The Daily Climate: 5 Reasons for Global Warming Optimism

by Emily Gertz

Published November 21, 2008 @ 09:44AM PST

The Daily Green's "5 Reasons To Be Hopeful About Global Warming" has rising up to the top of Digg's environmental news pile. So cheer up climate fans, and here's why:

1. Major progress towards saving Brazilian and Indonesian rainforests.
2. Britain commits: the UK has become the first nation to set binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions that match U.N. targets.
3. The U.S. coal industry is on the defensive.
4. A new report from the Bush administration shows that the U.S. can drastically improve energy efficiency 20% and cut greenhouse gas pollution by 20205. Yes, from the Bush administration.
5. One word: Obama.

Swedes are debating the ethics of industrial poultry operations so intensely that the issue has it's own word: "kycklingdebat," or chicken debate. Kyclingdebat is raging thanks to an expose by one of country's major daily newspapers on the lives of Swedish chickens "Nasty, brutish, short?" asks Treehugger, which offers a thorough writeup. Chicken consumption is rising in Sweden, notes the green megablog, thanks to ad campaigns touting the lesser harms poultry ag has on the climate compared to raising water- and land-hogging cows and pigs.

Everyone's got a list for the President-elect: Readers at DotEarth, New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin's blog, have selected 10 ideas for advancing "Earth-friendly" policies on the nation's thinner wallet. Mr. Revkin promises to forward them to Barack Obama's transition team. One suite of three-in-one ideas struck me as especially prescient:

a: Monitor long-term soil productivity, expressed as the land’s ability to sustain life as well as agriculture. This would apply to farmland, prairie, and forest. Include measurements of CO2 emissions and public health. Then, implement a national policy that strives toward approximate equilibrium, instead of the current trend of toxic degradation. [[Loss of topsoil in the U.S. is a crisis in progress, and gets scant coverage in the popular media.]]

b: Calculate the environmental externalities of all power production technologies, including CO2 and pollution. Put a price on them, and see that energy policy reflects these costs. [[An idea that goes to the heart of ecological economics, which I've touched on in the course of covering the financial crisis.]]

c: Modern industrial civilization is not “sustainable”: this is a meaningless goal, due to the law of entropy. Instead, develop equations that measure durability and environmental degradation for consumer products, including housing and transportation. Then, see that government policies encourage responsible living, instead of the opposite. [[The first point strikes me as crucial connection of dots in how we define "sustainability" (the "pare-down" philosophy has so far largely consigned largely to the realm of mysticism by authors of popcult feng shui guides, or personal growthy/design gurus like Apartment Therapy's Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan). Bruce Sterling examined in detail this week as well in his Last Viridian Note.]]

Last week, climate scientist Gavin Schmidt discussed the tendency of some citizen-observers of temperature data to over-emote the enthusiasm when something upholds their conspiracy-theory tinged vision of how climate science is conducted. Precipitating event: Within 24 hours of the release of a temperature analysis by NASA-Goddard, an anomaly in global temperature data reports for October was identified. NASA withdrew the analysis to correct the errors -- pretty standard stuff for science.

"It's clearly true that the more eyes there are looking, the faster errors get noticed and fixed," Schmidt wrote. "The cottage industry that has sprung up to examine the daily sea ice numbers or the monthly analyses of surface and satellite temperatures, has certainly increased the number of eyes and that is generally for the good..."

But unlike in other fields of citizen-science (astronomy or phenology spring to mind), the motivation for the temperature observers is heavily weighted towards wanting to find something wrong. As we discussed last year, there is a strong yearning among some to want to wake up tomorrow and find that the globe hasn't been warming, that the sea ice hasn't melted, that the glaciers have not receded and that indeed, CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Thus when mistakes occur (and with science being a human endeavour, they always will) the exuberance of the response can be breathtaking - and quite telling.

A few examples from the comments at Watt's blog will suffice to give you a flavour of the conspiratorial thinking: "I believe they had two sets of data: One would be released if Republicans won, and another if Democrats won.", "could this be a sneaky way to set up the BO presidency with an urgent need to regulate CO2?", "There are a great many of us who will under no circumstance allow the oppression of government rule to pervade over our freedom—-PERIOD!!!!!!" (exclamation marks reduced enormously), "these people are blinded by their own bias", "this sort of scientific fraud", "Climate science on the warmer side has degenerated to competitive lying", etc… (To be fair, there were people who made sensible comments as well).

The amount of simply made up stuff is also impressive - the GISS press release declaring the October the 'warmest ever'? Imaginary (GISS only puts out press releases on the temperature analysis at the end of the year). The headlines trumpeting this result? Non-existent. One clearly sees the relief that finally the grand conspiracy has been rumbled, that the mainstream media will get it's comeuppance, and that surely now, the powers that be will listen to those voices that had been crying in the wilderness.

Alas! none of this will come to pass. In this case, someone's programming error will be fixed and nothing will change except for the reporting of a single month's anomaly. No heads will roll, no congressional investigations will be launched, no politicians (with one possible exception) will take note. This will undoubtedly be disappointing to many, but they should comfort themselves with the thought that the chances of this error happening again has now been diminished. Which is good, right?

Yes, it's good. Also good: You can directly assist climate scientists in their work by joining climateprediction.net, and dedicate a bit of your computer's excess processing power to help produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century.

Image: Ziggurat 5, a limited-edition (but affordable!) print by Superdeluxr for 20x200.