Thursday, April 1, 2010
To Stabilize Climate 2010: An Atmosphere of 300 ppm Carbon Dioxide
The following statement was prepared by the undersigned and distributed at the Copehagen meetings of December 2009. It has been modified here only to correct the dates. The details remain correct as originally presented. "Stabilization" of the atmosphere at 300 ppm seems essential if we are to avoid a continuous, open-ended warming over the next century.
The First Principles for Climatic Stabilization
Scientific Objectives
The governments of essentially all the nations including the United States have ratified the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change. In ratification, those nations have agreed that the common welfare requires stabilization of the composition of the atmosphere with respect to heat-trapping gases at levels that will protect human interests and nature. There is now broad agreement in the scientific community, and a general understanding among the public, that the accumulation of heat-trapping gases has drifted above the levels at which serious deleterious effects are occurring globally. It is less clear to the public and to political leaders that the speed of the climatic disruption is accelerating. The causes are three-fold. First, emissions from fossil-fuel burning and land clearing are increasing. Second, the natural processes that soak up some of the anthropogenic emissions, such as oceanic sinks for CO2, appear to be weakening. Third, positive feedbacks driven by the warming itself, such as the melting of permafrost and mobilization of massive stores of previously frozen soil carbon, may already be speeding further warming. These trends are exceeding earlier predictions and bold action is needed that looks beyond what is convenient to achieve what is necessary to protect civilization and the biota.
Political and economic objectives and arguments currently obscure the facts of the changes in the atmosphere, their causes, costs to the public and to nations, and the objectives in correcting the drift into deeply disruptive climate change. There is moreover, an explosion of political and economic proposals nominally aimed at providing relief. These proposals include the substitution of biofuels for oil and the separation and storage in deep wells of carbon released in burning coal among many other proposals. While many of these proposals are important components of a global strategy for stabilizing climate, they are insufficient in themselves. And some solutions advanced now, such as corn ethanol, may actually exacerbate the climatic disruption when indirect effects on forest destruction are considered. Current discussions of an acceptable increase in global mean temperature by 2ºC do not take into account the range of regional variation such a target would imply. Under such a mean, the Arctic could see increases of 6ºC with associated drastic ecosystems responses. Defining an acceptable long-term risk to the climate system and the civilization that it supports needs to be based on scientific evidence and rationale rather than on short-term political and economic compromises.
The scientific community, operating largely with public funds and in the public interest, has a responsibility to provide timely and accurate assessments of the state of scientific knowledge. Staff of the Woods Hole Research Center have studied this topic for decades and offer the following observations.
1. The costs of the upward drift of global temperatures are already affecting major segments of civilization and will rapidly become more severe as the disruption of climate proceeds.
2. Objectives in correcting the trend must now include steps not only to stabilize the heat-trapping gas content of the atmosphere but also to start the process of reducing it toward long-term levels approaching the approximately 300 ppm of 1900. A short-term, decadal, target of 350 ppm is appropriate.
3. The oceans currently absorb more than two billion tons of carbon annually, approximately 25% of the CO2 generated by human activity. This absorption is leading to acidification that affects the ability of many marine organisms to grow normally. Increasing the carbonate concentrations and temperatures in oceanic surface waters diminishes the absorption of CO2 .
4. Stabilization of the atmospheric concentration at this moment requires removal from current annual releases an amount equal to the annual increment of carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere. The annual accumulation is 4-5 billion tons of the 10 billion tons of carbon released annually from human activities ( about 37 billion tons of CO2 equivalent). Greater amounts will have to be removed in subsequent years as the ocean sink weakens and as decay of organic matter is accelerated in high latitudes by the warming.
There are two mechanisms available at this level of control: management of forests globally and management of use of fossil fuels. No other processes or procedures alone have the potential for stopping and reversing the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere at the speed necessary to avoid more serious global environmental disruptions of climate and sea level.
1. Forests:
A. Conserving all remaining primary forests globally, allowing no further destruction of old-growth forests, would avoid the emission of about 1.5 billion tons of carbon annually and would confer untold other advantages in the public realm through preservation of land and landscapes and their various functions in stabilizing natural ecosystems and the human habitat.
B. Restoring forests to 1-2 million square kilometers of once-forested land would start the process of storing annually about 0.5-billion tons of carbon in trees and soils globally. Restoration and protection of marine wetlands and mangroves could store additional carbon.
2. Fossil Fuels: The remaining 2-3 billion tons of carbon to reach stability can be removed through a combination of conservation of energy and substitution of alternative and renewable fuels that do not emit carbon dioxide on a net basis. Actions need to be taken globally substantially immediately, and require leadership by the US and other industrial nations including China. More reductions will be essential and possible over time as energy systems are reconstructed to rely more heavily on alternative and renewable sources.
Our purpose is to point to the gross discrepancy between the science-based requirements for a stable and habitable biosphere, which are substantially immutable, and the current perspectives of political and economic interests who appear to believe there is ample room for, and enduring reality in, compromises with the details of its metabolism and structure. Every new suggestion needs to be tested on the basis of whether it has potential for dealing immediately with the core issue of stabilizing the biosphere by reducing by billions of tons the current emissions of carbon dioxide resulting from human activities. At this late date the opportunities for effective action are limited and require large changes in human behavior.
George M. Woodwell
Richard A. Houghton
Eric Davidson
Daniel Nepstad
Woods Hole Research Center
Box 296
Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543
George M. Woodwell gmwoodwell@whrc.org
w 508 540 9900 x 104 c 508 566 1838
Monday, March 29, 2010
The Two-Degree Fable
The Safety of a Two-degree Tipping Point is a Political Dream
The dream is that we can with safety and confidence allow the average temperature of the earth to rise by two degrees C above the long-term mean. The hypothesis is that (1) we can stop there; and (2) that the changes in the earth will be tolerable, if not minor. I do not know where the two-degree hypothesis was invented but it is a political wish and has no basis at all in biophysical reality.
To think about the issue realistically one must realize that solar energy is received differentially by the earth with the greatest intensity in the tropics and the least in the polar regions. In the tropics most of the energy that is absorbed and not reflected back into space is dissipated into the atmosphere in the latent heat of vaporization: it is absorbed in the evaporation of water, which is abundant in the tropics, and the tropics are not warmed greatly as the heat-trapping gases accumulate in the global atmosphere. The moisture vapor enters the normal circulation patterns of the atmosphere and is carried to the higher latitudes and to higher elevations. Cooled, the vapor condenses and produces rain. In condensing the latent heat of vaporization is released and the region is warmed.
The warming is especially great in the mid- and higher latitudes, 45 degrees north and above. In the northern hemisphere there is much land at these latitudes with much forest and tundra with large stores of carbon in plants, soil and in the peat deposits of the tundra. The change in temperature in these regions is two to four times the average for the earth as a whole. That rise in temperature is confirmed in various ways not the least of which is the melting of the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean now at its lowest level in history.
The result on land is already apparent in the increased frequency of fires and insect damage in the largest forested region in the world, the boreal forest of North America, Europe and Asia. It also appears in the north as the melting of once-permanently frozen ground and the release of carbon as carbon dioxide and methane from such soils and from the accelerated decay of tundra peat.
These transitions in the northern regions are all in the direction of releasing additional carbon from large carbon reservoirs into the atmosphere: positive feedbacks, factors that make the problem worse. Stopping a warming, once underway, becomes increasingly difficult. The assumption that a warming that reaches an average for the earth as a whole of 2 degrees with 6 or more degrees in some sections of the high latitudes is either safe or potentially reversible is a very large and risky assumption, almost certainly incorrect. Taking that risk is little short of foolhardy.
The time to experiment with easy or painless transitions to a carbon-free energy system was forty years past when it became clear that the world was headed for severe climatic disruption. Safety now lies in an abrupt change, an overt abandonment of fossil fuels as the primary energy source for industrialization. We can meet the requirements of the agreement signed and universally ratified in 1992 to stabilize the heat-trapping gas content of the atmosphere substantially immediately and then move to reduce it over the next decades.
The alternative is the potential for an environmental, political, and economic chaos whose seeds are being planted at the moment as persistent devastating droughts on all continents including Australia.
George M. Woodwell, Founder and Director Emeritus
The Woods Hole Research Center
P.O.Box 296
Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543
C 508 566 1838
W 508 444 1504
The dream is that we can with safety and confidence allow the average temperature of the earth to rise by two degrees C above the long-term mean. The hypothesis is that (1) we can stop there; and (2) that the changes in the earth will be tolerable, if not minor. I do not know where the two-degree hypothesis was invented but it is a political wish and has no basis at all in biophysical reality.
To think about the issue realistically one must realize that solar energy is received differentially by the earth with the greatest intensity in the tropics and the least in the polar regions. In the tropics most of the energy that is absorbed and not reflected back into space is dissipated into the atmosphere in the latent heat of vaporization: it is absorbed in the evaporation of water, which is abundant in the tropics, and the tropics are not warmed greatly as the heat-trapping gases accumulate in the global atmosphere. The moisture vapor enters the normal circulation patterns of the atmosphere and is carried to the higher latitudes and to higher elevations. Cooled, the vapor condenses and produces rain. In condensing the latent heat of vaporization is released and the region is warmed.
The warming is especially great in the mid- and higher latitudes, 45 degrees north and above. In the northern hemisphere there is much land at these latitudes with much forest and tundra with large stores of carbon in plants, soil and in the peat deposits of the tundra. The change in temperature in these regions is two to four times the average for the earth as a whole. That rise in temperature is confirmed in various ways not the least of which is the melting of the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean now at its lowest level in history.
The result on land is already apparent in the increased frequency of fires and insect damage in the largest forested region in the world, the boreal forest of North America, Europe and Asia. It also appears in the north as the melting of once-permanently frozen ground and the release of carbon as carbon dioxide and methane from such soils and from the accelerated decay of tundra peat.
These transitions in the northern regions are all in the direction of releasing additional carbon from large carbon reservoirs into the atmosphere: positive feedbacks, factors that make the problem worse. Stopping a warming, once underway, becomes increasingly difficult. The assumption that a warming that reaches an average for the earth as a whole of 2 degrees with 6 or more degrees in some sections of the high latitudes is either safe or potentially reversible is a very large and risky assumption, almost certainly incorrect. Taking that risk is little short of foolhardy.
The time to experiment with easy or painless transitions to a carbon-free energy system was forty years past when it became clear that the world was headed for severe climatic disruption. Safety now lies in an abrupt change, an overt abandonment of fossil fuels as the primary energy source for industrialization. We can meet the requirements of the agreement signed and universally ratified in 1992 to stabilize the heat-trapping gas content of the atmosphere substantially immediately and then move to reduce it over the next decades.
The alternative is the potential for an environmental, political, and economic chaos whose seeds are being planted at the moment as persistent devastating droughts on all continents including Australia.
George M. Woodwell, Founder and Director Emeritus
The Woods Hole Research Center
P.O.Box 296
Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543
C 508 566 1838
W 508 444 1504
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Haiti and The Nature of a House
March 25, 2010
Building a World that Works
Scientists like to gain perspective by pushing trends to the extreme to see the full dimensions of any issue. I have dealt throughout my life with various aspects of biotic impoverishment, causes and extent, and what I thought might be extremes, even end-points. I have dealt personally as an ecologist with agriculture, grazing, forest harvests, toxic substances, chronic mechanical disturbances, effects of ionizing radiation, effects of nuclear weapons, even "nuclear winter", and climatic disruption. In each instance I have looked at extremes, seeking insights as to how to avoid them by early action.
The experience was critical as I began writing about the new campus of the Woods Hole Research Center, where my ecologist colleagues and I tried to bring together the principles we develop in science and to apply them in building a campus as an inspirational example for the new century as we move past the fossil fueled age. To emphasize the imporance of making that transition I sought an example of the endpoint of current trends, where we are headed if we fail to make the change? Haiti stands as the singularly most powerful example of a failed nation in the western world. It is in political, economic, and environmental chaos and has been there, sinking decade by decade into greater depths of poverty through two centuries. There, the honors paid to growth in population and the free market system, led, not to economic nirvana, but to a poverty so severe that here was no hope of recovery without a massive infusion of money and plan from outside the country. Without a working, functional landscape, capable of supplying essential needs such as a reliable water supply, no governement and no economy could stand.
That was all before the earthquake of January, 2010 when Haiti’s miseries were compounded a hundred fold, almost beyond comprehension. And they are not over. Before the earthquake Haiti was in dire trouble and should have had the attention and extraordinary interest and support of all the western nations to restore a landscape, once a tropical dreamland, now barely more than a gravel pile at the mercy of tropical rains. It could, and should, have been a model for the restoration for the world. Now that objective is only more acute, but buried in the continuing emergency of ten million people trying to live on ten thousand square miles of largely mountainous land, virtually totally deforested, eroding and crowded with habitations, many now in ruins.
Haiti must be rescued. It must be rescued immediately from the devastation of January with massive gifts of food and housing, schools and public services. But in the only slightly longer term it must be reconstituted as a functional landscape, capable of supporting a finite population, yet to be determined, indefinitely.
I referred in the book to the Haitian Abyss, an example awaiting an unsuspecting world. The earthquake has brought the seriousness of the Haitian example home to all. We owe it to ourselves, and to the world, to take the example as a lesson and by common will restore that nation to prosperity with an environment that works in support of all, a wholesome and attractive example, a complement to a world in transition to the post-fossil fuel age. It will take imagination, and billions of dollars. But the big new point is that the first steps must be the reconstitution of a functional landscape capable of supporting both an economy and a government. Civilization requires all three. And recovery from the Haitian Abyss will take a monster effort, much money, and years of attention from a coalition of governments, all of whom will benefit from the experience of rebuilding Haiti. It will be tough work but a far, far better investment than war.
GMW
Woods Hole, MA
* G.M. Woodwell. The Nature of a House: Building a World that Works. Island Press. 2009
Building a World that Works
Scientists like to gain perspective by pushing trends to the extreme to see the full dimensions of any issue. I have dealt throughout my life with various aspects of biotic impoverishment, causes and extent, and what I thought might be extremes, even end-points. I have dealt personally as an ecologist with agriculture, grazing, forest harvests, toxic substances, chronic mechanical disturbances, effects of ionizing radiation, effects of nuclear weapons, even "nuclear winter", and climatic disruption. In each instance I have looked at extremes, seeking insights as to how to avoid them by early action.
The experience was critical as I began writing about the new campus of the Woods Hole Research Center, where my ecologist colleagues and I tried to bring together the principles we develop in science and to apply them in building a campus as an inspirational example for the new century as we move past the fossil fueled age. To emphasize the imporance of making that transition I sought an example of the endpoint of current trends, where we are headed if we fail to make the change? Haiti stands as the singularly most powerful example of a failed nation in the western world. It is in political, economic, and environmental chaos and has been there, sinking decade by decade into greater depths of poverty through two centuries. There, the honors paid to growth in population and the free market system, led, not to economic nirvana, but to a poverty so severe that here was no hope of recovery without a massive infusion of money and plan from outside the country. Without a working, functional landscape, capable of supplying essential needs such as a reliable water supply, no governement and no economy could stand.
That was all before the earthquake of January, 2010 when Haiti’s miseries were compounded a hundred fold, almost beyond comprehension. And they are not over. Before the earthquake Haiti was in dire trouble and should have had the attention and extraordinary interest and support of all the western nations to restore a landscape, once a tropical dreamland, now barely more than a gravel pile at the mercy of tropical rains. It could, and should, have been a model for the restoration for the world. Now that objective is only more acute, but buried in the continuing emergency of ten million people trying to live on ten thousand square miles of largely mountainous land, virtually totally deforested, eroding and crowded with habitations, many now in ruins.
Haiti must be rescued. It must be rescued immediately from the devastation of January with massive gifts of food and housing, schools and public services. But in the only slightly longer term it must be reconstituted as a functional landscape, capable of supporting a finite population, yet to be determined, indefinitely.
I referred in the book to the Haitian Abyss, an example awaiting an unsuspecting world. The earthquake has brought the seriousness of the Haitian example home to all. We owe it to ourselves, and to the world, to take the example as a lesson and by common will restore that nation to prosperity with an environment that works in support of all, a wholesome and attractive example, a complement to a world in transition to the post-fossil fuel age. It will take imagination, and billions of dollars. But the big new point is that the first steps must be the reconstitution of a functional landscape capable of supporting both an economy and a government. Civilization requires all three. And recovery from the Haitian Abyss will take a monster effort, much money, and years of attention from a coalition of governments, all of whom will benefit from the experience of rebuilding Haiti. It will be tough work but a far, far better investment than war.
GMW
Woods Hole, MA
* G.M. Woodwell. The Nature of a House: Building a World that Works. Island Press. 2009
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