By DAVE FISHER/ecoRI News staff
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The second half of the MIT/Knight Foundation seminar on the failure of elected officials to take climate change seriously, and hence, failure to enact any sort of comprehensive policy regarding it began with a keynote speech by Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, followed by a panel discussion entitled "What can scientists do? What can the public do?"
Cicerone said climate change is happening, and that human activities are the greatest contributing factor.
“If you take all human energies in all forms, and spread them all over the world, it amounts to about a fortieth of a watt per square meter; about 10,000 times less than the incoming solar energy," he said. "The extra heat trapped by the greenhouse gases that are solely of human origin is a number 100 times bigger than the dissipation of all of the energy we use. This calculation shows the enormous leverage that the greenhouse effect provides over the planetary energy budget. We are changing the earth’s atmospheric chemical composition.”
Cicerone exhibited data that has been confirmed by hundreds of scientists all over the world using many different techniques. The planet’s atmospheric carbon content has gone from about 312 parts per million (ppm) to nearly 390 ppm. On top of that, he said, the geological record has shown that greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations have shifted to a greater degree in the past hundred years than during the previous four ice ages, and though carbon in the atmosphere has spiked prior to these ice events, the carbon content of the atmosphere during those periods never approached 390 ppm.
“Whatever is going on is not only unnatural and significant, but it’s very fast. And it’s growing in time,” Cicerone said.
Polar ice loss and the subsequent sea level rise associated with increased GHG emissions is another concern, according to Cicerone. That loss is a great example of the dreaded positive feedback loop. Polar ice reflects the sun’s energy; dark sea water absorbs that energy. But as ice caps shrink and become sea water, less of the sun’s energy is reflected back into space and more is retained in our oceans, increasing the planet’s atmospheric temperature, which melts polar ice, which becomes sea water, etc., ad infinitum.
Cicerone said adaptation and mitigation techniques have to be implemented, and sooner rather than later. “We have to manage the unavoidable (adaptation) and manage the unavoidable (mitigation)," he said.
There are many barriers, in addition to the scientific challenges, to adopting comprehensive climate policy, according to Cicerone. Those include the false and much-promulgated idea that man’s impact on climate change is insignificant; temporary and regional reductions in warming; understanding and characterizing extreme weather events; and observations must be continuous and in conjunction with proper assessments by the scientific and media communities. Not to mention the extreme and unprecedented polarization in our current political atmosphere.
Leah Christian, senior researcher at the Pew Center
Poll after poll has shown that there is a disturbing trend downward in the amount of people who think that global warming is a serious or somewhat serious problem. “From 2008 to 2010, there has been an 11-point drop in the percent saying that it (global warming) is a problem,” she said.
The unsurprising part is that the drop occurs almost exclusively along party lines. In the past four years, the percentage of those polled who identified themselves as Republicans that think climate change is a serious problem has dropped by 25 percent.
Polls by the Pew Center
Possibly the most frightening data that Christian presented was a poll that showed that a mere 36 percent of people believe that global warming is mostly anthropogenic, or man-made; again with Democrats believing at a much higher rate than Republicans in our impact on the global climate.
William Moomaw, the director of the Center for International Environment and Resource policy at Tufts University, said the failures of the Kyoto Protocol, and the more recent climate change summits in Copenhagen and Cancun, are because they were, in his words, “unprincipled negotiations, that is, they had no guiding principle.”
“The problem is really the way we develop economically,” he said. “We tend to think that development equals carbon emissions.”
There are significant roadblocks to international climate policy. One of the most pressing problems in that arena is the idea of burden-sharing. Countries have argued about who should pay for the necessary adaptation and mitigation and what percentage of that financial burden should be paid by the developing and developed world. To get any kind of comprehensive, international climate policy, Moomaw said, "What we really need to do is reform the argument from (economic) pain to (environmental) gain.”
Daniel Schrag, MacArthur fellow and professor of geology at Harvard University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, put forth three major points: climate responds to cumulative emissions; the timescale of climate change is 100 years, that is, even if we stopped emitting GHG’s today, the planet would still warm for the next 100 years; and our goal should be to achieve a net-zero emissions scenario.
“A significant fraction of the carbon dioxide that we put into the atmosphere today,” he said, “will still be there in 20,000 years. We will deglaciate the planet. It’s a question of when not if.”
Schrag worries that the science community is focusing too much on the reduction of black carbon, methane and chlorofuorocarbons. “Not because I don’t think that it’s a good idea to reduce these emissions, but because I believe that it shifts the focus away from carbon dioxide, which due to its timescale, is the bigger problem," he said.
For instance, in the European Union, if you are a major carbon emitter, you can get carbon credits for flaring off methane, which is valued at a 25-to-1 ratio to carbon dioxide. He also expressed concern over percentage-based goals concerning GHG reduction. "They don’t really get us to net-zero emissions," he said.
Schrag sees the most viable way to get to a net-zero emissions scenario as a quantum leap in clean energy technology that will "provide a cheap, energy dense alternative to burning fossil fuels.”