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Northeast US to suffer most from future sea rise:
The northeastern U.S. coast is likely to see the world’s biggest sea level rise from man-made global warming, a new study predicts.
However much the oceans rise by the end of the century, add an extra 8 inches or so for New York, Boston and other spots along the coast from the mid-Atlantic to New England. That’s because of predicted changes in ocean currents, according to a study based on computer models published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
An extra 8 inches — on top of a possible 2 or 3 feet of sea rise globally by 2100 — is a big deal, especially when nor’easters and hurricanes hit, experts said.
“It’s not just waterfront homes and wetlands that are at stake here,” said Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who wasn’t part of the study. “Those kind of rises in sea level when placed on top of the storm surges we see today, put in jeopardy lots of infrastructure, including the New York subway system.”
All of which only reinforces my belief that decades from now we’ll see a big movement of people and businesses toward the Great Lakes areas. While the seas rise, the Great Lakes will pose no flooding issues–Lake Ontario’s surface is over 200 feet above sea level and is already declining (as are the levels of the other Lakes) due to reduced precipitation.
Scientists are grim, economists more optimistic about climate change’s effects:
Scientists are gloomy; economists are more upbeat. Such was the bottom line of an epic, three-day international congress of climate change experts that ended here yesterday.
At the congress, it seemed that all the scientists had to share with their peers was bad news, but a number of economists saw the climate crisis rather as an historic opportunity to reorganize the world economy and develop new, clean and job-creating activities.
At the opening of yesterday’s session, Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist for the World Bank, added his own dose of gloom by saying that his now-famous report on the risks of global warming, written for the British government in 2006, had underestimated them. “The reason is that emissions are growing faster than we thought, the absorption capacity of the planet is less than we thought, the probability of high temperatures is likely higher than we thought, and some of the effects are coming faster than we thought,” he explained.
Stern called for $400 billion in extra public funding — 20 percent of a global package of $2 trillion — to be made available for the ‘green component’ of the world stimulus over the next year or two.
Several other economists also sent messages of growth promotion via support for green investments. These included Terry Barker, director of the Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research of the University of Cambridge. “The current global financial crisis must be seen as a timely stimulus to tackling climate change, not a hindrance,” Barker said.
This one is difficult for me to comment on, because I know that anything I say in support of my fellow dismal scientists will trigger a knee-jerk reaction from “all economists should be drawn quartered, shot, and eaten at high noon, televised live on pay-per-view” camp. But let me try to wade into this mess and offer a little perspective on why I think we’re seeing this divergence of views.
The scientists involved are all extremely well, but narrowly, educated people. The same is true for economists. On average, most people in each group probably know just enough about the other’s specialty to make some laughably bad mistakes. Surely there are the exceptions, the scientists who know the difference between “demand” and “quantity demanded”[1], and the economists who know at a deep level that weather is not climate. But my guess is that they’re still the exceptions.
Specifically, the key difference is in what they consider possible at an acceptable cost and in what time frame.
Scientists will look at climate chaos (or peak oil) and see a big, impending event: A catastrophic sea level rise that endangers many major cities around the world, for example, or perhaps a suffocating drought that all but wipes out a major agricultural region, and feel a moral obligation to sound the alarm. And we should be very thankful for those with the courage to try wake up the rest of us.
Economists are trained to think not so much about events themselves, but how those events set the stage for a chain of ensuing events. Classically trained economists think in terms of limited, localized change; a particular raw material becomes more expensive, so manufacturers that use it have no choice but to pass along the price increase to customers, who buy less of their products. Eventually, those manufacturers lose market share to other firms that use one or more alternative materials or precesses, creating a sizable incentive for everyone to switch. (If everyone is using the same material, then the immediate incentive is to use less of it or find a cheaper alternative.) As some manufacturers make the switch, the demand for the raw input drops, producing downward pressure on its price, and possibly an actual price drop. Eventually the market “sorts itself out”, as the cliche goes, and the market glides on to the next disruption and set of ripples it causes.
The key point here is that in the economists’ mental framework there is always another option readily at hand, and always time to make the transition without the entire economy crashing. In the case of the two big challenges we face right now, peak oil and climate chaos, these are shaky assumptions. Peak oil is likely so close, and we’ve done so little to transition some economies away from it (the US being the best possible example, obviously), that we could be looking at a very rough few years, even assuming we’re lucky enough to experience an undulating plateau in world oil production.
On the climate chaos front, it’s anyone’s guess just how quickly and severely the impacts will come. I’ve tried over the last few months to keep readers abreast of the amazing number of “it’s worse than we thought” news items, but I doubt I’ve covered even half of those that I would consider relevant.
Another issue is the perception of how sensitive scientists and economists are to human impacts. It’s not that economist’s don’t care about such things; we’re human being s who care just as much as everyone else. Many of us seem to care less because we’re so focused on the next thing–if parts of the US Gulf Coast will be facing more and much stronger storms, then what happens when millions of people, and many businesses, leave those areas? What happens ot the land they leave behind? What happens to the communities where they relocate? What is the affect of radically shifting tax revenues as some areas all but turn into ghost towns? It’s not that economists don’t care, it’s that we’re looking for all the ramifications–and human impacts–of events.
None of this is to say that either camp is right or wrong. But everyone would be better off if both sides in this urination for distance contest would try harder to understand the other’s viewpoint. In particular, the next time I hear some peak oil doomer spouting off about economists I’m going to smakc him with a hardback copy of The Wealth of Nations.
Nuclear waste: No solution yet, but expansion continues:
As Georgia Power and other utilities race to build a new generation of nuclear reactors, one of the industry’s steepest challenges has been absent from the official debate.
That challenge just got worse.
Thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste are sitting in enclosed pools and concrete casks in Georgia, waiting for a final resting place.
The nuclear industry still has no place to dispose of its most toxic and long-lived byproduct, the radioactive spent fuel rods nuclear power production leaves behind.
And two weeks ago, the Obama administration all but killed the industry’s sole hope for changing that, cutting funding for a long-delayed federal waste depository under Nevada’s remote Yucca Mountain.
The industry, including Georgia Power’s nuclear affiliate, Southern Nuclear, says Yucca’s demise shouldn’t affect plans to build new reactors.
For now, the waste can stay safely stored at the plants that create it, spokeswoman Amoi Geter said: “Southern Nuclear has safe, reliable on-site options to store the used fuel at all of our nuclear plants.”
The industry’s trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, said that can continue for decades: “We can safely store it for a century plus more,” NEI spokesman Mitchell Singer said.
Singer said the demise of Yucca might steer the country toward other alternatives, and applauded the Obama administration’s Wednesday announcement of a blue-ribbon task force to study the waste issue.
Nuclear energy’s foes, meanwhile, say the waste issue is the undiscussed elephant in the room as utilities such as Georgia Power pursue dozens of new U.S. reactors for the first time in decades.
“We shouldn’t start producing more waste when we can’t deal with the waste we have,” said Sara Barczak of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
Nuclear waste remains dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years, she said: “There’s supposed to be a permanent solution.”
Only a few dozen plug-in hybrids are on the road today. Most current plug-ins are conversions by do-it-yourselfers or by companies that charge $10,000 or more. Kusig, an engineer from Wayland, Mass., converted his hybrid Honda Insight into a plug-in by adding a built-in battery charger and a mechanism that lets him control the electric motor.
But the plug-in dearth seems set to change before long. A combination of unpredictable gasoline prices, prodding activists, unsold SUVs, and hefty government financial incentives for plug-ins have changed the game. After years of foot dragging, major car companies are at last accelerating into a market for electric-powered vehicles of all kinds, analysts say.
“They’re making pretty good progress,” says David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., of GM and other companies’ development efforts. “They’re doing this for real.”
At least nine car companies worldwide say that by 2013 they will offer plug-in vehicles that use electric motors as their primary means of propulsion, according to Plug-in America, an activist group. Some will be all-electric drive vehicles (EV). Most will be plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) that use small gasoline engines as a backup.
Dear car companies: Faster, please.
Water scarcity ‘now bigger threat than financial crisis’:
Humanity is facing “water bankruptcy” as a result of a crisis even greater than the financial meltdown now destabilising the global economy, two authoritative new reports show. They add that it is already beginning to take effect, and there will be no way of bailing the earth out of water scarcity.
The two reports – one by the world’s foremost international economic forum and the other by 24 United Nations agencies – presage the opening tomorrow of the most important conference on the looming crisis for three years. The World Water Forum, which will be attended by 20,000 people in Istanbul, will hear stark warnings of how half the world’s population will be affected by water shortages in just 20 years’ time, with millions dying and increasing conflicts over dwindling resources.
A report by the World Economic Forum, which runs the annual Davos meetings of the international business and financial elite, says that lack of water, will “soon tear into various parts of the global economic system” and “start to emerge as a headline geopolitical issue”.
…
Water use has been growing far faster than the number of people. During the 20th century the world population increased fourfold, but the amount of freshwater that it used increased nine times over. Already 2.8 billion people live in areas of high water stress, the report calculates, and this will rise to 3.9 billion – more than half the expected population of the world – by 2030. By that time, water scarcity could cut world harvests by 30 per cent – equivalent to all the grain grown in the US and India – even as human numbers and appetites increase.
Some 60 per cent of China’s 669 cities are already short of water. The huge Yellow River is now left with only 10 per cent of its natural flow, sometimes failing to reach the sea altogether. And the glaciers of the Himalayas, which act as gigantic water banks supplying two billion people in Asia, are melting ever faster as global warming accelerates. Meanwhile devastating droughts are crippling Australia and Texas.
The World Water Development Report, compiled by 24 UN agencies under the auspices of Unesco, adds that shortages are already beginning to constrain economic growth in areas as diverse and California, China, Australia, India and Indonesia. The report, which will be published tomorrow, also expects water conflicts to break out in the Middle East, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Colombia and other countries.
See also: Global forum seeks to avert water crisis
[1] Yes, it’s a difference I gloss over in almost every instance. While there is a difference and it is important, stressing it only pushes the conversation to extreme levels of pedantry that just ticks off a lot of people.
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