Tag Archives: Seth Borenstein

Climate change, coffee and chocolate

Posted: March 18th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Last week I wrote about climate change and water, which are pretty basic issues, but this week, as noted above, it’s time to get our heads around the impacts of climate change that could really hit home with ordinary folks – the rising prices of chocolate and coffee.

Reese Halter, an Australian born environmentalist, has an article on The Huffington Post website that looks at yet more recent evidence of the accelerating speed of climate change and its impact on what have become for Americans commodities so integral to everyday life that few would want to even think about living without them.

Halter begins with a reference to an Associated Press story with yet more unsettling news about rising carbon emissions from the National Oceanic and Atmoshperic Administration. A carbon monitoring station near a volcano in Mauna Loa, Hawaii — far from any major greenhouse gas spewers — found carbon dioxide levels have jumped by 2.67 parts per million since 2011 to total just under 395 parts per million.

That’s the second highest rise in carbon emissions since 1959, which is when record keeping began, AP journalist Seth Borenstein reported. The culprits, he said, are coal-burning plants in the developing world.

Only 1998 had a bigger annual increase in carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas from human activity. That year, 2.93 parts per million of CO2 was added. From 2000 to 2010, the world averaged a yearly rise of just under 2 parts per million. Levels rose by less than 1 part per million in the 1960s.

I should also add here that many scientists have said that 350 parts per million is the upper limit for carbon dioxide the earth can tolerate without dramatic climate change.

The news gets worse. Not only are we pouring more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but plants and the world’s oceans, our natural carbon storage units, last year absorbed less CO2 than they normally would have, according to John Reilly, co-director of Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.   Plant and ocean absorption of carbon varies naturally year to year.

But, the AP article notes, carbon dioxide rates in the atmosphere are now rising faster than the worst-case scenarios climate scientists typically use for their simulations and reports.

So, what does this mean for our morning lattes and afternoon or evening chocolate fix?

“Coffee beans are the second most globally traded commodity next to oil,” Halter writes.

Higher temperatures, longer droughts and more intense rainfalls have brought coffee producers around the globe more resilient pests, i.e. coffee berry borer, and higher incidences of plant disease, i.e. coffee rust. Furthermore, intense water stress associated with vicious droughts in southern Sudan are driving wild coffee plants to extinction, now predicted to occur by 2020.

Maxwell House, Yuban and Folgers all increased their coffee prices by 25 percent between 2010 and 2011, while Starbucks upped its coffee prices by almost 20 percent in 2011.

The story is the same for chocolate, Halter said.

West Africa produces more than 40 percent of the world’s cocoa. In the past decade, droughts around the globe have caused the price of cocoa to double.

Rising carbon dioxide concentrations could mean ever-higher temperatures and ongoin drought across the cacao-producing regions of Africa, putting thousands of small-scale growers out of business and pushing chocolate prices to new, luxury-commodity highs.

How quickly can we cold-turkey off fossil fuels? Grand Rapids, Mich. has set itself the goal of getting 100 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020. In Germany, the deadline for 100 percent renewable power is 2050.

Iceland already gets all of its electricity from renewable sources, either hydropower or geothermal.

California will require new homes to be carbon neutral, or net zero, by 2020 and new commercial buildings by 2030.

It isn’t that we can’t. The evidence is stacking up that we are past the tipping point where climate change can be stopped or managed.

High gas prices haven’t worked; super storms and droughts aren’t making much of an impression.

Maybe if chocolate and coffee prices go off the charts, disgruntled and caffeine-tweaked American voters will demand their lawmakers find the political will to tackle climate change and set an aggressive national renewable energy agenda.

 

The $64,000 question: Is climate change causing extreme weather?

Posted: July 10th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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With temperatures hitting triple digits across the country, backed up by unprecedented storms like the one that hit the East Coast last month — my 91-year-old father in Bethesda lost power and spent a few days in hotels, when he wasn’t volunteering for the Red Cross, helping to set up cooling centers — the question on many people’s minds is whether and to what extent our increasingly extreme weather can be linked to climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

And, in articles appearing on a range of websites, the answers range from cautious — we need more research — to unqualified.

In an article on the Environmental Protection website – not to be confused with the EPA — Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist at the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison acknowledges the extreme weather but says further study is needed to see if it’s really outside of normal variations.

But he says heat waves like the current one will become more common on a warmer planet as we continue to add greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels.
 
“I think it’s a harbinger of what’s to come under greenhouse warming,” says Vavrus. “Virtually all climate models simulate more intense and frequent heat waves as the climate warms, and most of the world has experienced increases in extreme heat during the past several decades.”

Just how unusual are the current heat spikes and other extreme weather events?

“For the last 40 years of global warming, there is nothing comparable in the instrumental record since about 1880,” said Jack Williams, director of the Nelson Institute Center. “To find comparable analogs for the amount of warming expected for this century under standard greenhouse gas emission scenarios, you have to go back to the climate changes accompanying the last deglaciation, about 20,000 years ago.”

Writing on The Washington Post website,  enviro-energy reporter Brad Plumer cites the the National Climatic Data Center’s “State of the Climate” report for June 2012.

The last 12 months in the mainland United States, it notes, were the warmest on record. What’s notable, however, is that every single one of the last 13 months were in the top third for their historical distribution (i.e., April 2012 was in the top third for warmest Aprils, etc).

“The odds of this occurring randomly,” notes NCDC, “is 1 in 1,594,323.”

The National Climatic Data Center says the past 12 months in the continental United States are the warmest on record.

 Plumer also cites a recent article by Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein, who talked with a dozen climate scientists on what’s going on. The verdict, as summarized in the article’s title, is ”This US summer is ‘what global warming looks like’”

“What we’re seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like,” said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. “It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters.”

The summer heat wave in the Coachella Valley may not have broken any records yet, but it’s still worrisome given concerns about power supplies in the wake of the ongoing closure of the San Onofre nuclear power plant near San Clemente, which I wrote about last month.

So for those who want to monitor how the grid is doing, the California Independent System Operator, aka CAISO, has daily supply and demand figures on its website.

Right now we’re staying ahead of the curve, but usage is going up with the heat. Today’s forecast peak demand is 41,930 megawatts, while tomorrow’s is intended to shoot up to 43,797 megawatts.  Peak supplies, more than 50,000 megawatts, are still well ahead of demand.

Southern California Edison also has a Outage Center with an interactive map where you can see who’s lost power and the status of repairs. As I type, we have an isolated outage in Rancho Mirage, affecting one person.

But the really big, unanswered question behind all the articles and information, is how much longer are law-makers in Washington, D.C. going to sit around playing politics with a national plan for climate change, reducing greenhouse emissions and promoting renewable energy?

Extreme weather is a signal that the world is approaching a tipping point where even more radical and swift climate change could overtake us. The problem, of course, is that we probably won’t know if we’ve tipped until it’s too late.