Environmentus Absconditus
It is curious -- and a bit alarming -- how absent discussion of environmental issues has been from this presidential campaign. Although the environment is arguably a global (and, thus, a foreign policy) issue, I think most Americans tend to view it as part of "domestic" policy, reserving the foreign-policy descriptor for questions of warfare and statecraft. Yet at last night's debate, ostensibly focused though it was on domestic issues, barely a word was whispered about environmental policy -- even as we face some of the profoundest choices on this front in human history.
Coincidentally, a few hours before the debate, I attended a very brief but instructive talk on one corner of the climate-science discourse, where some issues of demonstrable political importance did come up. One of the scientists in the spotlight presented highlights of some recently published research on long-term patterns of drought in the area that's now the western United States. Looking at tree-ring data over the past 1,200 years, the work documented a widespread "megadrought" in this area from A.D. 900 to A.D. 1300, during the so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP) -- followed by generally moist conditions until the late 1990s, when the current western U.S. drought began. This latter drought, though of comparatively short duration and low severity thus far relative to those of the MWP, has been the severest seen in this area in some time, and represents a departure from the comparatively moist conditions that have prevailed there since the end of the MWP.
This talk was follwed by remarks from a well-known climate modeler, who pointed out that the drought in the western U.S. during the MWP could be plausibly modeled as the result of changes in the Pacific Ocean El Niño/La Niña pattern as a result of higher temperatures (probably due to the long-term solar cycle during the MWP). And, he noted, if the current global warming has the same effect on those patterns as may have been seen in the MWP, the warming could be shifting the western U.S. into a period of sustained long-term aridity. This has a number of interesting political implications, as the climate modeler noted in informal conversation afterward. For one, most of the current water-sharing and water-rights agreements in the American Southwest were forged in the early to middle 20th century -- which, according to the long-term tree ring record, was a period of comparative moisture in the region. Given the interstate squabbling and bad feelings over water that has increasingly characterized the region, one can only imagine the consequences of a warming-induced shift into long-term drought for this area of domestic policy.
Considerations like these take on some extra resonance in light of the unprecedented rise in carbon dioxide, one of the most important greenhouse gases, that scientists have documented over the past two years. Whereas the "background" growth rate of carbon dioxide has been fairly steady over the past several decades, at 1.5 parts per million (ppm) per year, the rate suddenly accelerated to more than 2 ppm per year in 2002 and 2003. It is always dangerous to extrapolate climate trends from a few years' data, of course, and some researchers have pointed out that the rise could be due to transient factors such as an increased number of Northern Hemisphere forest fires, which in turn might have reduced the global carbon sink. But others have warned darkly that, at worst, the higher CO2 levels could be the first signs that the carbon sink itself is getting saturated -- which would pave the way for the much-feared "runaway greenhouse effect."
Which, of course, brings us back to politics, and the shameful failure of the U.S. to honor the Kyoto protocol. Additional years of monitoring will be necessary before we know whether the acceleration in CO2 levels is merely a two-year anomaly or something more foreboding. But if it's the latter, America's lack on leadership on this issue will deserve to be seen as one of the most abysmal global policy and domestic policy failures in our country's history.
And yet it's apparently not an election issue. Amazing.
. . .
Carve out your place in history! Enter the Dump Bush Pumpkin Carving Contest.
Coincidentally, a few hours before the debate, I attended a very brief but instructive talk on one corner of the climate-science discourse, where some issues of demonstrable political importance did come up. One of the scientists in the spotlight presented highlights of some recently published research on long-term patterns of drought in the area that's now the western United States. Looking at tree-ring data over the past 1,200 years, the work documented a widespread "megadrought" in this area from A.D. 900 to A.D. 1300, during the so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP) -- followed by generally moist conditions until the late 1990s, when the current western U.S. drought began. This latter drought, though of comparatively short duration and low severity thus far relative to those of the MWP, has been the severest seen in this area in some time, and represents a departure from the comparatively moist conditions that have prevailed there since the end of the MWP.
This talk was follwed by remarks from a well-known climate modeler, who pointed out that the drought in the western U.S. during the MWP could be plausibly modeled as the result of changes in the Pacific Ocean El Niño/La Niña pattern as a result of higher temperatures (probably due to the long-term solar cycle during the MWP). And, he noted, if the current global warming has the same effect on those patterns as may have been seen in the MWP, the warming could be shifting the western U.S. into a period of sustained long-term aridity. This has a number of interesting political implications, as the climate modeler noted in informal conversation afterward. For one, most of the current water-sharing and water-rights agreements in the American Southwest were forged in the early to middle 20th century -- which, according to the long-term tree ring record, was a period of comparative moisture in the region. Given the interstate squabbling and bad feelings over water that has increasingly characterized the region, one can only imagine the consequences of a warming-induced shift into long-term drought for this area of domestic policy.
Considerations like these take on some extra resonance in light of the unprecedented rise in carbon dioxide, one of the most important greenhouse gases, that scientists have documented over the past two years. Whereas the "background" growth rate of carbon dioxide has been fairly steady over the past several decades, at 1.5 parts per million (ppm) per year, the rate suddenly accelerated to more than 2 ppm per year in 2002 and 2003. It is always dangerous to extrapolate climate trends from a few years' data, of course, and some researchers have pointed out that the rise could be due to transient factors such as an increased number of Northern Hemisphere forest fires, which in turn might have reduced the global carbon sink. But others have warned darkly that, at worst, the higher CO2 levels could be the first signs that the carbon sink itself is getting saturated -- which would pave the way for the much-feared "runaway greenhouse effect."
Which, of course, brings us back to politics, and the shameful failure of the U.S. to honor the Kyoto protocol. Additional years of monitoring will be necessary before we know whether the acceleration in CO2 levels is merely a two-year anomaly or something more foreboding. But if it's the latter, America's lack on leadership on this issue will deserve to be seen as one of the most abysmal global policy and domestic policy failures in our country's history.
And yet it's apparently not an election issue. Amazing.
. . .
Carve out your place in history! Enter the Dump Bush Pumpkin Carving Contest.
posted by ahab at 8:24 AM
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