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First Infrared Satellite Monitoring of Peak Pollution Episodes in China

Jan. 20, 2014 — Plumes of several anthropogenic pollutants (especially particulate matter and carbon monoxide) located near ground level over China have for the first time been detected from space. The work was carried out by a team at the Laboratoire Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales (CNRS / UPMC / UVSQ) in collaboration with Belgian researchers and with support from CNES, using measurements by the IASI infrared sounder launched on board the MetOp satellite. Their groundbreaking results are published online on the website of the journal Geophysical Research Letters dated 17 January 2014. They represent a crucial step towards improved monitoring of regional pollution and forecasting of local pollution episodes, especially in China.

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George Monbiot news@monbiot.com via google.com	6:17 PM (45 minutes ago)
to me

Addicted to Comfort

Posted: 20 Jan 2014 12:16 PM PST

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 20th January 2014

The question has changed a little since Rousseau’s day, but the mystery remains(1). Why, when most of us now possess greater freedom than almost any preceding generation has enjoyed – freedom from tyranny, freedom from slavery, freedom from hunger – do we act as if we don’t?

I’m prompted to ask by the discovery that the most illiberal and oppressive instrument proposed by any recent government – injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance in the Anti-Social Behaviour Bill – has been attacked by Labour not because it is draconian but because it is not draconian enough(2,3). The measure was decisively rejected by the Lords last week(4). But if the government tries to restore this monstrous proposal in the Commons next month, Labour is likely to insist only that it is too timid.

Why do we tolerate a politics that offers no effective choice? That operates largely at the behest of millionaire funders, corporate power and a bullying media? Why, in an age in which people are no longer tortured and executed for criticising those in power, have we failed to create viable alternatives?

In the US Congress this year, for the first time a majority of members are millionaires(5). As the representatives become richer, the laws they pass ensure that they exercise ever less power over the rich and ever more power over the poor. Yet, as the Center for Responsive Politics notes, “there’s been no change in our appetite to elect affluent politicians to represent our concerns in Washington.”(6)

We appear to possess an almost limitless ability to sit back and watch as political life is seized by plutocrats, as the biosphere is trashed, as public services are killed or given to corporations; as workers are dragooned into zero-hour contracts. Though there are a few wonderful exceptions, on the whole protest is muted and alternatives are shrugged away without examination. How did we acquire this superhuman passivity?

The question is not confined to politics. Almost universally we now seem content to lead a proxy life, a counter life, of vicarious, illusory relationships, of secondhand pleasures, of atomisation without individuation. Those who possess some disposable income are extraordinarily free, by comparison to almost all our great-grandparents, but we tend to act as if we have been placed under house arrest. With the amount most of us spend on home entertainment, we could probably buy a horse and play buzkashi every weekend. But we would rather stare at an illuminated box, watching other people jumping up and down and screaming. Our political constraint is one aspect of a wider inhibition, a wider failure to be free.

I’m not talking about thinktank freedoms here: the freedom of billionaires not to pay their taxes, of corporations to pollute the atmosphere or induce children to smoke, of landlords to exploit their tenants. We should respect the prohibitive decencies we owe to others. But there are plenty of freedoms we can exercise without diminishing other people’s.

Had our ancestors been asked to predict what would happen in an age of widespread prosperity in which most religious and cultural proscriptions had lost their power, how many would have guessed that our favourite activities would not be fiery political meetings, masked orgies, philosophical debates, hunting wild boar or surfing monstrous waves but shopping and watching other people pretending to enjoy themselves? How many would have foreseen a national conversation – in public and in private – that revolves around the three Rs: renovation, recipes and resorts? How many would have guessed that people possessed of unimaginable wealth and leisure and liberty would spend their time shopping for onion goggles and wheatgrass juicers? Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.

A few years ago, a friend explained how depressed he had become while trying to find a stimulating partner through online dating sites. He kept stumbling across the same phrase, used verbatim by dozens of the women he looked up. “I like nothing better than a night in on the sofa with a glass of red and a good DVD”. The horror he felt arose not so much from the preference as from its repetition: “the failure to grasp the possibilities of self-differentiation.”

I wrote to him last week to see if anything had changed. Yes: he has now tumbled into the vortex that dismayed him. He dated 18 women in 2013, seeking “the short sharp hit which keeps you coming back despite the fact that the experience taken as a whole does not add up to anything worth having. My life … is beginning to dance to the Internet rhythm of desire satiated immediately and thinly”. In seeking someone who was not trapped on the hedonic treadmill, he became trapped on the hedonic treadmill.

Could it be this – the immediate satisfaction of desire, the readiness with which we can find comfort – that deprives us of greater freedoms? Does extreme comfort deaden the will to be free?

If so, it is a habit learnt early and learnt hard. When children are housebound, we cannot expect them to develop an instinct for freedom that is intimately associated with being outdoors(7). We cannot expect them to reach for more challenging freedoms if they have no experience of fear and cold and hunger and exhaustion. Perhaps freedom from want has paradoxically deprived us of other freedoms. The freedom which makes so many new pleasures available vitiates the desire to enjoy them.

Tocqueville made a similar point about democracy: it threatens to enclose each of us “entirely in the solitude of his own heart.”(8) The freedoms it grants us destroy the desire to combine and to organise. To judge by our reluctance to create sustained alternatives, we wish neither to belong nor to deviate.

It is not hard to see how our elective impotence leads before long to tyranny. Without coherent popular movements, which are required to prevent opposition parties from falling into the clutches of millionaires and corporate lobbyists, almost any government would be tempted to engineer a nominally democratic police state. Freedom of all kinds is something we must use or lose. But we seem to have forgotten what it means.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1.  Rousseau’s unanswered question, at the start of The Social Contract, concerns the mystery of our submission to captivity.

2. http://www.labour.org.uk/asb-the-government-is-proposing-to-weaken-powers

3. Yvette Cooper, Column 176. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/cm130509/debtext/130509-0002.htm

4. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jan/09/lords-reject-antisocial-asbo-ipna-bill

5. http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/01/millionaires-club-for-first-time-most-lawmakers-are-worth-1-million-plus.html

6. http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/01/millionaires-club-for-first-time-most-lawmakers-are-worth-1-million-plus.html

7. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/education-children-not-feral-enough

21 January 2014

The why and how of radical emissions reductions: (1) Kevin Anderson

Prof. Kevin Anderson

First in a series

On 10-11 December 2014, a Radical Emissions Reduction Conference was held at the Royal Society, London under the auspices of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. The conference’s purpose was described as:

Today, in 2013, we face an unavoidably radical future. We either continue with rising emissions and reap the radical repercussions of severe climate change, or we acknowledge that we have a choice and pursue radical emission reductions: No longer is there a non-radical option. Moreover, low-carbon supply technologies cannot deliver the necessary rate of emission reductions – they need to be complemented with rapid, deep and early reductions in energy consumption – the rationale for this conference.

Prof. Kevin Anderson and Dr. Alice Bows-Larkin, both from the Tyndall Centre, were instrumental in in framing the challenge for the conference. In 2010, they noted in a research paper that:

…while the rhetoric of policy is to reduce emissions in line with avoiding dangerous climate change, most policy advice is to accept a high probability of extremely dangerous climate change rather than propose radical and immediate emission reductions.

And in 2012 in “A new paradigm for climate change”, Anderson and Bows call for academic rigour in elaborating the scientific and economic choices:

    … academics may again have contributed to a misguided belief that commitments to avoid warming of 2°C can still be realized with incremental adjustments to economic incentives… as the remaining cumulative budget is consumed, so any contextual interpretation of the science demonstrates that the threshold of 2°C is no longer viable, at least within orthodox political and economic constraints…
At the same time as climate change analyses are being subverted to reconcile them with the orthodoxy of economic growth, neoclassical economics has evidently failed to keep even its own house in order. This failure is not peripheral. It is prolonged, deep-rooted and disregards national boundaries, raising profound issues about the structures, values and framing of contemporary society… This catastrophic and ongoing failure of market economics and the laissez-faire rhetoric accompanying it (unfettered choice, deregulation and so on) could provide an opportunity to think differently about climate change…
It is in this rapidly evolving context that the science underpinning climate change is being conducted and its findings communicated. This is an opportunity that should and must be grasped. Liberate the science from the economics, finance and astrology, stand by the conclusions however uncomfortable. But this is still not enough. In an increasingly interconnected world where the whole — the system — is often far removed from the sum of its parts, we need to be less afraid of making academic judgements. Not unsubstantiated opinions and prejudice, but applying a mix of academic rigour, courage and humility to bring new and interdisciplinary insights into the emerging era. Leave the market economists to fight among themselves over the right price of carbon — let them relive their groundhog day if they wish. The world is moving on and we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures.

Their writings which underpin the conference’s rationale, include: A new paradigm for climate change, Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world, and Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. More recently, Anderson’s Avoiding dangerous climate change demands de-growth strategies from wealthier nations more explicitly lays out some of the key assumptions.

So to the conference itself, and many thanks to Shane White for wading through the conference videos and taking extensive notes which form the basis of these blogs.

Anderson’s presentation was entitled “‘Avoiding dangerous climate change’: Why we need radical reductions in emissions”, and it kicked off the conference. The video is here plus slides.

Anderson starts with the proposition that stabilisation at 2°C remains a feasible goal of the international community, just. [Readers of this blog will know well that at less than 1 degree of warming, there is a good deal of evidence that climate change is already dangerous and of the view of leading scientists that 2°C hotter is not an acceptable climate target but a disaster.]

Anderson makes the point that radical mitigation has economic benefits, not financial. He says it is time to wrestle economics away form the financiers. The word economics originates from the Greek oikonimia, meaning stewardship of the household; no mention of money. The word financial comes from the Greek chrematistic meaning the making of money. If making money is our priority then 2°C is not viable. If we’re interested in the wellbeing of our lives and the planet, then 2°C is viable with a successful economy.

The science message contained within latest IPCC report hasn’t changed in the last 20 years. This science is mature. But what has changed, says Anderson, is that:

• Since IPCC AR4 in 2007, an additional 200 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) has been released;
• Annual emissions are ~70% higher than at the time of the first report in 1990;
• Atmospheric carbon dioxide  levels are higher than during past 800 thousand years.

The world says it is still committed to make a fair contribution “To hold the increase in global temperature below 2°C, and take action to meet this objective consistent with science and on the basis of equity”. (Copenhagen Accord 2009).

So why do we need to concentrate on energy demand rather than supply? Because, says Anderson,  in 2013 it’s too late to only rely solely on the supply side. We need to focus on the demand side now too.

So what of future emissions? Everything built today based on fossil fuels is locking ourselves into a high carbon future: power stations, large scale infrastructures, built environment, aircraft and ships. All this infrastructure will be in place for 30 to 100 years.

Emissions in the above chart are higher than emissions in IPCC’s highest emission pathway (RCP8.5), with 2% a year growth from 2020.  Are such rising emissions scenarios realistic? They are certainly viable, says Anderson,  since UK is considered a leading country on climate change and the UK has made extensive fossil fuel investments.

Current pathway leads to emissions of greater than 2500 GtCO2 for the period 2000–2050, and 5000 GtCO2 for 2000–2100. Yet for a 66% chance of less than 2°C, we can emit only 1000 GtCO2. Along our current pathway all of that will be emitted by 2032. There is nothing left for emissions by 2032.

The carbon dioxide trend, says Anderson,  is “perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6°C, which would have devastating consequences for the planet” as IEA chief economist Faith Birol has noted. Whether it is 4, 5 or 6°C doesn’t mean too much; they’re all devastating.

There is nothing we can do significantly in the wealthy parts of the world to get emissions down with just low carbon supply in the short term. The only thing we can do now is reduce our demand. The supply side is a pre-requisite in the long term to holding temperature below 2°C.

This analysis is global. But premised on the basis of equity, poor countries shouldn’t be forced to suffer by reducing their emissions demand by the same rate as us in the short term.

So let’s assume non-Annex 1 nations (developing nations) collectively peak their emissions by 2025 (which a a big ask) and reduce emissions thereafter by 6 to 8% per year. Then what emissions budget is left for the rich, developed Annex 1 nations? The answer is that Annex 1 nations require at least a 10% reduction in emissions year on year (this is based on analysis a few years old so 10% is a bit low now). That means a 40% reduction by 2018 (c.f 1990), 70% reduction by 2024, and 90% by 2030 (remembering that these these are radical emission reductions but provide a 66% chance of less than 2°C.

Asks Anderson: Is above viable? Is 4, 5 or 6°C a better option? No.

Radical emission reductions on the basis of equity are viable by:

• Equity: Small group of people make radical and early reductions (40-60% of emissions are from 1-5% of the population) i.e. those in Annex 1 countries.
• Technology: demand side can deliver early and large reductions (why are low efficiency products on the market when high efficiency products are available?)
• Growth: There are alternative measures of a good life. Above a certain threshold GDP is a poor proxy for welfare.

So in summary, a radical plan looks something like this:

• Low carbon energy supply is pivotal in the long term but can’t be built fast enough in order to solely be relied upon for 2°C, so;
• Radical reductions in energy demand from now to ~2030. Radical reductions in energy demand over one decade are possible if carefully planned. This extends the window to get the low carbon energy supply in place.
• A Marshall plan to build 100% low carbon energy supply by 2030–2040.

Anderson concluded by quoting Robert Unger that“at every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different.” He said the paradigm he had outlined will be dismissed as not being practical, but 4, 5 or 6°C is impractical and certainly not equitable.

Science News

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Get Used to Heat Waves: Extreme El Nino Events to Double

Jan. 19, 2014 — Extreme weather events fueled by unusually strong El Ninos, such as the 1983 heatwave that led to the Ash Wednesday bushfires in Australia, are likely to double in number as our planet warms.

S