News and Outreach: John Reilly

Bobby Magill
Climate Central

Water stress — the general scarcity of freshwater for people who need it — is considered by many scientists as one of the biggest challenges facing humanity and struggling ecosystems in a world increasingly affected by climate change.

Studies differ on how much the world’s growing population will be affected by the growing difficulty of finding freshwater, but a new report by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that climate change could actually provide more water to people in some parts of the globe while reducing freshwater for other areas.
 
Global warming may increase the overall amount of freshwater flowing in rivers worldwide by about 15 percent, easing water scarcity in many places, including the U.S. Midwest, according to MIT’s Energy and Climate Outlook 2014, released Monday.

By the end of the century, during which time greenhouse gas emissions could double globally, the MIT outlook projects that water scarcity could also ease in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Libya, China and Western Europe. In other places, water stress could worsen, especially in the U.S. Southwest, Pakistan, Turkey, South Africa and parts of North Africa.

“All climate models predict a speedup of the hydrological cycle with warmer temperatures,” said the study’s lead author, John Reilly, co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT’s Center for Environmental Policy Research. “That means faster evaporation, more moisture in the atmosphere and more rainfall.”

MIT researchers project that while more moisture in the atmosphere will increase freshwater flow 15 percent globally by the end of the century, consumption of freshwater for all human uses worldwide is expected to increase 19 percent, including water for industrial, domestic and agricultural uses.

Of those uses, the outlook shows that domestic freshwater consumption could double from 348 billion cubic meters in 2010 to 698 billion cubic meters in 2100, and industrial use of water could increase from 763 billion cubic meters to 1,098 billion cubic meters, or about 45 percent. Irrigation use is projected to decline slightly worldwide.

But more freshwater doesn’t paint the full picture. In a warming world, how and if that water can be made available for people to use gets complicated.

Exploding human populations may overwhelm water supplies, creating new areas of water stress, according to the outlook.

“This water stress arises because of increased water demand, and in some cases reduced runoff,” Reilly said. “As with almost all climate models, we project more precipitation poleward, and generally drier conditions in subtropical regions.”

And, freshwater availability depends on how and when it falls from the sky.

“Water stress, or not, is very much a function of precipitation in the right place at the right time, and in the right form,” Reilly said.

Rain may begin to fall at times when it can’t be used for irrigation or can’t be captured for storage in reservoirs, he said.

A big concern is precipitation falling as rain rather than snow, or snowpack melting earlier in areas that depend on snowmelt, such as much of the western U.S., he said.

“Snowpack is nature’s water storage, slowly releasing water far into summer dry months and therefore providing even timing even when summers are dry,” Reilly said. “With less snowpack storage, we would need to make up for it by building reservoirs where possible.”

A drought-ravaged village in Mauritania. Credit: United Nations/flickr Building new reservoirs is a costly proposition, and they’d have to be built to handle the added challenge of capturing water from extreme rainfall.

“There is a general conclusion that more rain is likely to come in heavier downpours, with longer periods in between,” he said. “So that raises the specter of both flooding and drought because in a heavy downpour most of the water runs off, and unless there is man-made storage somewhere, it quickly ends up in the sea, and is no longer fresh water.”

That’s a major concern in Rocky Mountain states such as Colorado, which contains the headwaters of some of the most important rivers in the West, including the Colorado River, which provides water to drought-stricken Phoenix and Los Angeles.

Spring snowmelt in Colorado could come up to 17 days earlier than today, and some rivers the state relies on for fresh water supplies could see streamflows decline by up to 35 percent, according to a 2012 Colorado climate vulnerability study.

“As the climate warms, more water will evaporate and sublimate from mountain snowpacks before it ever reaches reservoirs, and agricultural demand will rise,” meaning that there will be less water to go around as a booming population conflicts with a decreasing and less predictable water supply, Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Scott Denning told Climate Central in January.

The MIT report cautions that any projections of regional precipitation patterns and the processes that control runoff from mountain snowpack in a warming world are extremely uncertain, and rain and snowfall are likely to vary widely from year to year and decade to decade.

Not all studies focusing on water security have shown water stress easing much at all in a warming world.

A 2013 study by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact and Research showed that declining precipitation and increasing evapotranspiration will strain water supplies in many areas, especially the U.S. Southwest, affecting 2 billion people globally.

A Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) study published in August showed that without any climate policy curbing global greenhouse gas emissions, half of the world’s population is will be living under “extreme” water scarcity by the end of the century.

These studies reach different conclusions because there are multiple ways to measure water stress: Some studies focus only on water supply, while others, such as the MIT report, focus on both supply and demand. Each study also uses its own assessment of hydrology, the effects of climate change and other factors, said PNNL climate scientist Mohamad Hejazi, lead author of the PNNL water scarcity study.

In some cases, studies may significantly underestimate overall water deficit in some areas in a warming world, he said.

“This (MIT) study constitutes one plausible scenario, but it is not definitive,” he said.

MIT’s report was published Monday following the United Nations Climate Summit in New York the previous week, when the Obama administration committed to greenhouse gas emissions cuts to be included in a treaty expected to be signed in Paris in 2015. The Paris negotiations will be known as COP 21, or the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

by BusinessGreen staff

MIT has added its voice to the cacophony of scientific institutions presenting warnings on the true scale of projected climate impacts, with the publication of a new report arguing we are currently on track to far exceed the 2C temperature goal set by the international community.
 
The 2014 Energy and Climate Outlook, published earlier this week, predicts that based on current emission reduction commitments the world is likely to see temperature increases of 3.3C to 5.6C by the end of the century, well above the 2C mark that scientists have warned could trigger "dangerous" levels of irreversible climate change.
 
"Our world is rapidly changing," said John Reilly, co-director of the MIT Joint Program and a coauthor of the report, in a statement. "We need to understand the nature of the risks we're facing so we can prepare for them."
 
The report also modelled scenarios where world leaders agree a deal at next year's Paris Summit to curb emissions, but it warned that even with ambitious new commitments to curb emissions post 2020 the world was still likely to release enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2040 to make it unlikely that the 2C goal will be met.
 
"There is some uncertainty associated with these estimates," said Erwan Monier, a research scientist at the Joint Program and a coauthor of the report, in a statement. "The fact is that there is uncertainty about future emissions, and also in the climate's response to those emissions. Yet, it is clear that we are not meeting the 2C target based on current efforts alone."
 
In addition, the report recognises that clean technologies will make "some headway", but it predicts the global energy system will continue to be dominated by fossil fuels in the coming decades as global energy use doubles by 2050.
 
"Population and economic growth are key drivers of change," said Reilly. "Developing countries like China and India are growing fast, and will play a big role in future emissions. They're also facing the unique challenge of trying to plan for this growth under a changing climate."

The report highlights the scale of the climate adaptation challenge faced by political and business leaders, and warns that disruption to water supplies could present a particularly acute risk to future economic development.
 
It predicts that rising temperatures will lead to a net increase in freshwater supplies of around 15 per cent this century as the hydrological cycle accelerates. But it also expects global water demand to increase 19 per cent, leading to increased water stress.
 
In addition, it predicts that higher temperatures could lead to significant changes in the distribution of precipitation and the timing of rainy seasons, posing a threat to growing seasons.
"These pressures on water will mean increased focus on making sure there is enough water where and when it is needed," said Charles Fant, a postdoctoral associate at the Joint Program and a coauthor of the report. "This can be done by transporting water to where it is needed, building more storage, or conservation and efficiency efforts."
 
The report came as the UK's Met Office this week confirmed that it expects this September to by the driest since records began in 1910, with exceptionally low rainfall for many parts of the country. It is also likely to finish in the top five warmest Septembers on record, with UK mean temperatures significantly above the monthly average.

Trust in technology: That seems to be the underlying message of a coming report from the world's top panel on climate change.

Scheduled for release on Sunday in Berlin, Germany, the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will point to many possible ways—from burying greenhouse gases to going nuclear to encouraging biofuel production—to save humanity from the ravages of climate change.

[…]

A Hard Climb

A 1992 United Nations agreement broadly obligated the world to limit global temperature increases to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) over preindustrial levels. Some studies have noted significant dangers—chiefly, lower farm production—if the planet warms beyond that point.

"The most interesting and useful thing the new report could do would be in simply laying out all the paths we could take to not breach that limit," says MIT economist John Reilly. "Most people think it's very unlikely we are going to stay within that [3.6-degree] limit."

The IPCC Working Group 3 report, based on six years of economic and technology studies, will lay out innovations and reforms in power generation, industry, transportation, farming, and other fields that might help nations to reduce emissions. Yet many of the scenarios examined in the report also look at what the world might do if the 3.6-degree limit is passed and temperatures rise still higher.

"Based on the studies that are already out there, I think we can say the sooner emissions are reduced, the easier it becomes to reach those goals," Edmonds says.

Written by 235 scientists from 53 nations over four years, the report on climate change mitigation is the third in a series released in the past year. The IPCC has released such reports in groups every six to seven years since 1990.

IPCC reports synthesize scientific studies to present policy options to government leaders. The two earlier reports enumerated the near-certain evidence that greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for increasing temperatures worldwide over the last century, and detailed the impacts on people, wildlife, and the environment.

"The IPCC is not going to solve the political problem that is at the bottom of things," Reilly cautioned. "A lot of the studies [considered] in the report started from the premise that we already were doing something about carbon reduction. That didn't happen."
 

Read more...

By Stephanie Paige Ogburn
ClimateWire

Every seven years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes three colossal reports about global warming.

The second of that set of three, focusing on impacts and adaptation, was just released, and on its heels have come calls for the structure of those reports to change.

On Friday, David Griggs, a professor and director of the Monash Sustainability Institute at Australia's Monash University, who has been involved in the last three IPCC reports, was the latest to weigh in with a proposal for reconfiguring the IPCC.

The comment, published in the journal Nature, addresses the burden the IPCC places on scientists, who volunteer their time, and the frequency of the reports.

Griggs argues for publishing shorter, less frequent reports, every 10 years, pointing out that the past three science reports from Working Group I have lengthened from 410 pages to 881 pages to 1,535 pages with the report released late last year.

[...]

Another past lead author, John Reilly, who is now co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has also written on some of his frustrations with the report.

Reilly, who wrote about the topic in MIT Technology Review, believes the report would be more powerful if it integrated science, adaptation and mitigation rather than producing three separate efforts.

Looking for more focus

"I think streamlining the IPCC process would be extremely important. It has gotten extremely burdensome in terms of these three separate working groups all doing a lot of work. If anything, reduce it down to a single volume that better integrates the three elements of the problem," Reilly said.

He pointed out that if someone wants to learn about how climate change is affecting tropical storms and hurricanes, he or she would have to find that information inside the publication produced by the IPCC's Working Group I, which is focused on science.

"Then if you want to figure out how to adapt to them, you have to go to Working Group II and dig into several chapters," Reilly added.

Read more...
 

John Reilly
Co-director MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change

The difficulty of predicting local effects of climate change makes a compelling case for preventing it.

This week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a major report focused on what actions might or could be taken to adapt to climate change. It attempts to describe who and what is especially vulnerable to climate change, and gives an overview of ways some are adapting.

The report makes clear that specific estimates of how climate change will affect places, people, and things are very uncertain. Brought down to a local level, climate change could go in either direction—there are risks that a given area could get drier or wetter, or suffer floods or droughts, or both. This uncertainty makes efforts to prevent climate change even more important.

Specific risks to natural systems are well documented by the report. It finds, for example, the greatest risks are to those ecosystems, people, and things in low-lying coastal areas, because expected sea-level changes are in only one direction, up. This is also the case in the Arctic, where the temperature rise is expected to be much greater than the global average. There is good science and unanimous agreement among climate models behind these assertions.

But a frustrating aspect of the report—and a reflection of the difficulty of working in this line of research—is that very few specific risks to humans are quantified in a meaningful way. For example, one might ask: has my risk of death increased because of more hot days? The report says, “Local changes in temperature and rainfall have altered the distribution of some water-borne illnesses and disease vectors (medium confidence).” This seems to state the obvious, while giving no indication of whether the alterations may have increased or decreased risk or what the magnitude of the alteration might be. Given that the statement seems to say little, it is hard to imagine there is not high confidence.

The report does conclude with high confidence risks to low-lying coastal areas: emergencies during extreme weather, mortality from heat, food insecurity, loss of livelihood in rural areas due to water shortage and temperature increases, loss of coastal ecosystems and livelihoods that depend on them, and loss of freshwater ecosystems. But again, this high confidence comes with an absence of quantification of how many/much and the degree of risk. Will extreme weather double, triple, or quadruple the number of extreme emergency weather-related events of a given magnitude (dollars or lives lost)? Will it increase these incidences by 10 percent, or will some areas face increased risk while other areas face reduced risk?

In the end, the report is a compendium of things that might happen or are likely to happen to someone or something, somewhere. But what does this actually mean for me, or anyone who might read the report? I would avoid beachfront property. If my livelihood depended on a coastal resource, I would try to find a different job, or at least urge my children to pursue another line of work.

That is where a measure of wealth brings some resilience—I have those options, others do not. The report “quantifies” in some sense by establishing an element of “relative risk,” concluding that the poor and marginalized in society are more vulnerable because they do not have the means to adapt. Beyond this, it is not clear that climate prediction is at a high enough level to offer information that I can use to take concrete actions for most day-to-day decisions and investments.

What the report does provide is some documentation of adaptation in action—what different regions, cities, sectors, and groups are doing to adapt—concluding that there is a growing body of experience from which to learn.

However, perhaps the greatest truth in the report is in the following statement:

“Adaptation is place and context specific, with no single approach for reducing risks appropriate across all settings (high confidence). Effective risk reduction and adaptation strategies consider the dynamics of vulnerability and exposure and their linkages with socioeconomic processes, sustainable development, and climate change.”

Hence, while it’s possible to learn from others’ adaptation experiences, in the end, the specifics of climate change in my place, given my circumstances, and the socio-economic environment in which I live will present me with very different climate outcomes and opportunities to adapt than you will have where you live.

This fact alone raises the cost of adaptation, because to some degree each recipe needs to be invented anew. What worked in the past likely won’t work in the future—or at least, not as well. And we need to process a lot of highly uncertain climate projections in developing the new recipe.

The report also concludes, not surprisingly, that risks increase and extend to more people, places, and things if the global temperature rise is three degrees Celsius or greater than if there is only a one-degree rise. Overall, the report provides, in my judgment, a compelling case for more serious mitigation efforts—the topic of the next IPCC report, to come out later this month.

John Reilly is the co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.
 

By Vicki Ekstrom

Read the 2013 Energy and Climate Outlook

As international negotiators discuss global efforts to confront climate change at the 19^th United Nation’s Conference of Parties (COP19), a group of MIT researchers suggest that the current regional efforts may not be enough to avoid the dangerous consequences of rising emissions.

“As our global population swells to more than 10 billion by the end of this century, climate change is one of the forces of global change that will shape how the world feeds, shelters, transports, and otherwise attends to this growing mass of people,” says John Reilly, co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and an author of the 2013 Energy and Climate Outlook. “Our latest Outlook is a window into the future as we view it in 2013, but it is still in our power to change what we see by taking action.”

While much of the Outlook’s projections remain the same as in their 2012 Outlook – highlighting that large or developing countries will play a greater role in shaping our global challenges over time – shifting trends and new and updated data have led to subtle changes.  One such trend is the growing use of natural gas and, to a lesser extent, renewable energy. Policies such as the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (and assuming Europe continues on its announced post 2020 policies)helped bring about some of these changes; cutting Europe’s coal generation in 2050 by almost half compared to the last Outlook. The U.S. is also expected to generate 35 percent more renewable energy and 15 percent more natural gas by 2050 compared to the 2012 Outlook.

Taking into account these resource and policy changes, the researchers project global natural gas consumption by 2050 to be 8 percent higher than their 2012 estimates, with China’s consumption alone more than tripling. They also project global consumption of renewable sources by 2050 to be 13 percent higher, while coal and oil usage will sink slightly (3 percent).

Changes in the global energy mix are partly responsible for a 12 percent dip in the projected CO₂ emissions by the end of the century. Yet, these emissions are still projected to be 95 percent higher than in 2010. Even with cumulative emissions sinking slightly, the Outlook projects the world will warm by 3 to 6°C by 2100 compared to 2000, with the median forecast at 3.8°C.

“With natural gas becoming more and more important to the global energy mix each year, and recent policy efforts spurring an increased use of renewables, we do believe there will be slightly fewer emissions than we originally forecasted,” says Sergey Paltsev, an author of the study and the assistant director for economic research at the Joint Program on Global Change. “But, while growing at a slightly lesser rate, emissions are still increasing, and if they continue to grow we might experience very harmful consequences.”

Building on the models used for their 2012 Outlook, the researchers identify the hottest and coldest regions and the range of uncertainty. They find that generally the polar areas display the most warming, with Northern Canada and Siberia warming between 6 and 12°C by 2100. Meanwhile, North America, Europe and Asia can expect temperatures to warm by as much as 4 to 8°C, and Africa, Australia and South America can expect temperature increases between 3 and 7°C. The researchers also warn there could be very damaging consequences from an increase in extreme precipitation events, such as floods.  Their analysis shows most land areas will become wetter, while over the ocean and Tropics a few regions could become drier.  

“Taking into account the vast uncertainty in climate projections, even in our most optimistic scenario we see that these changes will surely impact food and water resources, among other changes,” says Erwan Monier, an author of the study and a scientist at the Joint Program on Global Change.

As in the 2012 Outlook, the researchers emphasize that further cuts in developed countries would be useful. But only 13 percent of emissions are expected to come from these countries by 2100, meaning their efforts will have less of an impact over time as the share of emissions from other nations increases. Emissions from countries outside the developed world could grow by almost 150 percent by the end of the century.

Reilly, Paltsev and nine others based their projections on the United Nations' estimate that the world's population will grow to more than 10 billion by 2100. Using their computer modeling system to project how this growth would affect our energy and climate, they then incorporated pledges made by G20 nations at international meetings in Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancun in 2010 to cap emissions by 2020.

“As difficult as the progress made in Copenhagen and Cancun was to achieve, far more effort is needed to limit greenhouse gas concentrations to levels that avoid dangerous climatic consequences,” the authors write, stressing the importance of the ongoing international talks.

Global population is expected to rise from about 7 billion today to close to 11 billion by the end of the century. This growing population will increase the demand for food, putting further strain on global land and water resources already feeling the pressures of climate change. Responding to the urgency of these challenges, the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change brought together experts from academia and industry at a food symposium on November 5^th, “Feeding the World without Consuming the Planet.”

MIT Vice President Claude Canizares joined Joint Program on Global Change Co-Director Ron Prinn in opening the event. He highlighted MIT’s dedication to expanding research on agriculture, as urged by President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in a report published last December. He also emphasized the Institute’s long history of forming industry collaborations to confront the world’s greatest challenges.  

“MIT’s 150-year history of being devoted to the industrial arts makes us very comfortable to work closely and in real partnership with industry. I can’t think of a more important problem for us to tackle,” said Canizares at the event, which included experts from Cargill, Coca-Cola Co., Mosaic Company, Weyerhaeuser Company and Bunge Limited.

Cargill Vice Chairman Paul Conway also gave opening remarks outlining the challenges of increased food consumption, accelerating urbanization, demands for biofuels and variability in climate.

“We see climate change as a critical risk. We have to prepare ourselves to make sure we adapt,” said Conway, who also encouraged additional research in science and technology. “To ignore some tools that are available to us that have had a significant  impact—particularly in terms of the reduction of chemicals—would be foolish.”

Agricultural Resources and Inputs

Joint Program Co-Director John Reilly kicked off the first session of the event with an overview of MIT’s work on modeling water stress, resource demands, variability in temperature and precipitation patterns, and the economic impacts of climate change on food prices.  

“We need to better understand local and regional climate changes and extremes to improve agriculture,” said Reilly, of which the Joint Program is already studying with their Integrated Global System Model (IGSM) — a tool that connects Earth and human systems to better predict future climate changes. 

Industry is also doing its part to maximize yields and adapt to climate change. Reilly’s session focused on two key industries in particular: forestry and fertilizers.

As fertilizer companies meet growing productivity demands, they must focus on improving resource inefficiencies and misallocations of fertilizer in the developing world, said Michael Rahm of the Mosaic Company. Meanwhile, timberlands management could help mitigate climate change, according to Robert Ewing of the Weyerhaeuser Company. Weyerhaeuser is also working with Chevron to research how timber scraps could be used in biofuel production.

Agricultural Commodity Markets, Food and Consumers 

The second session of the event progressed up the food production chain and looked at the impacts on prices and trade.

Describing the challenge of growing food prices, Professor Thomas Hertel from Purdue University said that there are many factors to watch including biofuel expansion, oil prices, technical capabilities, drops in research and development, and climate change. Hertel also explained income rises in the developing world will encourage diets to change and require more land intensive agriculture. Improved efficiency in trade and technology will be essential in meeting the demands of growing affluent societies.

Stewart Lindsey of Bunge Limited agreed with the importance of trade, “It plays a very important role in the world,” he said. “It really is a mechanism that gives deficit countries—countries that don’t have enough food to ensure security—the ability to do that in a pinch.” 

Only 15 percent of global grains and oilseeds are exported today. By expanding global trade of agriculture, Lindsey suggested we should urge countries to be more efficient by growing and exporting foods based on their locally available resources and climate conditions.

As the food and agriculture industry continues to prepare for climate change and increased food demands by supporting agricultural trading, optimized yields and sustainable agricultural practices, Reilly emphasized the important role of academia in such efforts.

“We look forward to continuing this conversation with collaborators in industry,” Reilly said, “in order to improve our understanding of all these challenges, and find the best ways to adapt to our changing climate and resource demands.”

Watch videos from the event here: http://globalchange.mit.edu/foodsymposium

Read about our coverage on social media here: http://storify.com/MITGlobalChange/feeding-the-world-without-consuming-the-planet