Articles by Joseph Romm

Does a serious bill need action from China?

I'm not asking whether we should pass a serious climate bill before China acts. The answer to that question is obviously yes, as I've written many times (see The "China Excuse" for inaction and The U.S.-China Suicide Pact on Climate).

But as I noted in my post on Steven Chu's confirmation hearing for energy secretary, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) made some worrisome remarks on the subject. Our very own David Lewis transcribed the exchange in the comments (here). I'm going to repost it below because Bayh is a thoughtful moderate who certainly understands the climate issue.

First, however, let me make a few comments. We have no chance to stabilize CO2 concentrations at 450 ppm (let alone 350), if China does not agree to cap its carbon emissions by 2020 (see "Must-read IEA report explains what must be done to avoid 6°C warming"). Right now, however, China seems to be willfully pursuing planetary self-destruction (see "China announces plan to single-handedly finish off the climate").

The international negotiation process that led to the Kyoto Protocol -- and that is supposed to culminate in another deal in Copenhagen at the end of this year -- is for all intents and purposes in a deep coma, even if most of the participants don't realize that (see "Obama can't get a global climate treaty ratified, so what should he do instead? Part 1"). Indeed, the only thing that could possibly revive it is China agreeing to a cap by no later than 2020. That alone means Obama's top international priority this year must not be Copenhagen, but rather China. Whether or not Obama needs some action by China to get a U.S. bill passed, his entire presidency and the fate of the planet rest on whether he can in fact get a China deal (see "What will make Obama a great president, Part 2: A climate deal with China").

Let me go further here, based in part on Bayh's remarks. I think it is rather obvious that if China simply refuses to agree to any strong emissions constraints sometime during Obama's (hopefully) two terms in office, than even if we had passed a climate bill in this country, the political support for the kind of carbon dioxide prices needed to achieve meaningful reductions by 2020 would just fade away. Second, I think it is even more obvious that the climate bill we could pass in this country would be considerably stronger if we could in fact negotiate a strong, bilateral GHG agreement with China (or trilateral with China and the E.U.) -- though presumably the Chinese side of things would be contingent on a U.S. bill passing.

I do not want to be misunderstood here: It is more than reasonable to argue, as I have repeatedly, that the U.S. should try to pass a bill first -- and such a bill may be the key to unlocking Chinese action. But Bayh's comments in his exchange with Chu suggest that may not work politically:

IPCC chief challenges Obama to further cut U.S. emission targets

Worldwatch just released its State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World, which finds:

The world will have to reduce emissions more drastically than has been widely predicted, essentially ending the emission of carbon dioxide by 2050 to avoid catastrophic disruption to the world's climate.

At a kick-off event, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said

President-elect Obama's goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 falls short of the response needed by world leaders to meet the challenge of reducing emissions to levels that will actually spare us the worst effects of climate change.

Told ya! (see "The U.S. needs a tougher 2020 GHG emissions target.")

Pachauri was the guy handpicked by Bush to replace the "alarmist" Bob Watson. But facts make scientists alarmists, not their politics, as I've said many times (see "Desperate times, desperate scientists"). At the end of 2007, Pachauri famously said:

The ocean is absorbing less carbon dioxide

Premier among their many unscientific beliefs, deniers cling to the notion that some magical negative feedback will avert serious climate impacts. Sadly, we will need magic to save humanity if we foolishly decide to listen to the deniers and to keep ignoring the one negative feedback that science says can certainly save humanity -- simply reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientific reality based on actual observations (not to mention the paleoclimate record) is that the climate models are not underestimating negative feedbacks -- the models are wildly underestimating the positive or amplifying feedbacks. Among the greatest concerns is the growing evidence that the major carbon sinks are saturating, that a greater and greater fraction of human emissions will end up in the atmosphere.

A new study in Geophysical Research Letters ($ub. req'd), "Sudden, considerable reduction in recent uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ by the East/Japan Sea," finds,

The results presented in this paper indicate that the rate of CO₂ accumulation in the deepest basin of the East/Japan Sea has considerably decreased over the transition period between 1992-1999 and 1999-2007.

The authors explain to the U.K.'s Guardian why this is an amplifying feedback, why warming is diminishing the ability of the ocean sink to absorb CO2:

The world's oceans soak up about 11bn tonnes of human carbon dioxide pollution each year, about a quarter of all produced, and even a slight weakening of this natural process would leave significantly more CO2 in the atmosphere. That would require countries to adopt much stricter emissions targets to prevent dangerous rises in temperature.

Kitack Lee, an associate professor at Pohang University of Science and Technology, who led the research, says the discovery is the "very first observation that directly relates ocean CO2 uptake change to ocean warming".

He says the warmer conditions disrupt a process known as "ventilation" -- the way seawater flows and mixes and drags absorbed CO2 from surface waters to the depths. He warns that the effect is probably not confined to the Sea of Japan. It could also affect CO2 uptake in the Atlantic and Southern oceans.

"Our result ... unequivocally demonstrated that oceanic uptake of CO2 has been directly affected by warming-induced weakening of vertical ventilation," he says ...

Lee adds: "In other words, the increase in atmospheric temperature due to global warming can profoundly influence the ocean ventilation, thereby decreasing the uptake rate of CO2."

This study matches other recent research on ocean sink saturation. In 2007, the BBC reported, "The amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world's oceans has reduced" based on more than 90,000 ship-based measurements of CO2 absorption over ten years. The Global Carbon Project analysis of the "natural land and ocean CO₂ sinks" finds:

Richard Tol says wildly optimistic MIT/NBER study is 'way too pessimistic'

An amazing comment (here) from climate economist luminary Richard Tol epitomizes the narrow, linear, non-scientific thinking of the economics profession in the climate arena.

In Voodoo economists, part 3, I explained why a recent study, "Climate Shocks and Economic Growth [PDF], was a new favorite of global warming deniers. In projecting the economic consequences of global warming this century, the authors:

• knowingly ignored many of the key impacts (like sea-level rise, extreme weather, species loss)
• (unknowingly?) ignored all the other key impacts (like desertification and loss of the inland glaciers and ocean acidification)
• assumed the the tiny global warming impacts we have experienced in the last few decades could be be extrapolated in a linear fashion to determine the huge global warming impacts projected for this century on the business-as-usual emissions path
• absurdly did not assign China and India "significant negative consequences of climate change" because those countries would soon be rich.

That's the only way they could come up with conclusions like "we find very little impact of long-run climate change on world GDP" or "Changes in precipitation had no substantial effects on growth in either poor or rich countries" -- conclusions the right wing deniers at the Heritage Foundation and elsewhere were quick to embrace. But Richard Tol posted a comment here: