CS3 In the Media

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

MIT attendees of COP21 share experiences, perspectives on outcomes

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

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

Jason Margolis | PRI’s The World

If you’re in the oil business, you might think your best days are in the rear-view mirror. Oil is selling for rock-bottom prices. Your product is blamed for destroying the planet. And here’s what the leader of the free world thinks of oil. 

“We’ve got to accelerate the transition away from old, dirtier energy sources. Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future,” said President Obama during his recent State of the Union address.

To state the obvious though, if you’re an oil company, you produce oil. Energy economist John Reilly at the MIT Sloan School of Management says companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron are facing a classic business challenge.  

“Could the horse and buggy manufacturers become automobile producers?  Or is some other company going to because they’re more innovative, or not bound by what they’re already doing?" asks Reilly.

But before we pity the poor oil companies, remember, these are the richest companies in the world.

“Most of them have lots of cash. And so, if there’s a successful alternative, if they don’t develop it, they probably can acquire those companies and transition that way,” says Reilly.

. . .

Read the full article and hear the broadcast at Public Radio International’s The World.
 

Photo: Norwegian company Statoil plans to build the first floating wind farm off the Scottish coast. (Photo courtesy of Statoil)

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.

The Economist

WHEN Egyptian politicians discussed sabotaging the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in 2013, they naturally assumed it was a private meeting. But amid all the scheming, and with a big chuckle, Muhammad Morsi, then president, informed his colleagues that their discussion was being broadcast live on a state-owned television channel.

Embarrassment apart, it was already no secret that Egypt wanted to stop the largest hydroelectric project in Africa. When Ethiopia completes construction of the dam in 2017, it will stand 170 metres tall (550 feet) and 1.8km (1.1 miles) wide. Its reservoir will be able to hold more than the volume of the entire Blue Nile, the tributary on which it sits (see map). And it will produce 6,000 megawatts of electricity, more than double Ethiopia’s current measly output, which leaves three out of four people in the dark...

EXCERPTS:

. . . A sense of mistrust hangs over the dam’s ultimate use. Ethiopia insists that it will produce only power and that the water pushing its turbines (less some evaporation during storage) will ultimately come out the other side. But Egypt fears it will also be used for irrigation, cutting downstream supply. Experts are sceptical. “It makes no technological or economic sense [for Ethiopia] to irrigate land with that water,” as it would involve pumping it back upstream, says Kenneth Strzepek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. . .

. . . How much water Sudan uses in the future, and other variables such as changes in rainfall and water quality, should determine how the dam is operated. That will require more co-operation and a willingness to compromise. Disagreement between Egypt and Sudan over such things as the definition of “significant harm” bodes ill. But all three countries will benefit if they work together, claims Mr Strzepek, citing the dam’s capacity to store water for use in drought years and its potential to produce cheap energy for export once transmission lines are built. . .

Read the article in The Economist.

Photo: Landsat-7 satellite image of the bend in the Nile River and adjacent farmland (Photo courtesy of Jesse Allen, NASA)

Benefits from international regulations may double those of domestic policy

Valerie Karplus and Michael Davidson | MIT Joint Program

After two weeks of negotiations, the Paris climate talks that ended on December 12 delivered the foundations of a post-2020 climate regime.

To advance climate change mitigation efforts, the new agreement incorporates national targets for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for 2025/2030, a new five-year cycle to establish subsequent targets, a reporting and review placeholder, and official stocktaking two years prior to those submissions to compare global progress against long-term goals.

In Paris, 189 of 195 participating countries pledged action in the form of intended nationally determined contributions, or INDCs. These pledges will be assessed in 2018 to encourage countries, where possible, to increase the level of ambition.

The review mechanism agreed on in Paris is a crucial first step. The new climate regime has also been lauded for its transparency provisions, which will be essential to establishing trust in the review process.

Implementing the pledge review process laid out in Paris will not be easy, but it is necessary to have a chance of ratcheting up efforts over time to meet the agreement’s ultimate goal of limiting global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

It is here that research universities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) will have an important role to play.

A transparent review process

A functioning review process will require open and collaborative participation of signatory countries but should not rely solely on an expanded global bureaucracy. The vast majority of third-party analysis on countries’ energy and climate policies comes from academic and nongovernmental organizations, which should be strengthened following Paris.

Official reporting and review processes have existed since the framework convention in 1992. Over time, they have evolved to include periodic communications and highly structured reviews – differentiated by developing and developed countries – performed by a small set of accredited UN experts and other countries themselves. Paris strengthened these requirements by requiring, among other items, all major economies to submit biennial reports and a unified review of all countries' submissions.

Many parts of the current agreement are placeholders for detailed provisions to be decided over the coming years. We argue that in the new architecture of bottom-up pledges, the international community has an increased responsibility to assess levels of effort and abilities to scale up successful approaches.

Because of the complexity of nations' institutions, these mechanisms should be designed to enhance both the quality and impact of research outside formal UN processes. In particular, to both assess and support country pledges with an aim to accelerating global emissions reductions, we need significantly more transparency on pledges and policies and a flexible review process that can respond to concerns from academia.

Measurable and model-able pledges allow research communities to arrive separately at their own assessments of countries’ relative levels of effort and progress toward national commitments.

For example, using a countrywide energy-economic model of China, our collaborative team of researchers from Tsinghua University and MIT estimated annual reductions of over four Gigatons CO2 per year in 2030 in a scenario consistent with that country’s Paris pledge compared to a no-policy case. This reduction would equal approximately three times Japan’s CO2 emissions in 2014. More importantly, this work helped policymakers in and outside of China understand how policies then under consideration could help the country reach peak CO2 emissions in 2030, with the help of a CO2 price.

Many other groups arrived independently at estimates of available CO2 emissions reductions from the Chinese economy. It is exercises like these that offer transparency, credibility and – perhaps most importantly – an opportunity to probe and enhance a shared understanding of the implications of national commitments that remain at arm’s length from the political arena.

Beyond pledges

Assessments of pledge progress reports would naturally be more convincing if accompanied by a suite of policy actions and planned changes in existing institutions and processes to facilitate implementation.

To reinforce pledges, countries are called on in the agreement to submit “information necessary to track progress.” More concretely, they should be asked to compile a list of implementing directives, challenges faced and proposed pathways, given that most governments are establishing domestic policies prior to announcing them on the global stage in future climate talks.

For instance, the US’ Clean Power Plan, a crucial policy in the absence of nationwide climate legislation, will face significant court challenges.

Reporting requirements should explicitly recognize these domestic policy constraints, allowing the scientific and modeling community to consider their implications and investigate, as needed, alternative policy pathways.

Data challenges

A transparent, arm’s-length review process will also help to generate internationally credible assessments of GHG abatement efforts in developing countries, where accounting challenges are significant.

As a case in point, China, which targets a 60%-65% reduction in its CO2 intensity in 2030, relative to 2005 levels, is well known for its challenges in reporting accurate data. The country recently revised upward how much coal it has been burning every year by as much as 17%.

Indeed, data revisions will occur, particularly in developing countries that are in the process of establishing data collection systems.

The biennial reporting requirement agreed to in Paris can provide a regular avenue to incorporate revisions. The research community can also help by incorporating revisions into models and assessing implications for meeting emissions goals.

Negotiators further agreed that national commitments should be communicated to “facilitate clarity, transparency and understanding.” This should extend to the range of assumptions and calculation methodologies.

For example, conventions for calculating the nonfossil share of primary energy differs among countries and agencies. China uses the coal-equivalent method, which equates electricity use to the coal use it displaces, while the International Energy Agency employs the direct-equivalent method, which yields smaller percentages for a given level of deployment.

Another benefit of engaging research communities is scaled-up technical analysis and support, while added redundancy allows for multiple independent assessments of progress. These assessments can help identify and laud when countries exceed their goals, encourage upward revisions by expanding successful programs, identify reasons for slow progress and inform technological and policy solutions.

Peer-reviewed pledges

Transparency is critical, and redundancy will further limit – although not entirely avoid – any efforts to undermine the integrity of the process.

Building on previous pledging systems, an important change in Paris was to create a common technical expert review, composed of a limited number of accredited experts with special training. These experts could play an important role in knowledge assessment and synthesis of the country analysis outside experts deliver. In addition, the review should be constructed to allow for official clarification of methodologies such as those raised above.

Stocktaking processes will also be decided over the coming years, and galvanizing a wide range of civil society researchers will likewise be critical to success. The range of emissions gap reports in advance of Paris, a case in point, illuminated important assumptions for future trends such as expected levels of future efforts, or ratcheting.

The requirement to take stock every five years has the potential to become a focal point for wide-ranging studies on long-term goals.

Engaging the broader community

The Paris agreement institutionalizes a periodic review of pledges such that countries are expected to come back both with increased commitments and progress reports. This process will be absolutely critical if we are to come close to achieving the most ambitious climate change mitigation goals embodied in the Paris agreement.

Engaging the broader research community in the review process is our best hope for generating credible estimates of how we are doing as a planet. A critical part of this will be equipping researchers in developing countries to participate as equal partners in this assessment effort.

Up to now, pledges have been the key measure of a climate regime’s success. But only if it devotes just as much ambition to review as it does to pledges can the new global climate regime truly deliver.

Authors

Valerie J Karplus, Assistant Professor of Global Economics and Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

Michael Davidson, PhD Candidate in engineering systems , Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Conversation is a collaboration between editors and academics to provide informed news analysis and commentary that’s free to read and republish.

Photo: Valerie Karplus takes questions at a panel discussion held by the MIT Club of Paris during the COP21 talks. (Source: Emily Dahl/MIT Energy Initiative)

MIT events throughout climate talks underscore Institute's global perspectives and partnerships