EU Pledges Unilaterally to Reduce Carbon Emissions by 20%

Earlier this week, the European Union agreed to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases by 20% within 13 years — but you might not have found out about it if you only read U.S. news sources.

In Europe, environmentalists grumbled that a 30% cut was needed if there was to be any hope of stabilizing temperatures. (I'm not sure where they got that figure. Don't we have to zero out emissions to fully stabilize temperature increases?) But EU officials said a bigger cut would be economically harmful if it was done unilaterally. So they plan to press the U.S. and China to commit to a 30% cut in a post-Kyoto agreement.

Is this credible? According to an article in the Guardian, "the EU's original 15 members are well short of reaching their 8% cut by 2012" under the Kyoto protocol. So if they can't do 8% over 1990 levels, how are they going to do 20 or 30% over current levels?

Meanwhile, here in the United States, the EU's new commitment to combat global warming was barely covered in news reports. The Washington Post relegated it to a tiny brief. And Michael Nisbet reports over at Framing Science that global warming did not make it onto the list of the 10 most heavily covered news stories since the first of the year, as indexed by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. This is despite the flurry of coverage around the release of the IPCC report.

I guess we'll have to wait for hurricane season for the next barrage of coverage.

-- T.Y.

Colorado River to Take Hit from Global Warming

Anyone who has paid close attention to water issues in the West will find much that's familiar in a new report from the National Research Council about the Colorado River. The report warns that increasing population growth in the interior West, combined with droughts made worse by global warming, will be putting increasing pressure on the Colorado.

The report notes that the Colorado River Compact, which divied up the flow between the upper and lower basin states, was signed in 1922 — right after a particularly wet period in the interior West. The average flow for the purposes of the compact was pegged at 16.4 million acre feet a year. Today, according to the report, the average flow of the river is 15 million acre feet per year. And tree-ring records show that extended droughts lasting decades or even longer are a recurrent feature of climate in the West, causing the Colorado's flow to fall significantly below average.

Now, based on many climate model simulations, "the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that warmer future temperatures will reduce future Colorado River streamflow and water supplies," the report concludes. "Reduced streamflow would also contribute to increasing severity, frequency, and duration of future droughts."

This is occurring against the backdrop of a burgeoning population in the West. Arizona alone saw its population rise by 40 percent just since 1990. Here in Colorado, population grew by 30 percent. Although Westerners have made strides in reducing per capita water use, continued conservation will not be enough in the face of rising population and dropping availability of water, the report states.

It offers no simple solutions. Instead, it calls for continued conservation, use of innovative technology, greater cooperation between Colorado River basin states to prepare better for drought, increased communication between water managers and scientists, and, of course, more study:

"The report thus recommends a comprehensive, action-oriented study of Colorado River region urban water practices and changing patterns of demand be conducted. The study should evaluate a range of issues, including demographic projections and water demand forecasts, impacts of urban water demands on riparian ecology, and contemporary urban water policies and practices."

No surprises there, but the issues raised by the report are a reminder of the compelling need for good environmental journalism in the West. Reporters who are knowledgabe about the complexities of water in the West are desperately needed — to avoid common mistakes, such as the one made in NPR's All Things Considered broadcast on the report by Elizabeth Shogren yesterday. It wasn't a huge mistake, but it betrayed a lack of knowledge of how the reservoir system on the Colorado River works. Shogren stated that Lake Mead "keeps taps flowing in Southern California, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado. The problem is that Colorado gets no water from Lake Mead.

Lake Powell, impounded behind Glen Canyon Dam, is a kind of hydrological bank for the upper basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. It helps the states meet their obligations under the Colorado River Compact to send a specified amount of water down the river to the lower basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada. When drought prevails, the upper basin states can take water out of the bank and send it downstream, meeting their compact obligations while also satisfying their own water demands. Meanwhile, Lake Mead is used by the lower basin states to store water for their own uses. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, "Hoover Dam helps ensure a dependable water supply for municipal, industrial and other domestic uses in southern Nevada, Arizona and southern California. More than 16 million people and numerous industries in these three states receive Colorado River water that was stored by Hoover Dam."

No taps in Colorado depend on water from Lake Mead.

-- T.Y.

Environmental Journalism at its Best — Again

Ray Ring, Northern Rockies editor of High Country News, has won a prestigious Polk award for political reporting. Ray investigated the financing of referendum campaigns against land-use regulations in six Western states. "National libertarian groups are not just funneling big bucks into this campaign to protect a few property owners from eminent domain," Ray wrote. "They have their sights set on something much bigger — laying waste to land-use regulations used by state and local governments to protect the landscape, the environment and neighborhoods." After his story appeared, and word of what was going on spread, the referenda were defeated by voters in three states; and the courts knocked down or scaled back two others. Only one state out of the original six, Arizona, approved its referendum.

Congratulations to Ray for great work!

Australia to Ban Incandescent Light Bulbs to Combat Global Warming

It's true, according to this article in Australia's Courier-Mail.

Guest Blog: Opinion Column in Science Times

The following is a guest posting:

The addition of conservative columnist John Tierney to the staff of the New York Times's Science Times section has to be one of the most bizarre--and irresponsible--editorial decisions in awhile. Tierney's new column, "Findings," runs on the front page of the section, mixed in with the standard-issue news and feature stories. And while particularly astute readers might pick up on the fact that Tierney is an opinion writer rather than a science reporter, it's a good bet that general readers won't make that distinction. So while the section's staff reporters and other contributors work hard to maintain some shred of objectivity in their stories, those stories are now running side-by-side with Tierney's politically charged commentaries--and the result is a serious blow to the whole section's credibility, and a public misled by opinion masquerading as fact.

Check out Tierney's column from this past Tuesday (Feb. 13). It uses Richard Branson's $25 million prize for a solution to global warming as a way to begin talking about Al Gore (the connection is tenuous). Tierney's real intent is to attack Gore and his film, "An Inconvenient Truth," which is old news at this point, since it's been out for almost a year. One senses Tierney's been rubbing his hands together for about that long trying to find an appropriate venue for his attack. He accuses Gore of "hype" and of extrapolating "a short-term trend into a disaster," and of various other crimes against science (and indirectly against humanity). To those with good working knowledge of climate change, Tierney sounds just half a step removed from right-wing fiction writer and global warming denialist Michael Crichton. But to the majority of readers, he sounds like he's reciting facts that call into question Gore's entire endeavor (which has been, for the most part, lauded by climate scientists).

Tierney also uses this column as a pulpit for a message he's been hammering for years: There's no point in trying to change people's habits, so the only solutions to environmental problems will be technological. "As far-fetched as it seems today," Tierney wrote on page one of the section, "removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could turn out to be a lot more practical than the alternative: persuading six million people to stop putting it there." Of course, this statement is a lot more true if you are opposed, as Tierney clearly is, to any sort of federal or international environmental regulation. To run political commentary like this on the front page of the Science Times is to etch opinion into the minds of many readers as fact. Why more people haven't raised red flags is a mystery.

Top Bush Official Caught in Bed with Oil Lobbyist

Maybe literally. The San Jose Mercury News reports the following:

"WASHINGTON - Nine months before agreeing to let ConocoPhillips delay a half-billion-dollar pollution cleanup, the government's top environmental prosecutor bought a $1 million vacation home with the company's top lobbyist."

You just can't make this stuff up.

Former Assistant Attorney General
Sue Ellen Wooldridge

Global Warming and Red Herrings

Two arguments are often made by skeptics of climate change. The first is that the link between human activities and global warming is not definite. The second is that while "climate alarmists" claim that a consensus exists among scientists on this issue, there is no such thing as consensus in science.

Both arguments are red herrings.

Skeptics who say that the link between climate change and human activities "isn't definite" are throwing up a red herring because the statement distracts from what they really mean: Despite the very strong body of evidence favoring a link between human activities and significant climate change, they do not favor action for other reasons — usually economic reasons. Policy action never requires certainty. So folks who raise this argument should be asked why they demand certainty with climate change.

The answer, of course, is that they want to ensure inaction.

Science never proves hypotheses and theories with 100 percent certainty. From the perspective of logic, it is impossible to rule out every possibility, because we have not conducted every conceivable observation or experiment, and we haven't lived in the future. It is always possible that we haven't thought of something. So we can only test the predictions arising from theories. And as the philosopher of science Karl Popper pointed out, if the predictions hold up with repeated testing, then the best you can say is that the theory has been well "corroborated."

I like that word and I try to use it when I can in my science stories.

So folks in the petroleum industry who make the lack of certainty argument are technically right. The link isn't, quote — definite — endquote. It never will be. But it is very well corroborated that human activities are causing significant changes to the climate.

When they say it to us, we might ask them whether they think the predictions made by their corporate economists are "definite," or whether their calculations of petroleum reserves are "definite." They would have to answer "no." And then we could ask whether their companies should not drill for oil in a promising spot because the predictions that oil is there are not "definite."

The "no consensus on climate change" red herring is just as distracting. Once again, policy can proceed without consensus on the underlying scientific issues. We might just decide that action is warranted as a kind of insurance policy — just in case the scientific projections are right. Speaking now as a citizen, not a journalist, I would say that we should have taken that approach long ago, before the current consensus emerged. If we had, we would be in a much better position both geopolitically and environmentally.

In this case, of course, a consensus really does exist. "Consensus" means "general agreement." And the word "general" means "affecting or concerning most people." I think it is completely accurate to say that most scientists who study one aspect of climate change or another and who publish in peer reviewed journals agree on some of the fundamental aspects of climate change, but by no means all aspects.

There is simply no question that most such scientists would agree that humans are very likely responsible for most of the observed warming over the past 50 years, and that potentially disruptive changes are likely to continue. This is one of the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But if the word "consensus" bothers you, call it a "general agreement." Or forget trying to affix a one- or two-word label and be punctiliously precise like Libby Rosenthal and Andy Revkin did in their story for the N.Y. Times on the day of the IPCC release. They referred to the conclusion from "the leading international network of climate change scientists."

Global warming is a huge and complex subject with many unknowns. For example, will it snow more or less here in Colorado? Some of the predictions are for more snow and some are for less, and the science is uncertain. What about sea level? How fast will it rise and how high? The IPCC was pretty conservative there, backing off some of the scary scenarios floated last year about 20 feet of rise by the year 2100. But those scary scenarios are still credible. You can say with utter accuracy that paleoclimate records demonstrate the following: The last time the Arctic was as warm as computer models say it will be by the year 2100, sea level was indeed 20 feet higher.

Should we be worried? Stepping out of my role as a journalist again, I'll say unequivocally: I think so. But there's no consensus on this question. And maybe that's the problem.

-- T.Y.