Global Carbon Sink Holding Up So Far

Are Winters Getting Warmer in Ithaca, NY?

Hints of Climate Change Affecting the Electricity Grid

It's interesting reading the NERC 2013 Summer Reliability Assessment.  Although it's not a focus of the report, reading between the lines you can see that climate change is going to have complex effects on the grid, and all of them increase the stress on it:

1. Weather extremes, particular heat-waves, cause higher peak demands, and larger swings in power demand.  For example, p1 refers to challenges in the Texas interconnect (ERCOT) as follows: "The Anticipated Reserve Margin for ERCOT is 12.88 percent for summer 2013. This is below the 13.75 percent target for ERCOT. Sustained extreme weather could be a threat to supply adequacy this summer. ERCOT may need to declare Energy Emergency Alerts (EEA) if there are higher‐than‐normal forced generation outages or if record‐breaking weather conditions similar to the summer of 2011 lead to higher‐than‐expected peak demands."
2. Drought (expected to increase under climate change) can affect the operation of thermal generation plants (both nuclear and fossil-fuel powered).  Eg p4 says: "When water levels fall significantly, water intake structures may be exposed above the water surface, causing the plant to become nonoperational. Additionally, generators are less efficient as the temperature of cooling water increases and results in a reduction of the power capability of the plant. Along some bodies of water, regulatory limits are placed on the temperature of the cooling water system discharges, and power plants are not allowed to raise water temperatures above levels deemed safe for species of fish and other aquatic life. Again, no major system impacts are expected; however, in certain extreme cases, waivers may be needed to keep critical generation online."
3. Drought more obviously reduces available hydro-electric generation, eg in the midwest this year (p5): "For the upcoming summer season, the Missouri River main‐stem water levels are being monitored closely, as impacts to this water source may affect significant hydro generation. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicts that 2013 will be a drought year, and electric energy produced from the Missouri River will be approximately 80 percent of the historical average."
4. Major storms appear to be worsening, and these can cause unpredictable damage to the grid, or the fuel sources required to run the grid.  For example, hurricane Sandy caused substantial outages in the northeast last year, and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico can cause loss of natural gas production required for electricity generation (p6).
5. Finally, the increase in solar and wind production (which is being undertaken to reduce the causes of climate change) itself is a grid-stressor as these sources are intermittent and mostly not under the control of the grid operators.  The larger the mix of these sources becomes, the more we will demand of the transmission grid.

Of course, none of these things need be fatal to the reliable production of electricity.  But it's clear that it's going to take significant additional investment to keep the grid working reliably in the face of climate change.  Given human inertia, one might imagine that we will be slow to make all the necessary investments and be prone to run the grid in a stressed and vulnerable manner.

Initial Conference Impressions

A few quick hits from the conference.

• I went to the opening plenary last night.  I estimate there were about 250 people in the room.  I thought this was seriously impressive for a local conference organized in two counties (Tompkins and Cortland) with about 150000 population between them.  The conference is perhaps drawing from the larger region to some degree, but still, this is not a state-level conference in Albany or a national conference in Manhattan.
• My impression is the high level of interest is driven by two things: a) we have had some very extreme and variable weather here in recent years and it's really got people's attention, and b) the big fight about fracking has led quite a few people to a larger interest in energy/climate issues (if you start insisting that you don't want your region to be a fossil-fuel supplier, your conscience is apt to start nagging you that maybe you shouldn't be using too much fossil fuel either). 
• The keynote speaker was Mark Hertsgaard, author of Hot: Living through the next Fifty Years on Earth.  I liked his speech, it was inspiring.
• I couldn't help noticing that the parking lot outside the conference venue had a mix of vehicles that looked very typical of the region.  Wall-to-wall Priuses and bicycles it was definitely not.  I have a half a mind to do an actual sample tomorrow to get a sense of where we are at; have people who care enough about climate to attend a conference cared enough to make any detectable changes in their own lifestyle?
• The definitive word on climate change and New York State is NYSERDA's Climaid (600 pages but you can get it one chapter at a time).
• This morning I was in Cortland all morning for the section on adapting agriculture to climate change.  The audience was smaller (it being a weekday), but the speakers were excellent - in the main session we heard from scientists and then at lunch we heard from actual growers.  The basic message was the same from everyone:
• New York State has warmed noticeably, particularly in the winter.  The growing season is longer.  One big dairy operator mentioned that in 1973 he was planting 80 day corn on his hills and 90 day on his river bottom land, whereas today he is planting 95 day corn on the hills and 110 day corn on the bottomland.
• The weather is also noticeably more extreme.  There are more droughts, more floods, more risk of frosts during the longer growing season, more occasions when they can't get machinery into the fields because the weather is too wet, and more big snowfalls.  This showed up both in the scientist's statistics and also the grower's anecdotes.  The scientists all pinned this on more moisture in the warmer atmosphere and changes in the circulation due to a warmer Arctic.
• Here are corn yields in New York State since 1945.  There is the same linear pattern that yields often show nationally and globally.  Although the climate is certainly affecting agriculture here in both positive and negative ways, apparently it all nets out to maintain roughly the existing trend:

• I got to ask a lot of questions.  The most intriguing answers came in response to me observing that climate scientists seem to have been repeatedly blind-sided in the last decade, and did the scientist speakers have confidence in mainstream climate science projections or did they think there was a material risk of non-linear poorly understood processes causing significantly more radical change.  None of them sounded reassuring.  Dave Eichorn said that he agreed the situation was poorly understood and he wasn't confident that the changed weather patterns we are currently observing will still be the same in 20 years, or something else altogether might be occurring.  Larry Klotz said that scientists are inherently conservative because they don't want to publish something that won't hold up in twenty years, so they shy away from making strong claims without being very confident of their ground, which contributes to the impression that they underplay the issues.  He personally is speaking out more in part because he has a new grandchild.  David Wolfe said that he, like a lot of his colleagues, tends to stick to mainstream projections to avoid losing credibility and/or sowing panic with less likely but possible scenarios.  However, privately, climate scientists discuss amongst themselves the possibility of much more extreme scenarios and they cannot be ruled out.

Global Crop Production

Climate Change Still Not Affecting Global Cereal Yields

Distinguishing Natural and Man-Made Climate Change

Figure is from here, and shows estimated global temperature from the last glacial maximum to the end of the 21st century (according to a fairly business-as-usual emissions scenario).

To Boldly Go Where None Have Been Before...

Global Warming Perspective of 1958

Interesting to understand the perspective at that time.  They already knew that a few degrees warming was a really big deal.

The Location of the US Forest Carbon Sink

Distribution of Katrina refugees

CO2 Concentration in "Panic and Repent" Scenarios

The Human Response Function to Climate Change

Extreme Weather Rages Around the World

Seems like climate change has arrived on the front page of the New York Times.  Does this mean we could maybe think about doing something about it?

Latest Ice Sheet Mass Balance Estimates

Avoiding Defeatism on Climate Change

Kevin Drum sounds a little bit down in the mouth:

If you were teaching a graduate seminar in public policy and challenged your students to come up with the most difficult possible problem to solve, they'd come up with something very much like climate change. It's slow-acting. It's essentially invisible. It's expensive to address. It has a huge number of very rich special interests arrayed against doing anything about it. It requires international action that pits rich countries against poor ones. And it has a lot of momentum: you have to take action now, before its effects are serious, because today's greenhouse gases will cause climate change tomorrow no matter what we do in thirty years.

I have to confess that I find myself feeling the same way Andy does more and more often these days. It's really hard to envision any way that we're going to seriously cut back on greenhouse gas emissions until the effects of climate change become obvious, and by then it will be too late. I recognize how defeatist this is, and perhaps the proliferation of extreme weather events like Sandy will help turn the tide. But it hasn't so far, and given the unlikelihood of large-scale global action on climate change, adaptation seems more appealing all the time. For the same reason, so does continued research into geoengineering as a last-resort backup plan.

I don't think this is really quite the right way of thinking about the problem with it's all-or-nothing, either-or quality.  I'd like to suggest some other ways of framing the issue that are helpful to me in staying motivated to take action.  As a starting point, let's look at a few emissions scenarios and temperature projections:

Nearest Precedent for Hurricane Sandy

So Far, So Good: The Global Carbon Sink in 2011

Sea Level Pressure Changes since 2007

Collapse in Minimum Arctic Sea Ice Area