Category: Global Warming

Biodiversity May Increase If We “Let the Winners Go on Winning”

(p. C7) In 2004 Mr. Thomas, a biologist at the University of York, garnered headlines with a study predicting that at least a fifth of land animals and plants would be “committed to extinction” by 2050. In “Inheritors of the Earth,” Mr. Thomas does not disavow those findings. A mass extinction is in full swing, he concedes. But the “gloom-merchants” are ignoring the success stories, Mr. Thomas argues, of animals and plants that are thriving in the Anthropocene. Nature, in many respects, “is coping surprisingly well,” he writes, and we shouldn’t ignore “the gain side of the great biological equation of life.”
In some corners of the planet, warmer, wetter conditions have allowed a greater variety of species to survive than would have just decades ago, he points out, while modern transport keeps new immigrants rolling in. The result is a greater number of species in many regions–more local biodiversity–even if the global picture may be trending toward less.
Many species that contribute to diverse and functioning ecosystems aren’t native–they did not evolve where they now occur. And introduced species can jump-start evolutionary processes. They compete with established species, prey on them, or breed with them, and they can occupy ecological niches once occupied by organisms that have died out or are faring poorly.
Mr. Thomas describes a honeysuckle in Pennsylvania that’s a hybrid of species from several remote continents, and yet delicious to local flies, which began to interbreed out of a shared love of its berries; there’s a deer with Japanese genes that’s doing just fine in Scotland’s woods. We should be cheering on these victors, he says, but instead many have been subjected to dubious campaigns to eradicate them.
Conservation usually aims to help the most imperiled species, and favors those with a longer claim to the habitats they occupy. But rather than “always try to defend the losers,” Mr. Thomas proposes, what if we embraced the dynamism of evolution and let the winners go on winning?

For the full review, see:
Jennie Erin Smith. “Picking Sides in the Fight for Survival.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 23, 2017): C7.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 22, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Thomas, Chris D. Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. New York: PublicAffairs, 2017.

No Increase in Number and Intensity of Hurricanes in Recent Decades

Hurricane researcher Ryan Maue, summarizes his own research:

(p. A19) My own research, cited in a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, found that during the past half-century tropical storms and hurricanes have not shown an upward trend in frequency or accumulated energy. Instead they remain naturally variable from year-to-year. The global prevalence of the most intense storms (Category 4 and 5) has not shown a significant upward trend either. Historical observations of extreme cyclones in the 1980s, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, are in sore need of reanalysis.

By focusing on whether climate change caused a hurricane, journalists fail to appreciate the complexity of extreme weather events. While most details are still hazy with the best climate modeling tools, the bigger issue than global warming is that more people are choosing to live in coastal areas, where hurricanes certainly will be most destructive.

For the full commentary, see:
Ryan Maue. “Climate Change Hype Doesn’t Help; The bigger issue than global warming is that more people are choosing to live in coastal areas.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Sept. 17, 2017): A19.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 18, 2017.)

Maue’s research, that he mentions above, is reported in:

Maue, Ryan N. “Recent Historically Low Global Tropical Cyclone Activity.” Geophysical Research Letters 38, no. 14 (2011): 1-6.

“Hurricane Superstar” Had No Use For Global Warming

(p. 24) William M. Gray, whose pioneering research helped him make hurricane predictions for three decades and allowed the East Coast and the Caribbean to gird for their fury, died on Saturday [April 23, 2016] in Fort Collins, Colo. He was 86.
. . .
Dr. Gray issued his first data-driven seasonal forecast in 1984. He eventually aggregated measures of atmospheric conditions, water current and water temperature to predict the number and intensity of tropical storms, rather than their paths or potential landfalls.
. . .
Dr. Gray was skeptical about the causes of climate change, prompting vitriolic exchanges with other scientists. Judith A. Curry, who was chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, accused him of “brain fossilization.”
Dr. Gray was less alarmed than many of his colleagues at the rate of climate change and attributed it to natural causes, like the circulation of heat-bearing ocean currents, rather than to the human-made greenhouse effect of heat-trapping gasses from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil.
“After unveiling the first Atlantic seasonal hurricane forecasting system in 1984, he became a hurricane superstar and darling of the media,” Chris Mooney wrote in 2007 in “Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming.” “But he had absolutely no use for the notion of global warming, much less the idea that it might seriously affect the storms he’d spent a lifetime studying. And he had no problem saying so — loudly and often.”
In an interview with Westword, a Denver online newsletter, in 2006, Dr. Gray said, “When I am pushing up daisies, I am very sure that we will find that humans have warmed the globe slightly, but that it’s nothing like what they’re saying.”

For the full obituary, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “William M. Gray, 86, a Predictor of Hurricanes’ Fury.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., APRIL 24, 2016): 24.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date APRIL 20 [sic], 2016, and has the title “William M. Gray, Hurricane Predictor and Climate Change Skeptic, Dies at 86.”)

The book by Mooney, mentioned above, is:
Mooney, Chris. Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming. Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007.

Natural Gas Tanker Reaches South Korea 30 Percent Faster, Through Arctic

(p. 12) A Russian-owned tanker, built to traverse the frozen waters of the Arctic, completed a journey in record time from Europe to Asia this month, auguring the future of shipping as global warming melts sea ice.
The Christophe de Margerie, a 984-foot tanker built specifically for the journey, became the first ship to complete the so-called Northern Sea Route without the aid of specialized ice-breaking vessels, the ship’s owner, Sovcomflot, said in a statement.
. . .
The ship, transporting liquefied natural gas, completed the trip from Norway to South Korea Thursday of last week, in just 19 days, 30 percent faster than the regular route through the Suez Canal, the company said.
Sailors have for centuries sought a navigable Northwest Passage: a shorter, faster route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that transits the Arctic.

For the full story, see:
RUSSELL GOLDMAN. “No Icebreaker Needed: Thaw Lets Tanker Traverse Arctic.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., AUG. 27, 2017): 12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 25, 2017, and has the title “Russian Tanker Completes Arctic Passage Without Aid of Icebreakers.”)

Large Carbon Footprint of Air Travel to Climate Activist Meetings

(p. 7A) If climate change is really such a crisis, and if sacrifice on our part is needed to stop it, why aren’t we seeing more sacrifice from people who think it’s a problem?
As one person asked on Twitter, “What if climate scientists decided, as a group, to make their conferences all virtual? No more air travel. What a statement!” And what if academics in general–most of whom think climate change is a big deal–started doing the same thing to make an even bigger statement?
What if politicians and celebrities stopped jetting around the world–often on wasteful private jets instead of flying commercial with the hoi polloi–as a statement of the importance of fighting climate change?
And what if they lived in average-sized houses, to reduce their carbon footprints? What if John Kerry, who was much put out by President Trump’s withdrawal from the non-binding Paris agreement, gave up his yacht-and-mansions lifestyle ?
What if, indeed? One reason so many people don’t take climate change seriously is that the people who constantly tell us it’s a crisis never actually act like it’s a crisis.

For the full commentary, see:
Reynolds, Glenn Harlan. “To Fight Climate Change, Start with Celebs, Pols.” USA Today (Mon., June 12, 2017): 7A.

Global Warming Would Increase Access to Arctic’s “Natural Beauty”

(p. A1) When the Crystal Serenity, a 1,000-passenger luxury liner, sails in August on a monthlong Arctic cruise through the Northwest Passage, it will have a far more utilitarian escort: a British supply ship.
The Ernest Shackleton, which normally resupplies scientific bases in Antarctica, will help with the logistics of shore excursions along the route from Alaska to New York through Canada’s Arctic Archipelago.
. . .
As global warming reduces the extent of sea ice in the Arctic, more ships — cargo carriers as well as liners like the Serenity taking tourists to see the region’s natural beauty — will be plying far-northern waters.

For the full story, see:
HENRY FOUNTAIN. “As Liners Ply Arctic, Worry Tempers Thrill.” The New York Times (Mon., JULY 24, 2017): A1 & A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 23, 2017, and has the title “With More Ships in the Arctic, Fears of Disaster Rise.”)

Rising Hurricane Costs Due to More Rich People Choosing to Live on Coast

(p. A15) “An Inconvenient Truth” promoted the frightening narrative that higher temperatures mean more extreme weather, especially hurricanes. The movie poster showed a hurricane emerging from a smokestack. Mr. Gore appears to double down on this by declaring in the new film’s trailer: “Storms get stronger and more destructive. Watch the water splash off the city. This is global warming.”
This is misleading. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change–in its Fifth Assessment Report, published in 2013–found “low confidence” of increased hurricane activity to date because of global warming. Storms are causing more damage, but primarily because more wealthy people choose to live on the coast, not because of rising temperatures.
Even if tropical storms strengthen by 2100, their relative cost likely will decrease. In a 2012 article for the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers showed that hurricane damage now costs 0.04% of global gross domestic product. If climate change makes hurricanes stronger, absolute costs will double by 2100. But the world will also be much wealthier and less vulnerable, so the total damage is estimated at only 0.02% of global GDP.

For the full commentary, see:
Bjorn Lomborg. “Al Gore’s Climate Sequel Misses a Few Inconvenient Facts; Eleven years after his first climate-change film, he’s still trying to scare you into saving the world.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 28, 2017): A15.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 27, 2017.)

War and Pandemics Are Greater Threats than Global Warming

(p. A17) To arrive at a wise policy response, we first need to consider how much economic damage climate change will do. Current models struggle to come up with economic costs commensurate with apocalyptic political rhetoric. Typical costs are well below 10% of gross domestic product in the year 2100 and beyond.
That’s a lot of money–but it’s a lot of years, too. Even 10% less GDP in 100 years corresponds to 0.1 percentage point less annual GDP growth. Climate change therefore does not justify policies that cost more than 0.1 percentage point of growth. If the goal is 10% more GDP in 100 years, pro-growth tax, regulatory and entitlement reforms would be far more effective.
. . .
Global warming is not the only risk our society faces. Even if science tells us that climate change is real and man-made, it does not tell us, as President Obama asserted, that climate change is the greatest threat to humanity. Really? Greater than nuclear explosions, a world war, global pandemics, crop failures and civil chaos?
No. Healthy societies do not fall apart over slow, widely predicted, relatively small economic adjustments of the sort painted by climate analysis. Societies do fall apart from war, disease or chaos. Climate policy must compete with other long-term threats for always-scarce resources.

For the full commentary, see:
David R. Henderson and John H. Cochrane. “Climate Change Isn’t the End of the World; Even if world temperatures rise, the appropriate policy response is still an open question.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 31, 2017): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 30, 2017.)

Human Species Is Highly Adaptable to Climate Variation

(p. A15) In “Evolution’s Bite,” paleoanthropologist Peter S. Ungar follows the stories encapsulated in our enamel-coated anatomy.
Mr. Ungar’s story isn’t so much about teeth themselves as about the sweeping tale of human evolution as seen through the mouth.
. . .
Unpredictability in climate and resources, Mr. Ungar emphasizes, has made us a species adapted to variation. Drawing from the work of researchers like Elisabeth Vrba and Rick Potts, he underscores how environmental shifts influence our evolution just as they have for other animals. The invention of culture did not somehow free us from nature. Our existence and continuing evolution are still influenced by shifts in climate and their effects. Humans didn’t become locked into just one narrow mode of life but rather became a flexible species as comfortable above the Arctic Circle as on the equator. “Climate change,” he writes, “drove human evolution, in large part by swapping out food options available on the biospheric buffet.”
This new story–that humans became adapted to the variability of the world rather than any one set of conditions–hasn’t had time to become pop-culture canon just yet. Images of Man the Hunter stepping out onto the savanna in search of big game still dominate. “The story used to be simpler,” Mr. Ungar writes, when it seemed that “the spreading savanna coaxed our ancestors down from the trees, and the challenges it brought made them human.” All the same, the mounting swell of research doesn’t show a slow and steady transition from a chilly Ice Age world to the warmer one we know today. Instead, Mr. Ungar points out, temperatures dipped and spiked in a haphazard pattern prior to our influence on the climate, having an overall trajectory that we can detect now but that probably would have seemed simply chaotic to the people and creatures living through it.

For the full review, see:
Brian Switek. “BOOKSHELF; Chewing Over History.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 31, 2017): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 30, 2017, and the title “BOOKSHELF; Chewing Over Humanity’s History.”)

The book under review, is:
Ungar, Peter S. Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Geoengineering for the Timid

(p. A15) In 2012, a man named Russ George, working with the Haida people of British Columbia, tried an experiment. From the back of a rusty fishing vessel he spread 120 tons of iron-rich dust on the surface of the North Pacific Ocean. The result was a bloom of plankton, visible by satellite–and a quadrupling of the salmon catch along the coast of the Northeast Pacific. This may or may not have been a coincidence, but it was the intended result.
. . .
Far from being thanked, Mr. George was pilloried for failing to get permission for this rogue “geoengineering” gesture. A second experiment by German scientists in the Antarctic Ocean was stopped by the German government under pressure from environmentalists. A United Nations treaty–the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution–was changed to forbid “any activity undertaken by humans with the principal intention of stimulating primary productivity in the oceans.” This seems a strangely defeatist prohibition, given that a more productive ocean would not only feed more people (and whales) but also sequester more carbon dioxide from the air, through photosynthesis by plankton, potentially providing a self-financing way to prevent possible future climate change.
. . .
. . . Mr. Biello is a writer from Scientific American and is impeccably sympathetic to the environmental movement. The result is a book that explores an intriguing topic but lacks a hard edge or even a clear message.
. . .
Just in the choice of stories to tell, though, the book leans toward the notion that the solution to our environmental challenges will come from technology, and in that sense it is most welcome. Technical fixes are anathema to many environmentalists, but it has been obvious for some time now that innovation and adaptation are the way we will reverse or cope with pollution, habitat loss and climate change. By contrast, a retreat to some golden age of simpler lives more dependent on organic and natural resources is neither possible nor likely to be good for nature: Seven billion people going back to nature would leave nature in a parlous state. The way we will save the planet is by high-tech invention and prosperity, not low-tech simplification and asceticism.

For the full review, see:
Matt Ridley. “BOOKSHELF; Ruling Over Our Dominion; We are living in the Anthropocene: an era when human beings have changed the planet in ways that will be obvious in the geological record.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Nov. 17, 2016): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 16, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Biello, David. The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age. New York: Scribner, 2016.