Global Warming – Page 16 – artdiamondblog.com

Global Warming Causes Trees to Grow Faster and Absorb More CO2

“CITY TREE, COUNTRY TREE; Scientists have been looking more closely at urban plant growth in places like Central Park.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) . . . , some . . . scientists have moved beyond political questions to explore how rising levels of heat and emissions might provide at least some benefits for the planet.
. . .
Lewis H. Ziska, a plant physiologist for the Department of Agriculture, . . . [said] . . . , “we need to think about the tools we have at hand, and how we can use them to make climate change work for us.”
Among the tools are cities, which have conditions that can mimic what life may be like in the temperate zone of a heated planet.
“The city is our baseline for what might happen in future decades, and with all the negative effects global warming may have, there may be a bit of a silver lining,” said Stephanie Searle, a plant physiologist who led a Columbia University research project on tree growth, and now works as a biofuels researcher at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation. “Higher nighttime temperatures, at least, may boost plant growth.” Robust growth takes more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
. . .
The effects of higher, mostly urban emissions are what prompted Dr. Ziska to reappraise global warming as a potential benefit to humanity. In an essay last summer in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Dr. Ziska and a group of colleagues from across the world argued that an expected increase in world population to 9 billion people from 7 billion by 2050 necessitated a “green revolution” to enhance yields of basic grains. Carbon dioxide, the group suggested, could be the answer.
Since 1960, world atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have risen by 24 percent to 392 parts per million and could reach 1,000 parts per million by the end of this century.
. . .
In New York, the Columbia researchers studied for eight years the growth of red oak seedlings at four locations, including an “urban” site near the northeastern edge of Central Park at 105th Street and a “remote” site in the Catskills 100 miles north of Manhattan near the Ashokan Reservoir.
. . .
The Columbia team’s first red oak experiments ended in 2006, and average minimum temperatures in August were 71.6 degrees at the city site, but 63.5 degrees in the Catskills. Researchers also noticed that the city oaks had elevated levels of leaf nitrogen, a plant nutrient.
The team did two more rounds of experiments, then in 2008 made a final outdoor test using fertilized rural soil everywhere so all the seedlings got plenty of nitrogen. The urban oaks, harvested in August 2008, weighed eight times as much as their rural cousins, mostly because of increased foliage.
“On warm nights, the tree respires more,” Dr. Griffin said. “It invests its carbon sugars to build tissue.” By morning, the tree’s sugars are depleted, and it has to photosynthesize more during the day, he continued. The tree grows more leaves and gets bigger.

For the full story, see:
GUY GUGLIOTTA. “Looking to Cities, in Search of Global Warming’s Silver Lining.” The New York Times (Tues., November 27, 2012): D3.
(Note: ellipses and bracketed “said” added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 26, 2012.)

The Ziska article mentioned above, is:
Ziska, Lewis H., James A. Bunce, Hiroyuki Shimono, David R. Gealy, Jeffrey T. Baker, Paul C. D. Newton, Matthew P. Reynolds, Krishna S. V. Jagadish, Chunwu Zhu, Mark Howden, and Lloyd T. Wilson. “Food Security and Climate Change: On the Potential to Adapt Global Crop Production by Active Selection to Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 279, no. 1745 (Oct. 22, 2012): 4097-105.

The article co-authored by Searle and Griffin, and mentioned above, is:
Searle, Stephanie Y., Danielle S. Bitterman, Samuel Thomas, Kevin L. Griffin, Owen K. Atkin, and Matthew H. Turnbull. “Respiratory Alternative Oxidase Responds to Both Low- and High-Temperature Stress in Quercus Rubra Leaves Along an Urban-Rural Gradient in New York.” Functional Ecology 25, no. 5 (Oct. 2011): 1007-17.

Great Cities Innovate to Adapt to Possible Global Warming Floods

(p. C3) Spurred by long histories of disastrous storms, the urban engineers of Venice, Tokyo and the Netherlands have been among the pioneers of modern flood control, building storm surge barriers and sea walls on the scale of the pyramids. Such structures could well be models for New York City in the wake of superstorm Sandy.
The cities most experienced in building bulwarks against flood tides and storm surges are at a turning point, however, in their struggle for control of nature. The land upon which they are built continues to sink, population grows and the seas around them rise. As city planners reach the limits of conventional flood control measures, they are experimenting with ways to re-engineer low-lying urban waterfronts.
In Rotterdam, architects are building houses that float on floods. Beneath Tokyo, engineers have tunneled to create miles of emergency floodwater reservoirs. And in St. Petersburg, where storm tides have flooded the city about once a year since its founding in 1703, engineers last year completed a storm-surge barrier more than 15 miles long.

For the full commentary, see:
ROBERT LEE HOTZ. “Keeping Our Heads Above Water; What can New York learn from other great cities battling rising tides and sinking land?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 1, 2012): C3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 30, 2012.)

Scientist Sees Benefits in Plan to Increase Global Warming

(p. D2) Plants are . . . part of one theoretical plan for turning Mars into a suitable environment for human beings, a process called terraforming.
. . .
Chris McKay, a Mars expert at the NASA Ames Research Center, theorizes that engineers would first have to encourage the kind of global warming they want to avoid on Earth. This could be done by releasing greenhouse gases, like chlorofluorocarbons or perfluorocarbons, into the atmosphere. The goal would be to increase the surface temperature of Mars by a total of about 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit.
. . .
With the rise in temperature, heat-trapping carbon dioxide would eventually be released from the planet’s south polar ice cap, producing a further average temperature rise of even greater magnitude, perhaps as much as 70 degrees Celsius, or 126 degrees Fahrenheit.
These high temperatures would melt ice to produce the water needed for living things.

For the full story, see:
C. CLAIBORNE RAY. “Q & A; At Home on Mars.” The New York Times (Tues., December 11, 2012): D2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 10, 2012.)

McKay wrote up some of his ideas in:
McKay, Christopher P. “Bringing Life to Mars.” Scientific American Presents: The Future of Space Exploration (1999): 52-57.

NYT Climate Blogger Sees Evidence “Trending” Toward Less Global Warming

“Worse than we thought” has been one of the most durable phrases lately among those pushing for urgent action to stem the buildup of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
But on one critically important metric — how hot the planet will get from a doubling of the pre-industrial concentration of greenhouse gases, a k a “climate sensitivity” — some climate researchers with substantial publication records are shifting toward the lower end of the warming spectrum.
There’s still plenty of global warming and centuries of coastal retreats in the pipeline, so this is hardly a “benign” situation, as some have cast it.
But while plenty of other climate scientists hold firm to the idea that the full range of possible outcomes, including a disruptively dangerous warming of more than 4.5 degrees C. (8 degrees F.), remain in play, it’s getting harder to see why the high-end projections are given much weight.
. . .
In fact, there is an accumulating body of reviewed, published research shaving away the high end of the range of possible warming estimates from doubled carbon dioxide levels.
. . .
(. . . recent work is trending toward the published low sensitivity findings from a decade ago from climate scientists best known for their relationships with libertarian groups.)
Nonetheless, the science is what the science is.

Revkin, Andrew C. “CLIMATE CHANGE; A Closer Look at Moderating Views of Climate Sensitivity.” Dot Earth: New York Times Opinion Pages Climate Blog. (posted February 4, 2013).
(Note: ellipses added.)

Antarctica Has 595,000 Emperor Penguins–Double Previous Count

“Using satellites, researchers counted Antarctica’s emperor penguins at 46 colonies like this one near the Halley Research Station, finding numbers twice as high as previously thought.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A2) Antarctica has twice as many emperor penguins as scientists had thought, according to a new study using satellite imagery in the first comprehensive survey of one of the world’s most iconic birds.

British and U.S. geospatial mapping experts reported Friday in the journal PLoS One that they had counted 595,000 emperor penguins living in 46 colonies along the coast of Antarctica, compared with previous estimates of 270,000 to 350,000 penguins based on surveys of just five colonies. The researchers also discovered four previously unknown emperor-penguin colonies and confirmed the location of three others.
“It is good news from a conservation point of view,” said geographer Peter Fretwell at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, who led the penguin satellite census. “This is the first comprehensive census of a species taken from space.”
Although all of Antarctica’s wildlife is protected by international treaty, the emperor penguins are not an officially endangered species. But they are considered a bellwether of any future climate changes in Antarctica because their icy habitat is so sensitive to rising temperatures.

For the full story, see:
ROBERT LEE HOTZ. “Emperor Penguins Are Teeming in Antarctica.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 14, 2012): A2.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 13, 2012.)

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Emissions Have Little Effect on Global Warming

My colleague Mark Wohar, and his co-author David McMillan, have used sophisticated econometrics to analyze a very long time-series dataset on carbon dioxide (CO2) and temperature. They find that CO2 has little, if any, effect on temperature. Here is the abstract of their paper:

(p. 3683) The debate regarding rising temperatures and CO2 emissions has attracted the attention of economists employing recent econometric techniques. This article extends the previous literature using a dataset that covers 800,000 years, as well as a shorter dataset, and examines the interaction between temperature and CO2 emissions. Unit root tests reveal a difference between the two datasets. For the long dataset, all tests support the view that both temperature and CO2 are stationary around a constant. For the short dataset, temperature exhibits trend-stationary behaviour, while CO2 contains a unit root. This result is robust to nonlinear trends or trend breaks. Modelling the long dataset reveals that while contemporaneous CO2 appears positive and significant in the temperature equation, including lags results in a joint effect that is near zero. This result is confirmed using a different lag structure and Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model. A Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach to account for endogeneity suggests an insignificant relationship. In sum, the key result from our analysis is that CO2 has, at best, a weak relationship with temperature, while there is no evidence of trending when using a sufficiently long dataset. Thus, as a secondary result we highlight the danger of using a small sample in this context.

Source:
McMillan, David G., and Mark E. Wohar. “The Relationship between Temperature and CO2 Emissions: Evidence from a Short and Very Long Dataset.” Applied Economics 45, no. 26 (2013): 3683-90.
(Note: bold added.)

Green Threats to Restrict Coal Creates Incentive to Extract More Coal Now

(Wang, p. 1146) The last chapter of the book advances the supply-side analysis and presents the “Green Paradox,” that “(t)he mere announcement of intentions to fight global warming made the world warm even faster” ([Sinn, p. ] 189). The key insight is that demand-reduction measures affect carbon supply through pressure on future prices. Since the existing “green” policies almost always involve increasing stringency and widening coverage over time, the increasing downward price pressure therefore induces resource owners to expedite extraction and thereby exacerbates the climate problem.

For the full review, see:
Wang, Tao. “The Green Paradox: A Supply-Side Approach to Global Warming.” Journal of Economic Literature 50, no. 4 (Dec. 2012): 1145-46.
(Note: bracketed information added.)

The book under review is:
Sinn, Hans-Werner. The Green Paradox: A Supply-Side Approach to Global Warming. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012.

“It Isn’t What You Know that Counts–It Is How Efficiently You Can Refresh”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A17) Knowledge, then, is less a canon than a consensus in a state of constant disruption. Part of the disruption has to do with error and its correction, but another part with simple newness–outright discoveries or new modes of classification and analysis, often enabled by technology.
. . .
In some cases, the facts themselves are variable. . . .
. . .
More commonly, however, changes in scientific facts reflect the way that science is done. Mr. Arbesman describes the “Decline Effect”–the tendency of an original scientific publication to present results that seem far more compelling than those of later studies. Such a tendency has been documented in the medical literature over the past decade by John Ioannidis, a researcher at Stanford, in areas as diverse as HIV therapy, angioplasty and stroke treatment. The cause of the decline may well be a potent combination of random chance (generating an excessively impressive result) and publication bias (leading positive results to get preferentially published).
If shaky claims enter the realm of science too quickly, firmer ones often meet resistance. As Mr. Arbesman notes, scientists struggle to let go of long-held beliefs, something that Daniel Kahneman has described as “theory-induced blindness.” Had the Austrian medical community in the 1840s accepted the controversial conclusions of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis that physicians were responsible for the spread of childbed fever–and heeded his hand-washing recommendations–a devastating outbreak of the disease might have been averted.
Science, Mr. Arbesman observes, is a “terribly human endeavor.” Knowledge grows but carries with it uncertainty and error; today’s scientific doctrine may become tomorrow’s cautionary tale. What is to be done? The right response, according to Mr. Arbesman, is to embrace change rather than fight it. “Far better than learning facts is learning how to adapt to changing facts,” he says. “Stop memorizing things . . . memories can be outsourced to the cloud.” In other words: In a world of information flux, it isn’t what you know that counts–it is how efficiently you can refresh.

For the full review, see:
DAVID A. SHAYWITZ. “BOOKSHELF; The Scientific Blind Spot.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., November 19, 2012): A17.
(Note: ellipses added, except for the one internal to the last paragraph, which was in the original.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated November 18, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Arbesman, Samuel. The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date. New York: Current, 2012.

The Case for More Climate Adaptations and Fewer Climate Mitigations

Source of book image: http://perseuspromos.com/images/covers/200/9780465019267.jpg

(p. 777) Climatopolis begins with the assumption that our future will bring some combination of higher temperatures, sea level rise, more intense natural disasters, and changes in precipitation and drought conditions. The forecast is considered inevitable because of humanity’s deep and (p. 778) growing dependence on energy from fossil fuels, the burning of which generates emissions that cause climate change. In a way that some readers are likely to find overly pessimistic, dismissive, or both, Kahn asserts that we are unlikely to invent a “magical” technology that allows us to live well without producing greenhouse gases. He is equally skeptical about whether geo-engineering will help stabilize the climate. So when it comes to facing a future that includes climate change, Kahn has concluded as soon as page 5 that “unlike a ship, we cannot turn away.”

Economics is, after all, the dismal science, but early pessimism in Climatopolis quickly gives way to an overall optimistic theme. It is first encountered, somewhat surprisingly, in a chapter titled “What We’ve Done When Our Cities Have Blown Up.” With examples that range from fires and floods to wars and terrorist attacks, Kahn makes the case that we humans are a surprisingly resilient species. Among the lessons he draws are that destruction often triggers economic booms, people learn from their mistakes, cities are shaped by the accumulation of small decisions by millions of self-interested people, and when conditions are bad in one location people migrate to where it is better.
Kahn gets traction out of the notion that people “vote with their feet,” and he describes how climate change will affect where people want to go. Rising temperatures will cause Sun Belt cities in the United States to suffer, for example, while northern cities such as Minneapolis and Detroit will become more attractive places to live.
. . .
Climatopolis . . . cautions against maladaptive policies, and the recommendation here will be familiar to economists: prices should be left undistorted to reflect real costs and risks. Kahn is critical of a policy in Los Angeles under which people who demand more water pay a lower marginal price, and thereby face exactly the wrong incentive for conservation as water becomes increasingly scarce. He also points to the problems of subsidized insurance or caps on premiums for residents in climate-vulnerable areas, as these policies only promote greater vulnerability. What is more, Kahn would like us to stop treating people who move into harm’s way as victims in need of a bailout when natural disasters strike. He writes that, “Ironically, to allow capitalism to help us adapt to climate change, the government must precommit to not protect ‘the victims’.”

For the full review, see:
Kotchen, Matthew J. “Review of Kahn’s Climatopolis.” Journal of Economic Literature 49, no. 3 (September 2011): 777-79.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Book under review:
Kahn, Matthew E. Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Preindustrial Icelanders Adapted to Adverse Global Cooling

(p. 254) We investigate the effect of climate on population levels in preindustrial Iceland. We find that short-term temperature changes affect the population growth rate. In particular, a 1ºC decrease in temperature causes about 0.57 percent decrease in the population growth rate for the two subsequent years, for a total effect of 1.14 percent. This effect appears to attenuate as the growth rate returns to trend in subsequent years. We also quantify the extent to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Icelanders adapt to long-run climate change. In particular, the data suggest that long-run adaptation to climate takes about 20 years and reduces the effect of cold shocks by about 60 percent. Our results also allow us to approximate the effect of permanent climate change on steady-state population levels. This approximation suggests that steady state population levels decrease by 10 percent to 26 percent for each 1ºC of sustained adverse temperature change.
(p. 255) . . .
If contemporary poor agricultural populations behave like their eighteenth- and nineteenth century Icelandic counterparts, then our results suggest that adverse climate change (which now refers to warming, not cooling) will have three effects. First, in the short run it will lead to a significant decrease in population growth rates. Second, over the course of a generation, adaptation will offset about 60 percent of the short run effects. Finally, in the long run, we expect a decrease in steady-state populations.

For the full article, from which the above conclusion is quoted, see:
Turner, Matthew A., Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, Jian Chen, and Chunyan Hao. “Adaptation to Climate Change in Preindustrial Iceland.” American Economic Review 102, no. 3 (May 2012): 250-55.
(Note: underlining added; the underlined words appeared on p. 254 of the print issue, and on p. 255 of the online issue, of the article.)