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Samantha12
Lecture13--GlobalWarmingandEngineers.pptClimate Change and the Built Environment – Challenge/Response
4 Major Effects on the Urban Built Environment
- Urban ventilation and cooling
- Urban drainage and flood risk
- Water Resources
- Outdoor spaces (air quality and biodiversity)
Global Urban Growth
Possible Impact(s) Include:
- Intensified urban heat islands
- Increased number of heat stress cases
- Air quality compromised, pollen induced allergies more prevalent
- Longer spring and summer seasons
- Increased winter rainfall, river flooding and pressure on urban drainage systems
- Rising sea levels
Baltimore – Green Spaces More Necessary
Sandy and NYC
Other Issues
- Building subsistence and clay soils
- Damage to rail transport and roads
- Rising insurance costs and difficulty in getting flood insurance
- Green space more necessary than ever
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Climate interactions: this 1974 summary of feedbacks was a pioneering attempt to show the complexity of the system. Nowhere did biology appear explicitly...
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whereas a mid-1980s "wiring diagram" put biology in the center. An extract is below; the whole diagram can be seen by clicking here (big file, 118k).
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Svante Arrhenius – 1896 balloon launch, Spitzbergen, Norway
Svante Arrhenius – 1896
- In truth, he did get a rough idea how climate could change – cutting the amount of CO2 in half in the air would cool the world by 5 degrees C.
- He grossly simplified the climate system, ignoring such things as wind patterns and ocean currents
- He asserted it would take a couple thousand years to double the amount of CO2 in the air.
- Arrhenius had sort of discovered global warming as a theoretical concept.
The only known photograph of G.S. Callendar
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The only known photograph of G.S. Callendar
- “When Callendar stood up before the Royal Meteorological Society in 1938, he was following many others who had speculated about climate change. Pointing to measurements of CO2 he had dug up in old and obscure publications, he argued that the level of the gas in the atmosphere had risen a bit since the early 19th century. The experts were dubious. They understood that nobody had been able to make reliable measurements of the slight trace of CO2 in the atmosphere. Callendar seemed to be picking only the data that had supported his case….”
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Callendar, 1938
To the 1950s, climatologists attempted to explain rapid climate shifts in various ways:
- Geological activity – volcanoes.
- Oceanography – oceans as central to the earth’s surface heat circulation – trade winds, warm water drifting northwards, salinity.
- A shift in plant cover – forests, prairies, agriculture.
- Astronomy – sun spots in 11 year cycles.
- Milutin Milankovitch – swaying of the earth’s axes – the precession of the equinoxes.
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Meteorology Project, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1952. Left to right: Jule Charney, MANIAC I, Norman Phillips, Glenn Lewis, N. Gilbarg, George Platzman.
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Roger Revelle, seen here studying seawater chemistry, ca. 1936, and as a leading adminstrator as well as scientist, ca. 1958.
Enter Roger Revelle
- Scripps Institution of Oceanography
- A side interest – amount of CO2 absorbed in the Ocean, using new radio isotopic techniques of Carbon 14
- Conclusion that the ocean surface could not absorb most of additional CO2 added by humanitiy
- Funding from Office of Naval Research and International Geophysical Year 1957-58
- Gets David Keeling involved in careful CO2 in the atmosphere measurements.
- Revelle wanted to establish a baseline “shot” of CO2 values around the world.
- By 1964, Keeling’s data showed that there was a possibility of global warming.
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Charles David Keeling. Upper: in 1961, photographed from R/V ARGO at dock in Wellington, New Zealand before departing on an expedition. Lower: In 1990s.
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The “Keeling curve” of CO2 measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii over nearly half a century. Within the long-term rise are annual fluctuations as Northern Hemisphere plants take up carbon during summer growth and release it in winter decay.
- Keeling’s data put the capstone on the structure built by Tyndall, Arrhenius, Calendar, Plass, Revelle and Suess. It was not quite yet the discovery of global warming. It was the discovery of the possibility of global warming….no longer could a well-informed scientist dismiss out of hand the possibility that our emission of greenhouse gases would warm the earth.
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A century of average surface temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere, looking back from 1980. (Shown as differences in °C from the 1946-60 mean. For a graph of temperatures through 2002 click here.)
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Deep-sea coring operation on Lamont's Research Vessel Vema in the 1960s.
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The Lamont library of deep-sea cores has been used for many kinds of studies. In the 1950s, cores were kept in an old garage (Bruce Heezen standing on ground, with a student). Inset: the "dry racks" in the 1990s.
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Camp Century. Viewing a section of core, 1964. Compare the picture here of the 1989-92 GISP trench.
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extracting a 6-meter core segment from the drilling apparatus in subzero temperatures at the GISP2 site in Greenland.
Disparate Disciplines Ask Questions about Climate during the 1960s
- Studies of the atmospheres of Venus and Mars
- Increased haze and jet contrail clouds
- Catastrophic droughts
- Fluctuating layers in ice and sea bed clays
- Computer calculations of planetary orbits
- Ice sheet collapse
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Rising sea level in New York City: the tide gauge at the tip of Manhattan has measured an increase of roughly a quarter meter (ten inches) since 1920. Other sea-level gauges around the world, but not all, have seen similar rises since the late 19th century. The reasons, such as effects of melting glaciers, have been hard to determine. But in future, thermal expansion of seawater due to the higher temperatures already observed is expected to cause a continuing, indeed accelerating, rise.
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The upper graph shows an attempted reconstruction of global (Northern AND Southern) Hemisphere temperatures over nearly two millenia. The red curve that shoots up abruptly in the 20th century is based on surface and ocean instruments (confirmed by measurements of temperatures down boreholes). The rest, drawing upon countless hours of data-gathering and analysis by thousands of people, averages a variety of "proxy" data ranging from tree rings to coral reef chemical analysis. The smoothed blue curve has been attacked by critics as misleading, since there may be significant leaps and falls of temperature hidden within the yellow uncertainty band. The expansion in this lower image compares a number of different estimates over the past 1150 years, including the 1999 "hockey stick" graph of Mann et al. (thin purple line). One recent reconstruction (in heavy blue) using a new method showed a warm Middle Ages, although only for the Northern Hemisphere; Mann replied with calculations indicating the method exaggerated long-term trends. While debate continues, even skeptics agreed with Mann and Jones's basic conclusion that "late 20th century warmth is unprecedented." The recent steep rise (black at far right) could only be explained as a result of the parallel rise of greenhouse gas emissions.1
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James Hansen at a 1995 panel discussion and in his New York office.
Hansen in 1988
- “it is time to stop waffling and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”
- state “with confidence” that a long term warming trend was taking place.
- Testimony before Congress in June of 1988.
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Global warming reached the status of a leading public issue in the summer of 1988 with lead stories in major media, like this Newsweek cover story of July 11.
From Erratic Beast to the Discovery Confirmed
- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
- 170 scientists working in 12 workshops
- By 1989 consensus had been worked out, but worked hard on crafting statements that no one could fault
- 1990 –first IPCC report – the world indeed had been warming – but it would be another decade before scientists could be confident that warming was the result of human activity.
- The fundamental conclusion of the report was that the future was uncertain
- An important question was whether or not to take policy steps
- By 2000 there was still plenty of uncertainty – 14 different climate models
- Concern over proposed government regulation would have on the American economy
- First Bush rejected IPCC report – an embarrassment at 1992 Rio meeting
- IPCC met twice a decade
- A growing recognition that it was more than CO2 and methane increases – dust, chemical haze
More IPCC reports
- 1995 – “The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on human climate.”
- 1997 – Kyoto Conference – 1997 U.N. Conference on Climate Change
- Al Gore – a compromise Kyoto Protocol – wealthy countries pledged to cut emissions by 2010
- Conservatives fight back – the protocol would prove an economic disaster to Americans – Senate voted 95-0 to reject treaty
HOCKEY STICK, 1999
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An influential 1999 reconstruction of temperatures for the past millenium,
averaged over the Northern Hemisphere, included measured temperatures for the past century. The dark solid line shows temperatures averaged over each half-century or so, and the shaded area gives the range of possible averages. An apparent downward trend from a warmer Middle Ages ("Medieval Warm Period," roughly comparable to the 1950s) into a cooler "Little Ice Age" is abruptly interrupted by a steep rise in the 20th century. (In retrospect, the dark line, which in some graphics was smoothed even more, caught too much attention. Steep changes might be concealed in the gray area of incomplete data, and the smoothed average curve could give a misleading impression of relative stability.) This "hockey stick" graph, prominently featured in the IPCC's 2001 report, immediately became a powerful tool for people who were trying to raise public awareness of global warming — to the regret of some seasoned climate experts who recognized that, like all science at the point of publication, it was preliminary and uncertain. The dedicated contrarians who insisted that there was no global warming problem promptly attacked the calculations. For example, in 2003 a few scientists argued that the Medieval Warm Period had been as hot as the 20th century. But other climatologists, looking at data for the entire world, found a scattering of warm and cold periods in different places at different times, not comparable to the recent general warming.
Iin 2004 other groups pointed out that the huge gaps and uncertainties in the pre-19th century data, and the methods used to average the data, could conceal changes of temperature in the past that might have been as large and abrupt as anything seen in modern times — that is, aside from the warming since the 1980s, which was truly unprecedented. A National Academy of Sciences panel reviewed all the studies and in 2006 announced that the original conclusions held: (1) the world had recently grown warmer than at any time in the last four centuries, and (2) while earlier data were much less reliable, it was "plausible" that the world was now hotter than at any time in the past millenium.
As so often in this story, no single scientific finding could bring conviction by itself, but only in conjunction with many other lines of evidence. The most worrisome result of paleotemperature studies was that global climate had probably swung substantially over the centuries. As climate scientists noted, variability in the past, presumably due to small changes in the atmosphere caused by solar and volcanic-dust variations, warned that climate must be highly sensitive to any perturbation — "So greater past climate variations imply greater future climate change." Worse, much evidence indicated that the current warming was faster than anything in the historical record. And the data neatly matched the warming that every variety of computer model, consistently since the 1970s, had been predicting would result from greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere.
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One of many examples of a G.W. Bush administration statement edited to reduce or (in this case) remove warnings about climate change, and to heighten feelings of uncertainty, beyond the original statements by science advisers and advisory groups. The edits shown are by Philip Cooney, a lawyer-lobbyist who had earlier helped lead oil industry opposition to limits on greenhouse gases, then became chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality and altered many statements. Two days after his activity was revealed in 2005, he left the administration and was hired by oil industry giant ExxonMobil.
Why U.S. Cars Emit More Carbon Dioxide
- Why U.S. Cars Emit More Carbon Dioxide
While Americans own only 30 percent of the 700 million vehicles that are in use worldwide, the authors of the report found that cars in the U.S. account for a disproportionate amount of greenhouse gas emissions because they are driven farther, have lower fuel economy standards, and burn fuel with higher levels of carbon than many of the cars in other countries. For example: - U.S. cars and light trucks were driven 2.6 trillion miles in 2004, the equivalent of 10 million trips from the earth to the moon.
- U.S. automobiles had an average fuel economy of 19.6 miles per gallon in 2004, for an average annual consumption of just over 600 gallons of gasoline.
- Gasoline in the United States contains 5.3 pounds of carbon per gallon. All of that carbon ends up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide in automobile exhaust when the fuel is burned. So the average car in the U.S. puts more than 1.5 tons of carbon into the air every year.
Skeptics – The Earth is Warming but the Cause is Unknown
- Richard Lindzen, MIT Meteorology professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences
- Robert C. Balling, Jr., director of the Office of Climatology and associate professor of geography at Arizona State
- Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama at Huntsville
Skeptics – the Earth is Warming but Mostly Due to Natural Processes
- William M. Gray, Colorado State University – global warming as “one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people.”
- Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
- Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia
Skeptics – the Earth is Warming Partly Due to Human Factors
- John Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Director of the Earth Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville
Global Warming is Good for Human Society
- Sherwood Idso, President, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
- “Warming has been shown to positively impact human health, while atmospheric CO2 enrichment has been shown to enhance the health-promoting properties of the foods we eat, as well as stimulate the production of more of it…. We have nothing to fear from increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and global warming.”
The Progressive Response – Naomi Klein
- The real issue in the minds of conservatives is the connection between climate change and freedom.
- In Climate of Corruption, Larry Bell argues that climate change has little to do with the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth distribution.”
The Heartland Institute
- Mission: Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.
- Staff: A full-time staff of 35, including 25 working in the Chicago office. Joseph Bast directs the Chicago office. Herbert Walbergis chairman of the board.
- Policy Advisors: Approximately 230 academics and professional economists participate in its peer review process, and more than 200 elected officials serve on its Legislative Forum.
- Publications: Heartland sends six monthly public policy newspapers addressing the major domestic public policy issues to every national and state elected official in the U.S. plus 8,400 county and local officials and thousands of civic and business leaders. It also produces books, policy studies, and booklets.
- Communications: We appeared in print and on television or radio nearly 3,800 times in 2011. More than 1.5 million people visited our Web sites in the last 12 months. Our Facebook page registers nearly 58,000 fans and approximately 300,0000 post views every week.
- Government Relations: Our government relations staff made nearly 1.4 million contacts with elected officials in 2011, 20,686 of those contacts were one-on-one either in person, by phone, or by one-to-one emails.
The Tea Party Republicans
- Climate change as a hoax perpetrated by liberals.
- Opposition to climate change as significant as gun rights, low taxes, and opposition to abortion.
The objective of progressives like Klein:
- To build “a much more enlightened economic system – one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful and dignified work, and radically reins in corporate power.”
- Is her vision realistic, given American exceptionalism, or does American exceptionalism have to be radically changed?
More of Klein’s arguments:
- “The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship top nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally.”
- [since] we have pushed nature beyond its limits it does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal – and acutely sensitive to nature limits, including the limits of human intelligence.”
And more:
- “Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable.”
- “real climate solutions are ones that steer [strong government interventions] to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture, or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.”
- “arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the free market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades”
- “climate change requires that we break every rule in the free market playbook and that we do so with great urgency.”
- ‘interdependence rather than individualism.”
Klein’s climate agenda – six arenas
- 1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere
- 2. Remembering How to Plan
- 3. Reining in Corporations
- 4. Relocalizing Production
- 5. Ending the Cult of Shopping
- 6. Taxing the Rich and Filthy
1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere
- Clearly, a call for Big government to assist in the development of transportation technologies and housing.
- “Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we ahe created in vital and complex natural systems.
- …collective muscle –to get off fossil fuels and shore up communal infrastructure
2. Remembering How to Plan
- Planning economies
- Agriculture rethought along the lines of polycultures
- “Wild West economics is failing the vast majority of people around the world.”
3. Reining in Corporations
- The rapid re-regualtion of the corporate sector
- Imposing strict caps
- Banning new coal-fired plants
- Shutting down dirty energy extraction projects like Alberta tar sands
4. Relocalizing Production
- From global free trade to the elimination of intensive long-haul transportation
- Buttress local business and farming
5. Ending the Cult of Shopping
6. Taxing the Rich and Filthy
- Reducing what we produce and consume
- Tax carbon
- Cut military budgets
- Eliminate subsidies to fossil fuel industry
- Tax financial speculation
- “Polluter pays” with regards to climate change
