Former Vice President Biden Says Climate Change Is An “Existential” Threat

Former U. S. Vice President Joe Biden spoke before the United States Conference of Mayors on January 24, 2019.  Following the link above takes you to the YouTube video of his address.  Fully half of his 30-minute speech was devoted to the dire need for the U. S. to address climate change rather than retreat from the issue the way the present Trump administration is doing. 

Vice President Biden summarized the important climate and economic benefits generated by the funds in the Obama administration’s Recovery Act of 2009 (intended to stimulate the economy out of the Great Recession) that were directed to mitigating climate change in the U. S.  He then proceeded to offer a heartfelt, sincere and cogent statement on why and how U. S. federal policy should continue to combat climate change by doubling down on policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build a renewable energy economy.  By doing so the U. S. would rejoin all the other nations of the world in our unified campaign to limit further global warming, to which we all subscribed in the Paris Agreement of 2015.

The link above takes one to the video of Biden’s speech.  The portion dealing with climate change begins at about 16 min, 19 sec (16:19) of the video, and continues to about 29 min, near the end.  (For those unfamiliar with YouTube, if you mouse over any part of the video screen the timeline of the video pops up at the bottom of the screen.  Then as the mouse scans along that timeline, you can stop at 16:19 [or any other time you wish].  If you then click on that position the video will begin playing at that point.)

Here are some direct quotes from Biden’s talk, with the time for each statement indicated.

• The Recovery Act included “the single biggest investment in clean energy in the history of the country - $90 billion.  It leveraged $150 billion in the private sector. [It] created hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs…By the end of the administration there was 30 times as much solar energy and [we were] creating clean energy jobs 12 times faster than any other sector of the economy.” (16:19)
• “There’s no reason that in 2025 all of North America can’t get half of electricity from non-polluting sources.  It’s within our grasp but for special interests!” (20:40)
• Addressing the mayors directly, he said “You also know…it’s a matter of survival.  The threat posed by climate change is existential.” (21:26)
• “You know what the military said [to President Obama and Vice President Biden]?  ‘You know what our greatest security threat is?  Global warming….If sea levels rise…you have tens of millions of people migrating.  That’s how wars start.’” (21:42)
• “Our government’s own most recent report found that heat stress and drought can kill up to a quarter of our corn and soybean harvest.  What’s that going to mean for you mayors from the Midwest…? What does that mean … when John Deere [a major manufacturer of farm equipment] has nothing to plow? (23:40)
• Our scientists have spoken…Since when did we become science deniers?  The United Nations told us…we have 12 years to act before it’s irreversible” (24:07)
• (Referring to the Trump administration intention to pull out of the Paris Agreement)…“you’ve stepped up [addressing the mayors]….400 of you said, no, no, not me….57% of you pledged to take action in 2019”  (25:50)
• “…this is the most urgent priority facing the nation, and we’ll be judged by our children and grandchildren for what we do today.” (27:48)    

  Conclusion

This writer finds it highly significant that Vice President Biden, in his appearance before the United States Conference of Mayors for 2019 devoted so much emphasis to the single issue of climate change.  With all the problems facing our mayors, such as economic and social injustice, and opioid abuse, to name only a few, he chose to stress the importance of the climate change issue as an “existential” threat, stating “this is the most urgent priority facing the nation”.

Skeptics may downplay this speech as being merely a political gesture from someone grappling with the decision of whether to run for president in two years.  Yet there are many other ways he could have addressed our country’s mayors.  Here’s a man who was at the center of national power for eight years.  He came to understand the singular, generational, global significance of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases that have led to intolerable levels of global warming in the short time, geologically speaking, of a figurative blink of an eye.  Mr. Biden is to be praised for this effort.  We all should support his call to action on climate change, regardless of whether he runs for president.

© 2019 Henry Auer

Attribution of Extreme Events to Global Warming

The public, when contemplating global warming, includes those who question whether warming underlies the occurrence of extreme weather and climate events.  The U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine recently issued a report, “Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change”.  It emphasizes that the appropriate format for questions concerning this issue can be phrased in terms such as “Are events of this severity becoming more or less likely because of climate change?” 

The report emphasizes that because of rapid advances in data analysis and climate modeling the severity of many extreme events can be attributed to contributing factors arising from warming.  It includes a schematic image, shown here, characterizing how the increasing degree of understanding of various types of events leads to increasing confidence in the degree to which we can attribute severity to contributions from global warming.

This post concludes with a selection of examples from the climate literature where such analyses have been made, leading to affirmative statements of attribution such as considered here.

Recently weather news has reported on extreme events in many regions of the world. 

• The American states of Texas and Louisiana, and their neighbors, had intense rain for over a week in early 2016, triggering record-breaking flooding in the area.    

• The American West has suffered severe drought conditions for four years, straining water supplies and lowering yields of important crops. 

• Over the past winter England and Wales have had prolonged bouts of heavy rain and flooding, including hundreds of flood alerts and warnings, more than 30 of which were labeled severe.  

• Perth, Australia had a heat wave four days long with temperatures over 40ºC (104ºF) in February 2016, and has had seven days over this temperature this season.  

• Pakistan has had increasing numbers of serious flooding events over the last century, including 40 events in the last 15 years.  Most of these are accompanied by loss of life and social dislocation, and significant damage to structures and agricultural lands.

These few anecdotes are potentially significant indicators of the effect that global warming is having at regional and local levels around the world.  Indeed, increased rates of occurrence of such phenomena are predicted with high confidence in recent global warming reports.  But in discussing the role of warming at the scale of such geographically small areas it is important to evaluate whether each one in fact is related to warming.  For example, if few or none are, climate science would be hard pressed to persuade policymakers and the public to undertake efforts to minimize further warming and adapt to its effects.  On the other hand, if it can be shown that there is indeed a contribution from warming, then climate science is justified in actively pursuing appropriate policies such as those agreed to at the United Nations conference in Paris in December 2015.

Here we discuss the question of whether, and how, extreme events can be attributed to global warming.

The U. S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued the report “Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change” (2016); Washington, DC: The National Academies Press (the Report) on March 10, 2016.  The Report emphasizes that extreme events, just as all our weather every day, results from the interactions of many atmospheric forces and processes.  For this reason, it makes the very important point that we can not justifiably ask a question such as “Was this extreme event caused by [man-made] climate change, yes or no?”  Such a simplified black-or-white question overlooks the complexity in climate and weather. 

Rather the Report offers different questions phrased as “Are events of this severity becoming more or less likely because of climate change?”; or, for single events such as local storms, the question could be “To what extent was the storm intensified, or its precipitation increased, because of climate change?”  Note that the questions deemed appropriate seek expressions of likelihood, rather than the certainty demanded by the yes-or-no question.  To any viewer of a televised weather forecast this should hardly be surprising.  After all, these daily predictions always provide likelihoods for sunshine (clear, partly cloudy, mostly cloudy, etc.) as well as percent probabilities of rain, sleet or snow.  In the same way, and for the same reasons, the Report concludes that statements of attribution should be phrased in terms of the probability or likelihood that global warming was a climatic factor contributing to the occurrence of the extreme event.

The Report summarizes its detailed deliberations about attribution of events to known or understandable contributing factors with a simplified conceptual diagram, shown here

 

Schematic diagram showing how our confidence (vertical axis) in attributing different kinds of extreme events to man-made climate change depends on our understanding of the extent to which climate change affects the particular type of event (horizontal axis).  Different types of extreme events are shown by the differently colored labeled circles.  The dashed line represents where a particular type of extreme event would fall if we had an ideal ability to attribute how climate change affects it.  In reality all the circles fall below the dashed line because our ability to attribute the specific events to man-made climate change is less than perfect.  Note that the understanding/attribution level is high for temperature events (upper right), and that these become lower as we pass through extreme rainfall (near the center) to severe convective storms (e.g., thunderstorms and tornadoes; lower left).

Source: U. S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,  “Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change” (2016); Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/21852.

 

 

The Report identifies two ways to label an event as “extreme”.  We have to be able to distinguish a supposed extreme event, potentially caused in part by the effects of global warming, from normal behavior.  First, data characterizing the event could be shown to differ from comparable data for a reference period extending over a sufficiently long period of time, with a high level of statistical significance.  Alternatively, data characterizing the event could be successfully modeled in a climate model that includes man-made global warming factors, whereas it could not be modeled by a similar model run excluding those factors, again, with a high level of statistical significance.  An event that fulfils either of these conditions can then be labeled as an event to which global warming contributes to its extreme character.
 

Extreme events had already been attributed to global warming before this Report. 

 

• Analysis of data over the 49 year period from 1951-1999 shows that global warming is responsible for extremes of rainfall over the Northern Hemisphere.  Min and coworkers (Nature, 2011, Vol. 470, pp. 378-381, doi:10.1038/nature09763) showed that “human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of … Northern Hemisphere land areas.”  This work is significant because it covers a period of time in which greenhouse gas levels, and global average temperatures, were much lower than at present.

 

• Extreme rainfall and catastrophic flooding in England and Wales in 2000 was very likely due to human-induced global warming.  Pall and coworkers carried out a probabilistic analysis of weather patterns and likelihood of flooding in the region (Nature, 2011, Vol. 470, pp. 382-385, doi:10.1038/nature09762). During October and November 2000 England and Wales had the heaviest rainfall since records began in 1766, leading to severe flooding. The authors concluded “it is very likely that global [human-induced] greenhouse gas emissions [occurring during the twentieth century] substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence…in autumn 2000.”

 

• Kelley and coworkers (Proc. Natl Acad. Sci., published online before print March 2, 2015) report on the worst drought in recorded history in Syria and neighboring countries just prior to the “Arab Spring”.  The drought was serious enough that large numbers of farmers left their villages and migrated to Syria’s cities.  This caused major social and political turmoil and is considered to be a contributing factor to Syria’s ongoing civil war.  The authors found that human-derived greenhouse gases contributed to the drought.

 

• Moore and Lobell (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., vol. 112 no. 9, pp. 2670–2675, 2015) analyzed changes in crop yields and climate change across Europe between 1989 and 2009.  Large scale decreases in yields were found in many localized regions, which correlated with increased temperatures and decreased precipitation over the 20 year period studied.

 

• Diffenbaugh and coworkers (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., published online before print March 2, 2015) examined the drought in California from December 2012 to September 2014, likely the worst in 1000 years.  By simulating the region’s climate in model calculations the authors found that the extra amount of greenhouse gases added by human activity likely resulted in higher temperatures and reduced precipitation in the region.  This factor also contributes to a high risk of continued severe droughts.

 

• Williams and coworkers also conducted detailed analyses of climate-related data for California, from 1901 to 2014 (Geophys. Res. Let. 2015; DOI: 10.1002/2015GL064924).  From rigorous statistical analysis the authors estimated that global warming was responsible for 8-27% of the observed excess drought conditions for 2012-2014, and for 5-18% for 2014 alone.  These findings indicate that although drought conditions may originate from various climatic factors operating cyclically over many years, its full extreme extent in the current drought has been worsened by global warming, producing the current record conditions.

 

• Cook and coworkers (Sci. Adv. 1, e1400082 (2015); published electronically 12 February 2015) assessed drought conditions in the American Southwest and Central Plains.  Assuming that unrestrained emission of greenhouse gases would continue, the risk of severe droughts in these regions is projected to be extremely high, by various measures between about 69% and 97% in the second half of this century.

 

Conclusion

 

The Report by the National Academies makes clear that climate science has advanced remarkably in the last decade, so that attributions of global warming as a contributing factor to extreme events can reliably be made after appropriate analysis.  This depends on use of one or both of the methods, either data based or model based, mentioned above.  The progress making this possible includes the availability of far more observational data, on the one hand, and constant improvements in climate models on the other.  As a result statements of attribution, when merited based on analysis, now authoritatively support the role of man-made global warming, due to humanity’s continued and increasing use of fossil fuels, in the increasing severity of various types of extreme climate and weather events.  We all, as citizens of countries around the world, must marshal our efforts to reduce emissions as aggressively as possible.  The goal should be achieving near zero annual emission rates within a few decades, say by mid-century.

 

© 2016 Henry Auer

Warming Temperatures Bring Droughts and Nutritional Stress

Summary.  In the U. S. and across wide regions of the globe, 2011 and 2012 have recorded heat waves and droughts at or near record levels.  These have severely impacted yields, and prices, of world staple grain crops.

OXFAM has issued a new report that projects impacts of global warming on staple grain crops and prices up to 2030.  As a baseline, it shows that yields and prices will rise significantly as a lon-term trend over this period.  But more importantly the effects of regional short-term extreme weather “shocks” must be added to the long-term trends.  These can produce serious crop and nutritional deficiencies, especially in regions of poverty around the world.  OXFAM urges renewed efforts to mitigate global warming, and investments by developed countries to help poorer nations adapt to the effects of long-term warming and short-term shocks on agricultural yields and nutritional status.

 

Introduction. Recent years have seen increases in the occurrence and intensity of extreme weather and climate events to an extent having no precedent in earlier decades or the previous century. Examples that come easily to mind include, at various times and locations around the planet, heavy rain and consequent flooding, prolonged heat waves accompanied by drought, and a high frequency and extent of forest wildfires.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization of hundreds of climate scientists from all around the world, operating under the auspices of the United Nations, issued its Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) in 2007.  4AR indicates that, as a result of man-made increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs), the long-term global average temperature has increased since the industrial revolution began and will continue to do so. 

Extreme weather events are consistent with trends anticipated by the IPCC in 4AR and its 2011 report on this subject (SREX; see Note 1).  4AR and SREX foresee that this warming will lead to warmer daytime as well as nighttime temperatures, increases in dryness and drought conditions in certain regions of the world, and increases in intense rainfall and flooding in others.

OXFAM’s Report on Reduced Crop Yields.  OXFAM GB published its briefing report “Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices” (Briefing) online on Sept. 5, 2012.  The Briefing is drawn from a more extensive research paper by D. Willenbockel, “Extreme Weather Events and Crop Price Spikes in a Changing Climate:  Illustrative Global Simulation Scenarios” (2012). The simulations combine climate science global models with economic projections of the effects on production of important world staple foods.

The Briefing provides examples of recent extreme weather events consistent with the expectation of higher temperatures and rainfall or drought foreseen by the IPCC.  These include:

as of July 2012, the U. S. has experienced its hottest 12-month period on record;

in the UK, the heaviest rainfall on record fell between April and June 2012, and it experienced the highest November temperatures in 100 years in 2011; and

worldwide, June 2012 was the 328^th month in a row in which the global average temperature exceeded the average temperature during the 20^th century.

The Briefing points out that single events cannot be categorically attributed to worsening warming of the planet, but rather that long-term warming trends have a much higher probability of occurring; it cites as examples the 2003 European heat wave and the 2011 heat wave and drought in Texas, in the U. S.

The post “ExtremeWeather Events and Global Warming” summarizes two current research papers confirming, by rigorous statistical analysis, that recent heat waves are unprecedented in history. Hansen and coworkers conclude there is a “high degree of confidence that events such as the extreme summer heat in [Russia] in 2010 and Texas in 2011 were a consequence of global warming”.  Coumou and Rahmstorf conclude “it is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without [man-made] global warming….the evidence is strong that [man-made], unprecedented heat and rainfall extremes are here — and are causing intense human suffering.”

OXFAM’s Model Foresees Higher Crop Prices Because Of Warming.  The model used in the Briefing predicts long-term trends for commodity prices of the staple foods maize (corn), wheat, and rice, for the period ending in 2030.  To establish accuracy, the modeling process was used to reproduce the effects of historical weather events on crop yields from 1979-2009.  It terms this long-term trend its baseline modeling. 

The Briefing foresees significant worldwide increases in food staple prices by 2030, approximately doubling by 2030 over the price levels of 2010.  For example, baseline average world prices would rise

for maize, by 177%, with almost half being due to the effects of warming;

for wheat, by 120%, of which about one-third is due to the effects of warming; and

for processed rice, by 107%, of which about one-third is due to the effects of warming.

The predicted price trends are the consequence of the long-term warming trend in the world’s climate.  For that portion of the world’s population living in poverty, these price increases are expected to impose the greatest hardship because the fraction of their personal incomes devoted to procuring food is already high.  Further price increases would impose even greater stress on these people.

But the Briefing presents even more stark predictions of the effects of single, short-term extreme weather events affecting crop yields, which it calls “shocks”.  Details of the effects of shocks depend, in its view, on whether the affected region is exposed to pricing from world commodity markets or is sufficiently isolated that it depends largely on local and regional farming to establish availability and pricing of staple foods. 

Nevertheless, shocks can have a major impact on the nutritional health of affected populations in two ways.  First, obviously, the price paid for a food staple will spike abruptly from an extreme weather shock, adding to any price elevation arising from the long-term trend.  But additionally, the effects of the shock commonly reduce the resources available to affected populations that can be used to purchase the commodity or staple at the spiked price.  The Briefing presents the following graphic as an example of the effects on world prices of wheat and maize from a climate shock in North America.

 

Dark Green, Price increase from 2010 to 2030 due to baseline climate projection; Pale Green, additional price increase beyond the baseline projection due to a modeled short-term climate shock.  From context, the author presumes that the upper bar should be labeled “WHEAT”.

© OXFAM GB, permission to reproduce this image granted.

Source: Oxfam, “Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices”; http://www.oxfamamerica.org/files/Extreme-Weather-Extreme-Prices.pdf.

 

From another graphic in the Briefing, other examples of the effects on prices expected in 2030 from a shock from an extreme weather event include:

East Africa, for a drought comparable to that in 1992, an increase in maize price by about 50%;

Southern Africa, for a drought and flooding comparable to that in 1995, an increase in maize price by about 120%; and

India and South Asia, for poor harvests generally, an increase in processed rice price by about 25%.

 

Effects in sub-Saharan Africa are likely to be very large because this is an example of a region not tied commercially to global commodity markets.  The Briefing notes that by 2030 95% of the maize and other coarse grains consumed is likely to be produced regionally.  Therefore a short-term climate shock could reduce amounts available for consumption by as much as 54%, while consumption of processed foods would fall by only 4%.

 

This writer reported in “Economic Costs of Extreme Weather Events Due to Global Warming” that the drought in Russia in the summer of 2010, which lowered yields and led to a ban on exporting wheat, produced an increase in the world commodity price of wheat by 71% over the year ending April 2011.

 

OXFAM Considers Its Projections To Be Conservative.  Additional factors worsening the effects on commodity prices were not incorporated into the model.  These include competition for cropland and crops produced by diversion into biofuel production, and impacts of low food stocks at any time; actual intensities of climate shocks experienced by 2030 may be greater than those used in the model drawn from the baseline years 1979-2009; and cumulative effects of simultaneous or consecutive shock events.

 

The Briefing concludes that a warming world requires strong action to help vulnerable regions of the world survive long-term and shock effects of the climate on availability of nutrition.  It summarizes adaptation mechanisms that need to be taken to make agriculture in developing countries more robust, and more capable of accommodating the added stresses of population growth.  It notes that investment in local agriculture, sustainable methods and resilient crops has been lacking in recent decades, and should be increased. 

 

It calls on developed countries to live up to earlier commitments to adequately fund adaptation mechanisms, such as the Green Climate Fund.  This call to action is all the more important because, as the Briefing notes, it is expected that greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise, leading to higher accumulated concentrations in the atmosphere as time passes.  This higher concentration is foreseen to lead to an average warming of 2.5-5ºC (4.5-9ºF) during this century.  If this trajectory of increased emissions and higher temperatures remains unabated, the Briefing foresees serious consequences in the availability of food resources, affecting especially the most vulnerable and poorest populations of the world.

 

Conclusion

 

Severe droughts in the agricultural midsection of the U. S., and in Russia, during the summer of 2012 have led to decreased grain harvests (posted online in the Huffington Post (accessed Sept. 12, 2012)).  It states that, according to the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), as of mid-September 2012, the U. S. corn crop will be the worst in six years and the soybean crop will be the lowest in nine years.  USDA also reports that the wheat crop in Russia and neighboring regions is 9% lower than an estimate from August 2012, and that the world wheat crop is 5% lower than one year ago.  The decreased yield of wheat in Russia arose presumably from excessive heat over the January-August 2012 interval, contributing, with the record heat in the U. S., to making worldwide land surface temperatures over this interval be the sixth warmest on record (U. S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration).  These extremes are due at least in part to global warming, according to an Op-Ed article by Mark Hertsgaard in the New York Times, Sept. 13, 2012. In a retrospective study, Lobell and coworkers found (see “Decreased Worldwide Crop Yields Are Tied to Global Warming”) that the worldwide yields for maize and wheat declined by 3.8% and 5.5%, respectively, between 1980 and 2008 (yields for soybeans and rice showed no clear trend over this period). 

 

Here, the Briefing by OXFAM GB projects future effects of long-term warming of the planet, and of short-term extreme weather shocks, on crop yields and commodity prices for staple foods around the world.  The warming and shock events are projected to adversely affect yields and lead to lower availability and higher prices.  These will impact the poorest populations of the world the most, causing great suffering, and producing a need for emergency interventions for short-term relief.

 

It is important for the developed countries of the world to invest both in abating emissions of greenhouse gases so that the temperature of the world ultimately stabilizes.  Additionally they should maintain their commitments, expressed in international meetings, toward those less well off, by helping poorer countries accommodate to the increased stresses on food availability.

 

Note 1. IPCC, 2011: Summary for Policymakers. In: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation [Field, C. B., Barros, V., Stocker, T.F., Qin, D., Dokken, D., Ebi, K.L., Mastrandrea, M. D., Mach, K. J., Plattner, G.-K., Allen, S. K., Tignor, M. and P. M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA; http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/images/uploads/SREX-SPM_Approved-HiRes_opt.pdf

© 2012 Henry Auer