Op-Ed Columnist

Mother Nature and the Middle Class

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: September 21, 2013 2 Comments

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

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So go back to sleep? Not so fast. I can guarantee that the next 30 years will not be the same old, same old. Two huge new forces have muscled their way into the center of both Egyptian and Iranian politics, and they will bust open their old tired duopolies.

The first newcomer is Mother Nature. Do not mess with Mother Nature. Iran’s population in 1979 when the Islamic Revolution occurred was 37 million; today it’s 75 million. Egypt’s was 40 million; today it’s 85 million. The stresses from more people, climate change and decades of environmental abuse in both countries can no longer be ignored or bought off.

On July 9, Iran’s former agriculture minister, Issa Kalantari, an adviser to Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, spoke to this reality in the Ghanoon newspaper: “Our main problem that threatens us, that is more dangerous than Israel, America or political fighting, is the issue of living in Iran,” said Kalantari. “It is that the Iranian plateau is becoming uninhabitable. … Groundwater has decreased and a negative water balance is widespread, and no one is thinking about this.”

He continued: “I am deeply worried about the future generations. … If this situation is not reformed, in 30 years Iran will be a ghost town. Even if there is precipitation in the desert, there will be no yield, because the area for groundwater will be dried and water will remain at ground level and evaporate.” Kalantari added: “All the bodies of natural water in Iran are drying up: Lake Urumieh, Bakhtegan, Tashak, Parishan and others.” Kalantari concluded that the “deserts in Iran are spreading, and I am warning you that South Alborz and East Zagros will be uninhabitable and people will have to migrate. But where? Easily I can say that of the 75 million people in Iran, 45 million will have uncertain circumstances. … If we start this very day to address this, it will take 12 to 15 years to balance.”

In Egypt, soil compaction and rising sea levels have already led to saltwater intrusion in the Nile Delta; overfishing and overdevelopment are threatening the Red Sea ecosystem, and unregulated and unsustainable agricultural practices in poorer districts, plus more extreme temperatures, are contributing to erosion and desertification. The World Bank estimates that environmental degradation is costing Egypt 5 percent of gross domestic product annually.

But just as Mother Nature is demanding better governance from above in both countries, an emergent and empowered middle class, which first reared its head with the 2009 Green revolution in Iran and the 2011 Tahrir revolution in Egypt, is doing so from below. A government that just provides “order” alone in either country simply won’t cut it anymore. Order, drift and decay were tolerable when populations were smaller, the environment not so degraded, the climate less volatile, and citizens less technologically empowered and connected.

Both countries today need “order-plus” — an order that enables dynamism and resilience, and that can be built only on the rule of law, innovation, political and religious pluralism, and greater freedoms. It requires political and economic institutions that are inclusive and “sustainable,” in both senses of that word. Neither country can afford the old line that Hosni Mubarak used for so many years when addressing American leaders: “After me comes the flood, so you’d better put up with my stale, plodding but stable leadership, otherwise you’ll get the Muslim Brotherhood.”

That is so 1970s. As Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment, puts it: In the Middle East today “it’s no longer ‘After me, the flood’ — Après moi, le déluge — but ‘After me, the drought.’ ” Syria’s revolution came on the heels of the worst drought in its modern history, to which the government failed to respond.

Iran’s Islamic leadership seems to realize that it cannot keep asking its people to put up with crushing economic sanctions to preserve a nuclear weapons option. Mother Nature and Iran’s emergent middle classes require much better governance, integrated with the world. That’s why Iran is seeking a nuclear deal now with Washington.

And that’s why two of the most interesting leaders to watch today are President Rouhani of Iran and Egypt’s new military strongman, Gen. Abdul Fattah el-Sisi. Both men rose up in the old order, but both men were brought into the top leadership by the will of their emergent middle classes and newly empowered citizens, and neither man will be able to maintain order without reforming the systems that produced them — making them more sustainable and inclusive. They have no choice: too many people, too little oil, too little soil.

And pay attention: What Mother Nature and these newly empowered citizens have in common is that they can both set off a wave — a tsunami — that can overwhelm them and they will never see it coming.

by Prof. Andy Pitman, via The Conversation

Prof. Any Pitman, Univ. of NSW

On September 27 2013 the 5th Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be released.

One part of this report will address the so-called “warming hiatus”. This is the argument that warming has stopped, with the further assertion in some quarters that we therefore have nothing to worry about in the future.

It is a fact, based on observations of air temperature, that the rate of global warming measured as surface air temperature has slowed over the past 15 years. The last decade is still the warmest in the past 150 years.

If you measure global heat content then global warming has not slowed. If you measure other indices including sea level rise or ocean temperatures or sea ice cover global warming has not slowed.

However, the warming trend in air temperatures has slowed over the last 15 years. There is a great deal of interest in this “hiatus” in the sense of whether it points to some fundamental error in climate science.

The 5th Assessment Report by the IPCC explains the slowing in the rate of global warming in roughly equal terms as the consequence of reduced radiative forcing (the difference between radiative energy that hits the earth and energy radiated back to space), increased heat uptake by the oceans and natural variability.

The reduced radiative forcing (the amount of energy available to drive the climate system) is due to the recent solar minimum (a period of low solar activity), and volcanic and anthropogenic aerosols (these are particles such as sulphur and soot, which block some radiation from hitting the earth).

The slowing in the rate of warming over the last 15 years is not in the least surprising. We have seen a combination of the solar minimum, anthropogenic aerosol emissions and back-to-back La Niñas.

What is surprising – and what is deeply concerning to me and almost entirely missed in the media commentary – is that we have not cooled dramatically over the last 15 years.
Below is the global surface temperature graph – this comes from a NASA site but any other reputable temperature reconstruction makes similar points. Note that there were periods through the 20th century where combinations of aerosols from volcanoes and human sources, solar variability and natural variability led to very significant cooling.

Figure 1: Global surface temperature. NASA

Between about 1880 and 1890, temperatures cooled by about 0.4C. Between 1900 and 1910 temperatures cooled close to 0.3C. Between 1945 and 1950 temperatures cooled about 0.35C. Between 1962 and 1965 temperatures cooled about 0.3C. There are other examples, but these were decade-scale cooling of 0.3C to 0.4C.

The most recent period of similar relevance starts with the extremely hot year, 1998. Since 1998, through to 2012, the temperatures cooled by 0.03C. However you choose to view the figure you simply have to conclude that natural variability, aerosols and solar variability have caused global cooling in the past of a scale that dwarfs anything that has occurred in the last 15 years.

So, here is what I think we should be genuinely concerned about.

Given the double-dip La Niña, coupled with the solar minimum and coupled with the high aerosol output from some developing nations, the question in the minds of some climate scientists is not “why has it cooled?”, because it has not cooled in any significant sense and the climatologically significant trends (calculated over 30 years) remain upwards.
Indeed, despite a suite of forcings that should have led to cooling, we still had the warmest decade in the observational record.

So, the question is, given it did cool several times in the historical period under broadly parallel circumstances in terms of the forcing, why has it not cooled since 1998 by 0.3C or 0.4C, and how come we broke the records for the warmest decade?

There has been time (its 15 years while previous cooling occurred in 10 years) for cooling of 0.3C or 0.4C to have occurred. There really is a case to argue that we should have cooled to close to the values measured in around 1990 and definitely not broken the record for the warmest decade on record.

A plausible answer is that we have underestimated the climate sensitivity.

We know, for certain, that aerosols, natural variability and solar variability have cooled the climate in the past. This time, they have not.

One way that this makes sense is if climate scientists have underestimated how dominant CO₂ and other greenhouse gases are in warming the climate. In other words, CO₂ and other greenhouse gases are countering the cooling effects of natural variability by much more than we anticipated.

If correct, this means that the capacity of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases to accelerate warming – once natural variability, solar variability and aerosols decline in influence – has been underestimated.

A second possible explanation is that the warming by CO₂ has led to a sufficiently different climate system that natural variability now functions differently. This seems extremely unlikely but is certainly anything but comforting.

If you see the slowing of warming over the last 15 years as a hint that climate scientists might have been wrong and that global warming is less of a problem than predicted, you are very likely being lulled into a false sense of security.

The lack of cooling of 0.3C or 0.4C since 1998 is most easily explained by the effect of increasing CO₂ and other greenhouse gases masking the cooling that would otherwise have occurred.

It follows that when we next see an El Niño, and the solar cycle is more average, or if developing countries clean up their aerosol emissions, we will see an acceleration of warming rates observed prior to 1998.

In short, the slowing of warming rates since 1998 is not a good news story. It is very likely a hint that climate scientists have underestimated the sensitivity of climate to increasing CO₂ and the slowing of warming is lulling us into a very false sense of security.

Video: Forecasting St. Louis’ Future: Part 2

Video: Brig. Gen. John Adams (ret.) talks about changing climate

Video: Forecasting St. Louis’ Future: Part 3

Video: NASA scientist Walt Meier talks about climate change

Video: Extended interview about climate change

Video: Dr. George Luber with the CDC talks about climate change

Video: Forecasting St. Louis’ Future: Part 4

ST. LOUIS (KSDK) – A new voice is being heard in the discussion on climate change, as new evidence connecting it to extreme weather events begins to pile up.

When the current Chief of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, Admiral Samuel Locklear III, was asked what his biggest security concern is, he did not name North Korea or China. He did not mention a nation or military threat at all. He said; “climate change.”

In NewsChannel 5’s half-hour special, “To the Extreme: Forecasting St. Louis’ Future,” the man the U.S. Navy assigned to be its first director of the Task Force on Climate Change, retired Rear Admiral David Titley talks about change. In 2009, he was asked to make a projection on how climate change would impact the Navy and its ability to keep the nation secure.

Among Titley’s conclusions: seas will rise an average of 3′ to 3.5′; by 2025 to 2030 there will be places in the arctic with no sea ice; and decreased ice in the Bering Strait will open the arctic in many different and hard to predict ways.

The military is moving forward on the assumption that climate change will cause a variety of problems.

“There are more than 30 U.S. military installations in the world which project severe disruptions due to rising sea levels,” said retired U.S. Army Brigadier General John Adams. “There’s a real high sense of awareness in the Department of Defense about the risks of climate change and especially on coming up with plans to mitigate the risks.”

Our special presents evidence released just this month by the American Meteorological Society, which concludes half of the extreme weather events examined from 2012 were impacted by human-induced climate change.

In fact, the past few months have been something of a traffic jam for revelations in climate change understanding. Information came out in May showing that the earth’s atmosphere has now reached 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide for the first time in three million years, based on observations taken at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. NewsChannel 5 meteorologist Chester Lampkin will have that story for us.

In July the World Meteorological Society said “extreme weather events are the new face of climate change” and in August a report by a panel of international scientists connected “with near certainty” human activity to most of the increases in temperatures seen in recent decades. All of these findings factored into our report.

There’s also a story of how a local community, faced with a daunting challenge to its water supply, met that challenge. Farrah Fazal introduced us to those folks.

We have information based on a study by the E.P.A. on how the climate may change in the Midwest and finish with a panel discussion with Dr. Charles Graves from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at St. Louis University; Anu Hittle, Director of Hawaiian Projects at Washington University and financial analyst Juli Niemann from Smith-Moore.

There’s a lot more and we hope you can be with us to watch this evening at 7 p.m. for our special on climate change; “To the Extreme: Forecasting St. Louis’ Future.”

You can watch the entire broadcast by clicking on the video players above and to the left of this story.

Sources:
U.S. Naval Task Force on Climate Change
American Meteorological Society: Retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral David Titley on climate change and national security
Scientific American: U.S. Military forges ahead with plans to combat climate change
New Security Beat: U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy Daniel Chiu on energy concerns
The Hill: Climate change causing Pentagon planning shift, says DOD strategist
American Meteorological Society: Half of Extreme Weather Events in 2012 Tied to Climate Change
NASA: Scientists react to 400 ppm carbon milestone
United Nations: World Meteorological Organization
IPCC 5th Assessment
Centers for Disease Control: Climate change and state readiness
EPA: Regional implications of climate change in the Midwest

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Sep. 19, 2013 — Extreme weather may lead people to think more seriously about climate change, according to new research. In the wake of Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, New Jersey residents were more likely to show support for a politician running on a “green” platform, and expressed a greater belief that climate change is caused by human activity.