CS3 In the News
By Ari Natter
WASHINGTON, D.C.--A tax on carbon dioxide emissions could raise $1.5 trillion, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology report that said the revenue could be used to stave off budget cuts as Congress seeks to reduce a looming federal deficit.
The report, Carbon Tax Revenue and the Budget Deficit: A Win-Win-Win Solution?, released Aug. 27, examined the effects of a carbon tax starting at $20 per ton in 2013 and rising 4 percent annually.
According to the report, such a tax would cut carbon dioxide emissions 20 percent below 2006 levels by 2050, encourage the use of renewables, and reduce oil imports.
“Whether we cut taxes or maintain spending for social programs, the economy will be better off with the carbon tax than if we have to keep other taxes high or cut programs to [rein] in the deficit,” John Reilly, an author of the study and the co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, said in a statement.
Alternative to Tax Increases, Defense Cuts.
The report, which comes as Congress seeks ways to reduce the federal deficit, says the revenue provided through a carbon tax could provide an alternative to tax increases and cuts to defense spending and social programs, and could allow an extension of the Bush tax cuts that are due to expire at the end of 2012.
However, the report's authors warn that “while in principle it is possible to get very positive results from a carbon tax, in practice” it depends on the specific proposal.
One, the Managed Carbon Price Act of 2012 (H.R. 6338), introduced earlier in August by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), would place a carbon tax on fossil fuels but would set aside most of the revenues to be refunded to consumers, with the remainder being used for deficit reduction (149 WCCR, 8/2/12).
Still, many analysts remain skeptical that Congress has the appetite to enact carbon tax legislation anytime soon.
Climate legislation that would have required mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions passed the House in 2009, but the Senate version collapsed in 2010.
By: Zack Colman
Taxing carbon would generate $1.5 trillion, potentially giving politicians cover from making politically difficult decisions on taxes and social spending cuts, according to a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released Monday.
A carbon tax would take pressure off Congress to find “tradeoffs” between closing the deficit gap and reviving the economy, according to John Reilly, an author of the study.
“Congress will face many difficult tradeoffs in stimulating the economy and job growth while reducing the deficit,” Reilly, the co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, said in a statement.
“But with the carbon tax there are virtually no serious tradeoffs. Our analysis shows the overall economy improves, taxes are lower and pollution emissions are reduced.”
The study found that taxing carbon at $20 per ton would generate $1.5 trillion in revenue in a 10-year period. That could be used to reduce corporate and personal income taxes and maintain social services spending, all while reducing the deficit.
The study said the carbon tax also would lower pollution by 20 percent by 2050, compared with 2006 levels, and prevents oil imports from rising. It would also shift energy markets to clean technology, a sector to which the United States has already devoted much capital, the report said.
Sebastian Rausch, an assistant professor of energy economics at ETH Zurich, co-authored the study with Reilly. The study assumed full employment and was based on an earlier Congressional Budget Office report that used a $20-per-ton carbon tax.
Conservatives and liberals alike have recently explored the possibility of a carbon tax.
Right-leaning think tank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) hosted informal discussions on the topic in July. GOP leadership, however, firmly dismissed the idea of a carbon tax following reports about the AEI talks.
Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) introduced carbon tax legislation in August, the revenue from which would be used to pay down the deficit and to offset cost increases. That proposal largely mirrors one from Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).
By: Brad Plumer
With the United States facing the expiration of a slew of tax cuts in 2013—the dread “fiscal cliff”—there has been plenty of interest in offbeat tax-reform proposals. And one idea that a few economists keep knocking around is a fee on carbon emissions. After all, if we need to raise revenue, why not just tax global-warming pollution?
A new paper from the MIT Global Change Institute lays out how a carbon tax might work in practice. The authors model what would happen if, this December, Congress enacted a small fee on carbon emissions to fend off a portion of the tax hikes and spending cuts that are scheduled to occur. The carbon tax would be levied directly on fossil fuels—on coal that comes out of the mine, say, or oil that’s shipped in from overseas—and would start at $20 per ton of carbon in 2013, rising 4 percent each year thereafter.
The authors, Sebastian Rausch and John M. Reilly, estimate that this tax would raise $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. If that revenue were then used either to cut income taxes, reduce payroll taxes, or deflect cuts to social-spending programs, the MIT authors find, most Americans would be slightly better off than if Congress simply let the fiscal cliff hit, with the Bush tax cuts and payroll tax cuts expiring automatically. (Using the carbon tax in this way would lead to an 0.02 percent bump in consumption and leisure over time.)
Now, the betting line is that Congress will do something to avert the looming tax hikes and spending cuts, so this isn’t a terribly realistic scenario. Implementing a carbon tax next year would still hurt the economy—it would just hurt slightly less than the fiscal cliff. Still, the broader point of the MIT analysis is to suggest that a carbon tax could be a more economically beneficial way of raising revenue than, say, payroll or income taxes. So even if Congress waited until 2014 or 2015 or whenever the U.S. economy has recovered, replacing other taxes with a carbon tax could still provide a minor economic boost (see the first graph below).
A carbon fee usually gets criticized for hurting poorer Americans the most—they spend the biggest slice of their income on gasoline and other energy-intensive products, after all. But Rausch and Reilly found that a lot of the distributional effects depend on what Congress does with the revenue, as shown in the chart below:
CTCorp = carbon tax used to cut corporate tax rate, CTPersInc = carbon tax used to cut income tax rate, CTPayroll = carbon tax used to cut payroll taxes, CTTransfer = carbon tax used to bolster social welfare programs like Medicaid
The green line shows how different income groups would be affected in 2015 if the carbon tax was used to fend off cuts to social welfare programs like Medicaid. Lower-income Americans would benefit significantly, while wealthier Americans would take a small hit. By contrast, the red and blue lines show the effects if revenue from the carbon tax was used to cut the corporate tax or personal income tax—in those cases, higher-income Americans would come out ahead. If, however, a carbon tax was used to cut payroll taxes—that’s the black line—then the welfare effects in 2015 are more or less neutral.
The MIT report argues that a carbon tax would accomplish a few other things as well. Fossil-fuel use would go down, oil imports would shrink slightly, and U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions would decline. On that last point, however, it’s worth noting that the carbon tax proposed by the MIT study only gets the United States a fraction of the way toward its long-term climate targets, as shown in this graph:
Blue line: MIT reference case with no carbon tax. Black line: EIA reference. Green line: Scenario with MIT carbon tax in place.
With the carbon tax proposed by MIT (that’s the green line in the chart above), U.S. emissions would be 14 percent below 2006 levels by 2020 and 20 percent below 2006 levels by 2050. That’s lower than if there was no carbon tax at all.
Yet the United States would still fall short of its long-term climate goals, which involve an 80 percent cut in emissions below 1990 levels by mid-century. According to MIT calculations, a modest carbon tax, on its own, wouldn’t get the United States close to that longer-term mark. It might make sense as a more economically efficient way of raising revenue. But the tax would either have to be hiked dramatically or combined with other clean-energy measures in order to make a significant dent in tackling global warming.
In a study published online by the journal Science, Harvard University scientists reported that some storms send water vapor miles into the stratosphere — which is normally drier than a desert — and showed how such events could rapidly set off ozone-destroying reactions with chemicals that remain in the atmosphere from CFCs, refrigerant gases that are now banned.
The risk of ozone damage, scientists said, could increase if global warming leads to more such storms.
“It’s the union between ozone loss and climate change that is really at the heart of this,” said James G. Anderson, an atmospheric scientist and the lead author of the study.
For years, Dr. Anderson said, he and other atmospheric scientists were careful to keep the two concepts separate. “Now, they’re intimately connected,” he said.
Ozone helps shield people, animals and crops from damaging ultraviolet rays from the sun. Much of the concern about the ozone layer has focused on Antarctica, where a seasonal hole, or thinning, has been seen for two decades, and the Arctic, where a hole was observed last year. But those regions have almost no population.
A thinning of the ozone layer over the United States during summers could mean an increase in ultraviolet exposure for millions of people and a rise in the incidence of skin cancer, the researchers said.
The findings were based on sound science, Dr. Anderson and other experts said, but much more research is needed, including direct measurements in the stratosphere in areas where water vapor was present after storms.
“This problem now is of deep concern to me,” Dr. Anderson said. “I never would have suspected this.”
While there is conclusive evidence that strong warm-weather storms have sent water vapor as high as 12 miles — through a process called convective injection — and while climate scientists say one effect of global warming is an increase in the intensity and frequency of storms, it is not yet clear whether the number of such injection events will rise.
“Nobody understands why this convection can penetrate as deeply as it does,” said Dr. Anderson, who has studied the atmosphere for four decades.
Mario J. Molina, a co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for research in the 1970s that uncovered the link between CFCs and damage to the ozone layer, said the study added “one more worry to the changes that society’s making to the chemical composition of the atmosphere.” Dr. Molina, who was not involved in the work, said the concern was “significant ozone depletion at latitudes where there is a lot of population, in contrast to over the poles.”
The study, which was financed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, focused on the United States because that is where the data was collected. But the researchers pointed out that similar conditions could exist at other midlatitude regions.
Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, who reviewed the study for Science, also called for more research. “One of the really solid parts of this paper is that they’ve taken the chemistry that we know from other atmospheric experiments and lab experiments and put that in the picture,” he said. “The thing to do is do field work now — measure moisture amounts and whether there is any impact around it.”
“The connection with future climate is the most important issue,” Dr. Cicerone said.
Large thunderstorms of the type that occur from the Rockies to the East Coast and over the Atlantic Ocean produce updrafts, as warm moist air accelerates upward and condenses, releasing more heat. In most cases, the updrafts stop at a boundary layer between the lower atmosphere and the stratosphere called the tropopause, often producing flat-topped clouds that resemble anvils. But if there is enough energy in a storm, the updraft can continue on its own momentum, punching through the tropopause and entering the stratosphere, said Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When Dr. Anderson produced data about five years ago clearly showing these strong injections of water vapor, “I didn’t believe it at first,” Dr. Emanuel said. “But we’ve come to see that the evidence is pretty strong that we do get them.”
At the same time, he added, “we don’t really understand what determines the potential for convection in the atmosphere,” so it is difficult to say what the effect of climate change will be.
“We’re much further along on understanding how hurricanes respond to climate change than normal storms,” Dr. Emanuel said.
The use of CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons, was phased out beginning in the late 1980s with the signing of an international treaty called the Montreal Protocol, but it will take decades for them to be cleansed fully from the atmosphere. It is chlorine from the CFCs that ultimately destroys ozone, upsetting what is normally a balanced system of ozone creation and decay. The chlorine has to undergo a chemical shift in the presence of sunlight that makes it more reactive, and this shift is sensitive to temperature.
Dr. Anderson and his colleagues found that a significant concentration of water vapor raises the air temperature enough in the immediate vicinity to allow the chemical shift, and the ozone-destroying process, to proceed rapidly.
“The rate of these reactions was shocking to us,” Dr. Anderson said. “It’s chemistry that was sitting there, waiting to be revealed.”
Dr. Anderson said that if climate change related to emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane led to more events in which water was injected well into the stratosphere, the effect on ozone could not be halted because the chemistry would continue. “It’s irreversible,” he said.
If CFCs had not been banned, the ozone layer would be in far worse shape than it is. But by showing that CFC-related ozone destruction can occur in conditions other than the cold ones at the poles, the study suggests that the full recovery of the ozone layer may be further off than previously considered.
“The world said, ‘Oh, we’ve controlled the source of CFCs; we can move on to something else,’ ” Dr. Anderson said. “But the destruction of ozone is far more sensitive to water vapor and temperature.”
By Eric Niiler
As world leaders gather to assess the planet's health, most reports are gloomy, save for a couple bits of good news.
The world's political and environmental leaders gather in Rio de Janeiro tomorrow to assess the state of the planet's health 20 years after the first such gathering in 1992. But if science is any guide, Earth still needs some help.
Several new climate studies reveal various aspects of the same foreboding problem: the atmosphere continues to warm, glaciers continue melting and seas keep rising.
But there is a tiny bit of good news -- the United States and Europe have been able to cut their heat-trapping industrial emissions by switching to less-polluting natural gas, driving fewer miles and of course, sinking into an economic recession where fewer factories are working across much of the globe.
And while North America's mild winter, warm spring and, in some areas, hot June can't be blamed on global climate change, extreme weather events do grab the public's attention. Even though it's not entirely accurate to link climate and weather, perhaps that's not a bad thing, says Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Science Center in New York.
"People spend a lot of time talking about the weather and love to do so," Schmidt said. "It's an odd thing because as scientists we are using people's interest in weather and weather extremes to talk about something that is connected, but isn't quite the same."
Schmidt said that rather than focusing on extreme blips in weather, it's instead important to look at changes in temperature over the long term. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are doing just that, and reported that the past 12 months from June 2011 to May 2012 were the hottest since record-keeping began in the 1880s. The month of May 2012 was the second-hottest on record (2010 was first). And it looks like 2012 will barge into the top three hottest calendar years on record as well.
At the same time, there is occasional "noise" in the Earth's climate system, explained Ronald Prinn, professor of atmospheric sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That means that the linear warming trend could stagger a bit from year-to-year, or decade-to-decade depending on the cooling effects of cloud cover or the ocean's ability to soak up heat.
"If you take a 10-year running average," Prinn told Discovery News. "It's clear that world has been warming for a hundred-plus years."
Some climate skeptics have pointed to the world's forests as a likely carbon "sink" that could suck up heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane and other such gasses from burning fossil fuels. But a new study by researchers in California found that scenario might not be so simple.
As soil warms up, they found, it releases carbon dioxide made from microbes that decompose dead leaves and fallen trees. About one-third of that release comes from older soil, more than 10 years old.
"While that older material is not going to decompose really fast, there's an awful lot of it," Susan Trumbore, a University of California, Irvine, scientist who led the study, told The Washington Post.
That means that at some point in the future, the world's temperate forests could switch from a carbon sink to a carbon faucet, increasing the vicious cycle of rising CO2 causing even more CO2 to be released.
Another new study finds that Chinese officials may be cooking the books when it comes to carbon emissions.
United Kingdom-based researchers found the gap between what Chinese state authorities report as the nation's industrial emissions and the aggregate of provincial reporting has widened to 1.4 gigatons, that's about 5 percent of the world's entire CO2 emissions budget. Local officials may be padding the books to show more industrial output, while national authorities want to appear more environmentally-friendly to the West.
Either way, the new figures wipe out any gains elsewhere.
"The trends are pretty bad," Schmidt said. "All of the flattening in Europe and the U.S. are being more than matched by increases in China and India."
Despite the recent gloomy news, experts say there are solutions: replacing individual dung-burning stoves in Chinese homes with more efficient centralized power plants; developing more efficient cars, homes and light bulbs in the West; and continuing to shift away from coal as a prime energy source in both the United States and China.
"Nobody wants (another recession) as a solution to the climate issue," Prinn said. "We don't want to be hurting our economies. We need to develop new energy sources."
Unless the world gets a handle on its fossil fuel habit, experts say there's likely to be more extreme events like floods, droughts, heat waves and tropical storms.
"Without climate change we would be seeing extreme heat waves once every 100 years, now it's more on the order of 10 times in 100 years," Schmidt said. "That's going to increase. The dice are loaded, and we're loading them even more."
By: Katherine Bagley
While the national climate debate is fixed on whether Earth is warming, climate scientists are focused on understanding how bad it will be.
The global warming debate in Congress, the states and on the campaign trail centers on two issues: Is Earth warming, and if so are humans to blame?
But ask most climate scientists, and they'll tell you that these are the only questions not in dispute. Climate change is a matter of how bad and by when, they'll say—not whether.
"Scientists are inherently skeptical," says Lonnie Thompson, a paleoclimatologist at Ohio State University, who has led studies of glaciers and ice sheets in 16 countries. "After enough evidence and observation, though, you have to start to accept findings. That is what happened with climate change. This wasn't a rash conclusion."
"There is not any serious debate about whether anthropogenic climate change is happening," says Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University and a professor of science and society. "Scientists are certain about that, and it is unfortunate that the national debate is lagging so far behind."
The public and political discourse on global warming was framed by the 2007 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which concluded that climate change is occurring and human activity is the cause. That seminal report, and the subsequent coverage and debate, split the country into two partisan camps, with Democrats generally accepting the scientific consensus and Republicans questioning or flat-out denying it.
Missing from the discussion is the perhaps surprising, and rising, view of many scientists—that the UN climate panel gravely underestimated the immediacy and danger of global warming.
The IPCC process itself is partly, though not entirely, to blame. "It takes seven years to produce an IPCC report," says Thompson, who is also an IPCC author. "By the time it is published, the science is already dated ... and the models being used aren't accurately assessing how rapidly these changes are taking place."
There are real-world implications at stake, Thompson says. "We are in for tougher scenarios than what are being relayed in the reports."
A Flawed IPCC Assumption
The IPCC, the world's leading scientific body on global warming, is charged by the UN with assessing research and releasing periodic reviews of climate risks, which governments often use to set targets for cutting carbon emissions. In 2007, the panel shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Al Gore.
At the core of its assessments are IPCC "scenarios"—summaries of coming climatic conditions like global temperature and sea-level rise, which are based on a number of assumptions about future greenhouse gas emissions. One of those assumptions is that the world will make good on its carbon-cutting pledges.
Therein lies a key flaw, says John Reilly, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and an expert on climate economic models. Many nations have failed to take promised steps to slash global warming emissions, particularly China and the United States, the world's biggest polluters. Even in the European Union greenhouse gases are on the rise. Yet the IPCC doesn't account for this.
The result, says Reilly, is that emissions today are higher than what the IPCC predicted in 2007. The panel's middle-of-the-road scenarios, for example, estimate that the world would emit between 27 and 28 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2010. In reality, 30.6 billion metric tons of CO2 were released that year, the latest figures available, says data from the International Energy Agency. While that may seem like a small difference to a lay person, climate experts say that small increases can steamroll into something much bigger.
What Newer Climate Models Show
In 2009, Reilly and his colleagues at MIT, along with researchers from Penn State, the Marine Biological Institute in Massachusetts and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, decided to model forecasts for climate that assumed the world would continue with business as usual.
Their results, published in the June 2012 issue of Climatic Change and online last year, found that without major greenhouse gas cuts the median global temperature would increase by 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, compared to the IPCC's worst-case prediction of a 3.5 degree Celsius rise (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit).
The study found that the Arctic would warm up to three times as much as was foreseen by the IPCC. There would also be more severe extreme weather events and greater ocean warming, sea-level rise and ocean acidification.
"The IPCC suite of scenarios provide ... a bit too rosy of a picture," says Reilly. "Our study shows that without action, there is virtually no chance that we won't enter very dangerous territory."
Even moderate action isn't likely to help. Follow-up work by these same researchers published this year in MIT's annual Energy and Climate Outlook found that if countries achieve the emission cuts they promised at international climate negotiations, the global temperature would still increase by over 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit), with a significant chance of a 5 degree Celsius rise by century's end
For some scientists, however, the IPCC's findings are extreme.
"I'm surprised there are those who think the IPCC is too conservative," says John Christy, atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, IPCC author in 2001 and a well-known skeptic of human-caused climate change. "I think the simple evidence is very clear—the IPCC models overestimate the warming of the climate system." The IPCC declined to comment on the record.
Missing Ice Sheets and Slow Timing
Perhaps the biggest controversy surrounding the IPCC scenarios is that they omit the rapid melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets in sea-level rise projections.
Several researchers, including Thompson, the polar ice expert from Ohio State University, and James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, have been vocal critics of that omission, which they say dramatically skews the IPCC scenarios. If the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the only two in the world, continue to melt at their current pace, Thompson and other scientists believe sea levels could rise several feet and swamp coastlines this century, not the 8 to 17 inches projected in the IPCC mid-range scenarios.
"Those [ice sheets] are the big elephants in the room," says Thompson. "They are going to play a big role, yet they aren't taken into account." (The IPCC left them out because of uncertainty about how to predict effects of ice-sheet meltdowns in climate models.)
Some scientists say the very nature of the IPCC process means its reports can never be truly up to date. Research must be published at least two years before the release of an IPCC assessment to be considered. That lag time also means the projections will be on the conservative side, Thompson says. He argues that as scientific understanding of climate change improves, and as CO2 emissions continue to rise, the predictions grow more dire.
Reilly, the MIT scientist, says most scientists studying climate change today are viewing "the seemingly unstoppable rise in global greenhouse emissions" with "increasing alarm."
Why Aren't Scientists More Vocal?
So, if climate scientists are convinced that the Earth is warming faster than expected, then why aren't more speaking out?
The researchers interviewed for this story said many have retreated into silence to avoid the small but vocal band of climate skeptics. "Researchers find it hard to raise significant questions even within the climate science community for fear that it will be exploited by the skeptics," says Sarewitz, the science and society professor from Arizona State University.
"Climate science is a huge, sprawling area of discussion," explains Sarewitz, and skeptics are known to seize on arguments as proof that the science linking human activity to global warming is dubious.
Indeed, there are still many points not understood in climate science. Long-term changes in solar activity and their effects on the climate system are not well known. The effect of aerosols on global temperature is still uncertain, because they all react differently to atmospheric heat. Sulfates, for example, block sunlight, which in turn can cool the climate, while black carbon absorbs sunlight and can accelerate warming. Few doubt that sea levels will rise, but how fast and by how much is hotly contested.
There are also major limitations with climate models. They can predict whole-Earth scenarios better than localized scenarios, meaning regional trends still can't be predicted with much accuracy. They also don't reflect the physics of cloud formation well, an issue the IPCC has made a research priority.
While none of these undermine the consensus that climate change is human-caused, Sarewitz says, any dissension helps skeptics chisel away at the perception of scientific agreement. "It all makes it hard for the disinterested citizen ... to actually know how to untangle the conversation and who to trust."
Is silence the answer? Not according to Thompson of Ohio State, who admits to being "frustrated' by skeptic tactics and scientists' lack of response to them. "If they want to be more than just a historian documenting the change—if they want to make a difference—[scientists] have to speak out about these issues." Thompson himself regularly speaks about climate change, even allowing TV and print journalists to join his polar ice expeditions.
Reilly agrees. "Without interaction [with the public], it becomes too easy for people to vilify or defy those who disagree or agree with them, and there is little chance for real understanding."
The world’s air has reached what scientists call a troubling new milestone for carbon dioxide, the main global warming pollutant.
Monitoring stations across the Arctic this spring are measuring more than 400 parts per million of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. The number isn’t quite a surprise, because it’s been rising at an accelerating pace. Years ago, it passed the 350 ppm mark that many scientists say is the highest safe level for carbon dioxide. It now stands globally at 395.
So far, only the Arctic has reached that 400 level, but the rest of the world will follow soon.
“The fact that it’s 400 is significant,” said Jim Butler, global monitoring director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colo. “It’s just a reminder to everybody that we haven’t fixed this and we’re still in trouble.”
Carbon dioxide is the chief greenhouse gas and stays in the atmosphere for 100 years. Some carbon dioxide is natural, mainly from decomposing dead plants and animals. Before the Industrial Age, levels were around 275 parts per million.
For more than 60 years, readings have been in the 300s, except in urban areas, where levels are skewed. The burning of fossil fuels, such as coal for electricity and oil for gasoline, has caused the overwhelming bulk of the man-made increase in carbon in the air, scientists say.
It’s been at least 800,000 years — probably more — since Earth saw carbon dioxide levels in the 400s, Butler and other climate scientists said.
Until now.
Readings are coming in at 400 and higher all over the Arctic. They’ve been recorded in Alaska, Greenland, Norway, Iceland and even Mongolia. But levels change with the seasons and will drop a bit in the summer, when plants suck up carbon dioxide, NOAA scientists said.
So the yearly average for those northern stations likely will be lower and so will the global number.
Globally, the average carbon dioxide level is about 395 parts per million but will pass the 400 mark within a few years, scientists said.
The Arctic is the leading indicator in global warming, both in carbon dioxide in the air and effects, said Pieter Tans, a senior NOAA scientist.
“This is the first time the entire Arctic is that high,” he said.
Tans called reaching the 400 number “depressing,” and Butler said it was “a troubling milestone.”
“It’s an important threshold,” said Carnegie Institution ecologist Chris Field, a scientist who helps lead the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “It is an indication that we’re in a different world.”
Ronald Prinn, an atmospheric sciences professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said 400 is more a psychological milestone than a scientific one. We think in hundreds, and “we’re poking our heads above 400,” he said.
Tans said the readings show how much the Earth’s atmosphere and its climate are being affected by humans. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels hit a record high of 34.8 billion tons in 2011, up 3.2 percent, the International Energy Agency announced last week.
The agency said it’s becoming unlikely that the world can achieve the European goal of limiting global warming to just 2 degrees based on increasing pollution and greenhouse gas levels.
“The news today, that some stations have measured concentrations above 400 ppm in the atmosphere, is further evidence that the world’s political leaders — with a few honorable exceptions — are failing catastrophically to address the climate crisis,” former Vice President Al Gore, the highest-profile campaigner against global warming, said in an email. “History will not understand or forgive them.”
But political dynamics in the United States mean there’s no possibility of significant restrictions on man-made greenhouse gases no matter what the levels are in the air, said Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow of the libertarian Cato Institute.
“These milestones are always worth noting,” said economist Myron Ebell at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute. “As carbon dioxide levels have continued to increase, global temperatures flattened out, contrary to the models” used by climate scientists and the United Nations.
He contends temperatures have not risen since 1998, which was unusually hot.
Temperature records contradict that claim. Both 2005 and 2010 were warmer than 1998, and the entire decade of 2000 to 2009 was the warmest on record, according to NOAA.
The dramatic decoupling of crude oil and natural gas prices in 2009 has created a riddle of profound importance to energy investors and company balance sheets, two Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers conclude in a new study.
There are two ways to think about the cost of energy. There’s the dollar amount that shows up on our utility bills or at the pump. And then there’s the “social cost” — all the adverse consequences that various energy sources, from coal to nuclear power, end up foisting on the public.
The Obama administration proposed rules limiting carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants, a move that could essentially bar new coal-fired electric generation facilities. Howard Herzog comments.
A new study by researchers at MIT shows that there is enough capacity in deep saline aquifers in the United States to store at least a century’s worth of carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s coal-fired powerplants. Though questions remain about the economics of systems to capture and store such gases, this study addresses a major issue that has overshadowed such proposals.