News and Outreach: Kerry Emanuel

The ethical challenges presented by climate change and the question of what individuals — and academic institutions like MIT — can do to affect change drew approximately 250 people to Morss Hall at MIT on Thursday, Nov. 17 for an MIT-wide forum titled “Climate Change: Ethics in Action.”

Sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Radius (an initiative of the Technology and Culture Forum), the forum was part of an agreement created by the student-led group Fossil Free MIT and Vice President for Research Maria Zuber in March, to further advance the Institute’s responses to climate change. The goal for the event was to explore the ethical dimensions of climate change, as well as the ethical responsibilities of many different parties involved in the phenomenon.

A question for all of us 

The three-hour forum featured a keynote address by Dale Jamieson, professor of environmental studies and philosophy at New York University and author of “Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle to Stop Climate Change Failed — and What It Means for Our Future,” followed by dinner and a panel discussion among five scholars in fields ranging from atmospheric science to philosophy.

Zuber shared a key thought in a video that launched the event: “Science has performed its role adequately,” she said “[but] it cannot tell us what our obligations are to future generations. Determining how to respond to climate change is a question for all of us.”

Introduced by Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Jamieson reinforced this idea, beginning his talk by outlining the history of climate science, from Joseph Fourier's 1824 discovery that the atmosphere traps heat, to the present day. Among the growing body of evidence he cited was a 1979 study by the National Academy of Sciences that said, “A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it's too late” — which, Jamieson added, “is pretty much the policy that has been followed.”

Sources of inaction: Human nature and the structure of democracies

The key question at this point, Jamieson said, is: “Why, despite the steady growth of scientific knowledge, policy initiatives at every level, and an active civil society, have we failed to act effectively? What's gone wrong here?”

Those who deny the existence of climate change, while troubling, are not the primary culprit, Jamieson said. At the most fundamental level, the difficulty in addressing climate change lies in human nature and in the structure of democracies. “Democracies are supposed to act in the interest of the governed. It's not part of the ethos that [a government] should govern for all those it affects” more broadly, such as future generations and those outside national borders, he said.

Furthermore, since climate change is the result of millions of individual actions taken over time, the moral compunction to change behaviors is diluted. “Everyday reality doesn't hold us morally responsible for most of our behavior that contributes to climate change,” Jamieson said. “In climate change, we have a case where terrible things happen in the world, yet no one feels responsible.”

Fundamentally, people find it difficult to address issues that are abstract, long-term, or remote in time or space. “The problem is that ethics begins with human psychology,” Jamieson said. “If CO₂ was sickly green and stunk, we probably would have done something about it already.”

The solution, he said, is to show the connection between daily human actions and climate change in a way that is “visual, proximate, and dramatic.” As an example, Jamieson cited the successful campaign to end Britain's slave trade in the early 1800s; activists at that time used powerful language and visual imagery to link behaviors (such as buying slave-trade sugar) with the viciousness of slavery.

Jamieson said the goal now must be to help people feel they are capable of addressing climate change. “Together, collectively, we've caused this problem, yet as individuals we feel powerless.” Therefore, he said, “We must begin with the recovery of agency. We must hold ourselves and others responsible.”

Motivations for action

Jamieson's talk was followed by a panel discussion that expanded on the theme of motivating action and went on to explore what role universities can play in addressing the climate problem.

Professor Kieran Setiya, acting chair of MIT Philosophy, moderated the discussion among the four panelists: Kerry Emanuel, MIT’s Cecil and Ida Green Professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences; Susan Silbey, MIT’s Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of humanities, sociology, and anthropology and a professor of behavioral and policy sciences at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Janelle Knox-Hayes, the Lister Brothers Associate Professor of Economic Geography and Planning in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning; and Nathan Phillips, professor of earth and environment at Boston University.

One way to motivate change in the current political climate, Emanuel suggested, is to move away from the climate change argument and toward an economic motivation. Noting that the $6 trillion energy market is already making the transition away from fossil fuels, he said: “Does this country want to be at the leading edge of that transformation or the trailing edge? I would say leading. Then you have to price the externalities of carbon.”

Knox-Hayes, the economist on the panel, agreed. “It's hard to imagine a future in which we're still using fossil fuels. That's why China is so aggressive in the development of renewable technologies. ...They realize fossil fuels won't be the energy source of the future, and they want to control energy markets,” she said.

Silbey assigned some of the blame for inaction on the tendency of educational institutions to focus on individual behaviors and self-interest. “We ignore any attention to social organization — that is, how we mobilize [and] aggregate individual actions,” she said. “Thus, I think we have been quite complicit in the creation of this crisis, and that's why our reaction has been so feeble.”

She recommended that MIT require a class centered on addressing the question of what constitutes "the good life" for human beings. Emanuel in turn suggested ensuring people learn history — particularly the connection between climate change and armed conflict. “Food and water shortages and very often catalysts for revolutions and wars,” he said, referring to two likely effects of climate change. “That's the big thing to worry about.”

Phillips joined others in thanking Fossil Free MIT for bringing climate change issues into sharp focus. He said he thought students deserve much of the credit for moving academic institutions to address climate change and urged them to continue the work.

Emanuel agreed that students can be a powerful force for change. “I would say that the most effective thing students in particular can do is act collectively,” he said. “I think politicians pay attention when they sense there is a very strong unified sentiment coming from young people.”

Two miles thick and a continent wide, piles of snow have been accumulating across the world’s polar regions over millennia. After cycles of melting and freezing, compressing and spreading under their own weight, packed snow formed magnificent glaciers. These majestic, yet powerful, bodies of ice sculpt the land beneath them as they move, responding to the Earth’s climatic changes. As they do so, a new ice sheet layer freezes on top, capturing a snapshot of the current climate and building on the ice record below.

For many, this is enough to inspire awe, but for glaciologists, much more lies beneath the surface.

“I can tell you, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at ice, and I don’t regret it. It is a fascinating undertaking,” said Richard Alley, the Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences in Pennsylvania State University’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, and this year’s John Carlson lecturer.

“Richard is the world’s foremost expert on the relationship between ice and climate — what ice has to tell us about past climates, the role that ice has played in climate change, and the relationship between continental ice and sea level,” said Kerry Emanuel — the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science and co-founder of MIT’s Lorenz Center — as he introduced Alley. The John Carlson Lecture, presented by the Lorenz Center, communicates exciting climate science to a broad audience. Alley’s exemplary efforts in this endeavor and his long list of accolades were some of the reasons he was invited to speak at the 6th annual Carlson lecture. Kerry continued, “[Alley] is also the most energetic and entertaining public lecturer I personally know — living proof that fire and ice somehow go together.” And for attendees of the lecture, Alley’s dynamic nature certainly brought the cryosphere to life.

About 24,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum, ice sheets reached their greatest extent. Stretching down from Canada, glaciers brought soils to Lake Michigan and Erie, and the lobe of Massachusetts’ Cape Cod — a virtual backyard for Boston residents. But around 18,000 years ago, the ice began melting across Europe and North America and receding toward the poles. The climate had changed, Alley explained succinctly, “and you live in the footprint of a great ice sheet and it was a fascinating footprint.”

But it was cause of this climate warming and its physical manifestation on glaciers that piqued Alley’s interest; to learn more, Alley and his fellow scientists drilled down into Greenland’s ancient ice.

Frozen time

Like tree rings, ice cores tell a complicated story of the world’s climate, which Alley has been working to untangle. In the 1990s, extracting a core measuring 2 miles deep into Greenland’s ice sheet allowed Alley’s group to visualize and access a record of the climate there. Alternating layers of thick and thin ice read as winter and summer seasons, respectively, and trapped air bubbles and dust in each layer captured a freeze frame of climatic conditions at that moment in time.

“We can fingerprint the dust,” Alley said, directing the audience’s attention to image of the core and what its contents could reveal about the changing climate. “In that is sea salt, a little bit of pollen, forest fire smoke, micrometeorites falling down from space, odd isotopes that are made by cosmic rays breaking things in the air. Anything that’s blowing through the air falls on the ice sheet.” The team also analyzed chemical signatures from the air bubbles, which shed more light on Greenland’s atmospheric composition throughout its history, and a temperature probe dropped into the middle of the glacier showed that it still had not yet warmed up from the last ice age.

Piecing it together

Using these clues and similar ones from around the world, scientists constructed a record of the world’s temperature that goes back 440,000 years to try to figure out why the climate changed so dramatically. They found that every temperature record on the planet had a similar ice age cycle, moving through periods of warm and cold with shorter episodes running on the back of them. “It doesn’t look like a random generator made it. It looks like a clock made it,” Alley said pointing out the peaks and troughs in the plot. “You could see it going sort of tick, tick, tick, tick.”

The reason for this, Alley continued, can be explained by looking at the ice cores. They showed that while there is some evidence that volcanic eruptions; weather and ocean circulation changes; and natural fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit and sun exposure can affect the climate, the climate largely ignores it. But when ice grows in Canada and the Arctic, the world responds by getting colder, even in places that are receiving more sun, thanks to the Earth’s tilt.

This, Alley emphasized, is a story about CO₂ — carbon dioxide. “If you ignore the CO₂, no one has ever explained why half of the world ignores its sun and listens to Canada’s ice. If you include the CO₂, it all makes sense. Alley and his colleagues discovered that ice growth in Canada causes sea levels to fall 100 meters, and ocean currents, dust and winds to change, which sequesters some of the greenhouse gas into the deep ocean. The reversal of this process moves CO₂ out of the ocean and back into the atmosphere, heating up the Earth. Leading Alley to conclude that, “Greenhouse gases really do matter, and we can’t make sense of climate history without them.”

Alley wrapped up the evening’s lecture with an entertaining lesson on the physics of glaciers and a song of caution about the consequences of Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheet melting. Using a pancake and waffle analogy, Alley demonstrated how batter poured on a hot griddle behaves similarly to glaciers, spreading under its own weight. Waffle irons and carefully placed spatulas impeded the batter’s flow, acting as Greenland’s bumpy terrain and flying buttresses that allow the snow and ice to amass. But, as Alley sang in G major, the Earth has been enjoying a relatively temperate climate during the time of humans, but increasing CO₂ and melting glaciers could bring that to an end in the foreseeable future.

“In my lifetime we’ve gone from an amazing amount of ignorance to an amazing amount of knowledge. There is an incredible amount to learn,” Alley said, speaking to the scientist in all of us, “so, let’s go find out!”

An EAPS evening

Before the Carlson Lecture began, researchers in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) gathered in the New England Aquarium’s Omni Theater foyer to share their research with the attendees. McGee Lab graduate students Chrstine Chen, Kaylee Brent, and Maya Stokes demonstrated how they reconstruct how precipitation and wind patterns responded to past climate changes as a way to improve our understanding of how rainfall might change in the future. Assisted by microscopes and a sample of Charles River water, Professor Mick Follows, postdoc Jonathan Lauderdale, and researcher David Talmy revealed a complex marine ecosystem — one of the many that they are trying to model with MIT’s Darwin Project. Professor Glenn Flierl and physics graduate student Keaton Burns showed how all the Earth, atmosphere, oceans, and climate components come together using the iGlobe, a real-time depiction of Earth processes.

A private dinner for EAPS donors and friends followed the lecture. During the evening, 2016 EAPS fellows met and thanked their benefactors. Mukund Gupta, a second-year graduate student in the Marshall group, spoke with John Carlson, whose generous gift to the Lorenz Center in EAPS also makes this yearly lecture possible. Likewise, first-year graduate students and this year’s Norman C. Rasmussen Climate Fellows Raphael Rousseau-Rizzi, Ziwei Li, and Tristan Abbott shared their appreciation with their supporter Neil Rasmussen, who is also an MIT Corporation member and EAPS Visiting Committee member. On behalf of the Lorenz Center, Kerry Emanuel and Dan Rothman thanked everyone for attending and for their support, and presented John Carlson with an autographed copy of Richard Alley’s book: “Earth: the Operator’s Manual”. 

The John Carlson Lecture communicates exciting new results in climate science to the general public. Free of charge and open to the general public, the lecture is made possible by a generous gift from MIT alumnus John H. Carlson to the Lorenz Center in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Photo: A capacity crowd at the New England Aquarium's Omni Theater enjoyed the 2016 John H. Carlson Lecture, "Big Ice: Antarctica, Greenland, and Boston," presented by Penn State University Professor Richard Alley. (Photo by John Gillooly)

Trump’s presidency could mean a resurgence of coal, a hollowing out of climate policy, and a shift away from clean energy innovation. MIT Earth and Planetary Sciences Professor Kerry Emanuel warns that the consequences could include major negative health effects; increased food and water shortages, migration pressures and armed conflict; and an America that gets edged out by the rest of the world in a burgeoning clean energy market.

Read the full article.

Kerry A. Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the evidence suggested climate change would cause the strongest storms to grow even stronger, and to be more frequent. Unresolved questions surround the effect of warming on the weaker storms, but even those will dump more rain, leading over time to increased damage from flooding.

. . .

Finding the strong telltale “signal” of climate change in events is challenging, Dr. Emanuel said, because there are relatively few storms to draw data from. “If we have our numbers right,” he said, “it will be very difficult to see a signal in the actual data for a long time.”

Still, he said, prudent risk assessment calls for expecting these theories to be proved right over time, and to prepare.

. . .

A big part of preparing, Dr. Emanuel said, is overhauling the nation’s flood insurance system, which currently does little to dissuade people from living in hazardous areas.

. . .

“Climate change just makes it worse,” Dr. Emanuel said, and he predicted far greater property damage and rebuilding costs in years to come. The insurance problem, he said, “sets up for a string of Katrinas and Sandys as far as the eye can see.”

Read the full article.

Photo: Flooding in Louisiana, 2016 (Source: Dave Malkoff)

“Most damage is done by Category 3 or higher hurricanes, and recent modeling by Emanuel and others strongly suggests that higher-category storms in the North Atlantic and elsewhere will become more frequent as the climate warms further. Factor in sea-level rise generating greater storm surges, and the scenarios do not look good.”
 

Photo: Hurricane Jeanne, 2004 (Source: kakela)

As Super Typhoon Nepartak hits Taiwan and China, National Geographic asks tropical cyclone expert Kerry Emanuel how these tempests form, and what risk they pose to people.

MIT Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Professor Kerry Emanuel comments on the potential climate change implications of the anticipated opening of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar reactor, which is expected to generate enough electricity to power 650,000 homes.

Climate scientists disagree on the impact of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation—a 25-to-40-year cycle of cooling and warming of the Atlantic Ocean—on the frequency of hurricanes. Some expect the AMO to drive cooler sea surface temperatures and fewer hurricanes in coming decades, but others do not think the AMO works this way. EAPS Professor Kerry Emanuel, who is affiliated with the MIT Joint Program, believes that another factor—air pollution—has played a significant role in reducing hurricane activity.