[Vision2020] Latest "Inlander"Cover Story: "Scorched Earth: How Climate Change Could Upend the Inland Northwest"

[Ted Moffett]

I have not closely studied this article in total for accuracy yet, but the
second sentence is a bit odd... Greenhouse gases due to anthropogenic CO2
emissions (other variables also) are now trapping more heat than is
released to space, so there is no speculative scenario about waiting till
2100 for this to occur (GISS article referenced below).  However, the
"Venus Syndrome" scenario is highly questionable, even if we induce another
PETM like (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55 million years ago)
event, which did not result in "runaway" global warming, but a temperature
increase of about 6 C.  However, a rapid PETM like event would devastate
human life on Earth, given the climate to which our civilization is
adapted, especially many meters of sea level rise.  I do not think it would
result in the extinction of human life, though a tragic mass extinction of
species is likely; and the population carrying capacity of human life on
Earth could be reduced profoundly (what a tepid way of phrasing this, but
of course I want to avoid appearing to be an "alarmist"):

On the PETM from "Nature" journal Jan. 2008:
http://es.ucsc.edu/%7Ejzachos/pubs/Zachos_Dickens_Zeebe_08.pdf

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum lasted around 20,000 years, and was
superimposed on a 6 million year period of more gradual global
warming,[6]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maximum#cite_note-Zachos2008-5>peaking
later in the
Eocene at the "Eocene climatic optimum". Other
"hyperthermal<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hyperthermal&action=edit&redlink=1>"
events can be recognised during this period of cooling, including the Elmo
event<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elmo_event&action=edit&redlink=1>(ETM2).
During these events, of which the PETM was by far the most severe,
around 1,500 to 2,000 gigatons of carbon were released into the
ocean/atmosphere system over the course of 1,000 years. This rate of
carbonaddition almost equals the rate at which
carbon is being released into the atmosphere today through anthropogenic
activity.

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Six pages of references at the bottom of his paper!

Earth's Energy Imbalance and Implications

Published 2011

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha06510a.html
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110415_EnergyImbalancePaper.pdf

Earth's Energy Imbalance and Implications
James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY 10025, USA
Columbia University Earth Institute, New York, NY 10027, USA
Karina von Schuckmann
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Laboratoire de Physique des Oceans, IFREMER, Brest, France


Abstract. Improving observations of ocean temperature confirm that Earth is
absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat,
even during the recent solar minimum. This energy imbalance provides
fundamental verification of the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse
effect in driving global climate change.
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http://www.inlander.com/spokane/article-18391-scorched-earth.html
Scorched Earth How climate change could upend the Inland Northwest Joe
O'Sullivan <http://www.inlander.com/spokane/by-author-805-1.html>

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

*Imagine this:* It’s 2050. Global warming has melted the icecaps, and
rising oceans are swallowing up islands and countries. Papua New Guinea is
gone. So is Florida. Refugees from Bangladesh stream into India and
Pakistan, two countries perpetually on the verge of conflict. The millions
of refugees spur panic. And then war.

Or this:

It’s 2100. Greenhouse gases have reached the tipping point where the
atmosphere traps more heat than it releases. Runaway warming begins turning
the world into a hot, dead marble like Venus. No one on Earth can stop it...

But why go with the doomsday, sci-fi scenarios? Let’s stick to the evidence
and what scientists think they can establish for certain.

So, what if:

It’s 2050 and it’s been a grueling summer. Summers and winters in Eastern
Washington are on average 3 degrees warmer than at the century’s start. The
snow pack melts early and leaves rivers nearly dry by summer’s end. Lower
river flows hamper the dams that generate electricity. And the heat
sustains more bugs: pine bark beetles eating into forests, codling moths
burrowing into apples. By this point climate change is costing
Washingtonians $6.5 billion per year, according to a study by the American
Security Project, a think tank headed by guys like conservative former
Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel and liberal Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

The 3-degrees figure comes from Nick Bond, Washington state’s
climatologist. And while he says long-term projections have to be taken
with a “bucket of salt,” Bond says that by 2100 Eastern Washington could be
7 degrees or 8 degrees hotter than it is now.

“We’ve kind of already made our bed,” Bond says.

After decades of talk about global warming, politicians have done little to
stop the greenhouse gases that began pouring into the atmosphere at the
dawn of the Industrial Age. And since 2008, when the Great Recession began
choking the United States’ economy, mention of climate change has been
largely verboten. In its place have come immediate needs: millions of
Americans unemployed, having lost their homes and retirements.

But with much of the country still wilting under the third-hottest summer
on record — plus a prominent climate skeptic changing his mind, drought
declarations hitting 26 states and the CIA now analyzing catastrophe
scenarios — we could look back on the summer of 2012 as the moment we
finally embraced the implications of human progress.

But will our current political climate stymie efforts to address global
warming? If so, can the Inland Northwest create change through its own
policies?

More to the point: As the region withers, how will people adapt?

*A History of Change*

“I’m not very optimistic,” says Gonzaga University Associate Professor
Brian Henning. “I wish I was.”

Henning, who teaches global warming ethics, says Americans would need to
cut between 60 percent and 80 percent of greenhouse gases to stave off
catastrophe (species going extinct, global populations being displaced).
The professor practices what he preaches — he bought a house within walking
distance of Gonzaga so he wouldn’t have to drive to campus — but like many
others he sits in an air-conditioned office.

The average American generates 20 metric tons of carbon per year, according
to a 2008 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even an
average homeless American, the study found, uses more carbon (8.5 tons) in
a year than does the average global citizen (4 tons).

“You need to have a conversation about whether our habits are sustainable,”
Henning says. “[Many people] like to think we can keep on pretty much as we
are, if [they] just put solar panels up.”

The science is paradoxical. Greenhouse gas — the cocktail of carbon,
nitrous oxide, methane and other gases found in the atmosphere — is what
holds in the sun’s heat and allows life. From orbiting spacecraft, it
appears as nothing more than a blue shell the width of a thumbnail. The
gases occurs naturally — plants give off oxygen and take in carbon, and
when those plants die, they often release the carbon again.

“The greenhouse effect is completely natural — if we didn’t have [some
greenhouse gas] in atmosphere, the planet would be frozen roughly to the
equator,” Henning says.

Too much greenhouse gas is equally fatal. Consider Venus, sometimes called
Earth’s sister planet. The two planets share a similar size and gravity.
But as a result of runaway greenhouse gas — meaning its blanket of gases
continue to trap more heat than they let escape — the surface temperature
of Venus can reach more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

The climate — the temperatures, seasons and weather patterns that surround
us — has always fluctuated. So why do scientists believe humans are causing
climate change this time around?

Several factors have been discarded as plausible theories, according to
Henning. The changes can’t be coming from the sun, because given its
current activity, we’d be getting cooler. And it can’t be from the
planetary cycles that cause ice ages and warming periods, because we’re
still 50,000 years away from another ice age, he says.

In the absence of other evidence, scientists believe humans are the reason
the world is warming faster than ever before recorded. Technological
advances in the Industrial Revolution of the mid-1800s brought factories,
the internal combustion engine and the need for fuel. Fossil fuels — coal
and gas, the buried carbon leftovers of trees and plants from ancient
forests and swamps — satisfied this demand. In the early 1900s the number
of cars burning motor fuels measured in the thousands. In 2010, the number
of cars worldwide surpassed 1 billion.

“We’re just simply making that blanket — CO2, methane and nitrous oxide —
thicker, trapping more heat,” Henning says.

It’s not just cars burning fossil fuel. By churning up carbon stored in the
ground, agriculture — the industry tasked with feeding 7 billion mouths
across the world — also contributes to greenhouse gases.

There’s been talk over the years of whether fossil fuels are really
polluting the atmosphere, but climate change deniers lost a major ally this
summer, when scientist and climate skeptic Richard Muller announced his
findings after an extensive global warming study.

“I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate
change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong,” he wrote in a July
28 *New York Times* opinion piece. “I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist
claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.”

But, he continued, “I concluded that global warming was real and that the
prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step
further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”

The irony: Muller’s research was funded by libertarian Charles Koch, one of
two oil magnate brothers whom liberals blame for funding climate denial.
Between 1997 and 2008, Koch Industries contributed more than $50 million to
groups that deny climate change, according to a report by Greenpeace.

Muller may have changed his mind, but according to a March Gallup poll
nearly half of Americans don’t believe global warming is happening right
now.

*A Practice That Mirrors Nature*

The headquarters of Shepherd’s Grain Co. consists of a pair of rooms on the
second story of a building on a dusty stretch of Highway 231 north of
Reardan. The road looks dusty, but that’s only because combine operators
are threshing grain and wheat stubble along the lazy hills that the highway
divides. A pour of red feed flows from the spigot of a grain bin into a
semi-truck as Fred Fleming walks from his house to his office. It’s a busy
day for a busy guy. In addition to co-owning Shepherd’s Grain and owning
Reardan Seed Co., Fleming, 63, farms the family land.

Parts of his fields are the same ones his great-grandfather farmed when he
homesteaded in 1888 — the same fields his grandfather roamed with a baby
Fleming in his truck.

“I always claimed that I was weaned in a 1950 pickup,” he says with a
chuckle.

Decades spent farming — he started spotting for grain trucks when he was 12
— helped Fleming evolve his practices to help popularize what he calls
direct seeding, also known as no-till farming.

As “a practice that mirrors nature,” direct seeding combines the seeding
and fertilizing of croplands and it allows the stubble from last year’s
crops to serve as fertilizer. Instead of making eight or 12 passes across
the ground, Fleming’s equipment may just pass over it two or three times.
Less carbon is released from disturbing the soil, and the amount of fuel
Fleming has to pour into tractors is 38 percent less than before. When
Fleming began 10 years ago, barely anyone in the region practiced
direct-seed farming.

Now, he estimates about 85 percent of the farmers in the watershed are
using the practice.

Customers have responded to Shepherd’s Grain’s image as an Earth-friendly
and locally sourced crop. This year, the company expects to ship 500,000
bushels of grain. Some of that will show up in Spokane at Bennidito’s
Pizza, Sweet Frostings and Main Market Co-op.

Despite being an advocate for globally conscious farming, Fleming scoffs at
the doomsday scenarios, like Earth becoming another Venus. He points to
advances he’s witnessed in 50 years of farming — in technology and more
sustainable practices. How can scientists predict what will happen in 50 or
100 years? How can anyone predict the hot, dead mess of Venus happening
here?

“I’m not going to believe that,” he says. “To me, that seems extreme. …
There’s many other end-of-the-world scenarios you could come up with
besides climate change.”

*History of Misinformation*

By the mid-1990s, politicians began to act on the consensus that global
warming was real and human-made. In 1997, countries struck an agreement
known as Kyoto Protocol to begin lowering greenhouse gas emissions. (Today,
84 countries, including China, India, Russia and much of Europe are
signatories — but not the United States). It was a consensus that posed a
grave threat to the industries — in particular, oil and coal — whose
production, when burned, release once-buried carbon into the air. In
looking for a reaction plan, they cribbed from an industry long experienced
with damning publicity: Big Tobacco.

Using money from corporate and personal benefactors, they borrowed the
playbook from tobacco companies that had spent decades spreading doubt and
confusion about the danger of cigarettes, according to Connor Gibson, a
research assistant with Greenpeace.

The first component, according to Gibson, was denial — global warming isn’t
real. Then, diversion.

“It’s real, but we can’t do anything about it. It’s real, but we can’t fix
it. It’s real, but it’s too expensive to fix,” Gibson says, ticking off
arguments.

It’s a set of arguments still in vogue with politicians opposed to climate
change policies. Republican U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers — Spokane’s
congresswoman, who sits on the House Energy and Commerce committee —
reflected this approach in a statement she made this summer to the *
Spokesman-Review*. In precisely four sentences, McMorris Rodgers denied
that people are responsible for climate change, said private industry must
lead the way in cutting emissions, then called cap-and-trade a “Big
Government” scheme that will destroy jobs. She ended by saying that
reducing greenhouse gases is hopeless because of rising emission by
emerging countries such as China.

Climate change deniers have also founded think tanks, published books and
pressured mainstream media reporting on climate change to pursue “balance”
in their stories by including skepticism about global warming. Gibson cites
an example that TV viewers in the Deep South may have seen in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina. Andrea Saul — currently a spokeswoman for Republican
presidential candidate Mitt Romney — was then working for DCI Group, a
public relations firm for Exxon Mobil, according to Gibson.

“DCI set up another firm [called] Tech Central Station to say there’s
absolutely no link to Hurricane Katrina with climate change,” Gibson says.
“And local news media picked it up.”

“It’s been extremely effective,” Gibson says of the doubt-sowing campaigns.
“We’ve seen climate change legislation crash and burn on the global stage.
The Dems don’t want to talk about it. Obama doesn’t want to talk about it.
… Romney is more a climate change denier now.”

While they pursued health care reform, Democrats attempted to enact a
national carbon cap-and-trade system. Cap-and-trade would set a price for
units of carbon pollution generated by companies. It would also set maximum
caps per year of how much carbon a company can generate, allowing those who
produce more carbon to buy credits from companies who come in below the
threshold.

The theory goes that while some businesses have to pay for disposal of
their garbage — a restaurant, for example, pays the city to pick up its
trash each week — large energy producers pollute the atmosphere for free.

“One cost of mining is getting [coal] out of the ground and bringing it to
market, but [they] don’t have to pay for the exhaust [they] put into the
atmosphere,” says Henning, the Gonzaga professor.

The cap-and-trade bill had the support of President Barack Obama and passed
the House in June 2009; but, even though it had the support of large
corporations — big companies like General Electric, Johnson and Johnson,
Honeywell, Alcoa, DuPont and Dow Chemicals joined a coalition that supports
cap-and-trade — the bill died in the Senate in 2010.

*Close to Home*

Researchers in Washington state aren’t talking about alarmist claims —
they’re talking about what will happen if, as expected, our temperature
bumps up just a few degrees.

By 2020, changes in climate are projected to cost Washington state close to
$10 billion annually, according to a report released in April by the state
Department of Ecology, due to “increased health costs, storm damage,
coastal destruction, rising energy costs, increased wildfires, drought and
other impacts.”

The study, commissioned in 2009 by the Washington State Legislature, isn’t
an idle research document. It’s a plan for how to cope as the state morphs.

“People know how to deal with natural variability — we’ve always had
droughts and floods,” says Hedia Adelsman, an executive policy advisor at
Ecology. “Climate change will make these events more chaotic, but also …
they’ll become much more frequent and intensive.

“Washington, if we don’t take it seriously, we will be unprepared.”

Crops are one concern.

Because of the Evergreen State’s northern latitudes, declining crop yields
aren’t a huge worry, according to Chad Kruger, executive director of the
Center for Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington
State University. Instead, Kruger worries about declining quality.

“A lot of our agriculture is really driven by high quality fruits and
veggies, which are more susceptible for quality issues in a change-climate”
scenario, he says.

And there’s the addition of more pests eating into crops. The larvae of the
codling moth, for example, seeks out fruit, gobbles through the skin and
bores through the fruit, eating its way to the seeds.

“The further we get out from today, the more likely we are to get a third
generation of codling moth” in a single growing season, Kruger says. That
means more pesticides on the food, more expense for farmers and more
chances for crop damage.

The warm weather could also bring more pine bark beetle infestations in the
forests of Washington. Such beetle infestations have caused the loss of up
to 1 million trees a year, according to U.S. Forest Service studies.

Warmer winters means the snow will melt earlier off the mountains. Since 70
percent of the water in western mountain regions comes from snow pack,
water supply, wildlife and fisheries will suffer, according to the Ecology
report. Under conservative estimates, snow pack in Washington mountains
will decline by a quarter of its current average for the 2020s, by a third
in the 2040s and by over half during toward the end of the century.

Hydropower production in the summer is likely to decrease about 10 percent
by the 2020s, according to the report. And less water will further hurt the
forests of Eastern Washington, increasing the number of forest droughts and
spurring on wildfires. The report predicts the land burned annually in
fires will double to around 800,00 acres in the 2020s.

Those shifts are unlikely to impact Avista’s ability to deliver electricity
in Eastern Washington, according to Jessie Wuerst.

Wuerst, a senior communications manager for Avista, says water flow changes
due to global warming are projected to change only minimally over the next
20 years. And because Avista supplies Eastern Washington with a mix of
hydropower, natural gas, coal and renewable energy, the decline wouldn’t be
directly felt in Spokane, Wuerst says.

*Hope and Change*

Could the Pacific Northwest tackle global warming by itself? Highly
unlikely. But several states are trying, using what Henning, at Gonzaga,
calls the “California” effect.

“California passes higher emissions standards, and businesses don’t want to
make products especially for California,” Henning says. “So they end up
adopting California standards nationally because California is such a big
market.”

With this in mind, a group of western states and Canadian provinces have
been laboring to assemble states for a cap-and-trade system. The Western
Climate Initiative (WCI) began in 2007 as five westerns states, including
Washington, teamed up to develop targets for reducing greenhouse gases.
Washington and Oregon both withdrew from the plan in November 2011.
Currently, only California and four Canadian provinces are part of the
project.

Jerome Delvin, a state senator from Richland, sponsored the bill to remove
Washington from the WCI. Delvin cites studies by the conservative Heritage
Foundation that say gas prices could rise by $1.40 per gallon under
cap-and-trade. And he calls it arrogant that people assume to predict the
future of climate change.

“To the effect they say it’s happening, I don’t think so,” Delvin said
recently over the phone.

In a statement to *The Inlander* responding about whether he’d support
rejoining the WCI, former congressman and Democratic gubernatorial
candidate Jay Inslee wouldn’t say. Nor did Inslee mention climate change;
he spoke instead of working to creating more clean energy jobs.

Calls and emails asking the same question of Republican gubernatorial
candidate, Attorney General Rob McKenna, were not returned.

Wuerst, the Avista spokeswoman, says her company tracks the progress of
cap-and-trade proposals. Noting the concern of some proposals as being
overly complex, Wuerst says Avista is already working to reduce the
region’s carbon footprint, for example, by helping large manufacturing
plants to add energy efficient lights, windows and refrigeration.

Henning holds out hope that a global solution — an international cap-and
trade or a carbon tax, for instance — can be found. He describes those big
reforms as a kind of insurance.

“I’m not likely to get into a car accident, but should I get insurance
because I might?” he says. “Some people have a higher risk tolerance than
others.”

But, “the burden of proof should be on the people who say there isn’t a
problem,” he says, “rather than on the people who say there is, out of an
abundance of caution.”
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POLITICAL HOT POTATO

Where do Mitt Romney and Barack Obama stand on climate change? It depends
when you’re asking. Both candidates have altered their remarks over the
years. Romney has said in the past — and in his 2010 book *No Apologies* —
that he believes climate change is caused by human actions. That changed as
he vied to become the Republican choice for president.

“My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this
planet,” an October 2011 story by CNN quotes Romney as saying. “And the
idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2
emissions is not the right course for us.”

And Romney last week, in a statement to Sciencedebate.org, said: “I am not
a scientist myself, but my best assessment of the data is that the world is
getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming and that
policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences.
However, there remains a lack of scientific consensus on the issue — on the
extent of the warming, the extent of the human contribution and the
severity of the risk — and I believe we must support continued debate and
investigation within the scientific community.”

President Obama has done some of his own shifting. Like other Democrats,
he’s chucked the soaring rhetoric of saving the planet in order to talk
about the consistently uneven economy.

In November 2008, Obama vowed during the presidential campaign “to reduce
climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050, and invest
$150 billion in new energy-saving technologies,” according to a 2008 *New
York Times* story. But while Obama still talks about how we need to reduce
greenhouse gases, the lofty promises are absent. In remarks last week,
Obama instead touted a series of smaller moves already made by the
administration to curb greenhouse gases.

“Climate change is the one of the biggest issues of this generation,” he
said in a statement to Sciencedebate.org, “and we have to meet this
challenge by driving smart policies that lead to greater growth in clean
energy generation and result in a range of economic and social benefits.
Since taking office I have established historic standards limiting
greenhouse gas emissions from our vehicles for the first time in history.
My administration has made unprecedented investments in clean energy,
proposed the first-ever carbon pollution limits for new fossil-fuel-fired
power plants and reduced carbon emissions within the federal government.”

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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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