Leave Carbon in the Ground or Humans Won't Be Around

By Richard Whiteford
Sierra Club Member & Environmental Communications Consultant

Congressional legislators who deny climate change typically focus on free market economics and fail to acknowledge the destructive impacts and associated costs that we experience now from climate driven extreme weather events.

They grouse about the Obama Administration’s request for a 2014 climate change budget of $11.6 billion and the expansion of government agencies to combat climate change. 

While realizing that the Republican party’s platform rests on smaller government and cutting government expenses to the bone, you can’t help wondering why their budget fetish ignores the fact that, according to  the U.S. Treasury Department, between 2011 and the first quarter of 2013 extreme weather events cost us more than $136 billion and that doesn’t count the endless numbers of flood, sand storm, drought, and wild fire damages that happened since then.

They claim that while the President stated a willingness to work with Congress toward enacting a bipartisan, market-based scheme to reduce GHG emissions, the Administration has also taken steps to move ahead with Executive Branch actions to address climate change concerns without Congressional support. 

They express outrage that President Barack Obama has advanced a series of unilateral regulations without appropriate legislative review – including a proper assessment of the cumulative influence, regional effects, and distributional impact of such actions on states and localities – would do more harm than good. 

The Republican Party, while vehemently denying the existence of global warming, ditched every proposed climate bill leaving the Obama no other choice.

At a time when our economy is struggling to recover, increasing the cost of energy and cutting more American jobs is not the right way to move forward.”

Here again, like so many people, these legislators fail to recognize the real issue because their only measure is money, revenues in particular.

The critical issue is: in the past 150 years humans increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by 117 parts-per-million by burning fossil fuels. For over 800,000 years before that CO2 levels hovered around 280 parts-per-miliion. 

Now because we pump 90 million tons of CO2 up there every 24 hours, CO2 has risen to an average of 397 parts-per-million and actually spiked into the 400 parts-per-million level twice in early 2013. It won’t be long until that will become the average as it continues upward.

Burning fossil fuels has already raised the global temperature from preindustrial levels by 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and we are already experiencing sea level rise, extreme storms, droughts and wildfires around the planet. Even more alarming, 80 percent of the Arctic ice cap melted in the summer of 2012.

Scientist believe that we can’t allow the preindustrial global temperature to rise higher than 2 degrees Celsius or human survival will be very challenging. We are almost half way there now.

The oil, gas and coal industries and their paid henchmen like the Heartland Institute and bought politicians distract the public with red herring issues like claiming that switching to clean energy will hurt the economy, kill jobs, and cause energy shortages while overlooking the job creation that clean energy creates.

What is tragically overlooked by them and the media is that if humans want to survive on this planet we have to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. Scientists say that we can’t put much more than another 565 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere without disastrous results. At this time, financial analysts calculate that there is already 2,795 gigatons of CO2 contained in readily available oil, gas and coal reserves. 

That’s five times more CO2 than we can afford to burn and expect to survive yet the plan remains drill baby drill; burn baby burn.

There is enough carbon just in the Canadian Tar Sands oil deposits to send the global temperature above the 2 degree limit. That is the reason environmentalists are protesting the Keystone XL Pipe Line. We just can’t afford to burn that carbon and expect to survive.

Again, the critical issue is carbon output. If we keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere jobs and the economy will be a moot point. What good will money be if we don’t live to spend it? 

Our first step should be to tax all carbon at its source of extraction and give that money directly to our tax-paying citizens to cover the increase in price that fossil fuels will go through until we are 100% clean energy and stop burning them. This points to another blind spot. Legislators want to cut subsidies to clean energy but they vote in lock-step to support the $90 billion in tax subsidies that the oil companies get from taxpayers each year in the name of “leveling the playing field.”

The bottom line is, leave carbon in the ground or humans won’t be around.

Originally published in the Patriot News Op-Ed on December 16, 2013. 

Acid Rain: Not Just an 80's Throwback

By Phil Coleman, Co-Editor The Sylvanian

In the 1980’s, the general public became aware of acid rain. Ecologists had been aware of acid precipitation for some time before that, but, as is usually the case, time passed until the term caught on. “Rain” is a better catch word than “precipitation.” And the fact was that sulfur and nitrous oxide compounds were in the air and coming to earth in rain, snow, sleet and plain old dust.

These compounds and a handful of others – especially mercury – were poisoning lakes and stunting trees, as well as giving people health problems. Acid rain was a growing problem because industrial processes were growing. The most serious contributor was the burning of coal. Coal-fired power plants, without adequate emissions cleaning processes, were the worst perpetrators.

Another Look   

But then along came the global climate crisis. Carbon dioxide emissions are affecting the ozone layer, causing the temperature to increase, glaciers to melt, and oceans to rise, and the climate to change, which makes farm land into desert and encourages violent storms. 

Global climate disruption is a serious world problem. And the culprits who produced acid rain are the same culprits who are the principal producers of climate disruption -- coal-fired power plants. Faced with a new problem, the coal industry developed a theory that carbon from coal plants could be “sequestered” by being pumped underground where it wouldn’t harm the ozone layer.

The industry called this “Clean Coal” technology. Sequestering carbon is technically doable if you ignore the expense involved, the energy required to transport and pump the carbon, and the increase in coal burning required to produce a unit of electricity. But the industry loved it. Companies petitioned the government to fund studies and trials to sequester carbon. They didn’t wait for the results: billboards proclaiming “Clean Coal” went up all over coal country.

The industry is much better at advertising than is the environmental community. Our response was vigorous but not as effective. And no one is talking about acid rain anymore.

Juggled

We all admire the juggler who can keep three or more balls in the air at once. But most of us most of the time are not jugglers. We can’t keep two slogans going at once. When we learned about global warming, we lost track of acid rain. The facts haven’t changed, but our attention was diverted. Isn’t it remarkable that the power plant wanted to continue polluting our rivers and lakes and stunting our forests even while they were proclaiming Clean Coal?

Fortunately, not everyone has dropped the ball. Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has been at work forcing the dirtiest power plants out of business. Using the Clean Air Act, they filed suit just last year against the Homer City, PA, power plant, one of the biggest polluters and one of the slowest to clean up.

The global climate crisis is a serious global problem. But let’s not forget that acid rain is an ongoing and closely-related problem. And Pennsylvania is one of its targets.

Photo Courtesy of glogster.com 

The Medieval Climate Anomaly

                                          Marlin Turby, member from Dillsburg, PA

To declare that climate change is due from natural climate variability acknowledges that there is observed global warming and the consequent change in climate. Does it not? The argument therefore is not concerning global warming and climate change as a physical reality; rather, it is whether it is of natural or human (anthropocentric) origin?

For each side of the argument the following is true: climatologists -- working as peer reviewed scientists and abiding by the scientific method -- have accurately measured the temperature of the planet, as well as the warming in the past century, and verified the change in world climates. 

I conclude that all people, institutions, and think tanks, which say that global warming and climate change are merely natural climate variability, are fully acknowledging that the planet is warming and the climate is changing. Likewise, they acknowledge that scientists and their methods of research are legitimate.

Yet, for some reason, when scientists, using identical scientific methods and peer reviewed protocols, determine that the carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels are the primary cause of warming, suddenly, scientists are involved in a conspiracy. There is a contradiction in their language to which they appear oblivious.

One climatological event sighted as evidence for natural variability was the Medieval Warm Period, 850 to 1250 AD and the Little Ice Age, 1300 through 1800 AD. The North Atlantic Ocean was unusually free of sea ice during the warm phase, which allowed sailing through the region and settlement in Greenland. This warming was felt in many areas; yet globally, temperatures were slightly cooler than those of today.  Afterwards and extending to 1800 AD there was a substantial cooling in northern Europe known as the "Little Ice Age".  

Taken collectively the Medieval Warm Period, MVP, and the Little Ice Age, LIA, are termed "The Medieval Climate Anomaly." It has been discovered that the MVP had two distinct causes: (1) an increase in solar output and (2) a decrease in volcanic activity.

Volcanoes emit particulates that are suspended in the atmosphere and are circulated by upper level winds in the troposphere for a number of years. These particles, called "aerosols," reflect incoming sunlight back into space. thus reducing the amount of sunlight the planet receives.

Carbon dioxide is also emitted from volcanoes, which as we know, warms the planet. Volcanoes tend to cool the planet in the short term due to aerosols and warm it in the long term from the CO2 that remains in the atmosphere for centuries. It is not an entirely linear arrangement, with numerous variables and feedback mechanisms contributing to the final net result.  

The atmosphere and world climates are influenced by the oceans. The "Thermohaline Circulation" is a massive river within the oceans that circulates globally. As the name indicates, it is driven by heat energy and saline density. This transfers tropical heat to the North Atlantic.

The melting in the North Atlantic during the MVP slowed the oceanic circulation thus contributing to the onset of the LIA. Today Greenland and the Arctic melt at alarming rates.

Does history repeat itself? We shall see.