The Natural Resources Defense Council released a report in March called Fever Pitch that seems to indicate that we might find ourselves vulnerable to Dengue Fever, a disease transmitted by mosquitoes that was heretofore only known in the tropics.

As temperatures rise, the potential for transmission of this dangerous disease may increase in vulnerable parts of the United States as warmer temperatures and changing rainfall conditions expand both the area suitable for the mosquito vectors and the length of the transmission season. An estimated 173.5 million Americans live in counties with one or both of the mosquito species that can transmit dengue fever.

Dengue Fever causes severe headache, muscle and joint pains, fever, and a rash, but is not usually fatal for healthy adults. The report notes that “currently, dengue fever and its complications cause an estimated 50 to 100 million infections, a half-million hospitalizations, and 22,000 deaths annually in more than 100 countries, including parts of South America, Central America, the Caribbean, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa.”

The report is largely conjecture; most of the cases reported in the US are from travelers who have recently returned from a trip to the tropics, but global warming is making the US more fertile territory for spread of the disease: “specific types of mosquitoes that can transmit dengue fever have become established in a swath of at least 28 states and the District of Columbia, and across the south and mid-Atlantic regions, creating a recipe for local transmission of the disease in the United States.”

Yet another reason to be worried about climate change. Why not listen to a few tracks from the fantastic band Dengue Fever to get your mind off things?

There has been a lot of vocal complaining from the right-wing, climate denialists about some small errors and inconsistencies in the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. Scant attention has been given to significant underestimates of some impacts in the 2007 report. You don’t have to delve far into the literature on sea level rise to find that many experts find the IPCC’s estimate of 20 – 60 cm rise by centuries end to be much too low.

This article at the website Real Climate titled Sealevelgate neatly summarizes the controversy. It is by Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at the University of Potsdam in Germany.

Let me propose this maxim:

For every overstatement of man’s impact on the earth’s climate by the IPCC, there is an equal and opposite understatement of some other impact.

The Daily Press, a newspaper in Newport News, Virginia, interviewed John Rummel, director of the Institute for Coastal Science and Policy at East Carolina University, who described sea-level rise and growing coastal populations as a “unique train wreck.”

Rummel describes the escalating costs of repairing or replacing storm damaged infrastructure in the Outer Banks, a 200-mile (320-km) long string of narrow barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina, is escalating. Why do communities spend millions to rebuild, when they must know another disaster is not only inevitable, but becomes more likely each year? “There is too much money invested in coastal properties, which are an important source of tax revenue, to retreat from them, he said.” He goes on to suggest, “localities should consider low-impact uses, such as eco-tourism, as opposed to heavy infrastructure.”

A couple more choice quotes from the article:

“It’s going to take a couple of disasters to make people think about this.”

“We can’t stop the sea but we can have it work for us.”

(Via the Sea Level Rise Foundation Google Group)

Oceans Getting More Acidic

A recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters, based on measurements in 1991 and 2006, shows that the ocean is becoming more acidic due to rising CO₂ in the atmosphere. This is very bad news for, well, everyone that cares about life on earth. I met Ken Caldera, a scientist at Stanford, last year, and heard a presentation on ocean acidification which terrified me more than anything else I’ve heard or read about climate change.

Plankton fertilization may backfire

One of the solutions proposed to reduce atmospheric CO₂ levels is to capture some of it and store it deep in the ocean. In these so-called sequestration schemes, the seas swaths of the ocean surface are fertilized with iron, and vast quantities of carbon are absorbed by single-celled aquatic plants, which then sink to the bottom of the ocean where they will stay, theoretically, forever. The only problem: these schemes also produce poisons which spread through the food chain and kill wildlife.

I think this is brilliant. From a paper by James Titus, sea level rise program director at EPA:

Does the U.S. Government Realize that the Sea is Rising? How to Restructure Federal Programs so that Wetland and Beaches Survive (PDF, 68 pp., 1.6 MB) – Golden Gate University Law Review, Vol. 30, Number 4 (2000).

The National Academies Press is offering free PDF downloads of some of their recent publications, including one which should be of interest to those who are concerned about air quality and their community’s health: Global Sources of Local Pollution: An Assessment of Long-Range Transport of Key Air Pollutants to and from the United States.

The book looks at four pollutants in detail: ozone, mercury, particulate matter, and persistent organic pollutants, which includes a whole range of pesticides and industrial chemicals like DDT which have been banned in the US but are still in use around the world.

Pollutants from traffic, cooking stoves, and factories emitted half a world away can make the air we inhale today more hazardous for our health. The relative importance of this “imported” pollution is likely to increase, as emissions in developing countries grow, and air quality standards in industrial countries are tightened.

Among the things I learned: only about 10-20% of the mercury deposition in my area is from North American emissions. The rest, presumably, are from Asia and Europe.

The authors recommend helping poor countries out of self-interest: “the United States should work with the international community to develop an integrated system for determining pollution sources and impacts and to design effective response strategies.”

Ultimately, these recommendations are weak. Doing more monitoring and modeling studies may help us to better understand the problem, but they are not likely to improve air quality or human health. The authors stop short of recommending foreign assistance to help developing countries wean themselves from these toxic chemicals.

There is also no mention of international treaties for their controls, like the one that phased out CFCs in the 1990s. I suppose this isn’t surprising coming from a group of scientists; they recommend more monitoring and modeling because it’s what they do best, and avoid the quagmires of policies and regulations. I think there is a compelling argument for us to help developing countries develop alternative energy sources, and reduce their consumption of fossil fuels like coal. Acting in enlightened self-interest, we would enjoy substantial co-benefits of reduced greenhouse gas emissions and better health.

In conclusion, this book is a an excellent summary of the science behind global air pollutants, but I wish that the authors had been more daring in crafting their recommendations.

There will be a lot of spin from the White House and others about how the unsurprising but disappointing failure in Copenhagen is a “meaningful agreement, a “step forward,” or a “continuation of the dialogue.”  Thank goodness for Friends of the Earth, who are not afraid to tell the truth:

Friends of the Earth U.S. Reaction: Sham Deal Requires Nothing, Accomplishes Nothing

Climate negotiations in Copenhagen have yielded a sham agreement with no real requirements for any countries. This is not a strong deal or a just one — it isn’t even a real one. It’s just repackaging old positions and pretending they’re new. The actions it suggests for the rich countries that caused the climate crisis are extraordinarily inadequate. This is a disastrous outcome for people around the world who face increasingly dire impacts from a destabilizing climate.

[...]

The devastation will extend to those of us who live in wealthy countries. If we cannot find a way to cooperate with others to produce a real agreement to solve this problem, climate change impacts will devastate the U.S. economy, undermine our security, and inflict irreparable harm on future generations.

The failure to produce anything meaningful in Copenhagen must serve as a wake up call to all who care about the future. It is a call to action. Corporate polluters and other special interests have such overwhelming influence that rich country governments are willing to agree only to fig leaf solutions. This is unacceptable, and it must change.

Recently, we created a Green Committee at work. Even though we are an environmental organization, we realized that we could be doing a better job at a few things. For example, why doesn’t the office have a green bin, even though the county has a composting program for green waste?

A few people in the office asked us to specifically look at carbon offsets, and whether we recommended purchasing them for air travel. The New York Times published an article on the subject last month, titled Paying More for Flights Eases Guilt, Not Emissions. Their conclusion:

Yahoo and the House of Representatives decided to stop buying offsets, deciding their money was better spent investing in energy efficiency improvements.

Here is a quick list of some of the available information and guidance on carbon offsets from a friend at Friends of the Earth:

• Clean Air Cool Planet was one of the first to come out with a Consumer’s Guide to Offsets. People still use it a lot, although it is getting dated.
• The Suzuki Foundation has a newer 2009 Carbon Offset Guide for the Canadian market, but which should be helpful for US groups too.
• My grad alma mater Tufts published research on carbon offsets in an April 2007 paper. It is a couple of years old now, but still informative. Mostly oriented towards air travel, the authors rate both carbon footprint calculators and offset programs.
• GreenAmerica has some helpful tips: don’t buy tree-planting offsets (too difficult to ensure permanent sequestration); or from exchanges like the Chicago Climate Exchange (puts your money into carbon commodities, rather than directly funding projects; DriveNeutral, in SF is one of those)
• For something really different, instead of donating money so that your carbon footprint can be “neutralized” tit-for-tat, you may consider donating money to grassroots groups working against fossil fuels. San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network has one of these non-offsets programs.

Here’s an alarming and important piece by George Monbiot, an environment journalist in the UK, published in the British newspaper The Guardian on November 20th. The Urgent Threat to World Peace is….Canada. He concludes, “The harm this country could do in the next two weeks will outweigh all the good it has done in a century.”

Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

This week, CARB, or the California Air Resources Board released a draft of the state’s cap and trade program to limit the emission of CO₂ from major polluters. From the original passage of California’s landmark global warming bill AB32 in 2005, cap and trade was intended as a centerpiece for reducing the state’s contribution to global warming. KQED’s Climate Watch has a few details, including some enviros’ disappointment that CARB has not spelled out some of the most pernicious details, including auctioning of allowances (who gets their existing level of pollution grandfathered in, and how much do polluters pay for the right to pollute), offsets (can I pay for a re-forestation project in Borneo instead of making actual changes at my plant?), and markets (are we seriously thinking of allowing hedge funds to create new exotic financial instruments called “carbon derivatives”?).