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By Cassie Martin | Oceans at MIT

Earlier this year, weather and climate agencies around the world declared 2014 the warmest year on record, even though the increase in global mean temperature has slowed. This warming “hiatus” has puzzled climate scientists, as it deviates from climate models which project a continuing temperature increase. Climate expert Jochem Marotzke visited MIT last week to deliver the 15^th annual Henry W. Kendall Memorial Lecture “Recent Global Temperature Trends: What do they tell us about anthropogenic climate change?” in which he discussed the hiatus as well as the abilities and limitations of climate models.

Marotzke is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and was an MIT EAPS faculty member in the 1990s. He has spent his career researching the role of the ocean in climate and climate change, and recently expanded his interests to include multi-year to decadal climate prediction. “If you look at other central indicators of global climate, such as sea ice melt, ocean heat uptake, and sea-level rise, they show that global warming is continuing,” Marotzke said. “But this particular indicator, global surface temperature, is rising at a much lower rate now. This is something that as a climate research community we need to take seriously; we need to understand it and communicate the issues about it.”

For the past 15 years, increases in global mean surface temperature has slowed contrary to what climate model simulations predicted. Known as the warming “hiatus”, this phenomenon is largely due to natural variability: Cyclical climate processes such as La Niña and fluctuations in the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface can disrupt the warming trend. Additionally, the oceans absorb an enormous amount of excess heat energy trapped by the atmosphere—as much as 93 percent, Marotzke said. Light-reflecting aerosols from volcanoes also contribute to the slow down.

The failure of climate models to predict this hiatus has long perplexed scientists and bred some public mistrust in climate models. Climate change skeptics claim the hiatus is proof that global warming doesn’t exist, and that climate models overestimate greenhouse gases’ warming effects. Marotzke ardently disagrees. He shared with the audience a study published in Nature earlier this year in which he and co-author Piers Forster of the University of Leeds analyzed 114 model simulations of 15-year global mean temperature trends since the beginning of the 20^th Century. If their analysis showed that models consistently overestimated or underestimated the amount of warming compared to real-world observations, then the models must have a systematic bias.

Fortunately the simulations performed fairly well, producing a range of predictions for each 15-year period in which actual observed temperature trends for those periods fell. Even if the observed trends at times fell close to range edges, they were not biased to one side or the other. Although the models didn’t accurately predict the current warming hiatus, which is not unusual, they also failed to predict other accelerated warming or hiatus events. In fact, the models underestimated warming in some periods compared to the observations. “The claim that models systematically overestimate warming from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations is unfounded,” said Marotzke.

To find out what these simulated short-term temperature trends actually tell us about the climate, Marotzke and Forster performed a multiple regression analysis, which aimed to identify the most significant factors contributing to the trend. For shorter 15-year periods, the analysis found random natural variability in the climate system had the largest influence—approximately three times the impact of all other physical factors combined. Only when Marotzke and Forster analyzed model simulations of global mean temperature trends spanning 62 years did differences in factors including ocean heat absorption, greenhouse gas concentration, and aerosol pollution begin to make a noticeable difference.

In other words, modeling 15-year-long periods only shows the impact of natural variations in the climate system. To see anthropogenic influences on climate change, we have to look at the bigger picture. “The hiatus masks anthropogenic warming,” said Marotzke. “It is a huge distraction, but an incredibly fascinating one.”

The 15th Annual Henry W. Kendall Memorial Lecture was sponsored by the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the MIT Center for Global Change Science. The lecture series honors the memory of Professor Henry Kendall (1926-1999), a 1990 Nobel Laureate, a longtime member of MIT’s physics faculty, and an ardent environmentalist. A founding member and chair of the Union of Concerned Scientists, he played a leading role in organizing scientific community statements on global problems, including the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity in 1992 and the Call for Action at the Kyoto Climate Summit in 1997.

Watch the full lecture here.

The Minamata Convention on Mercury, adopted by the UN in 2013, aims to reduce global mercury pollution by setting limits on specific pollution sources and prohibiting new mercury mining. Certain aspects of the treaty are still under negotiation, for instance the convention gives nations the flexibility to create their own plans for reducing mercury emissions from some sources, like coal-fired power plants. How nations choose to address these emissions has the potential to have a big impact on global mercury pollution, since coal fired power plants are responsible for about a quarter of mercury emissions worldwide.

MIT Engineering Systems Division graduate student Amanda Giang, a research assistant in the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, co-authored a recent study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology that evaluates different ways India and China might address coal-fired power plants. The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Q. Why study India and China?

A. Whatever China and India do to reduce their mercury emissions will have the biggest impact on future global mercury levels. China is currently estimated to emit about a third of global emissions, and India is the second largest source at 7 percent. These emissions come from a variety of activities—mining, cement production, metal smelting—but coal combustion for industry and electricity generation is one of the biggest sources in these countries, and this source is expected to grow as economies develop.

Mercury from power plants travels worldwide, but is also deposited in ecosystems close to where it is emitted. That means countries have a strong domestic incentive to decrease mercury emissions. That is, the benefits of reduced pollution will be most strongly felt where the cuts are made, in addition to at the global level. So, a strict emissions standard for coal-fired power plants will not just benefit other countries, it would benefit India and China domestically.

Q. How do you measure the treaty’s benefits?

A. We measure benefits as avoided future mercury emissions. So we compare what would have been emitted under current pollution control technologies to what would be emitted under a few different ways of achieving the requirements outlined in the Convention, either through stricter technology requirements, or system-wide changes in the energy system. There are many technologies that can reduce mercury pollution, some already widely in use. We also model how mercury emissions travel through the atmosphere and enter ecosystems under these different scenarios.

The decisions that Convention negotiators make about the stringency of the technology requirements for coal power plants will make a big difference in avoided emissions. Convention negotiators want to strike a balance between requiring strong pollution control and allowing flexibility for different countries’ economic and technical capacities. Through analysis of existing studies, policies, and interviews with Convention negotiators, we identify technologies that India and China would be likely to adopt if they were given a lot of flexibility. We find that putting these technologies in place avoids about 12 percent of current day emissions. Requiring stronger, but technologically feasible pollution control technologies avoids another 8 percent—an amount equivalent to India’s total present-day emissions.

Q. So far you’ve covered how to avoid increases in mercury pollution. Is there any way to actually decrease emissions?

A. Emissions-control technologies can slow emissions growth, but alone, they likely won’t keep total mercury emissions from growing as China and India consume more coal to fuel their energy needs. The most effective way to lower mercury emissions below present-day levels would be combining control technologies with a transition away from coal as a power source. Under a global transition to low-carbon energy sources, we could see a decrease in emissions from the power sector. In India though, where power sector growth is anticipated to meet energy access needs, we could still see an increase in emissions in the future despite control policies.

It’s important to keep in mind that whatever mercury is released into the environment now doesn’t stay where it’s deposited. Mercury that is deposited in the environment can easily cycle through the rest of the ecosystem for decades, ending up in the air, water, and land. So, whatever decisions are made about how to reduce mercury emissions now will continue to affect us in the future.

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Read the study
Impacts of the Minamata Convention on mercury emissions and global deposition from coal-fired power generation in Asia

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Dip a beaker into any portion of the world’s oceans, and you’re likely to pull up a swirling mix of planktonic inhabitants. The oceans are teeming with more than 5,000 species of phytoplankton — microscopic plants in a kaleidoscope of shapes and sizes. Together, phytoplankton anchor the ocean’s food chain, supplying nutrients to everything from single-celled organisms on up to fish and whales.

Through photosynthesis, these tiny organisms supply more than half the world’s oxygen. When these plants die, they drift to the ocean bottom, or evaporate into the air as carbon — a process that generates more than half the world’s cycling carbon.

Phytoplankton play a fundamental role in regulating Earth’s climate. But figuring out exactly how these organisms contribute to climate change is a tricky undertaking, primarily because they are so diverse: Any given species may have a set of genetic or physical characteristics entirely different from any other, leading to different behaviors and habitats.

Such diversity can appear, at the outset, “bewilderingly complex,” says Mick Follows, an associate professor of oceanography in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). He says wrestling such diversity into global climate models is a futile task. But lumping phytoplankton into a big “black box” can be equally unenlightening.

Instead, Follows is working at an intermediary level, developing models of marine microbes at the cellular and community levels, to tease out fundamental processes that may be worked into global climate models.

“We’re starting to open up the black box of simple models,” Follows says. “There’s a balance: Do you want to understand every detail of the world, or do you want to be able to stand back and have a big picture view? Somehow you have to keep circling around it from both directions to develop that view.”

For more than 20 years, Follows has worked as a research scientist at MIT, answering such questions. He was granted tenure as an associate professor in 2013.

“I’m now interacting with undergraduates in a way I wasn’t doing in my little research hole, and I have a whole new appreciation for the broader aspects of MIT,” Follows says. “I feel much more connected to the Institute as a whole.”

An ocean of opportunity

While growing up, Follows didn’t expect he would end up in academia: School wasn’t a priority then. 

Follows grew up in a small town in the British region of East Anglia, and fondly remembers “riding bikes around the countryside, and living quite freely.”

His father was a typesetter at a local newspaper, and his mother worked in a men’s clothing shop. Both his parents have roots in Manchester — “a downtrodden, post-industrial place,” Follows says — where his mother was nevertheless able to win a scholarship to a good public school.

“She worked in shops, and in the field, but would be quoting Shakespeare,” Follows says of his mother’s path.

Follows was less inclined toward school, and ended up leaving high school. “I don’t think people think of me this way now, but I was a bit of a loudmouth,” Follows recalls.

He ultimately continued his studies at a community college, and spent a year at an art school — a fact that he’d rather overlook: “My work was rubbish — terrible!”

He then decided to pursue studies in math and physics at the University of Leeds. “I liked the organization [the subjects] brought to the world,” Follows says. While exploring graduate programs, he was particularly drawn to atmospheric science. Follows enrolled at the University of East Anglia, where he earned a master’s degree and a PhD in atmospheric sciences, studying atmospheric circulation of ozone. In his research, he began to see parallels between the atmosphere and the oceans.

“How ozone gets down from the stratosphere to troposphere, there’s an analogous process, flipped, when you think of how nutrients get from the subsurface to the surface of the ocean, and I started thinking more about the ocean,” Follows says.

In particular, Follows felt there was an opportunity to contribute to a then-emerging field. “While coupled circulation and chemistry models were established for the atmosphere, the same was just spinning up in the oceans,” Follows says. “It seemed the ocean world was a bit less crowded, and there were interesting problems.”

Follows credits his colleague John Marshall, now the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography, for providing his path to MIT. Follows was still at the University of East Anglia when he first met Marshall, then a postdoc at Imperial College London.

“Being as I was the local guy, I said, ‘I’ll show you a place where we can go get a meal,’” Follows recalls. “I sat next to John and said, ‘Are you looking forward to going to MIT?’ And he kind of frowned as he does, and said, ‘You want to go?’”

A few weeks later, Marshall called Follows about a postdoc position opening up at Imperial College. Follows accepted the position, and then after a year, received a similar call from Marshall, this time to MIT. In 1992, Follows arrived on campus as a postdoc, and stayed for the next 20 years as a research scientist.

From a black box to the real world

At MIT, Follows has devoted his research to understanding the biological processes of phytoplankton and other microbes that contribute to the Earth’s carbon cycle. Initially, though, every microbe seemed to blur together.

He eventually teamed up with Sallie “Penny” Chisholm, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor in Environmental Studies at MIT, who discovered Prochlorococcus —the most abundant photosynthetic organism in the world. Chisholm was studying subpopulations of Prochlorococcus, and mapping individual communities in the ocean.

“Suddenly there was a beautiful system where organisms that are almost the same, but not quite, are taking different habitats, occupying different niches in the environment,” Follows says.

Chisholm’s data of diverse microbes stirred up an idea: What if the diversity in phytoplankton could be modeled based on natural selection? Could one predict the makeup of a microbial community, based on its inhabitants’ traits? It was a simple idea, and yet no one had attempted to realize it in global models.

Follows and his group developed a model — essentially a virtual ocean environment — in which a realistic set of microorganisms with diverse traits can interact and compete. The model determines which traits are the fittest phenotypes — the ones that will dominate in a given ocean community.

“I think that in the field, we had reached a bit of a stalemate, where you would just keep adding more parameters and tuning more knobs to fit the real world,” Follows says. “We turned around and said, ‘Let’s build a videogame — make an environment, throw some players in, ask how the system organizes itself, and acknowledge that in the real world, there is a huge diversity of organisms.’”

This radical thinking earned Follows a grant from the Moore Foundation in 2007, which he used to start the Darwin Project, a cross-campus collaboration between oceanographers, biogeochemists, and marine microbiologists at MIT to develop global ocean-circulation models built around fundamental microbial processes.

Follows is continuing to run the Darwin Project, and just recently became a member of SCOPE — the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology — a five-year project based at the University of Hawaii. He and his fellow researchers will measure and model ocean communities around Hawaii, which are thought to be representative of a large swath of the North Pacific. Their goal is similar to Follows’ original vision: to elucidate how such tiny organisms can have such huge climatic impacts.

“The climate system is incredibly tied up with life,” Follows says. “You can think of man in the same way as those first photosynthetic bacteria that changed the planet in a radical way, to a completely different set of requirements if you wanted to survive on that planet. Are we that thing now? Or are we a blip? It’s interesting to put it in perspective.”

“Sound climate policy makes for good politics.” In a nutshell, that was the message conveyed by a high-ranking delegation of government, civil society and business representatives from British Columbia, who discussed experiences with their province’s carbon tax at an Earth Day Colloquium organized on April 13, 2015 by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy (CEEPR). More than 200 participants convened in the Walker Memorial’s spacious Morss Hall to hear first-hand how British Columbia was able to introduce a carbon price, and what effects it has had on the local economy and the environment. Comments by MIT faculty and a local State Senator underscored the economic merits of carbon pricing and its prospects as a policy option for Massachusetts.

MIT Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart opened the event with a brief welcome address, handing over to Parliamentary Secretary for Energy Literacy and the Environment of British Columbia, Mike Bernier. In his keynote address, Bernier described the history, design and early impacts of his province’s carbon tax, which he praised for shifting costs from desirable to undesirable activities, namely from employment and investment to pollution. Because the tax is revenue-neutral, he explained, it has helped limit carbon emissions and fuel use while reducing individual and corporate income taxes, effectively boosting the British Columbian economy. “What we’ve been doing in British Columbia has not gone unnoticed”, Bernier noted, pointing to growing interest in his province’s experience with carbon pricing from the United States and elsewhere.

Moderating the event, MITEI Director Robert Armstrong introduced the remaining panelists and invited each to address a series of detailed questions about the British Columbian experience. Merran Smith, Director of Clean Energy Canada, began by reflecting on the political context at the time the carbon tax was introduced in 2008. Widespread public demand for climate action, coupled with bold leadership from the province’s then-Premier Gordon Campbell, were among the factors Smith credited with successful passage of the necessary legislation.

Susanna Laaksonen-Craig, Head of the Climate Action Secretariat in the British Columbia Ministry of Environment, provided further detail on the technical design and implementation of the carbon tax. In her remarks, she reminded the audience that the tax had been lauded as a “textbook example of a carbon tax” by former MIT professor and statesman George P. Shultz.

Speaking on behalf of the private sector, Ross Beaty, Founder and Chairman of the Pan American Silver Corporation and Executive Chairman of Alterra Power Corporation, conceded that companies usually oppose new taxes. Still, so Beaty, corporate leaders increasingly acknowledge the need for climate action, and British Columbia’s local economy, in particular, has seen far-reaching impacts from climate change. Enlightened companies were thus ready to embrace political leadership when the carbon tax was introduced, quickly seeking ways to innovate and reduce compliance costs under the stable policy framework it offered.

Christopher Knittel, the William Barton Rogers Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, commented on the carbon tax from an economist’s point of view. Despite almost universal agreement among economists on the merits of carbon pricing, he noted that few jurisdictions have decided to implement this policy option. On the contrary, the United States has recently seen a resurgence of rigid performance standards, which not only tend to impose higher cost than the externalities they avoid, but also have unintended consequence such as rebound effects. By contrast, he argued, a carbon price has positive spillover effects, such as revenue generation to reduce other taxes.

Drawing the discussion to a more local context, Massachusetts State Senator Michael Barrett of the 3rd Middlesex District answered questions on his own bill aimed at introducing a fee on carbon-based fuels in Massachusetts. All the revenue, he explained, would return to taxpayers by way of rebates, distributed in such a way that low-income households pay less for pollution than high-income households. Because of its revenue neutrality, moreover, the fee – so Barrett – does not fit the legal definition of a tax, allowing state officials who have pledged to oppose new taxes to support his bill.

An engaged discussion with the audience ensued, reflecting interest in carbon taxation as a policy option for Massachusetts and the U.S., and leading to detailed questions to the panel about policy design, impacts and ways to avoid hardship for different segments of society. Secretary Bernier’s parting advice to Senator Barrett and the largely Massachusetts-based audience was to “take the politics out of carbon pricing.” But once introduced, he added, it will limit pollution without harming the economy.

A video of the full event can be viewed here.

	Photo: Christopher Harting

by Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Joint Program researchers Prof. Valerie Karplus and Prof. Noelle Selin receive grants from from the Environmental Solutions Initiative to examine how current efforts to reduce coal use in China affect toxic air pollution across Asia.
 
How can sustainable consumption in U.S. cities be fostered? Can the ocean floor be mined in an ecologically benign way? What are the health risks associated with the mining of rare metals used in energy-efficient products like photovoltaic devices? And how can truly promising environmental solutions have a better chance of becoming real economic policies?

These are some of the complex questions that researchers at MIT will now be able to tackle, with support from the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI). The initiative was established last May to inspire solutions to major environmental problems through collaborative partnership.

In response to a call for research proposals, the ESI received 59 submissions. In March, the initiative awarded seed grants of up to $200,000 to nine research groups over the next two years.

ESI director Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says the seed grants have jumpstarted new collaborations among a variety of disciplines across campus.

“I was really pleased that so many people reached out to colleagues and looked at new collaborations, which was exactly what we were hoping would occur as a result of this process,” Solomon says. “There’s a lot of new thinking here. … I’m really pleased that people began those conversations. I think they’re just going to continue to grow and blossom as this initiative moves forward.”

The nine winning proposals fell into four main themes: sustainability; metals and mining; healthy cities; and climate/risk/mitigation.

Sustainability

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, humans have consumed more material and natural resources in the past 50 years than in the entire previous history of human existence. To curb consumption, the environmental community has encouraged the practice of sustainable consumption, using the mantra: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”

But how are U.S. cities — hubs of materialism and consumption — actually practicing sustainable consumption? A group of urban planners, architects, and historians led by Judith Layzer, a professor of environmental policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, will carry out a survey of 285 municipalities to explore the degree to which sustainable consumption goals have been adopted by local governments. The group wrote in its proposal that it hopes the survey will serve as a “valuable resource for cities that aspire to move toward sustainable consumption.”

Finding solutions to major environmental problems often involves input from both technology and policy experts — but it can be frustrating for both parties when they find that reasonable solutions can be difficult to put into practice. A classic example is the shared resource, such as a groundwater aquifer, that is overused to the point where it fails to benefit all parties. A group of engineers and economists, led by Dennis McLaughlin, the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Parag Pathak, an associate professor of economics, will examine the behaviors that drive competition for natural resources using game theory, a framework that has been used to analyze cooperative behavior in economics.

“There is a gap between the promise of game theory and the continuing difficulty of designing workable policy solutions to environmental issues,” the team wrote in its grant proposal. “The ESI seed grant program gives us a chance to narrow these gaps, so that the environmental solutions we propose as a community have a better chance of being implemented as real policies.”

Metals and mining

Metals and mining products are increasingly used to support development. For example, they are essential to building wind turbines, solar panels, photovoltaic devices, and lithium-ion batteries.

But as societies depend more on rare metals for products, what impact will rising demand have on the environment? A group of engineers, led by Antoine Allanore, the Thomas B. King Assistant Professor in Metallurgy, and Alan Hatton, the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering Practice, plans to launch a metals and mining initiative at MIT. As part of the project, the team will organize several symposia on campus that will connect industry stakeholders with MIT researchers to explore issues of sustainable mining.

Rare metals like indium and lanthanide are increasingly mined for use in high-efficiency photovoltaic devices, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and batteries for hybrid cars. The effects of these metals on the environment and human health are unknown. A team of engineers led by John Essigmann, the William R. and Betsy P. Leitch Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering; Bevin Engelward, a professor of biological engineering; and Harold Hemond, the William E. Leonhard Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will combine techniques in geochemistry and cell and molecular toxicology to assess the adverse effects of rare metals in the environment, and their potential impact on human health. Such an assessment, the team wrote in its proposal, should occur before new substances are introduced widely in the environment: “History provides numerous cautionary examples of the great economic and societal costs incurred when knowledge lags behind the deployment of new products.”

Deep below the ocean floor, there exist vast resources of gold, copper, platinum, and other rare metals — resources that are increasingly in demand for use in electronics and energy-efficient products. The world’s first deep-sea mining operation, scheduled to commence in 2017, will dig beneath the Bismarck Sea, off Papua New Guinea, for minerals. But scientists are concerned that mining operations may create currents that carry pollutants up from the deep sea, potentially poisoning marine species and the humans that consume them.

A team led by Thomas Peacock and Pierre Lermusiaux, both associate professors of mechanical engineering, and Glenn Flierl, a professor of oceanography, will develop a detailed ocean model to identify key circulation patterns in the region and determine the biological impacts of the mining operations. The team says the modeling tools developed through this effort “can be applied to any proposed location for the growing field of deep-sea mining.”

Healthy cities

China has some of the world’s worst air pollution, as well as half its mercury emissions, due to its rising use of coal. In the last few years, the country has adopted policies to curb coal use and reduce air pollution. It is unclear, however, whether these measures will be consistent with the air-quality improvements set by newer policies.

A team of economists, engineers, and atmospheric chemists led by Valerie Karplus, an assistant professor of global economics and management, and Noelle Selin, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor in the Engineering Systems Division and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, will examine how current efforts to reduce coal use in China affect toxic air pollution across Asia. The team will also estimate changes in coal demand throughout Asia, as China’s own demand for coal falls. The team’s proposal states: “Our systems approach enables us to fully evaluate and identify effective efforts to address regional air quality, taking into account both the complexity of economic interactions and atmospheric chemical behavior.”

Detailed measurements of air quality, particularly in urban environments, will ultimately help to reduce populations’ exposure to air pollutants. In recent years, advances in sensor technology have offered the promise of sensitive, distributed, urban air-quality networks, although few actually exist. A group of urban planners, atmospheric chemists, and civil engineers plans to address the need for air-quality networks, using “big data.” The team plans to examine air-quality measurements around the MIT campus and in Beijing, and apply advanced data-analysis techniques to gain “quantitative insight” into pollution sources.

This project, the team says, “would represent the first application of machine-learning tools to environmental sensors.” The work will be led by Marta Gonzalez, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering; Colette Heald, the Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor in Contemporary Technology; Jesse Kroll, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Jinhua Zhao, the Edward H. and Joyce Linde Professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

Climate/risk/mitigation

Tropical peatlands, swamp forests found mostly in Southeast Asia, are thought to be vast carbon sinks, containing up to 70 billion tons of carbon — about 3 percent of the world’s soil carbon. Over the last 25 years, peatland forests have been cut and drained so that the underlying peat acts not as a sink, but a source, emitting enormous stores of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

Policymakers and researchers suggest that controlling these emissions would be a cost-effective way to reduce the world’s total greenhouse-gas emissions. But there’s little knowledge about the physical and biological processes within peatlands that control carbon and methane fluxes. A group of engineers and atmospheric scientists will study soil processes in Brunei, on the island of Borneo, to characterize the flow of carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere. The researchers ultimately hope to apply their results to strategies for controlling greenhouse gas emissions. The group includes Charles Harvey, Benjamin Kocar, and Martin Polz of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Shuhei Ono and Roger Summons of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

While two-thirds of greenhouse-gas-induced warming is due to carbon dioxide, other gases, such as methane and halogen-containing gases, contribute significantly to climate change. In the near future, these emissions may increase as a fraction of total greenhouse-gas emissions, as policies to reduce carbon dioxide bear results. As countries transition from coal to natural gas for electricity, more methane may escape into the atmosphere through leaks in natural-gas pipelines.

A team led by Jessika Trancik, the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Assistant Professor in Energy Studies, and Francis O’Sullivan, director of research and analytics at the MIT Energy Initiative, will develop metrics to compare climate impacts of non-carbon dioxide emissions, such as methane. The researchers will use the metrics to identify ways to reduce these emissions, particularly those of methane through the natural-gas supply chain. The team will use these results to inform current U.S. policy, including a new federal initiative to reduce methane. “Climate change mitigation is a multi-gas problem,” the researchers wrote in their grant proposal. “This work will inform important policy decisions that are slated to be made in the next few years.”

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office

Panelists at an MIT discussion yesterday on how to improve communication about climate change said that while serious obstacles remain in making the issues and potential solutions clear to the public and political leaders, there is some cause for optimism, especially when the messages focus on readily available solutions.

The discussion, part of the MIT Conversation on Climate Change, was moderated by John Durant, director of the MIT Museum, and introduced by Nate Nickerson, MIT’s vice president for communications. The event — titled “Getting Through on Global Warming: How to Rewire Climate Change Communication” — featured journalists, scientists, and policy experts who deal with the issue of climate change. Durant opened the session by asking, given the often-polarizing nature of the subject, “how the MIT community … can do a better job of contributing to the discussion.”

Chris Mooney, an environmental reporter at the Washington Post, pointed out that rhetoric can quickly give way to action when people are confronted by serious impacts in their own backyards. For example, in Florida, four southern counties most affected by rising sea levels and storm surges are proceeding with serious countermeasures.

In that part of Florida, Mooney said, “the climate debate is not particularly partisan”:  People see the need for action to protect vulnerable coastal lands, and have focused on specific solutions — such as installing one-way valves in storm drains to prevent storm surges from backing up into homes.

Such contrasts between rhetoric and action provide a ray of hope, panelists said. Drezen Prelec, the Digital Equipment Corp. Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, said that sudden and unexpected shifts in public opinion — on issues such as smoking and gay marriage — show that rapid changes are possible, even in the face of strong resistance from political leaders.

Judith Layzer, a professor of environmental policy in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, said that politicians will begin to take action on issues such as limiting greenhouse-gas emissions when it becomes clear that their constituents take the issue seriously enough to vote accordingly. “We only will make progress if we let them know we will vote them out of office,” she said.

Tom Levenson, a professor of science writing and head of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, said that a key to getting people to internalize the importance of climate change is through memorable storytelling. “If you wish to communicate with human beings in ways that they will remember, you need a story,” he said.

Susan Hassol, director of the nonprofit group Climate Communication, said that research has shown that when Republicans who had resisted climate change are presented with potential solutions based on free-market mechanisms, they are three times more likely to accept those rather than solutions based on government regulations or taxes.

“We all want clean air and water and a better world for our kids,” she added — so it’s important to stress “how climate change is affecting these things.”

Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, whose research has shown the potential for stronger hurricanes as a result of climate change, said that he has made a particular effort “not to preach to the converted, but to go to the heart of skepticism.”

Emanuel said he has spoken to numerous groups known for their opposition to measures to curb greenhouse gases, and for skepticism about the human influence on climate — including conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. He believes that such groups’ resistance has to do with their sense of possible solutions involving government actions.

“They have a very narrow perception of what the range of possible solutions is,” Emanuel said. “Once they understand there are solutions out there that they can embrace, then suddenly they start to accept the science.”

These audiences are much more receptive when presented with a panoply of possible actions, Emanuel added, including ones based on market forces, entrepreneurship, and national competitiveness. “There are a lot of things we ought to be embracing that are worth doing anyway,” he said, such as developing low-carbon energy technology that the U.S. might “sell to other countries, instead of buying it from them.”

Such technologies, Emanuel said, could include next-generation nuclear reactors and carbon-capture systems that could allow fossil-fuel power plants to operate with drastically reduced emissions.  

Hassol summed up lessons she has learned from her attempts to communicate about climate change: “We need to stop trying to give science lessons, and talk about the solutions. The sweet spot is on the solution side.”

When it comes to solutions, panelists said, MIT is especially well positioned to take a leadership role. Among many proposals that have been made through MIT’s “Idea Bank” on climate change, the panel discussed the possibility of opening an MIT facility in Washington to educate political leaders and their staffs on climate and energy topics. Another suggestion was the creation of a rapid-response team of impartial experts who could quickly respond to media reports that contain misleading or incorrect information.

Solomon Asaba | The New Times

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Centre for Global Change Science are in advanced stages to start a climate observatory centre in Rwanda, next year, with an aim of collecting atmospheric observations from the slopes of Mt. Karisimbi, a volcano located in the northwest of Rwanda. The project is spearheaded by Prof. Ron Prinn, a professor of atmospheric science, department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the university. The New Times Solomon Asaba had an interview with him.

Excerpts.

Whom are you collaborating with to start this observatory and how much has been achieved so far?

The observatory is a partnership between the Government of Rwanda and the MIT Centre for Global Change Science. We already have in place an interim observatory that has been placed on Mt. Mugogo and is operated mainly by Rwandans.

What kind of information will be obtained at the observatory and who will have access to its final site?

The observatory will measure the composition of air coming from East and South Africa as well as the Middle East and India.

The final site for the observatory is the summit of Mt. Karisimbi. When the Cable Car for ecotourism is complete, all scientists will be in position to access this summit.

How will Rwandans benefit from this kind of modern facility?

If the observatory is successful, it will help educate Rwandans interested in atmospheric science. It will join the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), a global network measuring greenhouse gases and other climate driving agents. Rwandans are already on their way to running the observatory.

Read the full article at the New Times.

Jessica Fujimori | MIT News correspondent

On Tuesday, March 31, MIT students, faculty, staff, and administrators will gather for an interactive panel discussion about challenges in communication around climate change.

The event, titled “Getting Through on Global Warming: How to Rewire Climate Change Communication,” will be held from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in Room E51-115, and will be webcast live. It is the third of four open-forum spring events that are part of the MIT Climate Change Conversation, and the first to focus specifically on communication.

“It has become clear that a major bottleneck in the current inability to make progress in attacking climate change has to do with communication,” says Roman Stocker, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and chair of the Committee on the MIT Climate Change Conversation. “The input we obtained from the MIT community identified this topic as a priority and highlighted the need for better communication at multiple levels.”

Tuesday’s conversation will center on perceptions about climate change, how the subject is discussed, and how changes to the way it’s discussed could inspire action.

“There’s a consensus that this is a serious issue, that the climate change threat is significant, but there’s a lot of inattention, or apathy, or division around this topic in general,” says Anne Slinn, the executive director for research at the MIT Center for Global Change Science and a member of the Committee on the MIT Climate Change Conversation. “Really what we’re looking at is: What can MIT as an institution do? How can we advance the level of discussion around this topic, locally and nationwide?”

The event will feature a panel discussion followed by a discussion with the audience, wherein participants can ask questions of panelists and give input via email or text message.

Panelists at the Tuesday event will include MIT professors Kerry Emanuel (Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences), Judy Layzer (Department of Urban Studies and Planning), Tom Levenson (Comparative Media Studies / Writing), and Drazen Prelec (MIT Sloan School of Management). Joining the conversation from outside the Institute are Chris Mooney, a journalist for who writes about global warming for the Washington Post, and Susan Hassol, director of the organization Climate Communication, which works with scientists and journalists to make climate science more accessible to the public. The discussion will be moderated by John Durant, director of the MIT Museum.

The committee encourages community members to submit questions and topics of discussion prior to the event by emailing climatechange@mit.edu. Participants can also send questions and comments via email and text message during the event.

From Tuesday’s event, the committee hopes that attendees leave with “an awareness, but also hope, in the sense that there is a way around the issue: If we recognize the problem, we can come up with solutions,” Slinn says. “Some [solutions] might be as easy as saying things in different ways — if we focus on things we have in common, as opposed to what pushes us apart.”