John J. Berger''s new climate book: A comprehensive approach to saving the planet

 The top-of-mind responses to the climate crisis tend to be few and simple.

Use less fossil fuel and switch transportation to electric vehicles, restore forests, recycle, eat less meat.

But a serious response requires a broad rethinking of everything about how we live on the planet. And that’s complex.

John J. Berger’s new book runs through a lot of the approaches that are already underway and makes recommendations for how to proceed. The book is Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth.

Berger is the author of Climate Myths, Beating the Heat, Forests Forever and more. He is a noted environmental writer and climate policy expert, and in his latest book he conducts a comprehensive review of strategies to address our warming climate.

Some possible solutions are underway right now or at least starting. Manufacturing steel that doesn’t depend on massive fossil fuel inputs. Replacing oil-based products with ones made from plants. Electric and fuel cell aircraft.

There’s green concrete, new approaches to recycling, buildings that produce more power than they use, hydrogen cargo trucks and so much more.

There are examples of farmers who have turned problematic fossil-fuel-reliant businesses into thriving green enterprises that restore the soil and entrain carbon. He outlines the benefits of saving and expanding forests.

He reviews some of the geoengineering approaches, like sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, and seeding the skies with compounds that reflect solar radiation.

He takes a realistic look at the issues associated with decarbonizing planet-wide.

There’s clearly lots to be done at the legal, policy and international affairs levels, Berger writes. His to-do list starts with a national recognition that we are in an emergency, and that we need a National Clean Energy Transition Plan.

But it would all be so very costly, right? Maybe not.

“Various studies have found that a clean-energy transition would cost no more than 2 percent of gross domestic product in the United States,” Berger writes. He says he worries about the accuracy of those estimates, but even so, “that’s a pretty good deal, given all the other economic, environmental, and health benefits the United States would also receive.”

Berger’s book is a little overwhelming in its scope, but it’s well-written and anyone interested in how we need to approach this crisis will find lots to chew on. That, and some hope. It may be complicated, but it's possible, is Berger's message.

It does occur to me that, given the topic of the book, an actionable strategy for Berger would have been making the ebook dramatically less expensive than a paper copy of the book, but it’s close to $20 for the electronic version. Here, here, here and here are a some ways to find Solving the Climate Crisis.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Drying laundry efficiently: air dry is best, but in a dryer long and cooler is more efficient than short and hot.

A friend asked a question about energy use in clothes dryers.

The discussion started with the understanding that if you can hang your clothes in the breeze on a clothesline, youʻve found the most energy efficient way to dry your laundry.

But if you need to use a dryer, she asked, is more energy efficient to run the dryer longer at a cool temperature, or shorter at a higher temperature.

There are all sorts of variables in this calculation. Different types of fabric. Different starting moisture levels. The more-dry setting (uses more energy) compared to the less dry setting (more efficient.) Gas dryers with electric motors (more energy efficient) versus all-electric dryers (less efficient.) And within those categories, newer dryers that emphasize efficiency versus ones that donʻt.

But given equivalent conditions, and assuming all-electric, it looks like running a dryer longer at a slightly cooler temperature saves energy compared to running it hotter shorter.

Thatʻs because the heating requires so very much more electricity than the motor.

This paper from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that energy savings are available from "using a lower heat setting to reduce the energy spent heating air, cloth, and metal. The clothes get just as dry, though drying time may be longer."

Thereʻs a lot more in that paper, so if youʻre interested, read through it, or at least read the recommendations and conclusions in the last four pages.

And this piece of research is old, but it was authoritatively done by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it also found that itʻs the heating that uses most of the power in a dryer. The dryers back then were not all that different than those today, and ORNL calculated that 91 percent of the energy was used for heating, and 9 percent for all the dryerʻs other functions: tumbling, blowing and running the controls.

The U.S. Governmentʻs Energy.gov website comes to the same conclusion: "Use lower heat settings in the dryer. Even if the drying cycle is longer, you’ll use less energy and be less likely to over-dry your clothes."

The site also has lots of other tips on saving energy in the laundry arena.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2020

Forget 3 feet, Hawaii should be planning for 6 feet of sea level rise, new research says

Melting Greenland ice sheet. Credit: NOAA

Hawai`i may be planning for only half the sea level rise that is possible within the lives of todayʻs newborns.

A new study from British, American, Dutch and German climate researchers argues that sea levels could be more than 6 feet higher than now in 80 years, wiping out many of the worldʻs most important cities and coastlines.

Many of those coastal areas would be inundated far sooner than that. That includes much of Honolulu. 

Most of the worst-case planning in Hawai`i assumes a 3-foot or one-meter rise, but this study suggests we should be planning for twice that.

One planning organization in the Islands, Honoluluʻs city Climate Change Commission, is on board with the 6-foot recommendation by 2100. Commisson member Victoria Keener said 3 feet is possible much earlier, by mid-century.

The authors of the new paper are cautious about their numbers because the science is very complex. But they say that if the worldʻs great ice reservoirs—the immense Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets—melt as many climate models suggest, the world will be a very, very different place.

Imagine all cargo needing to be offloaded from ships at anchor, because all the harbor facilities are submerged. Imagine the most valuable property in Hawai`i underwater. Imagine no coastal road access—meaning many Hawaiian communities could be reached only by boat.

Part of the problem is that many researchers have been focused on keeping warming to 2 degrees Centigrade, but warming of as much as 5 degrees by the end of the century now seems possible. That is because fossil fuel use is rising instead of falling, global carbon dioxide levels are rising at faster pace rather than stabilizing, and the global ice sheets canʻt help but respond by melting.

The authors of this daunting report are some of the worldʻs premier researchers. They include Jonathan L. Bambera of the UKʻs University of Bristol School of Geographic Science, Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, Robert E. Kopp of Rutgers University, Willy P. Aspinall of the University of Bristol School of Earth Sciences, Roger M. Cooke of the Dutch Delft University of Technology Department of Mathematics. The paper was edited by Stefan Rahmstorf, of Germanyʻs Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. They consulted with climate scientists in America and Europe.

It is entitled, " Ice sheet contributions to future sea-level rise from structured expert judgment," and was published this week in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors are cautious, but they are clear that the world should stop focusing on the lower range of sea level rise estimates. Many nations are already planning and building structures to protect their shorelines from near-term sea level rise.

"Adaptation measures accounting for the changing hazard, including building or raising permanent or movable structures such as surge barriers and sea walls, enhancing nature-based defenses such as wetlands, and selective retreat of populations and facilities from areas threatened by episodic flooding or permanent inundation, are being planned or implemented in several countries," the authors write.

But it might not be enough.

"Our findings support the use of scenarios of 21st century global total (sea level rise) exceeding 2 m for planning purposes," they write. That translates to more than 6 feet, at the upper level of the estimates.

It doesnʻt stop there. Temperatures at those levels will progressively melt ice sheets, and the world in 2200 could see as much as 7.5 meters in sea level rise above todayʻs levels, the authors say. That represents a 25-foot rise.

Many of the best estimates of sea level change before now have not included the impacts of the ice sheets, because they are so extraordinarily difficult to model. They have not gotten easier to model, but both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have been losing mass at an increasing rate, and the authors say melting ice sheets have now exceeded mountain glaciers in their contributions to sea levels.

In response, there has been "a focused effort by the glaciological community to refine process understanding and improve process representation in numerical ice sheet models." As scientists learn more, they also learn how much they still donʻt know, and the uncertainty about the future rises, the authors said.

The most common estimate of 1 meter of sea level rise by 2100 comes from the 5th International Panel on Climate Change report from 2013. Numerous studies since then have indicated that its estimates are significantly too conservative, and that temperatures and sea levels are rising and are expected to continue rising far faster than that study estimated.

Is there enough water on Earth for sea levels to rise as much as they suggest? There is. NOAA and others have calculated that if all the planetʻs ice melted, there is enough water and ice to increase sea levels by more than 200 feet. National Geographic mapped what that might look like. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2013/09/rising-seas-ice-melt-new-shoreline-maps/

But much of the polar ice would remain frozen, so such catastropic sea levels are unlikely.

Still a possible 6-plus feet by 2100 is catastrophic enough for a coastal state like Hawai`i, and it is a level that most planning has not considered.

The Hawai‘i Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Commission last year recommended government and other agencies plan for 3.2 feet or 1 meter of ocean rise.

The Hawai`i Sea Level Rise Vulnerability and Adaptation Report of December 2017 also targets that level, but indicates it could come far earlier than 2100: "this magnitude of sea level rise could occur as early as year 2060 under more recently published highest-end scenarios." Thatʻs only 40 years out.

Some of the most aggressive estimates have come from the City of Honoluluʻs Climate Change Commission, which last year adopted numbers closest to those suggested by the new paper. That recommendation, adopted by the City, recommends the 6-foot number be used in planning for projects with long lifespans. Its sea level rise guidance is here.

You can view the impacts of 3 feet of rise a this site from the University of Hawai`i School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology: 

There is extensive information on sea level rise in the Islands at the Pacific Islands Ocean Observing System website: 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2019

Higher, Hotter, Faster, More Acid: Climate Change is Speeding Up

The Mauna Loa Keeling Curve, which indicates how much carbon-dioxide is in the atmosphere, has crossed into new high territory—more than 415 parts per million.

But perhaps more dangerously, the rate of rise has locked in a new trajectory—meaning itʻs going higher faster.

Climate researchers are seeing all the secondary impacts of that—rising temperatures, rising seas and rising ocean acidity are also going up.

Climate change is coming far faster than we ever anticipated. It used to be that activists could guilt us by saying we were leaving a climate mess to our grandchildren. But it appears most of us will see dangerous changes not in our grandchildrenʻs lifetimes, but in our own.

The Keeling Curve is a measurement that started being taken at Hawai`iʻs Mauna Loa Observatory in 1958 by Charles Keeling, and it has been taken steadily since then. It is a jagged line because the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere goes up and down with the seasons. But the overall path has been up.

And more worrisome, it is angling steeper with time. We have long known that an atmosphere with higher CO2 and other greenhouse gases traps more heat than one with lower levels.

The image to the upper right is from the latest Keeling Curve (May 18, 2019) from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego. The colored lines are my alteration, showing how the trajectory has changed. The lower orange line is the rate of rise during the 1960s. The upper red line is the rate of rise during recent years. 

It means weʻre still dumping fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere, and despite all the talk about conservation and efficiency and renewables and electric cars, weʻre doing it at an increasing rate.

Is there a statistic for that? Of course there is. World oil production 50 years ago—when the Keeling Curve was young—was way under 50 million barrels a day. Now itʻs 100 million barrels a day, and rising. 

Temperatures are going up with the increased production of greenhouse gas. If you look at this NASA chart, and check the graph from 1960 onward, you can see that temperature trends follow the Keeling Curve. The source of this graph is this NASA site. 

Live near the ocean? In Hawai`i we all do. If itʻs not your home that will be threatened, it may be your work place, but it will certainly be your beach park and your coastal roadway. Like temperatures, sea levels are rising and seem to be rising faster in recent years.  

Here is a graph from the U.S. Global Change Research Program. 

If you look carefully, youʻll see that it also has that increasingly upward slant in recent years, suggesting that sea levels are coming up way faster than it seemed they would a few years ago.

Ocean acidity changes the fundamental chemistry of the seas. Increasing acidity dissolves the shells of marine mollusks, weakens reefs and has all kinds of other global impacts. The acidity of the ocean is rising, along with sea levels and temperatures and carbon-dioxide.

Here is a great resource, aimed at students in grades 10-12, on understanding the chemistry and impacts of acidification of our seas. 

So with all that additional carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere, some of it dissolves into the ocean. Here's an EPA graph from 2016 showing carbon dioxide dissolved in ocean water in Hawai`i, Bermuda and the Canary Islands. And here's where that came from, another resource for students. 

Scientific American reviewed some of the latest data, which indicates that climate change is coming faster than was anticipated. It’s a sobering outlook. 

It can be useful to remember that every time you take a trip to the West Coast or Vegas, your portion of the fuel required represents roughly a full 55-gallon barrel, and burning it produces about half a ton of carbon-dioxide.

Every time you take an extra drive to the store, or fly to another island to shop, or go cruising in your pickup, you're choosing to add to the problem.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2019

Where are the electric pickup trucks?

Tesla's prototype pickup truck: Tesla

The electric vehicle market won’t make significant inroads in Hawai`i until there's a robust EV pickup truck available to buy.

Pickups are must-have vehicles for many Hawai`i families. They carry the surfboards, the coolers and beach chairs, the trash to the dump, the yard waste, the tools, the beach camping gear, and all the rest.

In Hawai'i, about 200,000 of our 1.2 million vehicles are light trucks and vans, about 16 percent.

But it's the Neighbor Islands where light trucks shine. Only about 12.5 of O`ahu's vehicles are light trucks. But it's 19 percent on the Big Island, 18 percent in Maui County and a whopping 24 percent on Kauai.

We tend to keep our trucks a long time. The mean age of pickups is north of 9 years. If you're interested in going EV, you might want to stretch that just a bit. We're still a year or two from folks being able to replace their old gas and diesel pickups with electric versions.

Elon Musk just energized the EV pickup arena with details on Tesla's entry into the pickup truck market, and his is certainly not the only one on the horizon.

But Musk's airing of a "futuristic-like cyberpunk" sure looks hot, with its aerodynamic design, all-wheel-drive (to get you out of the mud at the greenwaste swamp), and high-tech suspension. Here's USA Today's piece on it. 

Musk gets excited about this truck: "Well I can’t talk about the details, but it’s gonna be like a really futuristic-like cyberpunk, 'Blade Runner' pickup truck. It’s gonna be awesome, it’s gonna be amazing. This will be heart-stopping. It stops my heart. It’s like, oh, it’s great."

One downside is that it's not scheduled to be the compact pickup that many Hawai`i drivers seem to prefer. It's a large version—a pickup big enough to carry a pickup in its bed. Musk has suggested that another, smaller pickup might be in the pipeline behind that one.

Bollinger's pickup: Bollinger

There might be something like an electric pickup available from Tesla as early as next year, but we'll see. The electric truck has been just-around-the-corner for a long time now. Several look like they might be only a year or two out.

Bollinger Motors has announced a boxy EV pickup with a 200-mile range, which folks say will be for sale at $60,000. 

Bollinger's B2 looks like a cross between a Jeep and a Land Rover, but with better performance than either. Production is to start in 2020.

Condor pickup: EV Fleet; Bison: Havelaar 

EV Fleet has a pickup, the Condor, that has a 140 or so mile range. The front end of this looks like a cross between a VW Bug and a Deux Chevaux, and you can select the kind of bed you want—flat, panel, tool setup, whatever. It starts at $50,000 or so. 

The Canadian company Havelaar has its electric Bison, reportedly in the $50-60,000 range. It reports a 186-mile range, which would get you most anywhere in the Islands and back, unless you're doing long-distance cruising on the Big Island. I'm waiting on details on whether it's going to be available in the Islands. 

The company Workhorse has announced a plug-in electric pickup with 80-mile electric range on battery. It's a hybrid so you can use fuel to extend that range to north of 300 miles. 

But then all the major manufacturers have hybrid options with various levels of pure electric range. there's a Ford, a Dodge, a Chevy, a Toyota…and so on.

Pickups are clearly a big part of the market, but pure electrics are taking their time getting to mainstream. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2018

Hawai`i data shows CO2 at record levels in atmosphere: and growing faster than ever

Annual CO2 growth rate. Source: NOAA, Scripps

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue to grow at a record rate, promising that climate change will continue long beyond our lifetimes.

That's from data collected in Hawai`i—at the Mauna Loa Observatory, which has been collecting atmospheric CO2 data for 60 years. 

The Scripps release on the milestone is here.

In May, those levels reached a record high of 411.31 parts per million.

The latest tally was released last week by scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and NOAA.

And despite international efforts to control emissions, they appear to not be effectively under control. The level of emissions is not only continuing to grow, but it's growing faster. It was growing at 1.5-1.6 parts per million in the 1980s through 1990s, but during the past 10 years has been growing at 2.2 parts per million.

“Many of us had hoped to see the rise of CO2 slowing by now, but sadly that isn't the case. It could still happen in the next decade or so if renewables replace enough fossil fuels,” said Scripps CO2 program director Ralph Keeling, whose father Charles Keeling started the Mauna Loa CO2 program in 1958.

But while it's possible to reverse the growth trend in CO2, for species of all kinds, including humans, the future isn’t bright.

“Today's emissions will still be trapping heat in the atmosphere thousands of years from now.” Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network.

With Kilauea volcano erupting continually for so long, many ask if that has a significant impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide. Researchers say it's clear that most of the CO2 change is from fossil fuel use, not the volcano.

And the proximity of Kilauea to Mauna Loa is also not a big factor. The high rate of growth in atmospheric CO2 is not only being observed at Mauna Loa but also at other sites in NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2018

Aluminum tariffs, hotel taxes, electric cars and the value of complexity

Targeted taxes and added regulations always have unintended consequences.

In Hawai`i, when we pile taxes onto hotel rooms, it encourages alternative accommodations that may be able to avoid the tax—thus damaging the hotel industry.

When we regulate the heck out of taxis, it opens the door for Uber and Lyft.

Transportation fuel taxes provide an inadvertent subsidy to electric vehicles. Discussions of fixing that with a mileage tax will punish lower-income people who are forced to live where housing prices are cheaper, but who have to commute longer distances.

When President Trump announced new steel and aluminum tariffs, at first blush it seems sound. If these metals from foreign producers pay a big tax to get into the U.S., then that improves the competitiveness of metals from American producers.

But the unintended consequences are many.

Nearly a year ago, the firm NERA Economic Consulting looked into aluminum tariffs and their impact. They used an economic model from another firm, Regional Economic Models Inc. (REMI).

Among the conclusions: the higher prices from across-the-board tariffs would cost more jobs to the larger economy than they would add to the aluminum industry; and the tariffs would harm the parts of the manufacturing economy that rely on aluminum.

The study suggested that tariffs could be tweaked to actually be productive to the local economy, by targeting semi-finished aluminum products.

But, of course, that’s not what President Trump has proposed.

Tariffs and taxes are complicated. They often don’t produce the results intended.

One of the most concerning impacts of the metals tariffs is that while they may be intended to target our economic competitors, they more directly target our friends.

China is a big aluminum producer, and it has severely cut into our aluminum exports. But our biggest source of aluminum is Canada. Sixty percent of the product comes from our northern neighbor.

So it seems that an aluminum tariff could very well not harm China, but further damage Canada, which is already reeling from China’s growing exports.

Unintended consequences.

Which is a statement about complexity. Complexity breeds suspicion and misunderstanding. But complexity is almost always unavoidable in tax and tariff policy. Difficult subjects need smart people and careful consideration.

Simple solutions can sometimes be worse than no solution at all.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2018

Duck and cover. Climate catastrophe now probably inevitable

The climate chickens are coming home to roost, and the news for farmers, coastal cities, wildlife, people who don’t live in high-elevation bunkers and humans who drink water—they are now likely to be disastrous.

And that’s the best case scenario, according to a new study in Nature Climate Change.

The scary thing about changing climate is how intertwined it is with everything in our lives. As the Hawai`i Climate Adaptation logo suggest, Pili na mea a pau: All things are related.

The only way to avoid it being even worse is with herculean effort. Far more effort than is now being engaged. And nobody’s likely to be putting out that kind of effort—especially not our country, which just walked away from the Paris climate accords.

The latest predictions of climate warming suggest that by the end of this century, there’s a 90 percent chance the earth will be significantly hotter than the disastrous 2 degree rise that folks have been predicting.

There’s a small chance that it will stay as low as 2-degree rise, and a small chance of as much as a 5-degree rise. The median rise is now estimated to be 3.2 degrees, according to authors of a new paper in Nature Climate Change.

We are already so far down the climate change turnpike that even really strong measures would only keep the warming to 2 degrees, said the paper’s lead author, Adrian Raftery, a University of Washington statistician.

"Our analysis shows that the goal of 2 degrees is very much a best-case scenario. It is achievable, but only with major, sustained effort on all fronts over the next 80 years," he said in a Eurekalert article.

Scientists have long known it could be that bad, but the International Panel on Climate Change and others have downplayed the worst case scenarios, in part because they are so horrific as to be easily rejected. Imagine cities under water. Farmlands poisoned by saltwater intrusion. Coastal resorts washed away. Flooding in dry areas and drought in our breadbaskets. Storms. Massive wildlife losses.

“Damages from heat extremes, drought, extreme weather and sea level rise will be much more severe if 2 degrees C or higher temperature rise is allowed. Our results show that an abrupt change of course is needed to achieve these goals." said one of the paper’s co-authors, Dargan Frierson, a University of Washington associate professor of atmospheric sciences.

The study was a detailed review of climate data, country by country.

"This is a high-tech statistical model that looks at what has happened to per-capita output in each country, to carbon intensity in each country, and to population in each country. What we find is that there is a wide range of what could happen, but unfortunately the bottom end of the range is still fairly bad, and the top end of the range is catastrophic," said another of the paper’s co-authors, University of California at Santa Barbara economist Dick Startz.

"Our predictions assume that carbon intensity is going to continue to trend downward, as it has been. That still leaves us in a mess. The only thing that is going to get us out of it is finding a way to make carbon intensity fall much more quickly than it has been," Startz said.

He said it is difficult but possible to envision a global initiative that could keep the temperature rise within some limits, using major advances in energy technology, but he’s not hopeful. Carbon intensity as been declining, but not nearly fast enough to make a significant impact.

"We can hope for some magic breakthrough or we can do the unpleasant task of charging more when we're polluting. But even that might not be enough," Startz said.

California already has a sense of how bad it could be in terms of sea level rise, as the state earlier this year released a major report on the subject. It’s available here.

California, as Hawai`i is, is already seeing some of the early effects, the report said: 

“Coastal California is already experiencing the early impacts of a rising sea level, including more extensive coastal flooding during storms, periodic tidal flooding, and increased coastal erosion.”

Much of the sea level change in recent decades has been from thermal expansion of ocean water, glacier melting and ice cap melting. But the planet is moving into a new phase in which there is melting of the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.

California’s take on the most likely sea level rise by 2100 without significant mitigation? That would be 1.6 to 3.4 feet.

Worst case? Ten feet.

Hawai`i's efforts to understand the local impacts of climate and related changes are being overseen by the state's Interagency Climate Adaptation Committee, which has a website here. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2017

Do biofuels really sequester carbon? Hawaii research says yes.

Biofuel is a kind of stepchild in the renewable energy discussions—on the grounds that it may not really reduce carbon emissions.

Is biofuel a pipe dream? Is it really superior to burning fossil fuels?

New Hawai`i research indicates that certain grassy biofuels do better than most people believed. 

Sure, some of the CO2 stored in the plants gets released when they are converted to energy, but some of it also stays in the soil—sequestered out of the atmosphere.

A group of researchers conducted two years of testing using sugar cane and napiergrass, under the title, Field-Based Estimates of Global Warming Potential in Bioenergy Systems of Hawaii: Crop Choice and Deficit Irrigation. 

Their work was published in PLOS One. The authors are Meghan N. Pawlowski, Susan E. Crow, Manyowa N. Meki, James R. Kiniry, Andrew D. Taylor, Richard Ogoshi, Adel Youkhana, and Mae Nakahata. The two lead authors are with the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, University of Hawaii Mānoa.

They worked with napiergrass that was repeatedly harvested, and with sugar grown at Maui’s HC&S plantation—which ironically has now gone out of sugar production.

The crops were selected for having big, robust root systems, and being somewhat drought tolerant. And they worked with two irrigation systems—giving the crop 100 percent of what a plantation would normally provide, and depriving the plants of water with 50 percent irrigation.

“Deficit irrigation reduced yield, but increased soil (carbon) accumulation as proportionately more photosynthetic resources were allocated belowground,” the authors wrote.

But it’s all in how you manage the crop. 

“If inappropriately managed, the production of biofuel feedstocks could be a net contributor to greenhouse gas … emissions,” the authors wrote.

One key is that if you want to increase soil organic carbon (SOC), you harvest the crop above the soil line and leave the root mass in the ground. You keep harvesting the tops (ratoon harvesting, this is called) off the same root system.

Most sugar operations in Hawai`i in recent decades have pulled the roots out on a regular basis, reducing the carbon in the soil. A different cultivation plan would increase soil carbon, the authors found.

“Our results demonstrate the potential to sequester SOC in both of the sugarcane and napiergrass feedstock scenarios if conservation management practices, such as ratoon harvests and reduced tillage operations, are implemented,” they wrote.

(Here’s a 2012 Science Daily piece on using napiergrass as a biofuel. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120927142524.htm)

© Jan TenBruggencate 2017

Sea level can drive temperature change--this is weird but it explains a lot.

Scientists have long tried to calculate sea level rise from estimates of temperature rise, but now researchers believe they can work the other way.

They think they can predict global temperatures from sea level change.

Based on their calculations, they figure air temperatures will be up half a degree, Fahrenheit, by the end of this year (2016) from 2014. Half a degree in two years; that’s a lot.

It indicates a higher-than usual rise in global atmospheric temperatures, which is bad news. But the research also helps explain a long period of low temperature rise a decade ago--a slowdown that critics of climate theory used to suggest global warming was a hoax. More on that at the end of this post.

The new paper. Pacific sea level rise patterns and global surface temperature variability, is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. It was written by Cheryl Peyser, Jianjun Yin and Julia Cole of the Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, and Felix Landerer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. 

“We find a significant and robust correlation between the east-west contrast of dynamic sea level in the Pacific and global mean surface temperature variability on both interannual and decadal time scales,” they wrote, with typical scientific impenetrability.

The fact that sea level rise and atmospheric temperatures are linked is no surprise. Warmer weather causes polar ice and glaciers to melt, adding water to the seas. Rising atmospheric temperature transmits energy into the ocean, and warmer water expands. Both thing make sea levels go up.

But apparently it works the other way, too. Changes in ocean temperature patterns impact the atmosphere. When you think about it, that makes perfect sense. 

Science Daily summarizes the new paper here.

“We're using sea level in a different way, by using the pattern of sea level changes in the Pacific to look at global surface temperatures -- and this hasn't been done before," Peyser said.

They found that when sea levels in the western Pacific rise more than usual, worldwide surface temperature rise slows. And when sea levels drop in the Western Pacific but go up in the eastern Pacific, global air temperatures jump. Apparently that’s because a lot of ocean heat is lost back to the atmosphere.

Water appears to slosh back and forth across the Pacific east to west and west to east. Strong tradewinds pushing water westward is part of that sloshing phenomenon. (Sloshing back and forth may not be the best analogy, since some of the sea level rise isn’t from movement of water but from the expansion in volume of warmed water. But it helps visualize the activity.)

There was a period from about 1998 to 2012 when conservative pundits were touting a slowdown in global temperature rise as proof that climate change wasn’t happening. It now turns out that slowdown was associated with a dramatic slosh to the west, when sea levels in the western tropical Pacific were significantly higher than average global sea level change.

Now it’s sloshing back, and atmospheric temperatures are rising faster again. 

The research helps explain why atmospheric temperature rise slows and speeds up at various times.

“Our research shows that the internal variability of the global climate system can conceal anthropogenic global warming, and at other times the internal variability of the system can enhance anthropogenic warming,” said paper co-author Yin.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2016