CS3 In the News

Study led by Joint Program Research Affiliate Hanquin Tian; coauthors include JP Co-Director Ronald Prinn and Research Affiliates Jerry Melillo and Eri Saikawa

The following article appeared in CLP New Horizons, a compendium of news and perspectives on how to move the Asia-Pacific region toward a more sustainable energy future:

John Reilly | MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change

We live in a world where water, energy, land and the environment are inextricably linked. For example, water is used to produce electricity from hydropower as well as for thermal cooling. Water withdrawals for agriculture—the world’s largest consumer of water—deplete rivers and streams, thereby impacting freshwater ecosystems. Such ecosystems are also threatened by the discharge of water from power stations, which increases water temperature, and by the collection of water in large dams.  

Dams not only produce hydropower but also store water from spring snowmelt or rainy seasons for use in irrigation during dry spells, and provide recreational opportunities as well. Use of water for hydropower, irrigation and recreation requires a careful balance. The availability of water for irrigation will partly determine land use, and how land is managed can affect runoff and sedimentation in reservoirs and other bodies of water, potentially degrading water quality and ecosystems.

Other energy, industry and domestic uses of water can be substantial in areas where water resources are limited. For example, there’s concern that development of China’s shale gas resources, located in dryer western regions of China, could be constrained by water availability.
 

Global changes

In Asia, population growth and economic development are increasing demand for water, food and energy, exacerbating conflicts among land, water and energy needs. In addition, climate change is expected to significantly affect agricultural productivity worldwide and alter the supply of water. While global warming will, in general, speed the hydrological cycle and lead to more precipitation, rainfall will be unevenly spread across the globe, and many currently water-stressed areas will become more stressed.

Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will change the energy mix, and if renewable sources like wind and solar become more widely used, smaller water withdrawals will be needed for thermal cooling. On the other hand, if biomass energy is part of the mitigation solution, that could increase pressure on land and indirectly on water in order to increase food crop yields.

Rising concerns for fresh water ecosystems may lead to restrictions on the amount of water withdrawn from rivers and lakes. Many areas are already considered overused. In addition, areas relying on groundwater resources may become unsustainable. 

Building a more sustainable future

Businesses can take a number of steps to build a more sustainable future. First, by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—ideally supported by government incentives—they can limit the amount of climate change in the coming decades. Second, they can adopt practices that improve water use efficiency and maintain water quality. Third, they can take climate change into consideration when planning the location of new facilities, while noting the uncertainties in climate models.

Our recent research indicates that water stress will increase in China and India. In China, climate change and growth are expected to exacerbate water stress; in India, climate change is projected to have a neutral effect on water supplies, although growth will likely increase water stress. In mainland Southeast Asia, climate change is expected to increase water supplies, partly offsetting the impact of growth.

In all regions, the range of possibilities are far wider than the historical variability in water resources. This highlights the difficulty involved in facilities planning.

References

Modeling U.S. water resources under climate change  Blanc, É., K. Strzepek, A. Schlosser, H. Jacoby, A. Gueneau, C. Fant, S. Rausch and J. Reilly, Earth's Future, 2(4): 197–224 (doi:10.1002/2013EF000214), 2014

Climate change impacts and greenhouse gas mitigation effects on U.S. water quality  Boehlert, B., K.M. Strzepek, S.C. Chapra, C. Fant, Y. Gebretsadik, M. Lickley, R. Swanson, A. McCluskey, J.E. Neumann and J. Martinich, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 7(3): 1326–1338, 2015

Impacts on Resources and Climate of Projected Economic and Population Growth Patterns  Reilly, J. , The Bridge (National Academy of Engineering), 45(2): 6–15, 2015

The future of global water stress: An integrated assessment  Schlosser, C.A., K. Strzepek, X. Gao, C. Fant, É. Blanc, S. Paltsev, H. Jacoby, J. Reilly and A. Gueneau, Earth's Future, 2(8): 341-361 (doi:10.1002/2014EF000238), 2014

A Framework for Analysis of the Uncertainty of Socioeconomic Growth and Climate Change on the Risk of Water Stress: a Case Study in Asia  Fant, C., C.A. Schlosser, X. Gao, K. Strzepek and J. Reilly, Joint Program Report Series, 48 p., 2014

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office 

After months of dialog and negotiation, the student-led group Fossil Free MIT and the MIT administration have reached an agreement that has brought to an end the group’s sit-in, which began on October 22, in front of the administrative offices.

Both sides say that the new agreement (see text below) provides a positive set of plans that will help to meet the essential goals that the student group has been advocating, and will set in motion activities and structures to help ensure that MIT makes significant progress in dramatically reducing its own use of fossil fuels and in promoting serious local, national, and international goals toward reducing human impact on the Earth’s climate.

Members of Fossil Free MIT have been meeting for months with MIT’s Vice President for Research Maria Zuber, and they have identified four areas where they will work together to build on and enhance MIT’s “Plan for Action” announced last fall. Zuber, who was charged with implementing those plans, will work with the student-led group to advance these four specific goals.

The four action areas are: Moving toward campus carbon neutrality as soon as possible; establishing a climate action advisory committee to consult on the implementation of the Plan for Action; developing a set of strategies and benchmarks for MIT’s engagement with industry, government, and other institutions; and convening a forum on the ethics of the climate issue.

“For months now, I have been meeting regularly with several members of Fossil Free MIT, and I deeply admire their commitment to the cause and the honorable way they have pursued it,” said Zuber. “It is crucial that MIT seize a leadership role in addressing the urgent issue of climate change, and I believe that this agreement puts us in an even stronger position to lead effectively and successfully.”

A member of Fossil Free MIT, speaking for the group, says the group  “continues to support targeted divestment of the endowment from fossil fuel companies, and we see this as complementary to industry engagement and MIT's Climate Action Plan. We're excited to keep working with the administration on areas of common ground.”

Zuber says that she, along with MIT students, faculty, staff, and alumni, are moving forward on the four basic components of this new agreement.

• For the campus carbon reduction goal reflected in the plan – a reduction of 32 percent by 2030 – there is agreement that this is to be seen as a floor, not a ceiling. The Institute will work to do everything feasible to improve on that goal, and to reinforce its stated aspiration to reach carbon neutrality as soon as possible.
• The new Climate Action Advisory Committee will be set up, including representatives of MIT undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty, staff, MIT Corporation members, and alumni. The group will be inviting all members of the MIT community to work collaboratively and bring in ideas to take advantage of this pool of talent and expertise.
• That committee will also work on developing benchmarks and guidelines on how to assess the effectiveness of MIT’s efforts to engage on climate change issues with outside institutions, including industry and government.
• Working with the whole MIT community, Zuber’s office will convene a forum to explore the issues involved in the ethical dimensions of climate change, examining the ethical responsibilities of all the different parties involved.

MIT President L. Rafael Reif praised the agreement, saying, “To the student negotiators from Fossil Free MIT and to Vice President Zuber: I am inspired by both your conduct and your results. Through respectful discussion, creative thinking, and sheer persistence, you transformed a moment of impasse into an opportunity to accelerate progress against climate change. I hope we can all join now, with renewed momentum, in the urgent work ahead.”

Below is the agreement reached by Fossil Free MIT and the MIT administration.

Shared Statement on Climate Action

March 1, 2016

Over the course of many productive conversations during the last few months, Maria Zuber, MIT’s Vice President for Research, and members of the student-led group Fossil Free MIT (FFMIT) have discussed their shared interests with respect to accelerating solutions to the urgent problem of global climate change.

The conversations arose from concerns articulated by FFMIT on three issues: the trajectory of campus carbon emissions reduction; investments in fossil fuel companies through MIT’s endowment; and the role of disinformation in hindering action in the global debate over climate change. Vice President Zuber has listened to these concerns, described some of the infrastructural challenges associated with decarbonizing campus energy generation, reinforced the senior MIT administration’s belief in a strategy of constructive engagement with industry, and reiterated its support for providing accurate, high-quality information on climate change to the public.

Based on these conversations, Vice President Zuber and FFMIT have identified four areas for building upon and enhancing MIT’s Plan for Action on Climate Change, released in October 2015. As MIT’s Vice President for Research, Professor Zuber has oversight responsibility for the plan. She and FFMIT intend to work jointly to bring these four ideas to fruition.

First, the MIT senior administration and FFMIT agree that the campus carbon emissions reduction goal included in the plan – a 32% reduction by 2030 – is a floor, not a ceiling. As MIT’s Office of Sustainability has articulated, the campus aspires to carbon neutrality as soon as possible. The Office of Sustainability, which recently published MIT’s first campus greenhouse gas inventory, has challenged the community to advance solutions to help achieve this goal, and intends to report yearly on progress.

Second, Vice President Zuber will establish and chair a climate action advisory committee to advise and consult with her on the implementation and ongoing assessment of MIT’s Plan for Action. The committee’s membership will include faculty, students, postdocs, staff, Corporation members and alumni who wish to engage in the process in an open, collaborative way, inviting implementation ideas from across the MIT community and bringing to bear the full depth and breadth of the MIT community’s talent, experience, expertise, and creativity.

Third, because a strategy of engagement with industry, government, and other institutions lies at the core of MIT’s Plan for Action on Climate Change, the new climate action advisory committee will provide advice to identify, develop, and publish engagement strategies and benchmarks. Benchmarks will include inputs and activities, such as number of meetings held, in addition to outcomes aligned with a 2°C future: for example, these may include steps taken by industry to develop and implement 2°C business strategies and to support a 2°C public policy framework. The committee will also provide advice and input on an annual report to be produced by the Office of the Vice President for Research to assess MIT’s progress in implementing the Plan for Action and engagement partners’ response to the climate challenge.

Fourth, working with students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, Vice President Zuber willconvene a forum to explore ethical dimensions of the climate issue. The forum will seek to shed light on critical questions like the ethical responsibilities confronting all stakeholders – countries, industries, companies, shareholders, institutions, individuals, and different generations – if we are to limit the increase in average global temperatures to 2°C over pre-industrial levels, as well as the ethical dimensions of climate change communication.

Photo: Christopher Harting/AboveSummit 

“This, for me, is such a big shock,” said Prinn. “To think that you could stop measurements or throw out the people, that doesn’t make any sense to me and to many, many other people around the world.”

In recent years, proponents of clean energy have taken heart in the falling prices of solar and wind power, hoping they will drive an energy revolution. But a new study co-authored by an MIT professor suggests otherwise.

Over 300,000 babies every year are born in the United States with levels of mercury that put them at risk of neurological and developmental problems. How much would you be willing to spend to reduce this number?

A large group of climate scientists has made a bracing statement in the journal Nature Climate Change, arguing that we are mistaken if we think global warming is only a matter of the next 100 years or so.

Auburn U., MIT researchers link lower crop yields to higher ozone levels

Experts examine how MIT can be most effective in addressing climate-change issues

MIT attendees of COP21 share experiences, perspectives on outcomes

Andrea Thompson | Climate Central

In case you haven’t heard, Washington, D.C., and other parts of the Mid-Atlantic region, are about to get walloped by a major storm that could bury the city in a record-breaking amount of snow.

The storm is expected to bring snows that could top 2 feet in the D.C. area and has already resulted in thousands of cancelled flights. While snows may not be quite as impressive further north, the storm’s fierce winds could whip up significant coastal flooding.

Part of the reason this Snowzilla storm is expected to dump so much snow is because it is pulling abundant moisture. As the planet warms because of excess heat trapped by human-emitted greenhouse gases, the atmosphere can hold more moisture. Scientists already expect heavy downpours to increase because of that. But there’s been little research into what that means for “epic blizzards” like this one.

It might seem that more moisture in the atmosphere along with warming temperatures should mean more rain than snow, and that’s true. But, it turns out, that’s only part of the story.

On Thursday, MIT climate researcher Paul O’Gorman reviewed a 2014 study he conducted that is one of the few to look at extreme snowfalls and warming. Speaking before a group of scientists during a talk at Columbia University, he detailed his use of climate models to look at how extreme snowfalls might change as the planet heats up. Global temperatures have already risen by nearly 2°F (1°C) since the late 1800s.

O’Gorman found that while both average annual snow amounts and extreme snowfalls would decline as temperatures rose, the extremes didn’t drop off as rapidly. Effectively, extreme snowfalls would become a bigger proportion of all snow events.

The reason for this disparity, O’Gorman found, has to do with the very particular temperature conditions in which extreme snows occur, sort of like a frozen version of the Goldilocks tale: If it’s too warm, you get rain, not snow, but if it’s too cold, there won’t be enough moisture in the air to fuel a full-on blizzard.

But looking across a winter, snows in general will occur across a wider band of temperatures—essentially, less warming is needed to chip away at the temperatures that produce all snow than the narrow band where extreme snows occur.

One possible exception to this decrease could be in very cold places, such as the Canadian Arctic, where even with warming it would still be cold enough to snow, but the temperature increase would mean more moisture to fuel that snow.

O’Gorman’s study is one of very few to look at the issue of warming and extreme snowfalls, and, to date, the pattern he identified has yet to be seen in snowfall observations, he said. He suspects this is because there are fewer snow observations than those for rain because snow happens over a much smaller area of Earth’s land surface.

“I don’t expect the signal on snowfall to emerge for another 20 years or so,” O’Gorman said.

That study also only looks at one specific aspect of snowstorms. Another relatively unexplored factor is how warming might influence the storms, called extratropical cyclones, that actually bring the snow as they sweep across the country. Some research has suggested that, like hurricanes, these systems could become less frequent, but those that do occur will be more intense, but it’s still an active area of research.

Discerning any role of warming in fueling this specific storm would require a specific attribution study, but one expected impact of this storm that does have a clear connection to climate change is the coastal flooding it could bring to areas from Maryland up to Long Island. As sea levels continue to rise from global warming, nor’easters and other intense storms are more likely to cause damaging floods.

But for a better picture of what the Snowpocalypses of the future might look like, much more research remains to be done.

This article is reproduced with permission from Climate Central. The article was first published on January 22, 2016.

Photo: This NOAA satellite image taken Friday, Jan. 22, 2016 at 12:45 p.m. EST, shows a large strengthening winter storm system that is moving across the southeastern U.S.

Helen Hill | EAPS

The MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), together with the Lorenz Center and the MIT Alumni Association, are hosting a climate symposium on Jan. 27 in the Kirsch Auditorium of the Stata Center (Room 32-123).

While this event is now fully subscribed, the day's proceedings will be available via a live webcast. (Register to watch.)

Taking action on climate change has become a dominating issue — globally, nationally, locally, and even here at MIT. Yet so many questions remain. How much and how quickly will climate change? How will these changes manifest, and where? What are the greatest risks posed by a changing climate and how likely are these worst-case outcomes? What is the science behind climate change, and how can basic research inform our efforts to avert, mitigate and adapt to its impacts?

Essential knowledge built through basic climate research lies at the core of all these questions. We would not even recognize that Earth’s climate is changing were it not for the cumulative efforts of climate scientists over the past five decades, many of them here at MIT. And we cannot hope to improve the climate outcome for ourselves and future generations without the vital, ongoing contributions of fundamental climate science research.

Touching on everything from the essentials of planetary climate through the complexities of Earth’s climate system to the challenges of finding the will to act on our knowledge to address current climate change, the symposium features talks and discussion by faculty experts from across the spectrum of climate research at MIT, plus keynote speakers Marcia McNutt (editor-in-chief of Science) and Justin Gillis (environmental science writer for The New York Times).

Speakers include:

Daniel Cziczo, MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Arizona State University
Kerry Emanuel, MIT Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
John Fernandez, MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative
W. Eric L. Grimson, MIT Chancellor for Academic Advancement
Valerie Karplus, MIT Sloan School of Management
Thomas Malone, MIT Sloan School of Management
John Marshall, MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
David McGee, MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Ronald Prinn, MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Sara Seager, MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Noelle Selin, MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society and Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Lawrence Susskind, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Dennis Whyte, MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Maria Zuber, MIT vice president for research

For more information and a detailed agenda, visit the EAPS symposium website.

Image: Jennifer Fentress/EAPS