeing a transition fron ecosystems that can sustain us to a desertification process which we may, or may not, survive.

Doesnt that give you the creeps that that is even being modelled? It gets back to what Gore so simply and wisely said “how hard do you want to fall?”

Matt

Climate Change and Yellowstone National Park

There is an opinion piece in today’s Bozeman Daily Chronicle. It is about the impacts of climate change on Yellowstone’s wildlife. The article is by Pam Mcleod, of the National Parks and Conservation Association. I agree with much about her opinion on what is happening in Yellowstone to it’s iconic wildlife.

The other evening, economist Ernie Nieme said, that most persons who study climate change and national parks like this author Pam Mcleod, think that the pine beetle infestation that is currently devestating Yellowstone’s pine based ecosystems is an artifact of global warming. I very much agree with this and cannot remember beetle devistation at this level. He, like she, mentions the end of Yellowstone’s whitebark pine , a major food source of Yellowstone’s grizzly. I can SEE this happenining as I write this post.

Yellowstone is wildfire country and I have seen wildfires of well over 100,000 acres change entire ecosystems as they rage in Yellowstone National Park and areas around the park. Pine bark beetles will leave huge swaths of pine snags that will further dry as this country drys out as a result of a warming planet. Wild fires will be an artifact of these drying snags and entire ecosystems of what was once forests will begin the desertification process.

If this happens in  places like Yellowstone, what will happen in drier ecosystems like the Great Basin or deserts like the Mojave? Mcleod writes about decreasing poulations of Yellowstone cutthroats, another bear food source. I see the end of the cutworm moth, another major bear food source. I see this happening soon and I can see an outcome, as Yellowstone warms, where food like the calves of elk disappear as a result of a warming climate. Bear’s will disappear soon after this for good in Yellowstone.

I want to be wrong about these outcomes but I fear that I am not.Yellowstone and we may survive the warming planet but I do not think any bear will and I do not see this park as the same without bears…do you?

Matt

P.S. Another typhoon is about to hit the philipines. Who is skeptical about global warming?

Methane’s role in global warming underestimated

This is much worse than anything Carbon Dioxide can do.

Matt

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Greenhouse gas calculations blame carbon dioxide too much for global warming, and methane too little, suggest researchers Thursday. In the journal Science, a team led by Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York finds that chemical interactions between greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide cause more global warming than previously estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other efforts. “The total amount of warming doesn’t change, just the balance of gasses behind it,” Shindell says.The world’s climate warmed an average about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1906 to 2005, very likely due to industrial greenhouse gases, the IPCC concluded in 2007, adding that carbon dioxide is “most important” greenhouse gas. Methane is a greenhouse gas produced by lanfills, agriculture and some industries.In the study, Shindell and colleagues added chemical interactions between aerosols and greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon monoxide to a century-long model of climate change. They wanted to see the effects on each gas’s “Global Warming Potential,” or individual contribution to global warming. Methane played a bigger role than expected, suggesting that climate treaties such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol need to consider it more carefully, the study says. Greenhouse gases are transparent to sunlight, but retain heat in the atmosphere, raising global average temperatures. Burning fossil fuels, deforestation and other human activities have raised greenhouse gas levels to historic values in the last three centuries. “There is no way, other than aggressive geoengineering, to come close to meeting the world leaders? goal of overall warming not exceeding (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial (levels) without focusing on BOTH carbon dioxide and non-carbon dioxide emissions,” says Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute, by email. “This is not an either-or choice — we must do both to have any chance at all. “Because non-carbon dioxide gasses also cause air pollution, MacCracken and Shindell both suggest that politicians may embrace limiting those emissions in developing nations more quickly than carbon dioxide ones. China has about 750,000 air-quality-related deaths annually according to the World Health Organization, for example. In December, representatives of 192 nations head to Copenhagen to work on an international agreement to limit emissions. On the international front, “getting priorities right on the non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases has some real value,” says MacCracken, a former Clinton-administration climate scientist. If negotiations keep stalling on carbon dioxide emissions debate, then “all of our efforts on the non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases won’t make much difference,” he says. “There needs to be a deal and, in my view, cutting non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases and soot can be a helpful bridge to getting an agreement.”Current emissions of aerosols actually cool the atmosphere an average about 1.26 degrees Fahrenheit, notes aerosol expert Joyce Penner of the University of Michigan. “So changing aerosol concentrations through changing greenhouse gas emissions is certainly a factor that needs to be considered,” Penner says.” I think that what is needed here is a holistic approach to climate control that takes into account all the factors that influence climate change (including the present day “protection” by aerosol emissions).”

Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up

A changing earth I am glad to miss but my children will be around…get ready for a good fight in a world much different then the earth I new as a child.

Matt

Then came a development unforeseen by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC: Data suggested that Earth’s temperature was beginning to drop.

That has reignited debate over what has become scientific consensus: that climate change is due not to nature, but to humans burning fossil fuels. Scientists who don’t believe in man-made global warming cite the cooling as evidence for their case. Those who do believe in man-made warming dismiss the cooling as a blip triggered by fleeting changes in ocean currents; they predict greenhouse gases will produce rising temperatures again soon.

The reality is more complex. A few years of cooling doesn’t mean that people aren’t heating up the planet over the long term. But the cooling wasn’t predicted by all the computer models that underlie climate science. That has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect.

“There is a lot of room for improvement” in the models, says Mojib Latif, a climate scientist in Germany and co-author of a paper predicting the planet will cool for perhaps a decade before starting to warm again — a long-term trend he attributes to greenhouse-gas emissions. “You need to know what you can believe and can’t believe from the models.”

The renewed discussion of inherent shortcomings in climate models comes on the cusp of potentially big financial commitments. In five weeks, diplomats from around the world will meet in Copenhagen to try to hash out a new agreement to curb global greenhouse-gas emissions. The science continues to evolve.

Economics Talk On Climate Change

We are having a  series on Global Climate Change. It is in Bozeman and it is weekly and it is at the public library.

Last week they had a Fish, Wildlife and Parks Lobbiest and #3 man talk about climate change. I guessed that my knowledge base on climate change was way ahead of his but I was gratified that the agenciees #3 man believed very much in a changing climate and that is good.

Today’s speaker was, EcoNorthwest Economist-Ernie Niemi. He was scientifically parsimonius but he was quite good. His “just the facts Jack” attitude was frustrating at times but this guys heart was in the right place. He said what gratified him was so many people came out to hear him speak

He acknowledged his data came from a model that had a result that was middle of the road. He divulged that the science told a far more dire story than his data did. He showed a map of recent data that showed we would increase our temerature in this country to 9% above the 2,000 level and he said many of our known ecosystems would go ito a “tipping point” .I think we will see a desertification process at that point (mid-century) and droughts will be a persistant part of our ecosystrm, to the poin that it will shape the ecosystem, and not at the boundaries. He saw a lot of hope in the Waxman-Markey Climate Change Bill. So do I.

There was much data that he was missing and he was the first to admit his data was conservative but things he had no control over he threw up his arms and shrugged off. He was very much like my friends at Wild Joe’s Coffee Shop. He would work on things he could control and just forget what he had no control over.

I enjoyed listening to Niemi. He was pragmatic and not dry, like most in his proffession. Like Niemi, my best hope was that the room was overstocked full of smart persons who cared about the impacts of global climate change.

Matt

Global Warming Cycles Threaten Endangered Primate Species

Global Climate Change impacts all of the earths species. Here is an article on how this change will probably impact some new world primates. As you can surmise knowledgeable scientists do not think primates will not make it  through this change.

Wiederholt and Post decided to concentrate on the way the oscillating weather patterns directly and indirectly influence plants and animals in the tropics. Until the research by Wiederholt and Post, this intricate network of interacting factors had rarely been analyzed as a single system. “We know very little about how climate change and global warming are affecting primate species,” explains Wiederholt. “Up to one third of primates species are threatened with extinction, so it is really crucial to understand how these changes in climate may be affecting their populations.”

The research will be published on 28 October 2009 in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, a fast-track journal of the Royal Society of London.

The scientists focused on the large-bodied monkeys of South America, which are highly threatened. Choosing one species from each of the four genera of Atelines, Wiederholt and Post examined abundance trends and dynamics in populations of the muriqui (Brachyteles hypoxanthus, formerly B. arachnoides) of Brazil, the woolly monkey (Lagothrix lagotricha) in Colombia, Geoffroy’s spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi), which was studied on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, and the red howler monkey (Alouatta seniculus) in Venezuela.

For each species, long-term research projects carried out by other teams over decades have documented the abundance and feeding patterns of these primates. By studying the different species, Wiederholt and Post hoped to highlight the importance of the response to changing climate conditions of the trees that provide the dietary resources for the monkeys. All the species live in social groups and spend most of their time in the trees of tropical forests, using their limbs and prehensile tails to move around or to suspend themselves from branches. The monkeys differ in the proportions of fruit, flowers, and leaves in their diets. Woolly monkeys and spider monkeys predominantly eat fruit, howler monkeys specialize in leaf-eating, and muriquis also eat leaves but consume more fruit than howlers. “Long-term studies like those we derived data from are incredibly valuable for illuminating effects of global warming,” Post said. “Unfortunately for endangered species, such studies also are incredibly rare. We hope our results bring attention to the importance of maintaining long-term monitoring efforts.”

The team hypothesized that the trees’ response to the warming events might provide a crucial link between changes in climate and monkey abundance. To test their hypothesis, Wiederholt and Post needed to compare information on the monkey populations with data on fluctuations in food resources such as leaves, seeds, and fruits. Then, using statistical models, they investigated how food and abundance information related to annual temperature and rainfall information.

Detailed ecological information was not available on each of the forests in which the target species live, so the team used information from Barro Colorado Island — a lowland, moist, tropical forest where Geoffroy’s spider monkey was studied — as a general indicator of what happened over time in each of the habitats. From Barro Colorado, the scientists knew the number of tree species that were fruiting and flowering each month during the years between 1987 and 2004. They also looked at the annual values of flower and seed production for 44 specific tree species with seeds that are spread by mammals.

To examine these factors on a regional and local scale, Wiederholt and Post used information on mean annual temperature, rainfall, and the length of the wet and dry seasons for the years between 1960 and 1990 in Venezuela, Brazil, Barro Colorado Island, and Colombiaavailable. They obtained these data from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and from the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware. “We expected to find a strong relationship between the large-scale climate and the population dynamics of these species,” explains Wiederholt. “We also wanted to tease out which measures of vegetation-response to climatic conditions were most influential.”

The scientists obtained large-scale climate data from the southern oscillation index (SOI), the El Niño-Southern Oscillation indices (ENSO3, 34, 4, and 12), and the Southern Hemisphere temperature-anomaly index, which are available from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean provided a rainfall anomaly index. The El Niño and La Niña phases of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO — often called simply “El Niño”) are the cycles of warm/dry and cool/wet periods in oceanic and atmospheric temperatures in the tropical Pacific region. These cycles often are associated with disruptive events in to central and northern South America, such as floods, droughts, or disturbances in fishing or agriculture.

The results of the team’s analyses were spectacular. All four monkey species showed drops in abundance relating to large-scale climate fluctuations. Even though the monkey populations were separated by large distances, the three fruit-eating species had synchronous responses to large-scale warming. During El Niño warming events, trees produced more fruit than usual. Then, during the subsequent La Niña cooling events, the trees produced much less fruit, resulting in a local scarcity or even famine.

Some ecologists have speculated that high production of fruit during El Niño events may have been triggered by the increase in solar radiation, despite lower-than-usual rainfall. However, high productivity during an El Niño event might also use up the stored reserves of the trees, which would have difficulty recovering during the subsequent La Niña events, when weather was wet, cloudy, and cool. This mechanism would explain why the fruit-eating monkeys showed a delayed response to the El Niño events after a lag of one or two years.

Howler monkeys also showed declines with warm and dry El Niño events, but their population fall was out of sync with that of the fruit-eating species. The mechanism is not yet clear, but Wiederholt has some ideas. She notes, “Primate researchers have seen elevated adult female mortality and lowered birthrates among red howlers in drought years. Since leaf flush often occurs at the start of the wet season, a prolonged dry season might delay the availability of this resource for the howlers and perhaps cause them nutritional stress.”

Warmer temperatures also may cause leaves — the howlers’ primary food — to mature faster, which would accelerate the leaves’ acquisition of toxins and other chemical defenses against monkeys. The factor that the scientists found was most influenced by changes in climate was the monthly maximum number of tree species that were fruiting. Climate changes also were highly correlated with the monthly maximum number of species that were flowering and with annual seed production. The length of the dry season also was highly correlated with annual flower production. Thus, vegetation responses to climatic conditions substantially altered the food resources available to primates, which in turn influenced the decline or rise in monkey abundance.

Global warming already has produced a rise of 0.74 degrees over the last century, and an additional increase of 1.8 to 4 degrees Celsius is anticipated over the next century. “El Niño events are expected to increase in frequency with global warming,” explains Post. “This study suggests that the consequences of such intensification of ENSO could be devastating for several species of New World monkeys.”

The researchers say that now, more than ever, quantitative studies that delineate the complex ecological links between climate, vegetation, and animal survival are urgently needed.

This study was funded by Penn State’s Graduate Fellowship Program in a grant to Ruscena Wiederholt.