The End of Doom (26 page)

The Biotech Farmer and the Organic Environmentalists Should Be Friends

“The farmer and the cowman should be friends,” sing the folks in the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
Oklahoma!
So why shouldn't biotech and organic growers be friends, too? After all, both want to make decent livings as they produce nutritious food for a hungry world while enhancing soil fertility; fending off diseases, pests, and weeds; reducing costly and environmentally damaging inputs; preventing erosion and fertilizer runoff; conserving water; and protecting biodiversity. Some environmentalists are arguing that the world should “freeze” the amount of cropland at current levels and produce food for the 9 billion people living in 2050 only from the acres already being cultivated. Since organic agriculture as currently practiced produces on average about 75 percent of the yields of conventional farming, a global switch to organic farming would make it impossible to freeze cropland for today's population, much less for 9 billion in four decades.

On the other hand, high-yielding biotech seeds combined with organic soil management techniques could deliver just the sort of “sustainable intensification” that humanity needs. Organic soil management recycles nutrients, increases organic content, and enhances moisture retention. Adding crop varieties that can generate their own fertilizer, resist drought, flourish in saline soils, fight off diseases and pests without chemical sprays, and grow without weeding and plowing makes organic agriculture that much gentler on the natural environment.

In their 2008 book
Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food,
the wife-and-husband team of University of California at Davis plant geneticist Pamela Ronald and organic farmer Raoul Adamchak write, “We believe that the judicious incorporation of two important strands of agriculture—genetic engineering and organic farming—is key to helping feed the growing population in an ecologically balanced manner.” Sounds about right.

 

6

Can We Cope with the Heat?

IN 2005, I PUBLICLY CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT
climate change. I concluded that the balance of the scientific evidence indicated that man-made global warming likely posed a significant problem for humanity. My new assessment did not please a number of my public policy friends, some of whom made their disappointment clear. Perhaps the most amusing but nevertheless painful episode occurred during the 2007 annual gala dinner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.–based free-market think tank.

The master of ceremonies was former
National Review
editor John O'Sullivan. To entertain the crowd, O'Sullivan put together a counterfeit tale in which I ostensibly had given a recent lecture on environmental trends pointing out that most were positive. After the lecture, O'Sullivan told the audience, a young woman supposedly approached me to express her displeasure with regard to my change of mind on climate change. Continuing his fable, O'Sullivan recounted to the hundreds of diners that I had tried to explain why my views had shifted. Eventually realizing that the young woman was having none of it, I then purportedly asked her if it wasn't enough that we two actually agreed on most environmental policy issues. The young woman paused for a moment, said O'Sullivan, and then retorted, “I suppose that Pontius Pilate made some good decisions, too.” Being compared, even in jest, to the Roman governor who consented to the crucifixion of Jesus is, to say the least, somewhat disconcerting.

Welcome to the most politicized science of our time. As such, sorting through the claims and counterclaims of assorted “alarmists” and “deniers” with regard to the scientific research and policy prescriptions is a fraught undertaking.

On the catastrophe side stands former U.S. vice president Al Gore, who has warned Congress that man-made global warming is “a true planetary emergency.” Joining Gore is environmentalist Bill McKibben, founder of the
350.org
activist group, who promotes the goal of reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to back below 350 parts per million (ppm) from the current 400 ppm. In his 2014 book,
Oil and Honey,
McKibben sees future climate change as portending “an endless chain of disasters that will turn civilization into a never-ending emergency response drill.” McKibben's prescription is a turn away from global consumerism toward the organic and local, to “a nation of careful, small-scale farmers who can adapt to the crazed new world with care and grace, and who don't do much more damage in the process.” Fierce progressive activist Naomi Klein in her newest screed,
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,
declares, “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.” Klein asserts that the progressive values and policies she advocates are “currently being vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature.” Climate science, she further claims, has given progressives “the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism” ever. McKibben called Klein's book “the key new text on climate change.”

Across the ideological divide, the criers of climate crisis are passionately opposed by a cohort of skeptics who reject the claims of impending climate catastrophe, arguing that they are largely based on corrupted and politicized science. One leading voice challenging climate doom is Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who is now the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Inhofe declared in 2003 that “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Another of the fiercest challengers of orthodox climate science is Marc Morano, the publisher of the influential Climate Depot website. “The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim—from A-Z—the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing, and in many instances the claims are moving in the opposite direction,” asserted Morano in congressional testimony. He added, “The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts.” Fred Singer, former director of the US National Weather Service's Satellite Service Center and now head of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, asserts, “There would be very little public interest in funding climate science, were it not for an assertion by alarmists in the political and environmental communities that a human-caused global warming crisis exists.” Despite the billions spent on climate research, Singer argues, “There is no convincing evidence that it has been warming.”

I have been reporting on climate change for a quarter of a century. I covered the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at which the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated. I have since reported from ten of the United Nations annual Climate Change conferences. The anecdote at the beginning of this chapter reveals that after years of reporting on the subject, attending scientific conferences, talking with scientists, and extensively reading the research literature, I have concluded that the balance of the evidence indicates that climate change could become a significant problem for humanity as the twenty-first century unfolds.

First, let's look at what the best scientific evidence is (and is not) telling us about the likely trajectory of future climate change. This includes future temperature increases, sea level rise, shifts in the amounts of snow and rain, and ocean acidification. Next, we will analyze the possibilities of adapting to a changing climate and ask what we owe to future generations. Third, we will parse the costs and benefits of policies proposed to prevent or slow future warming. Fourth, we will probe the sorry history of global climate negotiations. Finally, we examine how human ingenuity can most likely deliver the energy technologies that will address and solve the climate problem well before the end of this century.

How Hot Is It?

According to the reckoning of various international meteorological organizations, 2014 was either the hottest year or close to the hottest year since fairly accurate instrumental temperature records started being kept in the mid-nineteenth century. For example, in January 2015 the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that there is 38 percent chance that 2014 was warmer than 2010 or 2005, the next two warmest years in the NOAA records. The independent climate research group Berkeley Earth also concluded that 2014 was nominally the warmest since the global instrumental record began in 1850 while noting, however, that within the margin of error, it is tied with 2005 and 2010. The UK Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia ranked 2014 as tied with 2010 for the warmest year in the record, but added that the uncertainty ranges mean it's not possible to definitively say which of several recent years was the warmest.

Climatologists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville have been tracking global temperatures for the past thirty-six years using satellite data that measure the bottom five miles of the atmosphere. They reported that 2014 was the third warmest year in that record. As analyzed by Remote Sensing Systems, 2014 was only the sixth warmest year in the satellite record. For both satellite data sets, 1998 is the hottest year. All data sets agree that the last ten years or so have been the warmest period during the instrumental record.

What the Science Says

The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is increasing; the world has warmed; glaciers are melting; and the seas are rising. These facts are not scientifically in dispute. As
Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis,
the 2013 report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), states: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.” The report adds, “Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850.” These findings were restated and bolstered in November 2014 in the IPCC's
Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report
. The vast majority of climate researchers agree that man-made global warming is now under way.

The amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, gases that tend to warm the atmosphere (greenhouse gases or GHG), are at levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing chiefly because humanity releases more as it burns fossil fuels and cuts down forests. Methane is released through natural gas drilling and the flatulence of growing livestock herds. And nitrogen oxide rises as a side effect of fertilizer use and emissions from vehicles. Carbon dioxide concentrations are 40 percent higher than during preindustrial times back in 1750. Thirty percent of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities has dissolved into the oceans, where it has increased the acidity of the water by 26 percent.

Since the 1880s, the planet has warmed by an average of 0.85°C (1.5°F). The IPCC report notes that since 1951 average global temperature has been increasing at a rate of 0.12°C (0.22°F) per decade. “It is
extremely likely
that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” states that report. In November 2014, the IPCC's
Synthesis 2014 Report
stated, “It is
extremely likely
that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.”

In addition, most mountain glaciers and the ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland are melting, and the extent of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has been declining since 1967. The area of Arctic Ocean summer sea ice has been falling at a rate of between 9.4 and 13.6 percent per decade since 1979. Between 1901 and 2010, sea level rose at a rate of 1.7 millimeters (0.7 inch) per year, increasing average sea level by 0.19 meters (about 8 inches) over that period. As more ice on land drains into the warming oceans, the IPCC estimates that sea level is now rising at 3.2 millimeters (0.12 inches) per year. At this rate, global average sea level would rise by about 0.27 meters (11 inches) by 2100.

In trying to discern how future climate change will play out over the remainder of this century, the IPCC scientists rely on the outputs from computer climate models. As part of the process of computer modeling, they have set up scenarios called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). Each RCP more or less corresponds to certain specified levels of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere that might be reached by 2100. Currently, the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere tallies at about the equivalent of 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, up from 280 ppm in 1750. For example, RCP2.6 reaches 475 ppm carbon dioxide equivalent; RCP4.5 is up to 630 ppm; RCP6 grows to 800 ppm; and RCP8.5 rises to 1313 ppm.

The IPCC reports, “Global surface temperature change for the end of the 21st century is likely to exceed 1.5°C [2.7°F] relative to 1850 to 1900 for all RCP scenarios except RCP2.6. It is likely to exceed 2°C [3.6°F] for RCP6 and RCP8.5, and more likely than not to exceed 2°C [3.6°F] for RCP4.5.” The 2°C number is significant since in ongoing negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change the agreed international goal is to keep the future average global temperature increase below that threshold. It bears noting that the IPCC reports that “the total increase between the average of the 1850–1900 period and the 2003–2012 period is 0.78°C [1.4°F].” More generally, the computer models on which the IPCC relies project by 2100 that the average increase in global temperature above the 1850–1900 average will be 1°C, 1.8°C, 2.2°C, and 3.7°C, for the RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6, and RCP8.5 scenarios, respectively.

The IPCC reports that computer models forecast that average sea level rise by 2100 will range from 0.26 to 0.98 meters (10 to 38 inches). Two scientific studies published in May 2014 indicated that the glaciers of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are beginning to melt and so will likely push the estimates of sea level rise by the end of this century toward the higher end of that spread. In an effort to set a highly unlikely worst-case upper limit on possible sea level rise, a study in the October 2014 issue of
Environmental Research Letters
reckoned that sea level could at worst rise by no more than about 6 feet during this century. In another October 2014 analysis, a team of researchers led by Australian National University earth scientist Kurt Lambeck indicated that global average sea level has begun steadily rising in the past 150 years, after having fluctuated no more than 6 to 8 inches during the past 6,000 years. At the Earth's northern pole, the IPCC expects significant reductions in Arctic sea ice extent by 2100 ranging from a low of 43 percent to a high of 94 percent during the annual summer melt. Spring snow cover is projected to decrease in the Northern Hemisphere by 7 to 25 percent by 2100.