Temperature Changes - Part 2

The last post in this series focused on the roughly 100,000 year time scale of the glacial cycle. In this post I am going to zoom down 2 orders of magnitude to focus on the last roughly 1000 years.



The figure above shows data that reconstructs the temperature history of Earth over the last 1000 years. As with the Vostok record, the temperatures are represented as differences from some reference period. The data in this figure come primarily from tree ring records. In the case of tree rings, growth rates can be correlated with temperature and the rings provide a time marker. Some of the more recent portions of this record are based include instrumental measurements and other record that were kept in monasteries and similar long-lived institutions.

This record above is sometimes referred to as the hockey stick record. This refers to the fact that the trend of the temperature changes abruptly from cooling to warming sometime around 1900. The cooling indicated by the blue line shows a cooling rate that is comparable to the cooling rates that are typical of the beginning of previous glacial periods. The warming indicated by the red line shows a rate that is about 3 times faster than the warming rates the commonly ended a glacial period.

As in the glacial record, the most recent portion of this record is anomalous. The cooling of the first part of the last millennia is consistent with the beginning of another glacial period and indeed in the 1970's many scientist thought that we should be entering a new glacial period. That cooling ends very abruptly with a rate that is very fast compared to those at the ends of the previous glacial episodes. (I will return to this rate in a later post in this series.)

A close look at the figure above suggests that this rapid rate may have slowed recently. The following figure shows that while there is some variation, the temperature continues to warm.



The trend lines indicate the variation that can come with the choice of the window over which the average is calculated. The fastest rate starts after the period of roughly constant temperature in the late 19th century and ends at the end of the record in 2000. The slowest rate is that calculated over the entire record. That rate is consistent with the rate shown the in first figure.

The point here is that whatever the cause of the recent warming, its rate is very high compared to those warmings that marked the end of the last 4 glacial periods. It also reflects an abrupt change from the cooling of the previous 900 years. We may quibble whether this variation is natural or human induced, but whatever the cause, it is clearly anomalous with respect to glacial cycles, with respect to the last 10,000 years and with respect to the last 900 years.

Bush Climate Science

Andrew Revkin and Katherine Seelye had a disturbing piece in the Times today. In that article they report that the editing of an upcoming EPA report on the state of our environment has been heavily influenced by the White House. A major section on the likely impacts of climate change has been essentially removed. Ironically, among the bits that have been chopped out are references to a National Research Committee report that the Bush Administration itself commissioned.

Rather than a "summary statement about the potential impact of changes on human health and the environment", the report's section on Global Issues begins with a statement about how complex and tricky the issues are. While the statement is true, it distracts from the issue that we have no choice but to deal as best we can with that complexity. The failure to address the global environment and in particular the climate is explained by Bush appointees as avoiding a rush to judgment. When this is challenged they respond by saying essentially "please be patient, our comprehensive plan for addressing global climate change will be ready soon."

A little more than a year ago, Bush presented his new way of thinking about greenhouse gas emissions by introducing the concept of greenhouse gas intensity. While clever many authors have shown the slight of hand of this rhetoric, my own contributions are a short white paper and a video.

Aside
Yesterday I lectured my environmental policy class on Kingdon's notions of governmental and decision agendas. We talked about whether the environment is on the Bush agenda and I argued that it is rhetorically present, but not really occupying any one's time. Now I am not so sure. It seems to me that it is occupying time but in the negative sense; the Bush administration seems to be actively avoiding taking action.
End

There are a host of simple observations that even many of the skeptics can agree on that indicate that our planet's physical and biological systems are not functioning as that once did (e.g. my post of a few days ago on the Vostok core, or any host of observations about the distribution of mountain glaciers or plant life). Yet in a frightening petard hoisting, inevitable scientific uncertainty is being used to avoid addressing changes in the Earth system a responsible way.

We have become distracted in our quest to determine whether or not or how much of a change in a system is due to human activity as opposed to natural variability. In many ways it does not matter. We are vulnerable to changes in the climate independent of any assessment of blame. While it is true that changes in our fossil fuel consuming habits will take many decades to manifest themselves as mitigative forces in the climate system, there are other kinds of activities we could be undertaking that will have shorter term benefits.

What really frighten's me about political staff becoming involved in the editing of scientific documents is not the cynicism but the hubris. I hated Greek tragedy when I was forced to read it, but the pattern was always there.

Carbon Trading

Most of the people I talk to think that we will trade carbon. It is just a matter of when. I think that I agree with them.

I also get general agreement when I say that I think that it is likely that leadership in the development of carbon trading will come from the private sector. This is actually an interesting development. Most of the thinking about carbon trading is based on an analogy with the trading of sulfur permits in the US. Sulfur trading is part of the framework that was put in place to address issues associated with acid rain. In that framework the US government sets a total amount of sulfur that can be emitted into the atmosphere and sells rights to emit that much material. The price of the right to emit a unit of sulfur is then set by market mechanisms.

There are two ways for a company (say an electric utility) to manage the sulfur that it produces as atmospheric waste. First it can modify it practices so that there is less atmospheric sulfur waste. Modification might include switching to lower sulfur coal or developing new combustion technologies that trap sulfur before goes up the stack. Second it can buy permits to allow the needed sulfur emissions. In a market system, companies will choose which ever option is cheaper. Because the total amount of sulfur that can be emitted is limited and declining, there is incentive to develop new processes in order to avoid having to buy increasingly scarce permits.

Sulfur trading has been fairly successful. The total amount emitted has steadily decreased and, surprisingly, so has the price of permits. Prices have dropped because, the process changes that were encouraged by the structure of the framework have been very successful.

Aside
The story is a little more complicated because at the same time as sulfur permits were being implemented, railroads were being deregulated. Railroad deregulation had the effect of lowering the price of lower sulfur coal from the western states.
End

The sulfur system is called a "Cap and Trade" framework. The total amount of sulfur emissions is "capped" and companies then trade to account for differences in their needs and capacities. The price is initially set by the imposition of the Federal government of the cap. At the implementation point of the system an initial set of property rights is established. Setting the initial level and the initial distribution of property rights is a tricky political problem, but one that was solved in the case of sulfur.

Carbon is different from sulfur. In the case of sulfur and acid rain, the problem could be usefully addressed within the confines of a single nation-state; although there are interesting conflicts with Canada. The time and space scales of the sulfur problem are such that costs and benefits could be assessed and results could be seen in manageable time frames. None of these is true for carbon. Carbon mixes fairly quickly on a global scale and has a time scale in the atmosphere of centuries; thus no single nation can unilaterally address the problem and the benefits may take decades to accrue. Furthermore the details of the carbon cycle are much more complex than those of acid rain.

In some ways the Kyoto Protocol can be thought of as a cap and trade system. It attempts to put limits on the total amount of carbon that can be emitted into the atmosphere and it attempts to allocate initial property rights to those emissions. In this way the Kyoto Protocol would establish a framework in which the value of a ton of carbon could be established.

In a classical sense, some form of capping is necessary to establish a market for carbon, but it doesn't look like people are waiting for that to happen. The price of a ton of carbon is currently somewhere between $3 and $30. Some people I have talked to say the range is much smaller than that. It appears that a growing number of forward thinking companies expect that carbon will be managed in some way in the future. Those companies believe that first movers with respect to the capacity to trade and manage their carbon will have competitive advantage when that day comes. There are enough of those companies that there is a group associated with the Chicago Board of Trade that has established the Chicago Climate Exchange to handle the expected market in carbon trading. There are also large companies such as BP and DuPont that trade carbon internally.

Thus the capacity to trade is being developed in the absence of a regulatory framework. That capacity reflects the expectation by large, globally distributed, firms and groups of firms that carbon emissions are a liability that needs to be hedged. I expect this to continue to develop and that those who are hedging now will come out ahead of the game.

El Nino and Love Canal

One spring day in 1977, Karen Schroeder saw from her window that the liner in the fiberglass swimming pool in her backyard had risen two feet above the ground as a consequence of the year's heavy precipitation. When the pool was removed that summer, the hole it left filled with water laden chemicals...

from A Hazardous Inquiry: the rashamon effect at Love Canal Allan Mazur, 1998

This was part of the beginning of the events that lead eventually to the evacuations of many residents around the infamous Love Canal chemical dump near Niagara Falls, New York.

Between 1941 and 1954, the Hooker Electrochemical Company dumped 25,000 pounds of chemical waste in an abandoned canal. These wastes were both solid and liquid; some, but not all, were contained in 55 gallon drums. Many of the waste products were benzene variants. There was also 120 lbs of dioxin.

Hooker knew that the materials they were dumping were toxic, but their was little understanding of the effects on humans. In reviewing the activities of Hooker in the legal aftermath of the evacuations, it became clear that the chemical company had, at the very least, conducted its waste dumping activities at the level of best practice for that period.

The canal that Hooker used was dug in the 1890s to tap into the power of the flowing water in the Niagara river. It was about 1/2 miles long, 8-16 feet deep and 60-80 feet wide. The lower parts of the canal were in clay which is fairly impermeable; above the clay, the material was fairly permeable. Hooker buried their wastes as they went, but the company-specified 4 feet of cover was not always maintained.

At the time they began dumping the canal was right at the edges of the westward expansion of development around Buffalo, NY. Hooker was concerned about its liability. When the property was transferred to the Board of Education, the deed explicitly acknowledged that chemicals were buried at the site and it seemed to be understood that excavation at the site would increase the likelihood of mobilizing the material that was buried there. In the 1960s and 1970s the area around the dump developed into working- and lower-class neighborhoods. Part of this development was the construction of a school and playgrounds on the dump site, building of houses that abutted the site and the installation of sewers and other infrastructure that, in fact, did involve excavations that compromised the integrity of the dump.

So where do floating swimming pools and El Nino come in?

1976 and 1977 were El Nino years and it rained a lot in upstate New York. That rained filled up the canal and floated Karen Schroeder's pool. As the canal filled up, it brought a lot of the stuff that had been buried there with it. Now the stuff had been there all along and there had been El Nino's since the building of the dump, but the extent of the rains was record setting and the neighborhoods had reached the point the Karen Schroeder had a pool along side the canal.

The disaster at Love Canal was going to happen; the heavy rains may have hastened the inevitable. The industrial and health standards of the 40s and 50s reflected the "infinite sinks" notion of waste management and the infancy the field of toxicology. The planning and early management of the site did not foresee the continued suburban development that would eventually surround the site. The waste management and toxicological naivete can be understood; the failure to project the suburban development, I think, is more difficult to explain.

The question in my mind is "what are the modern day analogs to the best practices that Hooker was using?"