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Synapsid at 07:11 AM on 14 December 2020Skeptical Science New Research for Week #49, 2020
Two journals to add:
Nature (a weekly)
Nature Geoscience (a monthly)
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nigelj at 05:41 AM on 14 December 2020Climate Change's Cause Confusion
John, MS Sweet
I recall reading some years ago that there is evidence that climate change is already leading to more lightening strikes in some places, and so essentially more forest fires. I did a quick google and found these studies here and here. So I agree you could argue climate change is a direct cause of at least some forest fires.
Of course it might be impossible to say that a specific forest fire was started by a lightening strike that happened because of climate change, but you could say its was xyz probability more likely to have happened due to climate change. And that climate change is causing more forest fires to occur.
That said, most forest fires would be stared by arson or "business as usual" lightning strikes, and climate change is basically making them worse in terms of areas burned. Although warmer conditions might mean dry timber is more likely to catch fire, so I guess you could say climate change is an "indirect cause" of those fires.
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One Planet Only Forever at 04:40 AM on 14 December 2020Climate Change's Cause Confusion
There is an important understanding related to my comment @5.
Regional perceptions of benefits from the rapid human induced climate change should not be allowed to be used to regionally promote rapid human induced climate change as a Good Thing.
The Utilitarian thinking of accounting for Overall Harm and Benefits is dangerous. It can lead to harmful justifications based on perceptions that "Personal benefits, or regional benefits, or benefits for a sub-set of humanity" out-weigh and justify the "Perceptions of harm done by the actions".
People "wanting something" can be very biased in their evaluation of the acceptability of their actions in pursuit of what they want. Like most scientists, as a professional engineer I had to learn to be constantly aware of the danger of "wanting a result" or the harmful threat of ignoring or understating the potential harm of a design result. Very few people actually have that degree of 'training'. Many people are easily impressed to believe that Their Perception of Benefit out-weighs Their Perception of Harm Done when they like or want something.
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One Planet Only Forever at 04:02 AM on 14 December 2020Climate Change's Cause Confusion
The evaluation of direct or indirect 'cause' may not matter.
The real issue is "Harm Done by human activity".
The research appears to support the understanding that "The rapid climate change due to human actions is Increasing Harmful Results in many ways".
And the focus on "Harm Done" can be extended to all the other "Harm Done" by fossil fuel use, especially the harm done by pursuits of wealth from fossil fuel use because, like all other business activity, "It is cheaper to get away with harmful actions. And cheaper and more profitable is more likely to be popular, increasing popular support to resist ending the profitable and popular activity"
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michael sweet at 00:08 AM on 14 December 2020Climate Change's Cause Confusion
John:
I think you have a good point. How do we decide what is a "cause" and what is an inderect cause.
What if a lightning strike ignites a fire in Siberia. 50 years ago that fire might burn out after 10 acres were burned. Today the fires in Siberia are gigantic. Was the gigantic fire caused by climate change since before the change it would not have happened at all? The same is true in Australia, California and other locations worldwide. The gigantic fires have no precedent.
It seems to me that the claim that gigantic fires are caused by climate change stands even though the initial fire was ignited by lightning (or more often ignited by humans).
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John Hartz at 07:12 AM on 13 December 2020Climate Change's Cause Confusion
Doug: A lot hinges on how one defines the word, "cause" and whether one has used the adjectives "direct" and "indirect" to motify the word "cause."
For example, I believe a fairly good argument could be made that a California wildfire started by a bolt of lightening from a massive T-storm could have been indirectly cused by dlimate change. (All weather occurs in the ambient climate sysem.) It would be much more dificult to argue that the wildfire was directly caused by climate change. This dinstinction is, in my mind, similar to the distinction made between "primary" and "secondary" environmnetal impacts as determined in an Environmental Impact Statement say for the construciton of a new highway.
On the other hand, I may be "over thinking" this issue. :)
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Doug Bostrom at 05:22 AM on 13 December 2020Climate Change's Cause Confusion
Per Nigel's remark, a sampling of our imperfect tracking of research output on this, from this year alone:
- Vegetation response to wildfire and climate forcing in a Rocky Mountain lodgepole pine forest over the past 2500 years
- Climate change significantly alters future wildfire mitigation opportunities in southeastern Australia
- Past variance and future projections of the environmental conditions driving western U.S. summertime wildfire burn area
- Wildfire risk science facilitates adaptation of fire-prone social-ecological systems to the new fire reality
- Large wildfires in the western US exacerbated by tropospheric drying linked to a multi‐decadal trend in the expansion of the Hadley circulation
- Climate change is increasing the likelihood of extreme autumn wildfire conditions across California
- Increasing concurrence of wildfire drivers tripled megafire critical danger days in Southern California between1982 and 2018
- Applying intersectionality to climate hazards
- Projected Changes in Reference Evapotranspiration in California and Nevada
- Assessing Climate Change Impacts on Live Fuel Moisture and Wildfire Risk Using a Hydrodynamic Vegetation Model
- The Australian wildfires from a systems dependency perspective
So yeah, climate affects wildfires. And it does seem true: if all the signals from science are "wildfire is affected by climate" yet it's a common misunderstanding that climate isn't related, there must be a reason for that.
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nigelj at 05:54 AM on 12 December 2020Climate Change's Cause Confusion
How hard can it be to see that climate change doesn't cause forest fires, but makes them worse? Virtually anyone should be able to understand this. The cause confusion people have mostly looks deliberate to me. Anything to avoid confronting reality.
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Bob Loblaw at 10:37 AM on 6 December 2020Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volumes Video - 2020 edition
Wilt:
Regarding your first point, keep i mind that large bodies of water in the Northern hemisphere, such as Hudson's Bay and the Great Lakes, already go through seasonal cycles from ice-free to substatially ice-covered. Even an "ice-free" Arctic Ocean will have a lot of ice for a lot of the year.
https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/ice/#historical
Yes, penetration of solar radiation into open water is a primary mechanism of feedback for additional warming. Maximum solar radaiation is on June 21, though - not in September when the ice minimum will (most likely continue to) occur.
As for point #2: RealCimate has freqently dicussed the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and it's potential climate effects. A search there for AMOC turns up several posts over the years. The most recent one is:
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wilt at 07:12 AM on 5 December 2020Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volumes Video - 2020 edition
Thanks for the thoughtful responses my catastrophic thinking. 2 things are still stuck in my brain though.
I recall it pointed out somewhere that at some point on the progression to zero summer ice it is likely to reach the point of a reduced enough ice cover to quickly and dramatically raise arctic temperatures by exposing enough uncovered ocean to sunlight which absorbs 10 times the heat of ice thus rapidly melting much more ice until the sun gets far enough south to let it grow again. That would probably begin a viscous cycle of rapidly increasing ice free periods, and probably start well before the zero September ice that the current progression indicates would be at a maximum of 12 years from now.
#2 A small enough amount of summer ice would likely stop amoc as the large variability displayed in the following chart seems to indicate is very possible; "Full array OSNAP east OSNAP west" chart, (the chart is about 3/4 of the way down this page): https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-study-uncovers-sea-change-in-worlds-understanding-of-atlantic-conveyor-belt.
Perhaps a complete ice free bit in the summer and its resultant halt of the primary driver of amoc would not disrupt amoc significantly or permanently, but it would seem likely that as the ice free periods extended it would.
So it would seem likely that in twelve years give or take we could be seeing a collapse of amoc and the resultant (by everyones descriptions of what a halted amoc would cause) catastrophe.
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Joel_Huberman at 00:54 AM on 5 December 2020How declining ice in clouds makes high ‘climate sensitivity’ plausible
Thanks for your interesting, clear explanation!
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MA Rodger at 06:52 AM on 4 December 2020CO2 measurements are suspect
Ken the Bear @94,
I don't think the drop in emissions from Covid will be anyway near enough to register a change that will be noticed in the Keeling Curve.
Recent annual CO2 increases measured at MLO as measured by ESRL run 2010-19 +2.32ppm, +1.91ppm, +2.61ppm, +2.01ppm, +2.20ppm, +2.95ppm, +3.01ppm, +1.90ppm, +2.86ppm, +2.46ppm. Those numbers have a 90% range of +/-0.8ppm. It seems most folk are still awaiting better understanding of the effect of Covid on emissions before making an assessment on the matter but one estimate of the drop in rising CO2 levels due to Covid has been given as between 0.08ppm & 0.23ppm. So not enough to make a noticeable dent.
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Ken The Bear at 06:11 AM on 4 December 2020CO2 measurements are suspect
When should we expect to see the global downturn in carbon emissions register on the Keeling Curve?
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Rob Honeycutt at 13:11 PM on 3 December 2020Fighting climate change: Cheaper than 'business as usual' and better for the economy
Another coming element to battery storage is going to be second-life EV batteries. Once these are depleted to the point where they aren't useful in a vehicle, there is a very long second life for them on the grid.
It also deserves mentioning that not all the FF sources of energy on the grid coming in at levelized costs. Peaker plants will often run only a few days a year and their cost of energy is pretty high.
There are many more complex elements to this topic than Steve seems to be aware of.
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Doug Bostrom at 07:24 AM on 3 December 2020Skeptical Science New Research for Week #48, 2020
Thanks Dawei. For some reason URLs from AMS were truncated in RSS feed. - I'd better recheck all of 'em.
Article name URL is preserved for purpose of recording details of original provenance. At least we now know that the DOI scheme for long term access works. :-)
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nigelj at 06:12 AM on 3 December 2020Fighting climate change: Cheaper than 'business as usual' and better for the economy
Yes the criticisms of the article by Steve 1) dont demonstrate that the issues he raises aren't already allowed for in the analysis and 2) dont provide any other actual research information. Its fair to say wind and solar power do rely on storage, but costs of storage are dropping fast. The sceptics just dont keep up with this.
My understanding is for storage to be fully economic it needs to be about $20 kwhr and lithium is up around $150 kwhr presently (its expected to drop further). But someone called engineer poet recently mentioned sulphur flow batteries, and I just googled them, and they are around $20 kwhr right now. This makes them very economically viable for up to about one days storage at least and of course costs would drop further if they are scaled up. I dont have time to dig into more detail around the storage issue, but heres the commentary on the batteries.
In addition solar power is now so cheap you can over build the resource to deal with intermittency issues as well as using some storage.
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Dawei at 06:05 AM on 3 December 2020Skeptical Science New Research for Week #48, 2020
The link for Changes in Observed Daily Precipitation over Global Land Areas since 1950 is broken, but the DOI link works.
Maybe the URL behind the paper title should just be the DOI URL? :) -
Bob Loblaw at 00:19 AM on 3 December 2020Fighting climate change: Cheaper than 'business as usual' and better for the economy
It is easy to note that SteveW does not cite a single source to support any of his assertions. It's the usual "it isn't happening, it's natural, it's not bad, it will cost too much" diatribe.
The "Most Used Climate Myths" section on the upper left of the SkS web page will lead people to information on each of the myths that are imbedded in SteveW's assertions. I wonder how SteveW missed that?
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SteveW at 23:44 PM on 2 December 2020Fighting climate change: Cheaper than 'business as usual' and better for the economy
This article is a laughable mishmash of disinformation. To cite a few:The "levelized" costs referenced do not include most costs needed to integrate solar or wind power into an industrial economy such as transmission costs and storage needed to ensure baseload power during times these variable source of electricity just don't work. These actual very real costs can and do easily exceed the costs included. The supposed "savings" from limiting temperature rise, even if such a thing were possible, are illusory. One can easily find that there has been NO increase in hurricane, flooding, fires or extreme weather events over the last 50 years so all the tremendous "costs" these flawed analysis attribute to "curing" this mirage will be nonexistent.
Basically the article prevaricates in the interest of supporting an unsupportable narrative and this should tell you all you need to know about how much "prrof" exists supporting these savings! The authors can make all the scary maps they choose showing half the country in a fiery red color but that doesn't change the facts that there are very little downside to a slightly warming climate but that there are numerous benefits. Interesting isn't it that they completely fail to add in the "negative damages" (normally called benefits) that even their flawed charts show much of the country to be "suffering"? Wonder how they missed this point?
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Sloganeering and off-topic snipped.
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Gerard.Bisshop at 16:28 PM on 30 November 2020CO2 emissions do not correlate with CO2 concentration
Sorry MA Rodger, I just did the sums on the remaining fraction loss for this and previous years and it is as you said in your earlier post - the remaining fraction adds up to be (1-) the sum of losses in all previous emission years - problem solved!
thanks for your help.
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Gerard.Bisshop at 12:31 PM on 30 November 2020CO2 emissions do not correlate with CO2 concentration
Thankyou MA Rodger for your time responding to this query, it's greatly appreciated.
I have a follow on question. Regarding the influence of size of emission on the CO2 response function, it appears from Figure 7 of Joos et al 2013 that a pulse equivalent to one year's emissions follows a very similar path to the 10 year equivalent pulse above (at least for the first decade or so), indicating that the remaining fraction from the pulse is close to 100% (maybe 90%) in the first year after emission.
As time goes by, the CO2 pulse removal from the atmosphere slows. So in the initial decade, almost 40% is removed, and in the 9th decade, only a few % are removed. So a cumulative removal curve of all previous years would be more heavily influenced by removal of recent emissions.
Which brings me to my question - given that Joos et al 2013 shows removal of recent emissions to be less than 10% in the first year, and in subsequent years removal drops at a lesser rate, I can only conclude that all the CO2 response functions start with the pulse already-discounted by the airborne fraction.
Obviously, this is not an issue for climate models, that deal only in atmospheric concentrations, and from what I can make out, the IPCC representative pathways that link emissions with future warming also use response function equations something like Joos et al 2013, that do not seem to discount emissions, but deal in atmospheric concentrations.
I'm sorry to labour this, and there may be a simple explanation, but I am struggling to find it, and it seems critical to my understanding the relationship between CO2 and other gases.
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MA Rodger at 17:35 PM on 28 November 2020Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volumes Video - 2020 edition
Wilt @2&3,
While we should not be surprised by the appearance of sub-million sq km Arctic Sea Ice minimums (=ice-free) starting sometime in the 2030s (& there has been a fair old kerfuffle with folk suggesting it could be sooner), the usual concern of ice melt and the AMOC is the melt run-off from Greenland which has increased by perhaps 30% in recent decades. (Note this is the increase in gross run-off. The net ice loss (run-off minus snowfall are the more dramatic values we usually see.)
The increased Greenland melt very roughly results in an extra 300Gt of cold fresh water discharged into the oceans which is a tiny change when compared to the 15,000Gt of cold fresh water resulting from the annual melt of the northern sea ice, a level of annual melt that has remained unchanged over the last 40 years. And the arrival of an ice-free summer minimums Arctic Ocean won't immediately change that 15,000Gt melt cycle, not until the arrival of an ice-free Arctic Ocean in the early summer and through to the autumn.
While the AMOC is driven in the most fundamental way by the freezing polar temperatures, its sensitivity to changes in salinity and these cold fresh water inflows is quite local and the Greenland discharge into Labrador & Nordic Seas is the very point of sensitivity.
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Bob Loblaw at 08:48 AM on 28 November 2020Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volumes Video - 2020 edition
Wilt:
Forecasting the "end of ice" is not that simple, and a linear extrapolation is probably not realistic. And although reaching that summer ice-free point will be major, I'd hesitate to call it "catastrophic".
What is your definition of "catastrophic"?
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wilt at 06:49 AM on 28 November 2020Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volumes Video - 2020 edition
PS: Just to be clear, I meant why is this not talked about in the media, not in the above presentation.
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wilt at 06:27 AM on 28 November 2020Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volumes Video - 2020 edition
Am I missing something on this? If you extend that line out there would be zero summer ice in about twelve years. As near as I can tell from a quick search, the arctic ice is assumed to be the major driver of the ocean conveyor belt (which is already slowing down). It would seem then that in twelve years or probably less would be global catastrophic climate change. If so why is this not talked about?
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Wol at 18:10 PM on 26 November 2020Gas-powered cars: Beginning of the end in California?
>>Still, the executive order only sets goals for 2035 and 2045. And it will still allow people to drive gas-powered automobiles after 2035, and also sell used ones. In other words, internal combustion engines aren’t disappearing anytime soon after 2035.<<
...but just where is the gas coming from? After the tipping point most gas stations will be non- viable after a year or two through lack of customers and it will then be the ICE cars' drivers looking for fuel - ironically the issue supposedly a problem now for EVs!
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alan northcutt at 02:00 AM on 26 November 2020Gas-powered cars: Beginning of the end in California?
As someone who has been driving an EV for about 4 years now (Bolt & Model 3) I think its a myth that EVs are too expensive. With federal and state incentives, one can purchase a new Mini Cooper for around $20K, a Leaf for about $22K and a crossover Kia Niro for around $30K. And the new Chinese Kandi will start in the US for around $12K after tax credit. Although policy is more important than individual action, I think individuals who care about climate should drive electric if possible. Of course mass transit is preferable, but many areas, like here in Texas, have minimal mass transit.
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One Planet Only Forever at 02:43 AM on 25 November 2020Gas-powered cars: Beginning of the end in California?
GM has just reversed its previous opposition to the California initiative.
"GM Stops Backing Trump Administration in Emissions Fight With California" - WSJ
One of the nastiest things humans develop is sub-groups pursuing power through Fascist Politics, like the Republican Party do. The power of fascist politics to harm Others was probably a major factor in the original GM decision. Not only could GM investors benefit from not having to rapidly change its production, GM could avoid the harmful wrath of the powerful likes of Trump.
"How Fascism Works" by Jason Stanley, is a comprehensive presentation of the political influence mechanisms that can be employed by harmful pursuers of Power. And many of the mechanisms can be seen to be employed by people opposed to Climate Science and the related understanding of the need to rapidly end the global use of fossil fuels, especially the opposition to the expectation that the largest beneficiaries from fossil fuel use lead the rapid transition from fossil fuel use and help the less fortunate deal with harm that has already been done and help them improve their lives with the least possible use of fossil fuels as a temporary transition to sustainable improved living.
As stated in the "2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #47" - Editor's Choice article there has been an extensive and diverse history of 'market failures' that 'improvements of the system' would help limit. The catch is that the problem is more than the economic system. A major part of the problem is the social-political environment that the economic system operates in. Changing the Social-political environment is what is required.
The harm done by competition for status in a materialism consumerism focused market driven by popularity and profit is a result of the developed sociopolitical systems. The type of sociopolitical system matters the most when it comes to getting helpful results out of the economic system.
Keeping harmful results from being produced by the economic system requires Governing to limit what is allowed to compete. The evidence appears to indicate that 'harmful unsustainable activity' has a competitive advantage if it can be gotten away with (it is easier and cheaper than the alternatives). And getting away with harm requires the harm to be hidden, or be ignored, or be dismissed, or have people pointing it out be discredited ... all to develop and maintain perceptions of, or opportunity for, higher status relative to Others. And higher status relative to Others can be harmfully pursued by "Fascist politics".
People fighting for Climate Action are fighting to reduce the harm done by pursuers of Personal Benefit who do not care if they are harmful to Others. The proponents of the need to rapidly end the use of fossil fuels need to also help rapidly end the success of harmful pursuits of power and status by groups that want Superiority over Others, especially when those groups use fascist politics - groups using fascist politics will claim 'to be the victim' of limits to harm done.
Harm Done never justifies Personal Benefits Obtained no matter what non-sense the harmful pursuers of Impressions of Superiority claim. The development of evidence-based constantly improving Common Sense understanding to end harm being done and improve helpful actions is the way to develop a lasting improving future for humanity. Try to keep that 'Top of Mind' is the massive deluge of non-sense messing-up pursuits of understanding what is going on.
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John Hartz at 06:39 AM on 20 November 2020Human Fingerprints on Climate Change Rule Out Natural Cycles
In the context of the OP, would it appropriate to include Catastrophic Weather Events as an Indicator of the Human Fingerprint of Climate Change? Ditto for the Melting Cyrosphere.
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GwsB at 20:30 PM on 19 November 2020The harmful impacts of climate change outweigh any benefits
This post hits the nail on its head. Climate change will alter the environment in which we live. We have geared our civilizations to take advantage of the fairly constant climate as it has existed over the past thousand years. It will be a huge and very costly upheaval to adapt to the new climate. The harm far outweighs any benefits even for cold countries like Russia and Canada. Anyway, if we persist, there is no new climate. Upheavals will become the new normal.
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knox kp at 09:26 AM on 19 November 2020Human Fingerprints on Climate Change Rule Out Natural Cycles
Towards the end of the '90's, the idea that maybe scientists were unawares of what constituted the planet's natural cycles over Earth's long history occurred to me, so I went looking, and quickly found something that answered my questions/doubts: paleoclimatology.
So this latest nonsense was in the ether, as it were, more than twenty years ago - so tired of going backwards, discussing the same things agaian and again - don't see the advantage to any but the already wealthy.
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MA Rodger at 02:21 AM on 19 November 2020Human Fingerprints on Climate Change Rule Out Natural Cycles
Wol @1,
The 'many thousands' of ppm CO2 in the distant past do make for a pretty powerful message. Of course, as you say, it is not inconsistent with the same science that says AGW will be a problem at 'several hundred' ppm CO2. The IPCC scenario RCP6.0 is so-named because by 2100AD it will have provided a climate forcing of 6W/m^2.
And while the CO2 levels were indeed up at perhaps 2000ppm 200My ago and perhaps even 6000ppm 500My ago, the sun was weaker back then and the CO2 effect is logarithmic, so the resulting climate forcing those hundreds-of-millions of years ago was less than the forcing we are set to deliver over the next 100 years. (The SkS post 'Do high levels of CO2 in the past contradict the warming effect of CO2' presents this graphically.)
And the SkS post doesn't account for the changing geography of the planet which is alos a big factor. CO2 hasn't been anything like todays' level for 3 million years, back when N & S America were yet to join together. And to find CO2 higher than today, it is 13 million years ago when the Himalayas were still being formed.
The denialist will push simple stuff (like CO2 was once thousands of ppm) but they tend not to be well versed in the full story - because if they were, they wouldn't be deniers.
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Wol at 16:32 PM on 18 November 2020Human Fingerprints on Climate Change Rule Out Natural Cycles
What always bugs me is when deniers say that xx Million years ago the CO2 was yyy and the temperature was ZZZ and THEREFORE blah blah blah so we cannot believe the scientists.
When it's pointed out that unless they have some unknown source for their figures they come from SCIENCE - the very same SCIENCE that they won't believ - as usual they change the subject to another myth.
Can't win.
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RedBaron at 00:58 AM on 16 November 2020How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
@5Ugern,
I am a big fan of project Drawdown in general, but there are some flaws in that analysis.
The biggest flaw is in claiming the top two drivers of rainforest deforestation is beef and soy used for other meat production. Well this analysis isn't precisely wrong per se, but as I mentioned above the elephant in the room is the over-production of corn and soy. They are #2 and #3 by the way. Number one is timber. ;-) But they could be considered the #1 and #2 reasons why they don't immediately replant after timbering.
Reducing meat consumption only means more production of corn and soy for biofuels, and the rainforests continue to fall. The real problem is the prime grasslands that could and should be producing forage for animals and a whole host of biology are largely already in commodity crop production, and not being grazed by animals. The industrialised system is NOT land efficient, it is labor efficient. This makes a huge difference and needs to be addressed or we will get nowhere.
“As the small trickle of results grows into an avalanche — as is now happening overseas — it will soon be realized that the animal is our farming partner and no practice and no knowledge which ignores this fact will contribute anything to human welfare or indeed will have any chance either of usefulness or of survival.” Sir Albert Howard
Until we return the animals to the land where they belong, and eliminate the current industrialised agricultural paradigm, we will get nowhere in our fight against AGW or a whole host of other environmental and health issues. Yes I said health too, because those health outcomes you mentioned all used industrialised meat in their studies. Properly raised food on the land, including animals, have never been shown to be unhealthy, quite the contrary. Greener Pastures: How grass-fed beef and dairy contribute to healthy eating
Learn more about it here Welcome to the Future of Agriculture
Reducing meat production in the industrialized system will have little to no effect on rainforest deforestation, because other industrialized uses for that overproduction will instantly take up any gains made there. This so called "solution" is a false hope. It does not adress the main problem, which the Father of Organic agriculture Sir Albert Howard correctly foresaw so many years ago.
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nigelj at 18:52 PM on 15 November 2020How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
Jef asserts: "Eating meat and dairy is by far the most nutritional elements to a diet you can do. To get all of what a meat and dairy dite provides otherwise in out of reach for the poorer half of the world population."
In other words a vegetarian diet is allegedly more expensive than a meat based diet.
This does not appear to be correct. Studies show a vegetarian diet is cheaper then a standard meat based diet as below. I just googled this quickly at random to get a feel for it. However it is fair to say it depends a lot on exactly what ingredients you use. Diets heavy in nuts could get expensive.
medicalxpress.com/news/2018-05-vegetarian-diet-good-youit.html
www.takepart.com/article/2015/10/12/vegetarian-diet-savings
I decided to also check this for New Zealand, out of interest. All prices per kilogram: Beef mince $16.00, Chicken thighs $13.00, fish $35.00 fresh, Fish $15.00 canned, rice $3.50, potato $3.00, Beans $3.00, carrots $4.00. Beef and chicken contain about 350 grams protein per 1kilo. Fish contains about 350 grams protein per 1 kilo fish. Beans contain about 200 grams protein per 1 kilo. I've ignored dairy for the sake of simplicity. It is not an essential in a diet. I've just chosen some key foods to get a rough first approximation of the issue.
It's clear that grains and vegetables are much cheaper than meat. Its clear that substituting canned fish and and equal quantity of beans for meat works out cheaper than meat alone. I'm assuming a vegetarian diet that combines fish and beans as a source of protein, for the sake of argument. I assume you would also need some multi vitamin supplements, but the cost per day is insignificant. The conclusion is a vegetarian diet is cheaper than a traditional meat based diet where I live, although not hugely cheaper.
However there are many things to consider. I'm not promoting a vegetarian diet as such, I just wanted the facts. FWIW I think a low meat diet makes sense with the rest of your protein from fish plus beans etcetera.
"It is all about how the animals are raised. Concentrated industrial livestock production is neither healthy for people or the planet and only serves to enrich a small handful of individuals."
Agreed, but its tricky because organic types of farming are currently typically 47% more expensive than traditional as below, particularly meat production. That is the hard reality. But as these farms scale up I would expect prices to drop.
www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2015/03/cost-of-organic-food/index.htm
Ultimately we have to transition from industrial agriculture to something organic with less tilling, and much less use of industrial pesticides or we are going to really seriously undermine the biosphere, but it probably has to be a phased transition so that people can absorb the costs.
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ungern at 16:17 PM on 15 November 2020How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
I don't disagree with the fact that animal agriculture is not the largest producer of greenhouse gases as this article rightly points out. However, in terms of solutions to reduce global CO2 equivalent levels to what is needed to stay below 1.5degC IPCC target, animal agriculture plays a larger role than it appears at first (and second) glance.
Project Drawdown (https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions) has a detailed list of well researched and vetted solutions to meet the IPCC 1.5 degC target ranked in order of gigatons of CO2 equivalent reduction. Fourth on the list is plant-rich diet yielding 92 gigatons CO2 reduction out of a total reduction target of 1576 gigatons (by 2050). Sixth on the list is tropical rainforest restoration yielding 85 gigatons.
The 4th and 6th ranked solutions happen to be closely related. The largest driver of deforestation of tropical forests is related to industrial animal agriculture; beef production and soybean production used mainly for livestock feed, rank 1 and 2, respectively, as drivers of deforestation (https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/summer-2018/articles/what-are-the-biggest-drivers-of-tropical-deforestation).
Taken together, plant-based diet and the resultant reduction of the main driver of rainforest deforestation combine to top the list of solutions proposed by Project Drawdown with a combined reduction of 177 gigatons of CO2 equivalent. Of course, 177 gigatons reduction is only a tenth of what is needed in total, but unlike revamping the electrical generation system, the transportation systems or industrial process, often individuals can move toward a plant-based diet and policies can be enacted to encourage it with near term results.
I disagree with the conclusion that going vegan is the easiest thing one as an individual can do to lower their impact on global emissions is not worthy of recommendation. Of course, there will be exceptions depending on individual and regional situations, but as a general rule, policies that encourage plant-based diets should be strongly supported as this represents upwards of 10% of the overall solution to reach IPCC targets. It is also in many cases the simplest step individuals can take to make meaningful strides in reducing atmospheric CO2 equivalent.
In addition, from a health perspective, plant-based diet is consistently shown to produce better health outcomes (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26853923/) which can be an indirect help in this struggle.
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jef12506 at 11:28 AM on 15 November 2020How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
Eating meat and dairy is by far the most nutritional elements to a diet you can do. To get all of what a meat and dairy dite provides otherwise in out of reach for the poorer half of the world population.
It is all about how the animals are raised. Concentrated industrial livestock production is neither healthy for people or the planet and only serves to enrich a small handful of individuals.
Safe, sound and humaine animal husbandry will provide the world with fulfilling jobs and complete nutrition.
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John Hartz at 09:44 AM on 15 November 20202020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
Jonas: Thanks for catching this glitch and for providing the correct url. The OP has been fixed. Also, thank you for being a loyal follower of this series.
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RedBaron at 07:40 AM on 15 November 2020How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
Sorry the typos
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RedBaron at 07:39 AM on 15 November 2020How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
Worse yet, both actually omit the methane cycle, ie Methanotroph activity, but counting only emissions there too.
You could draw an almost identical graph as the one showing the CO2 cycle including both plants and animals, and simply adjust this by substituting CH4 for CO2 and Methanotrophs for plants. (the numbers vary, but the cycle is very similar)
Any analysis of methane emissions that omits methanotrophs is just as misleading as any analysis of CO2 emissions that omits plants.
Couting natural emissions only give misleading
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Jonas at 06:20 AM on 15 November 20202020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
Hi John, the Link "20 climate change documentaries you need to watch because this planet is NOT fine" from Monday does not work. It should probably point to https://sea.mashable.com/social-good/13137/20-climate-change-documentaries-you-need-to-watch-because-this-planet-is-not-fine
Using the opportunity to thank you and the whole SkS team too, again: I regularly read the news roundup and more of SkS and share parts of it to my own (small) multiplication channels.
Greetings,
Jonas -
Alan Russell at 23:59 PM on 14 November 2020How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
I'm glad to see this article but I think you should reconsider your reference to Poore & Nemecek in the link posted above (LINK).
I applaud Poore and Nemecek for their efforts to collate and present this information but I believe that any study that uses 100 year emission factors for methane and does not account for the carbon sequestration potential of grazing land (using the best available current evidence) should not be cited without review and correction. Note that accounting for methane GWP correctly, and modelling livestock grazing using best practice (the Savory Institute and Regeneration International have good information on this) wouldn't just change the picture slightly, they would be likely to change the representation of livestock farming into a carbon sink. From review of Poore and Nemecek's Science article that the data has been taken from, you can see in the Erratum that they originally had underestimated the carbon sink potential for land not used for food, but neither in the report, nor the Erratum have they noted the carbon sink potential for grazing land. This is probably mostly because the study is a meta-analysis and understanding of soil microbiology has advanced in recent years so findings based on meta-analyses of outdated information are unlikely to reflect the best of evidence.
On the representation of methane GWP, methane has a half-life in the atmosphere of about 10 years, so if cattle herd sizes remain the same over the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere they will maintain the same amount of additional methane in the atmosphere year on year. In terms of their contribution to warming, this, in a very simplistic sense, is equivalent to a closed power station (LINK, LINK). Note that the number of cattle in Europe and North America is actually lower than it was in the 1960's whilst India has fewer cattle than it did in the 1980s, LINK, so their associated methane emissions have actually dropped. I put the misrepresentation of methane GWP down to laziness - it's much easier to apply a single figure per head of cattle than to look at how herd size has changed over time.
Moderator Response:[RH] Shortened and activated links.
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brnielsen at 13:57 PM on 14 November 2020What did 1970’s climate science actually say?
It is interesting to note the reduction in aerosols correlates to 1980 and beyond, as this is the area where warming effects, such as sea level rise, have accelerated. What I have noticed in reporting on climate (such as CSIRO state of the climate reports, 2010 to 2020) is the use of number of record temperature days, rather than warming per se, presumably to highlight the changes. I find this interesting, as that metric would seem to relate more to change in cloud cover, than radiative heat transfer caused by GHGs.
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nigelj at 07:18 AM on 14 November 2020What did 1970’s climate science actually say?
Nick Palmer makes a some good points. I regulary come across the terminology "scientists say this" or "experts say this" in all sorts of discussions, and not just on climate. The terminology doesnt say some scientists say this or most scientists say this so its ambiguous. It doesnt lie by claiming all or most scientists say this when they dont, but the denialists are probably hoping it leaves the impression all or most scientists are saying this. Its a tactic regularly used by all sorts of lobby groups in my experience. They obviously dont want to get caught out in an obvious lie and get challenged or sued so they do the next best thing, they create an impression.
And thats the thing. I would say most of the hard core, regular denialists are linked to lobby groups and are quite unscrupulous in what they say for whatever reasons, perhaps because their pay cheque depends on it, or they are sociopaths or libertarian fanatics.
I agree it is not whether warm or cold climates are dangerous. They both cause problems. The real problem is a rapid shift to a new form of climate that is so fast adaptation becomes very difficult, perhaps impossible.
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Nick Palmer at 23:10 PM on 13 November 2020What did 1970’s climate science actually say?
Norm Rubin @2 Both an 'ice age' or unmitigated anthropogenic global warming would be dangerous for civilisation but in different ways. Our civilisation, and the ecosystems, agricultural zones etc we depend on 'evolved' and grew up due to the relatively stable temperatures we've had for 100s of thousands of years+.
Any significant departure from that 'Goldilocks zone' either way is likely to be very risky -
Norm Rubin at 22:45 PM on 13 November 2020What did 1970’s climate science actually say?
For this MIT-graduate retired environmentalist who lived through the popular 1970s global cooling scare, there are several powerful lessons from that experience that are not addressed or debunked by this essay, or elsewhere on this site AFAICS. Among them the most troubling for motivating a political consensus for strong action now is probably the fact that the experts whose cooling fears were amplified by the press in the 70s (primarily Ehrlich, Holdren, and Schneider, according to my admittedly aging memory) seemed so convinced that lower average temperatures were strongly correlated with "scarier" and more deadly weather conditions, while the previous unusually warm period was unusually benign. Of course today's popular and press and political narrative justifying strong and urgent climate action is widely associated with the exact opposite correlation - that we have lived through a long period of unusually benign weather because it has been unusually cool, and that a relatively small amount of global average warming - too small for most "normal people" to notice as increased warmth - will necessarily bring a very significant increase in "scary" deadly weather conditions.
At least on the High School Science level on which most people and media and politicians (and striking students) seem to operate, there seems to be a choice between those two correlations: EITHER warm average temperatures are benign and falling temperatures threaten the world with scarier weather, OR cool temperatures are benign and rising temperatures threaten the world with scarier weather. But it seems unlikely that both are true.
I think it is also as true today as it was in the 70s that political action in the world's democracies is much more powerfully influenced by the press and politicians and the testimony of leading (=~ famous) scientists' sworn testimony to government committees than by the counting of peer-reviewed journal articles. Indeed, since virtually none of us is obviously capable of distinguishing between the roughly 50% of peer-reviewed articles that will eventually be proven false and the half that will be proven true, it seems that we must all rely heavily on the opinions of experts and "opinion leaders" on most complex policy issues.
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Nick Palmer at 22:23 PM on 13 November 2020What did 1970’s climate science actually say?
As any one will find out when dealing with 'hard core' deniers (as opposed to the gullible majority of 'sceptics'), who repeatedly post the same misinformation even after having been corrected multiple times, it's hard not to be driven to the conclusion that they are actually deliberately using deceit and insinuation to drive their readers to certain conclusions.
In this case the desired conclusion they want their audiences to jump to is that if scientists changed their mind once before, then it's unsafe to rely on what they are saying now, particulary about science based policy that is being planned to globally make big changes.
The insinuation and deceit is in how they frame their assertion. It uses a form of the 'magnified minority' technique (here's John Cook Tweeting about it twitter.com/johnfocook/status/1314301046756384794)
The misleader will say or write something like this
'but, but, but scientists predicted an ice age in the 70s - it was in Time and Newsweek - now they've changed their minds, so how can we trust them now?'
The thing about this deceit, like the best propaganda, is that it's technically true but rests upon the ambiguities of language to mislead.
The nitty gritty of the deceit is that the word "scientist's" can be taken to mean all scientists or as few as two. It gives no idea of the relative numbers, yet the insinuation in the 'imminent ice age' meme is that all, or the majority of, scientists supported the hypothesis.
The mention of the Time and Newsweek articles, which the public are infinitely more likely to remember and be far more familiar with than the consensus scientific view in the literature at the time, is highly likely to tip the undecided 'quantum state' of the public's appreciation of the topic towards their accepting that the scientific consensus back then was different to what it actually was... -
adrian at 01:48 AM on 12 November 2020Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA
There seems to be two charts missing: CO2 emissions and transport emissions
Moderator Response:[DB] Fixed.
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factotum at 06:01 AM on 11 November 20202020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #45
Given the topic this week, I do not think that this is off topic, though it is kind of political:
Not quite like I thought but really close.3.5M so Not over 4M popular vote margin
Here if Forbes betting on electoral vote result
Total electoral votes for Joe Biden
Over 310.5: -150
Under 310.5: +110
And indeed most predictions were well over 310. So when Pennsylvania comes in and Biden wins at 290 then my (well the great spirits really -— I am but a conduit via my aspergers pattern recognition) prediction of over 300 will turn out to be one of the most accurate of the night :-) I am, of course not unique, -— here is a site with a list of predictions. Note that if you split the tossups, almost all Biden predictions are well over 310 :-)
https://www.ajc.com/politics/election-projections-with-14-days-left-trump-gets-a-little-bump/B6GTZN3F7FC2VI4DAIOTJHXHZA/
The great spirit who moves through all things knows all, sees all. :-)
On 11/2/20 11:50 AM, Doug Nusbaum wrote:
>
> "The Great Spirit Who Move Through All Things" (TGS) Wishes to advise you of the following:
>
> Stupid is inconvenient, TERMINAL Stupid kills!!!
>
> You have been acting in a manner that is terminally stupid, absolutely refusing to learn from new things that NATURE (As in "Nature can not be fooled" -— R Feynman) shows you like a changing climate. Nature decided to present you with what she calls symptoms of what this could lead to. Hence Donald Trump, who better than almost anyone on the planet, is an avatar of stupid.
>
> Then rather than simply remove him with, say a terminal stroke (caused by "the deep state"), she then gave you COVID-19 so that the evidence of his and your terminal stupidity would be clear and unavoidable, and you would act appropriately. And she will make sure that the message that you send is unassailable by giving to Biden a margin Victory of over 300 votes in the electoral college, as well as a popular vote margin of over 4M votes.
>
> Douglas Nusbaum
>
> A conduit :-)Moderator Response:[DB] Too far off-topic and too-political.
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RedBaron at 10:57 AM on 10 November 2020New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
@51 Phillip,
Your new question:
"is it possible to integrate in any sustainable fashion the roughly 1 billion heads of cattle (estimates vary) we have right now in a holistic agricultural management model?"
The answer is yes.
The industrial model is labor efficient, not land efficient. Holistic management has shown to be land efficient. So land efficient in fact that we will even have the possibility of first reversing desertification then potentially rewilding large areas of degraded land.
However, the elephant in the room is corn/soy. The over-production of corn and soy will need to stop. The land to be restored to grazing needs to be non-human food use commodity crops like corn/soy for biofuels and CAFO feeds, not forests.
Currently any reductions in corn use for animal feeds is immediately picked up for biofuels and other industrialized uses, rather that actually giving the land the rest it needs to recover.\
Scientific America had an interesting article about this:
Fertilizer Runoff Overwhelms Streams and Rivers--Creating Vast "Dead Zones"
The nation's waterways are brimming with excess nitrogen from fertilizer--and plans to boost biofuel production threaten to aggravate an already serious situationBy David Biello on March 14, 2008
"Christopher Kucharik of the University of Wisconsin–Madison predict that nitrogen pollution from the Mississippi River Basin—the nation's largest watershed—will increase as much as 34 percent by 2022 if corn kernels continue to be the source of a growing proportion of ethanol fuel that U.S. energy legislation mandates." (underline mine)
I have tried to explain to people many times that the real issue here is corn not cows. And specifically corn for ethanol. And drop of meat use in the industrialized system we have now (fed by grains) is quickly taken up for ethanol production. That's what must end. Solar wind hydroelectric etc.. are all much more efficient choices for our energy needs. Then farmers have the option to raise food in a land efficient manner. In fact for a while we may have too few animals back on the land to optimally restore it. Especially since the vast wild herds are about 90%+ gone. But Holistic management, which includes Holistic planned grazing, (but not only) does have a way to deal with that too, while the wild herds, grassland birds, insects, soil food web, etc have a chance to recover.
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