Global Warming Real After All, Says Former Scientific Skeptic

Global warming is a contentious issue these days. Is it real?

Richard A. Muller

Richard A. Muller is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, who chaired the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project over the last two years. The BEST Project's results are now in, and Muller recently reported on them in The Wall Street Journal, in "The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism: There were good reasons for doubt, until now."

Muller was a climate skeptic going into the project, for reasons he elaborates in the article. After the careful study made by his team, he's changed his mind:

We discovered that about one-third of the world's [land-based surface] temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming ... Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.

How much warming has taken place?

The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC [Celsius], much greater than the IPCC's average of 0.64ºC.

(A 1° Celsius rise is equal to 1.8° Fahrenheit. A 2° Celsius rise is equal to 3.6° Fahrenheit. A 0.64° Celsius rise is equal to 1.152° Fahrenheit.)

The IPCC is the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Muller says it ...

... estimates an average global 0.64ºC temperature rise in the past 50 years, "most" of which the IPCC says is due to humans.

How much of the rise is manmade? Muller does not commit:

How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.

A well-stated, liberal reaction to Muller's article comes from op-ed columnist Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post. In "The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate," Robinson writes:

Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many [climate-change] deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.

As for the is-it-manmade issue, Robinson says:

... the Berkeley group’s work should help lead all but the dimmest policymakers to the overwhelmingly probable answer. We know that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions — the burning of fossil fuels by humans — as the cause. And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists have been both careful and honorable in their work.

My opinion: we need to get serious about addressing global warming now!

Kill the TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline!

I find strange, even as I cheer, the street protests against the proposed TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline expansion ...

Ashok Chandwaney of St. Mary’s College and others opposed
to the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline
march in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Oct. 7, 2011.

... which Juliet Eilperin, the lead environmental reporter for The Washington Post, writes in today's paper is becoming "a political headache for White House."

Strange, because "more than 1,250 [protesters] were arrested in demonstrations outside the White House in late August and early September." How long has it been since the environment was at the heart of 1,250 street protest arrests? Has it ever happened?

I cheer the protests because I am vastly disappointed in the Obama administration's general lack of environmental oomph. It recently delayed strengthening national anti-smog standards, kicking that can down the road for at least a few more years.

True, the president has done well recently in negotiating higher fuel-mileage standards with automakers.

But Obama (joined by Senate Democratic leaders) has totally fizzled with respect to the cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House in 2009. When was the last time you heard anybody even mention trying to get it passed?

All that said, I have not been wholly sure about whether blocking the Keystone XL expansion is worth all the struggle and all the protests. I have wondered: is it not possible that it is, in fact, in the national interest to build it? Would not the thousands of jobs created in expanding the pipeline alone outweigh the environmental damage the pipeline might cause?

But I Now Say "No" to the TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline Expansion

After a little research, I think the answer is no. It's a close call, but I now have to say the pipeline should not be built.

The pipeline is meant to transport oil extracted from tar sands in the boreal forests of Alberta, Canada. My research indicates that "the production process [for tar sands oil extraction and upgrading] alone generates three times as much global warming pollution as [that for] conventional crude."

"The emissions created from producing the tar sands oil piped through Keystone XL will increase carbon pollution by 27 million metric tons above emissions from the equivalent amount of conventional oil, according to the Environmental Protection Agency," says this discussion.

It's simply harder to extract useable petroleum from tar sands than from conventional oil wells. Energy has to be expended in doing so. That expenditure of energy which must be done to extract the oil and upgrade its low initial quality puts extra carbon into the atmosphere.

And there are further objections:

This discussion says the proposed pipeline expansion threatens Alberta's boreal forests, saying "the entire boreal forest [of the earth] ...

... stores almost twice as much carbon as tropical forests and nearly three times as much as temperate forests." And since "roughly 25 percent of global emissions" are absorbed by the planet's forests in general, any economic development that shrinks the earth's boreal forest delivers a body blow to the global climate.

What about the pipeline itself?

The route of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline expansion is shown as a dashed yellow line on this map:

(The orange line is the existing Keystone pipeline.)

Any leaks or spills from the central section of the pipeline expansion threaten to pollute the Ogallala aquifer ...

Ogallala Aquifer

... which Wikipedia says is "is a vast yet shallow underground water table aquifer located beneath the Great Plains in the United States." The new pipeline would intersect the aquifer mainly in Nebraska.

An aquifer is a water table just under the surface of the ground into which wells are sunk to provide drinking water. An aquifer also provides water for farmland irrigation. The Ogallala aquifer, says Wikipedia, "yields about 30 percent of the nation's ground water used for irrigation. In addition, the aquifer system provides drinking water to 82 percent of the people who live within the aquifer boundary."

In the wake of the recent Yellowstone oil spill, I for one do not place much confidence, if any at all, in the assurances of TransCanada that the proposed pipeline's threat to the aquifer is minimal.

Moreover, this discussion says the petroleum from the tar sands in Canada will, after flowing through the proposed U.S. pipeline, wind up (after being refined) being largely exported to markets abroad. It won't actually, as proponents claim, serve to increase our domestic supply of oil and gasoline.

Now, that's both good and bad. Good, because the money from selling the oil abroad will wind up mainly in U.S. pockets, particularly the pockets of workers in domestic refineries.

But also bad, because if the rationale for the pipeline is to decrease America's reliance on foreign oil, it won't really do that.

The Symbolism

It seems to me personally that the above arguments should be enough to kill the pipeline. Your mileage may vary ...

However, the true clincher for me is none of those rational arguments. Rather, it's symbolism. The protests ...

Woman being arrested during tar sands action
on Aug. 29, 2011, in front of the White House.

... have themselves changed the equation.

I don't think the Obama administration will retain much environmental credibility if it approves the pipeline now.

Don't get me wrong. I'm going to vote for Obama next year, as I did in 2008. If you think he isn't doing enough on the environment, you're right. But if a Republican gets into the White House in 2013, imagine the rollbacks of whatever meager environmental victories we've had under Obama!

Even so, we're now past the point where rational cost-benefits analyses can decide pro or con about the pipeline. The sheer symbolism of the protests and the associated pressure has tipped the debate irrevocably against the pipeline.

As I've been saying in this blog, more and more it's not just the economy, "It's the ecology, stupid!"

Yet there are times — and this is one of them — when it's the symbolism, stupid!

Mr. President, kill this pipeline!

Saving the Anacostia

The cover of The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, wp, for today, October 2, 2011 ...

... bears a lovely photo by Linda Davidson that highlights a series of articles inside. The lead article is Neely Tucker's "Anacostia River: From then till now". The Anacostia River ...

(The top of this map points northwest.)

... runs through my home town, Washington, D.C.:

It's fed by branches and creeks in Prince George's and Montgomery counties, in Maryland, and the Anacostia in turn feeds the Potomac River, on its way to the Chesapeake Bay.

Ms. Tucker reminds us that when white Europeans first saw the Anacostia in the early 1600s, it was still fully 40 feet deep, and in 1608 the famous Capt. John Smith could marvel at its clarity. The Nacotchtank Indians had long considered the Anacostia their river of life:

“The river was seen as a vein of Mother Earth; it was salty, like blood, and it tasted like blood,” says Gabrielle Tayac, a Piscataway Indian (the closest descendants the Nacotchtanks have left) and historian at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. “It was part of the living system.”

Back then, the native peoples "moved on the river and its dozen or so tributaries — clear and abundant with shad, pike, bass and oysters — on small canoes."

Since the coming of white men and women, what's happened to the river ...

Blue, gooey substance collecting on silt
at low tide.

Trash and debris along the river
near where the Washington Nationals play.

More trash and debris.

... has been a study in how to despoil our living Earth, step by step by deplorable step. That's one upshot of Ms. Tucker's article.

The early white settlers included wealthy planters who wanted to grow tobacco near the Anacostia, using black slave labor. They cleared the aboriginal forests and drained the wetlands. Since they didn't replenish the soil with manure, it kept declining in fertility ... so they just cleared more land and started over. The result was that much of the cleared soil wound up in the river.

After the American Revolution, the European market for tobacco declined, and the planters switched to wheat. That made things worse, since they now had to plow up land that was formerly cultivated with hoes. At the outset of the nineteenth century, after Maryland ceded territory to build the new Nation's Capital:

Within a generation, the Anacostia was so clogged with silt and debris that deep-water boats could no longer make it to Bladensburg. In 1873, Washington began using underground sewers to dump raw waste into the river.

Then came the depredations of the Army Corps of Engineers, who, in the early twentieth century ...

... began a campaign to create usable land around the Anacostia. Tributaries were strangled with heavy culverts. Great swaths of bog and marsh were converted into dry land with landfill.

The Anacostia riverbed is now so overlain with centuries of agricultural runoff, sewage buildup, and other debris that Ms. Tucker is forced to write, "Today, you can walk across almost any part of the 8.5-mile Anacostia, as most of it is five feet deep or less, choked by silt and pollution."

Now, though, we paradoxically find that the only way we can restore the Anacostia to its former health and glory is to apply governmental and institutional tools that only a European-derived democracy can muster.

We also need environmental advocacy groups — especially local ones like the Anacostia Watershed Society — to continue to put pressure on various components of federal, state, and local governments, including the U.S. military, to do the right thing. Again, that's something Ms. Tucker's article is telling us.

It's as though a culture that has long revolved around contention and conquest, rather than cooperation, came to these shores and contended with the native tribes, wiping many of them out. Meanwhile, they conquered the supposed chaos of nature. Result: a continuing cascade of environmental catastrophes. Now that same culture resorts to a litany of adversarial episodes — court cases, congressional hearings, political campaigns, etc. — as the only way to bring itself to heel.

How ironic. Yet there's a positive lesson here. The worst features of a culture can turn into its best characteristics.

There's no way America can ever go back to a lost, uncivilized past where humans live in complete harmony with nature, Indian-style.

So, to get back in harmony and balance, we have to find our own way. It has to be a process that does not undo the marvels of civilization. It has to respect the spirit of this photo from the wp article:

It's the Anacostia in one of its remaining clean, green settings ... crossed by a bridge for golf carts!