Gaiawords

Global Warming - How can we be ignoring it?

2012-03-09T06:48:00.000-08:00

Here's this factoid from Harper's Index:
Percentage of Americans who believe in anthropomorphic global warming in 2001: 75%
Percentage in 2010: 44%

Here's the actual data (1880 - 2011):

The red line is the straight, linear trend line. Yep, temperature is going up!
The green line is the polynomial trend line. Not only is it going up, but its going up faster and faster.

It's not the heat...

2011-02-17T06:49:00.000-08:00

When most people think of Global Warming, they think "getting hotter." But that's not what we're going to notice first. Scientists have said for awhile now that the first thing we'll notice is extreme weather (fueled by the heat).

Thing is - it takes a lot of degrees of heat for us to notice it personally, but only a little extra heat for storm systems to take notice.

Weather followers have been noticing for years now that the hurricanes seem stronger and more frequent, the droughts longer and more intense, the forest fire season longer and more intense, 100-year floods occurring several times a decade, etc. etc. But there's always been the caveat: these events are local events, and you can't pin local weather events on a global phenomenon like global warming.

No longer.

Two (count 'em) new studies published in yesterday's issue of Nature - one of the planet's most prestigious science journals - does exactly that. In one study, the heavy flooding in the UK was studied and researchers showed that global warming was the only explanation the fit the data. In the second, the increase in rain intensity in the Northern Hemisphere was again shown to be explicable only in terms of global warming.

Global warming isn't a future problem. It's here.

Here's a link the the Nature article: [click]

Cancun made progress; so did global warming

2010-12-21T04:29:00.000-08:00

As Bill McKibben puts it in this eloquent post, physics and chemistry don't negotiate. Yeah, they made good "progress" in Cancun, but that doesn't mean that Global Warming gave an avuncular nod and said "Hey, you did such a good job, we'll just slow the process down for a decade or so and give your compromise time to work."

McKibben's contention is that we already live on a different planet ("Eaarth" - the title of his new book). Here's why:

"As of January 2008, our best climatologists gave us a number for how much carbon in the atmosphere is too much. At concentrations above 350 parts per million (ppm), a NASA team insisted, we can’t have a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” We’re already past that; we’re at 390 ppm. Which is why 2010 will be the warmest year on record, almost a degree Celsius above the planet’s natural average, according to federal researchers. Which is why the Arctic melted again this summer, and Russia caught fire, and Pakistan drowned."

Read the rest of his post here.

Dangerously Addicted

2010-12-13T06:55:00.000-08:00

Dangerously Addicted

Global Warming Models underestimate warming

2010-11-05T17:30:00.000-07:00

From New Scientist magazine:
NARWHALS packing temperature and depth gauges connected to satellite transmitters have revealed that climatology models used for the Baffin bay region - which links the Atlantic and Arctic oceans - underestimate winter ocean temperatures there by as much as 1 °C. The measurements show that earlier warming between Greenland and north-east Canada's Baffin Island has continued over the past decade.

The Arctic mammals, known as "sea unicorns" because of their single long tusks, have provided the best winter temperature measurements yet for this biologically important part of the Arctic Ocean. These add to a body of evidence showing that ocean temperatures around the world are rising.

The measurements also suggest that the layer of water, or isotherm, that shields sea ice from the warmer waters below is thinner than predicted by the climatology models, according to Kristin Laidre of the Polar Science Center at Washington University in Seattle and colleagues. A thinner isotherm allows faster turnover of warmer waters from below, making the ice melt faster (Journal of Geophysical Research, DOI: 10.1029/2009JC005820).
Read the article here: Arctic narwhals reveal climate-model errors - environment - 29 October 2010 - New Scientist

Sea otters worth $700 million in carbon credits

2010-07-12T05:22:00.001-07:00

Here's an excellent article on working WITH Nature to turn around global warming, and undoing some unintended consequences of our past actions!

Sea otters worth $700 million in carbon credits - environment - 07 July 2010 - New Scientist

US not a leader of the green world

2010-07-05T09:09:00.000-07:00

Valerie Jaffee of NRDC has filed a post that laments the distance between our United States and the rest of the industrial world in promoting green energy. Everyone and their sister understands that this is the growth industry of the present (NOT the future) - and that even if we didn't believe in global warming, hey! we DO believe in capitalism. So why aren't we leading the charge?

A great (and non-political) read - catch it here!

Scoring a Goal for Clean Energy

2010-07-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

Scoring a Goal for Clean Energy

Another tipping point, and food vs. fuel

2009-08-31T06:37:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think it's the "either-or" thinking that's going to do us in.

New Scientist magazine cites research by Schlenker and Roberts of North Carolina State University that suggests that yields of three crucial crops (maize, cotton, and soybeans) in the United States would fall catastrophically by the end of the century if we don't cut greenhouse emissions.

Maize yeilds, for example, would plummet 82% if nothing changes, and would still drop by 30-45% even if we cut our emissions by half.

In the same article, David Pimentel of Cornell is quoted as saying that curbing biofuel production would solve hunger and high food prices faster than reducing greenhouse gas emissions. SO: accept lower yields and make it up in volume??

Of course, the answer is both: we need to make biofuels that don't use food crops or food-crop-suitable land AND reduce our greenhouse emissions. That way everybody wins.

Internet news - saving trees, BUT

2009-07-21T05:20:00.000-07:00

Feeling lonely yet, George?

2007-11-25T07:51:00.000-08:00

Australian prime minister Howard was a stalwart supporter of the Bush policies on Iraq and non-policies on global warming. In recent national elections, the opposition party, led by Kevin Rudd, ran on a platform of combatting global warming and bringing the Aussie troops home - and won overwhelmingly. The US is now the only major industrial nation to support the war and hide its head on global warming. It’s lonely at the top. Or is it the bottom?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been getting Google Alerts on “Global Warming” and “Climate Change”, and the country with by far the highest level of media coverage on this issue has been Australia (and it all started with a visit by Al Gore a year ago September). The coverage has been uniformly against the government’s policy, and was notable for its apparent lack of need to appear balanced by printing the nonsensical perorations of the nay-sayers...kudos to them, I say.

The U.S. continues to become more and more isolated (despite the new French president’s somewhat wierd friendliness) under the Bush regime. And, closer to home, Bush’s inner circle has all but completely left the house. Meaning that Bush, who relies almost exclusively on trusted confidants for what little input he will suffer, is becoming more and more isolated domestically as well.

Scary thought.

Good CARMA!

2007-11-15T07:26:00.000-08:00

The Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) website was launched yesterday, and provides best-available information on carbon emissions from your local power plant all the way up to a planetary overview. The site is easy to navigate, results are graphically presented and tied to Google Maps, and the whole thing works pretty well (I did find a few minor glitches, but it was just launched yesterday....).

Power plants are rated both by total carbon emissions and by “Intensity” - a measure of carbon produced for a given level of energy production (lower intensity is better). In addition to plant-related statistics, you can investigate carbon emission production by company and by geography.

Not sure where you get your energy from? No problem - just type your zip code into the “Start Here!” search box, and the web site will tell you who your provider is, with a hot link to more detailed information.

For example, my energy provider is Northern States Power Company (MN), and I discovered that it has 16 power plants, 10 of which operate “in the red” (meaning, in this case, high intensity ratings), and 3 of which are coded “green” (I’m betting, based on their location, that they’re hydroelectric plants - the site currently doesn’t tell you how the plant you’re looking at generates its power). As an added perk, it will tell you which Senators and House member represent the district that power plant is in, should, for example, you want to call their attention to that plant’s performance.

I’m a big believer that if good information gets in the hands of the people, good things will start to happen. In the end, we’re pretty bright, and always way ahead of the curve compared to our fearful leaders.

Sun spots and climate change

2007-08-18T07:53:00.000-07:00

The first-ever study to find a statistically significant linkage between sunspot activity and global temperature oscillations has important implications for climate change.
First, the effect of the sunspot cycle on global temperatures was greater than previously assumed, but still maxes out at 0.2 degrees C. Sorry, nay-sayers, the sun isn’t doing it.
And we’re at the minimum of the 11-year cycle – so while global temps have been seriously rising the last half-decade, the sun’s contribution has actually been diminishing (I know, its hard to talk about climate change over such small intervals, but hey, its been really, really hot!). Forecast – global warming ratchets up a notch the next six years as increasing solar energy adds to the problem.

Second, the study provides tangible backing to one major prediction of climate models: higher temperature variability at the poles. Since solar energy is much more variable at the equator, the polar variability must be due to something else – like melting ice feedback loops.

Finally the study gives us the first direct measure of the key climate model parameter “climate sensitivity”. This parameter drives climate model predictions because it is the estimate of the connection between climate change and the actual warming of the planet. The bad news: the measured value is higher than model-derived estimates being currently used. This means that the low-end of global warming predictions are “unlikely.”

Bearing in mind that the most quoted/published estimates of the future perils of climate changes are from the IPCC’s “consensus” (read: conservative) documents, I expect that this is one in a string of past and future studies showing that we should have been much, much more afraid….

Can we think, please?

2007-07-18T07:58:00.000-07:00

In a column in the on-line London Times, Magnus Linklater bemoans our collective unwillingness to face up to climate change.

His case in point: the Swiss willingness for their ski resorts to continue to mobilize fleets of snow-making machines to extend their ski-tourism season for a few weeks. One resort worth of machines uses as much power “as a small village,” and enough water in a year to supply a city of 1.5 million people. Water that has to be helicoptered in. He concludes “It would be hard to conjure up a more potent symbol of environmental perversity than the use of carbon-spewing fossil fuels to help to dispose of millions of gallons of carefully extracted water in order that a few thousand tourists can slide down a slope for an extra week.”

Other examples he cites are the unwillingness of people to accept wind farms because they might “spoil the view” or kill an “occasional absent-minded hawk” and a well-thought-out hydroelectric proposal in England that was declined because “the river is used by a few dozen canoeists every year.”

His point is well taken. We can’t adopt the Bush-at-war philosophy that hard gains can be had without sacrifice. But this is only one-half of the coin.

Equally scary is our willingness to jump on various save-the-planet schemes without thinking them through, leaving ourselves open to the law of unintended consequences. Case in point here is our headlong rush to ethanol – we’ve committed billions of dollars, farmers are betting their livelihoods, and the unintended consequences are coming home.

What’s needed is between “hurry” and “indecision”. What’s needed is to think things through. There are reasonable solutions to the climate change problem out there. Trouble is, they are nuanced and multi-faceted, they require thought and planning, they require sacrifice, and they are therefore seemingly beyond the reach of our politicians.

IPCC: Global Warming "very likely" caused by humans

2007-03-24T07:47:00.000-07:00

The recently released IPCC report on climate change, which reiterated the 2001 report conclusion that global warming was a real threat but upped the ante on human causation (from “likely (60% sure) to “very likely” (90% sure) was remarkable in many ways. Most usefully, it was unanimously accepted by the member countries, including the U.S., which for all practical purposes moves the debate forward from agreeing that there’s a problem to what’s the solution. And the report dragged the naysayers along with it, shifting their tactics from “it’s not happening” to “we can’t fix it.”

The downside is the price the IPCC paid to get that unanimity. Don’t get me wrong, I think the unanimity was hugely important to shift the debate focus. But now we have to deal with the scale and urgency of the issue, both of which were downplayed in the report. How? To get unanimity, they excluded any recent evidence that hadn’t formerly been incorporated into the climate models (i.e. had any degree of uncertainty about it). Two worrisome exclusions: feedback loops and extremes.

Feedback loops: we’ve known for years now that the farther you move from the equator, the more severe the warming. Evidence shows that the poles are warming up to five times faster than the global average. One reason is certainly this feedback loop: warming temps cause more ice to melt. Since ice reflects 90% of the sunlight (and heat) and whatever’s under the ice reflects a lot less, a net loss of ice means the earth’s surface warms more that it otherwise would. Warmer surface means the ice melts even faster, which uncovers even more of the heat-absorbing land/water, and so on. With a feedback loop, the changes aren’t linear, they accelerate. Unfortunately, our climate models are mostly still linear, so they are no doubt underestimating the scale of the problem. What’s true is that scientists still can’t precisely say how much they’re underestimating the problem, so they can’t come up with an equation for the climate model that could get general agreement.

Another loop: the rapidly warming northern tundra is causing the permafrost to melt. Trapped in the permafrost are huge amounts of methane, a gas that is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. As this gas is released, and its being released at an alarming rate, it causes accelerated warming, which in turn melts the permafrost faster, etc. etc.

Extremes: The other great omission is the extremes. The IPCC report mainly limited itself to global averages. It’s not the averages that will kill us first, it’s the extremes. An ‘average’ rise in sea level means a lot more to an inhabitant of Bangladesh than to a Midwest farmer. A small “average” global rise in temperatures masks the fact that in the Arctic and Antarctic, temperatures are rising much more dramatically, balanced by much smaller increases at the equator. The effects of climate change aren’t going to be uniformly felt: the higher latitudes will experience much higher rainfalls (warmer atmosphere holds more water), but in the subtropics they will be experiencing much lower amounts, exacerbating endemic drought conditions.

Global warming winners and losers

2007-03-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

In a well-written piece for the April, 2007 issue of The Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook looks at possible changes in the global distribution of money and power that Global Warming might bring.
For example, general warming will tend to make currently the currently frigid high latitudes (think Siberia and northern Canada) more temperate. Unfreezing the Siberian tundra might make available the largest chunk of pristine soil since the “discovery” of North America (an analogy that might make Canada’s northern native peoples think…). Russia wins big on this one.
A major impact would be that the rich (the industrial west owns most of the high-latitude land on the globe) get richer, reversing a trend toward more global economic equity. A second impact would be the mass migration of economic refugees northward.
Water impacts are harder to predict, but significant changes to the Gulf Stream in the north Atlantic might plunge Europe into a prolonged depression that could have disastrous effects on the global economy at large. Melting of the Arctic Ice Cap could finally make the fabled “Northwest Passage” a reality, shifting the locus of shipping centers from south to north.
Easterbrook’s conclusions are that we need to enact laws/regulations that incent the private markets to find and implement solutions, that the cost of preventing some of these potential problems is much, much less that the cost of fixing them later, and finally, for us Americans, the current world order has us at the top of the heap; therefore, any significant changes to that order are bound to be bad for us.

Gore making a difference

2006-12-17T07:46:00.000-08:00

The success of Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” gets a lot of credit in the US press for helping to elevate public awareness of, and concern for, the problem of global warming. I haven’t seen any actual data on this, but the fact that the movie is the third-highest grossing documentary of all time is pretty good supportive evidence.

More evidence comes from Australia: I subscribe to Google Alerts for “Global Warming” and “Climate Change.” That means that I get a daily email with a list of every news article on either subject that Google can find. In early September, Al Gore was in Australia for the opening of his movie, and engaged the government there (which is very Bush-like in its approach) in a public debate about global warming. Australia gets a couple of mentions in his movie, one because Australia is the only industrialized nation besides us that refused to sign the Kyoto agreement, and another because Australia figures to be a major loser (increasing drought and wildfires, the death of the Great Barrier Reef) if the planet keeps heating up.

Not surprisingly, during the time of Gore’s visit the number of news citations on global warming and climate change with an Australian dateline shot up dramatically. What's amazing is that Australian news coverage of global warming has stayed high. Yesterday, a third of the global coverage on the issue emanated from Down Under.

I’d say Al Gore is making not just a splash, but a difference.

Global Warming is not coming soon...

2006-12-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

It’s here. That’s the message that needs to get out. It’s here right now.

Here are a couple of reminders from the news today:

Current temperature readings in the Alps show that they are the warmest they’ve been in at least 1200 years. The warming trend began in the 1980s, about the same time that the hockey stick graph of global temperatures shot upwards.

We know the oceans are warming, and now we have hard evidence of what one of the consequences will be. A study published in Nature provides a direct link between warmer water temperatures and the shrinking of phytoplankton production – a double whammy since they are both the base of the ocean’s food web and a major carbon sink.

Add this data to the abundance of evidence that species are migrating because their habitat is getting too hot, the current loss of both sea and glacier ice, the measured rise in sea level, the increasing fury of ocean storms…how big does stack have to get? This isn’t tomorrow’s problem, it’s today’s problem.

Most worrisome, of course, is that we’re seeing the evidence today – and we’re already locked into several decades of further warming even if we immediately stop pumping CO2 and methane into the atmosphere.

Where is Chicken Little when you need him?

We have met the enemy...

2006-12-05T07:55:00.000-08:00

“When the subject is global warming, the villain is usually the United States.”

This was the lead sentence in an article in the Economist this week. The Economist, for those who don’t know, is a highly regarded weekly news magazine published in England. Sort of like Time or Newsweek, but with brains. And the courage to call it like it is.

Notice that is was the lead sentence in an article. Not an opinion piece. As far as the world is concerned, our shameless refusal to own up to our massive contributions to global warming (25% of the world’s CO2 output, for example) is a fact, not an opinion. The greatest crisis facing the planet, and our government has its collective head in the sand.

It's never simple

2006-12-04T07:50:00.000-08:00

Just when you thought it was safe to bet on hydropower for clean energy, there’s new evidence that the reservoirs created behind dams in tropical countries may emit as much – or more – greenhouse gasses than their fossil-fuel counterparts.

In a report in the September 30th issue of Nature, Jim Giles reports on a growing body of research that shows that both carbon dioxide and methane are emitted in large quantities from the water trapped behind, and flowing from, dams in tropical countries. Studies at one site in particular, the Balbina Dam in Brazil, have concluded that the environment would in fact have been better off if they’d built a conventional fossil fuel plant instead.

The problem is organic matter in the reservoir behind the dam: plants submerged as the reservoir is formed and plant matter that gets washed in and trapped later. As the organic matter decays – rapidly in those warm tropical waters – carbon dioxide and methane are produced. There is still disagreement on a formula for calculating how much of these gases are released, and by what mechanism: more research is definitely needed, and urgently.

But the evidence we do have is enough that future construction of hydroelectric facilities in tropical countries needs to be approached with caution. Giles notes that the Clean Development Mechanism, which allows developed nations to fund clean-energy projects in developing countries as a way to earn carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol, may need to be revised as well.

Even more scary, though, is that greenhouse emissions from tropical dams are not included in current climate models, and projections using existing evidence mean we are pumping around 20% more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than we thought, bringing the day of reckoning that much closer.

Bush change of heart?

2006-12-01T08:10:00.000-08:00

There are increasing hints in Washington that Bush is finally going to change his stance on CO2 emissions and possibly push for some kind of regulatory response to global warming. Nope – NOT because of the midterm elections – although I’m sure they may provide him some political cover for his “change of heart.” He’s changing his stance because Big Oil is changing theirs.

What? Big Oil is now FOR regulating CO2 emissions at the federal level? Well, yes and no. Of course they’d rather have no regulation at all, but if they must…. And why must they? Here’s where change is happening from the bottom up.

Turns out that the voting public is by and large (70%) convinced that global warming is a serious problem and are worried about the U.S.’s lack of action on that front. Because of this lack of action from the politicos in Washington, politicians at the state and even local level have responded to increasing pressures from the voting public and instituted measures to regulate CO2 emissions in their jurisdiction. When Republican Governor Schwartzenegger of California signed a major piece of CO2 emission legislation, Big Oil could see the handwriting on the wall.

In effect, the voters did an end run around the oil companies’ highly successful Washington lobbying efforts. Bravo for us!

These state-sponsored efforts create huge headaches for the big oil companies in two ways:
1. They would have to wage their head-in-the-sand battle against global warming measures on 50 fronts instead of one – expensive and difficult. Better to have the regulations come from Washington, where they can concentrate their efforts and lobbying funds.
2. Washington politicians are by definition less connected to the will of the people, the goings-on there are less transparent, and therefore it’s easier to secretly buy influence and water down regulations at the national level than at the state and local level.

Big Oil is agreeing to regulation so that they can return the regulatory efforts to Washington where they can have more control over it. Simple as that. Sure they may have to make a concession or two, but they’re experts at crafting legislation that looks like it’s accomplishing a lot but actually requires very little.

So, although it looks like Bush is having a change of heart on global warming, don’t you believe it. His heart still belongs to Big Oil. And where Big Oil leads, George will follow.

Double whammy: acceleration and feedback

2006-11-13T08:14:00.000-08:00

The global warming naysayers always accuse the scientific community of exaggerating the dangers posed by global warming. In fact, the opposite is true. What the naysayers don’t get is that the scientific projections are, by their nature, almost always conservative. Why? Because they tend to extrapolate past history linearly into the future. What’s wrong with that? Two things: acceleration and feedback.

Acceleration: The problem with extrapolating past CO2 emissions trends into the future is that the increases aren’t linear – they’re accelerating. New data presented by the Global Carbon Project (a consortium of 200 scientists worldwide) at an Earth science conference in Beijing earlier this month shows that global carbon emissions are now growing at a 3.2% per year clip. The average rate of growth as recently as the 1990s was 0.8%. That means that our CO2 production rate has quadrupled from one decade to the next – and we’re only halfway through this one. That also means that we’re already way beyond the IPCC projections that the naysayers were throwing so much heat at in 2001.

It’s not just the carbon, either. Sea-level is now rising at a rate that’s at the upper end of the IPCC projections of just five years ago, and that rate is also accelerating.

In an earlier post (September 12th) I described a plan put forth by two scientists for solving the carbon problem using existing technologies. They based their plan on the fact that we were pumping 7 billons tons of carbon into the atmosphere a year. Now we’re pumping 9 billion tons a year into the atmosphere. That’s almost a 30% increase in just a few years.

Feedback: One feedback loop that has gotten a fair amount of press before occurs in the polar regions: as more ice melts, less sunlight is reflected back into space and therefore more is absorbed into the ocean, heating it up, which melts even more ice, which means more sunlight is absorbed into the ocean, and so on and so on. Because of this feedback loop, many scientists believe we may have already passed the point of no return on Arctic sea ice – and when it’s gone, we don’t know if it will ever come back.

A second worrisome feedback loop has come to light more recently: as the permafrost in the northern tundra melts, less sunlight is reflected back from these regions as well, meaning the ground absorbs more sunlight, heating it up, causing more permafrost to melt, and the spiral continues. The big problem here is that there is a HUGE amount of methane trapped under the permafrost, and as the permafrost melts that methane escapes into the atmosphere. Recent measurements in Russia indicate that the rate of methane emission is accelerating as well. Add to this the fact that methane is 20 times more potent that CO2 as a greenhouse gas, so releasing more methane heats up the atmosphere even faster, which means ice and permafrost will melt even faster, releasing methane at an accelerating rate…..you get the idea.

We’re just starting to get a handle on the nature and size of these feedback mechanisms – which means they aren’t represented in the climate models yet. Which means that the climate models, if anything, are underestimating the severity, and urgency, of the global warming problem.

Stern medicine

2006-10-30T08:16:00.000-08:00

The Stern Report (“The Economics of Climate Change), alluded to in an earlier post, was officially published last week. Commissioned by the British Government, the report is a comprehensive overview of the economics of climate change, and manages to be both optimistic (there’s still time) and cautionary (but if we wait too long…).

This report is a thorough, painstaking and ultimately courageous step forward. The authors recognized they would have to go way out on limb after limb with their assumptions and projections, but rather than take the safe course, they went out onto every limb, taking care to clearly document their assumptions and their methods of projection. Creating economic projections for a single country a year into the future can be a pretty daunting task – this group tackled the entire global economy and went out a hundred years.

But they did it right. Here are the highlights:

Cost-benefit analysis
The report starts with a cost-benefit analysis. On the cost side, looking at a relatively narrow range of the possible economic impacts (based on the 2001 IPCC report), the price tag for global warming is estimated at 5% of global GDP. Per year. If you add in more recent evidence and take a broader view, the costs could rise to 20% of global GDP per year.

On the other hand, the costs to reduce greenhouse gasses are estimated in the 1% of global GDP range. “People would pay a little more for carbon-intensive goods

Is this a no-brainer, or what?

Looking at it another way, each metric ton of CO2 emitted today is causing about $85 worth of damage. Data from the carbon-trading markets indicate that the cost to eliminate that metric ton of CO2 is about $25. “In other words,” says Her Majesty’s Treasury, “we’d be better off…in the order of $2.5 trillion a year.” Throw in the creation of new markets for carbon reduction technologies, and you could add another $500 billion a year of benefits.

Pretty much a no-brainer. Or as we say in Minnesota: Ufda!

What to do?
Well, act now rather than later, to be sure. But the report goes on to list four key elements to acting now successfully:

International carbon pricing: The report calls the current global warming problem one of the biggest market failures of all time, and the reason is simple – the true costs of carbon usage are not accounted for by the market. To have the market work for us instead of against us, we need to starting adding in this cost – through taxation, carbon emissions trading and/or regulation.

Technology policy: In the long term, developing the technologies we need to drastically reduce our carbon usage is properly the role of private industry. Trouble is, we may not have a “long term” to work with, so in the short term, governments can and should provide the necessary incentives to accelerate the process.

Removing barriers to change: All systems resist change, and large companies and institutions can be the worst offenders. Government can help overcome this inertia through a combination of providing good information about the problems and “best practice” solution, by setting standards for new infrastructure so that our current carbon-usages doesn’t become ingrained, by tax and other policies designed to stimulate movement toward a lower carbon, more efficient economy.

Adaptation: No matter what, the report says, we will be facing significant consequences from the global warming we’ve already created. The CO2 we put in the air today lasts for a hundred years. And the consequences will fall most heavily on the countries least able to handle them. Governments can assist these countries through provision of good information, and planning and financial assistance.

Sun may give us a breather - let's not blow it.

2006-10-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

In an interesting article in New Scientist magazine (16 September 2006), Stuart Clark looks at evidence that the sunspot activity may strongly influence the Earth’s warming and cooling cycles. When sunspot activity is high, global temperatures go up. When sunspot activity is low, little ice ages occur.

In fact, the first evidence of the role of sunspots came as researchers noticed that periods of extremely low sunspot activity corresponded to two recent mini Ice Ages: the Little Ice Age of the late 1600s – when the Thames regularly froze over, and you could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island during the winter - and a similar period from the mid 14th to mid 15th centuries.

Turns out there is a boom-bust sunspot cycle with a duration of about 200 years or so where periods of high sunspot activity are followed by a crash. We’ve been in a high-activity period for a while now, but activity levels are the lowest they’ve been in 50 years. We’re about due for a crash.

Don’t pull out the extra winter coats just yet, though. Recent sunspot activity and global temperatures were pretty well correlated until 1970 or so, an indicator that human-generated warming has overwhelmed the sunspot cycle’s influence. Best guess: a sunspot activity crash might cool off the planet by about 0.2 degrees Centigrade. And these sunspot lulls don’t last that long – in 50 to 100 years, the sunspots will be back as strong as ever.

At best, we might get a little breathing room, a little extra time for the politicians to quit being political and start being leaders. A little extra time to overcome the economic inertia and get serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

At worst, a “natural cycle” slowdown in global warming will give the naysayers just the ammunition they need to stonewall our efforts for another 50 years – so that when the sun rejoins the global heating party we’re even worse off than we are today.

Living beyond our means

2006-10-22T07:51:00.000-07:00

This year, our planet began living beyond its means on October 9th. This according to calculations by the Global Footprint Network. They have designated October 9th as this year’s “World Overshoot Day” – the day we humans have used up all the resources that the planet can naturally replace in a year.

The idea behind their calculation is this: the planet can re-grow a certain number of trees each year. If in a given year we cut down more than that number, we start to borrow from the next year’s tree crop. The same principle applies to pollution – the planet can absorb a certain amount of carbon dioxide in a year. Once we exceed that amount, we’re basically passing along the absorption job to next year. If you take all these factors and add them up, you get our ecological footprint. October 9th is the day our collective footprint exceeded the capacity of the planet to sustain it.

But we can’t just stop using resources, so we’ll basically have to “borrow” about another 30% of the planet’s annual resource budget just to see us through the end of the year. It’s exactly like a family who spends all income by October 9th, and has to borrow a third of a year’s pay just to get through the year.

Sure, a family can get into this kind of jam for a year or two and survive, but this kind of deficit borrowing can’t work for very long. It doesn’t work on a planetary scale either. Sooner or later we have to pay the piper.

Unfortunately, we humans have been running an ecological deficit for some time now. The Global Footprint Network’s data goes back to 1987 when the World Overshoot Day was December 19th. That means in 1987 we only had to borrow about 3%. Nearly 20 years later, we not only haven’t solved the deficit problem, but we’re now borrowing 30%. And the really scary part is how quickly we went from 3% to 30%.

And we are starting to pay the piper –rising sea levels, more catastrophic weather, spreading disease…you know, the price for global warming.

There's gold in them thar global warming

2006-10-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

I suppose it would be nice if everyone would take up the challenge of combatting global warming just because it's obviously the right thing to do, but I'll be happy if they get into it just for the money.

A study by the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University said that failing to act now to reduce global warming could end up costing trillions of dollars per year by the end of the century. By contrast, spending a tenth of that today to limit the future rise in global temperatures to less two degrees could cut that in half. The good news – there’s still time to act and make a meaningful difference. The bad news: due to our inaction to date, we may end up spending 3-4% of total world economic output on the consequences.

Still, studies like this may help galvanize the movers and shakers of the world, who tend to see things more clearly when there’s a price tag attached.

Speaking of seeing clearly, environmental voices have been saying for a decade that fighting global warming can be an economic boon for any country that engages in the battle, creating new technologies, new jobs, and new wealth. The day before the study was published, Shell Oil came out with a statement that climate change represented a billions-of-dollars opportunity for businesses due to the demand for products and services aimed at reducing carbon emissions. And this from their web site: “Shell is a global group of oil, gas and petrochemical companies with a broad portfolio of hydrogen, biofuels, wind and solar power interests. Our aim is to meet the energy needs of society, in ways that are economically, socially and environmentally sustainable.”

Hopefully, they’ll put their money where their mouth is.

Law: the Stick

2006-10-13T07:50:00.000-07:00

In Great Britain, the opposition party and environmental organizations have long called for a bill setting regular carbon emissions reduction targets. No surprise there. The surprise is that such a bill may be introduced by the Government.

Why would a conservative government introduce such a bill? Add up the overwhelming scientific evidence, growing awareness of the economic costs of inaction (see previous post), and, perhaps most importantly, a growing public consensus that our planet is really in grave danger, and the arithmetic becomes pretty compelling to almost any politician.

I say “almost any politician” of course because I live in the United States.

The advantages of passing laws to enforce socially desirable ends has a long history of success in general, and in solving environmental problems in particular. The problem with voluntary action in a free market economy is that no one wants (or can afford to) be first. No automaker wants to be the first to make slightly more expensive cars with better gas mileage – they fear they’ll go out of business if consumers choose their competitors’ cheaper equivalents. A law raising fuel efficiency standards, on the other hand, puts everyone on a level playing field AND gets automakers into competition with each other to invent the most efficient means to the end. Everyone wins. Using the law as the stick got us out of our smog problem and is well on its way to solving the ozone problem.

We can go a long way toward limiting global warming by just passing a law limiting carbon emissions by the power and transportation industries, and then sitting back and watching the free market economy go to work on the problem.

Biofuels the answer? Stay tuned...

2006-09-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

Biofuels have gotten a lot of press as the answer to both global warming and to our dependence on foreign oil. In a well-written and -researched piece in New Scientist magazine, Fred Pearce warns us that the silver clouds of corn-based and sugar-based biofuels both have dark linings. Right idea, but we aren’t there yet.

Bioethanol is made from processing either starchy plants (like corn) or sugar-rich plants (like sugar cane). With corn, you first have to pre-process it to turn the starches into sugar, then the corn sugar or cane sugar is fermented and distilled to produce ethanol. Using biofuels instead of fossil fuels greatly reduces the emissions of greenhouse gases from an automobile. Good so far.

Trouble is, it takes a fair amount of fossil fuel to produce the corn-based ethanol due to that pre-processing step, not to mention the fertilizers and tractor fuel used in growing the corn in the first place. Study results vary depending on their assumptions, but the upshot is that if you look at the entire process, it’s not clear that corn-based ethanol is much of a leap forward, environmentally speaking. Then there’s the fact that it takes a lot of land to grow the corn: it’s estimated that if the U.S. turned its ENTIRE corn crop into ethanol, we’d meet about 10% of our fuel demand. And a lot of people around the world would go hungrier. There are already signs of a shortage of corn and a spike in prices worldwide as a result of the so-far modest demand for corn-based ethanol.

Sugar-based ethanol has its own problems. Although the ratio of greenhouse gases saved vs. used in the production is much higher, it also requires a lot of land and the fear is that tropical developing countries will clear-cut more forests to get that land, which will make global warming worse. Sugar growing is also very water-intensive, and fresh water is another non-renewable resource that’s getting scarce in many areas of the world. Finally, as word that sugar-based ethanol is more environmentally friendly spread and the biofuel industry jumped on the bandwagon, world sugar prices doubled, which is not good for a lot of world’s population.

All this means is that biofuels aren’t a biopanacea (yet) for replacing fossil fuels in our automobiles. As Fred Pearce points out, though, the industry is still in its infancy, and even the U.S. Department of Energy is funding research looking at alternative organic fuel sources that don’t have the downsides that corn and sugar do. The most promising alternative is fuel made from cellulose, the raw material that all plants are made of. One attractive possibility that’s been in the news lately is switchgrass. It can yield twice as much ethanol per acre as corn, and we can develop hybrids that grow on otherwise unused land with relatively low maintenance. What we need is an efficient process for converting the cellulose to ethanol. Stay tuned.

Clinton Global Initiative

2006-09-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

The big news from the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative was Richard Branson’s commitment to donate ALL profits for the next 10 years from his various companies (Virgin Airways et al.) to the development of clean energy sources. That is projected to be about $3 billion or so. As Bill Clinton said, “That’s serious money.” (Read the NYTimes article)

Overshadowed was the announcement by Clinton that he and several other conference attendees are setting up an investment fund (The Green Fund) which will raise $1 billion for the development of renewable energy sources. Add it up, and these two private efforts will outspend the U.S. Government’s Department of Transportation on clean energy research.

The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) brings together an impressive array of global political and business leaders for the purpose of addressing some of the world’s pressing problems, including energy and climate change. Besides generating practical ideas for initiating change, attendees are required to make financial or other commitments to help implement those ideas. There’s definitely an atmosphere of competitive philanthropy about the sessions, with major commitments announced and commitment documents signed with much fanfare.

Whatever works, I say, and good for all of them. Besides the $4 billion plus raised to combat global warming, another $3 billion or so was raised to help in the battles against poverty, disease and religious/ethnic conflict.

I happened upon CGI’s web site just in time to listen to Bill Clinton’s closing address. First, I really miss having a president who can talk intelligently off-the-cuff about important issues in plain English. Second, it was pretty uplifting to see major business leaders marching up to the dais to make commitments in the fight against global warming. Most commitments, unlike the well-reported Branson donation, were practical programs of action.

One example: WalMart committed to substantially reducing the amount of packaging used in the products it sells. Such reductions contribute to the fight against global warming by (a) reducing the number of trees cut down to produce the paper parts, (b) reducing fossil fuels used to make the plastics specifically and the energy used to make the packaging generally, (c) reducing the fuel used to transport goods by reducing their size, and (d) reducing the waste processing afterwards. As one step, they will begin a program of rewarding suppliers for minimizing packaging. If their program is successful, they estimate that, by 2013, they will have avoided over 600,000 metrics tons of CO2 emissions and taken over 200,000 plus trucks off the highways per year.

In another, the Green Building Council announced a joint venture with Newland Communitiesto launch a $250,000 program to education consumers about the virtues and value of building green.

But beyond the occasional monster effort were hundreds of smaller ones that definitely add up, many in subtle but long-lasting ways. In encouraging potential contributors to realize that even small scale efforts can have a big impact, Clinton related how he and George Bush Sr. caused a couple of schools in New Orleans to be rebuilt (post-Katrina) using green-building standards. Those kids will be learning about environmental stewardship every single day, said Clinton, “and they’ll take that with them wherever they go.”

Are you kidding me?

2006-09-22T07:56:00.000-07:00

Here’s a good one. The Cato Institute published a “policy analysis” entitled: “Is the sky really falling? A Review of Recent Global Warming Scare Stories” written by Patrick J. Michaels, who has some impressive-looking climatology/ecology credentials. This “study” is not only featured on the Cato Institute’s web site, but also on the George C. Marshall Institute’s web site. (See a previous post – the top British science academy has written ExxonMobil to stop funding the GCMI because it disseminates misleading information about climate change).

Michaels’ thesis is that, for political and press-bias reasons, only the bad news about climate change gets published. His “proof” of this claim? I have to quote it in full, just so you know I’m not making this up (if you want to read the whole thing, click here .)

“It is highly improbable, in a statistical sense, that new information added to any existing forecast is almost always ‘bad’ or ‘good’; rather, each new finding has an equal probability of making a forecast worse or better. Consequently, the preponderance of bad news almost certainly means that something is missing, both in the process of science itself and in the reporting of science.”

I try to be open-minded, but that’s about the lamest thing I’ve ever seen a supposedly reputable scientist say. In print, no less. Memo to Michaels – not all slices of data are random.

Follow me on this one. Suppose your neighbor comes to you and says that he has been measuring the temperature outside his front door since June 1st. It’s now June 30th, and he says that there is a definite warming trend, because every week was warmer than the week before.

Using Mr. Michaels’ logic, however, we’d have to assume that your neighbor is withholding data, since the “odds are” that half the weeks should be colder.
There’s another explanation, of course, namely that we’re heading from spring into summer. During this time, temperature fluctuations aren’t random (half warmer, half colder).

The reason, Mr. Michaels, that almost all the studies report “more bad news on global warming” is not because scientists are suppressing half the data. It’s because global warming is actually happening.

Choosing enemies over friends

2006-09-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

Brazil has been working toward energy independence since the big world oil crisis of 1973. They may achieve it this year. How? They’ve systematically invested in ethanol made from homegrown sugar. It was a long, expensive process, but today ethanol accounts for at least 20% of its transportation fuel use, while the rest of the world limps along at 1%. Good for their energy independence, great for global warming (besides the reduced emissions, you can’t grow sugar in the Amazon rain forest).

The Brazilians have gotten so good at this that they have ethanol left over for export. The U.S. has a rapidly growing demand for ethanol, and a (finally) official mission to wean ourselves off imported oil. You’d think, says Thomas Friedman in a column entitled “Dumb as we wanna be” (published yesterday in the New York Times), that importing Brazilian ethanol would be a no-brainer.

Not only would it be cheaper, but their sugar-based ethanol also:

has lower greenhouse gas emissions than our corn-based variety;
uses much, much less fossil fuel to produce (sugar ethanol creates 8 times as much energy as the fossil fuels it takes to make it, while corn-based ethanol only produces 1.3 times as much); and
can be produced in poor, tropical countries so that its purchase could help alleviate poverty in that part of the world, a fair amount of which is in our own back yard.

Instead, he continues, the Midwest farmers and agribusinesses who produce U.S. ethanol have convinced Congress to levy a 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. So we’re taxing imported fuel that, if we purchased it, would help out an ally and neighbor. On the other hand, we don’t tax imported crude oil that, when we purchase it, definitely helps out a few rich enemies. As Friedman asks, “Is this stupid, or really stupid?”

Climate change misinformation

2006-09-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest challenges facing those trying to get the public to understand the severity of the global warming problem is that there is so much bad information out there masquerading as science, and so little good science being presented to the public at large in an accessible way. The trouble is that as a rule scientists mostly just talk to themselves, and in a language that most of us can’t understand. This is a rule that has to be broken, otherwise they’ll continue to have the same kind of problems they’ve had trying to explain why the “theory” of evolution is something you can take to the bank, despite the fact that it’s a “theory.” You know, like the theory of gravity.

Sometimes its relatively easy to weed out the bad information just by using the common sense “duck test” (if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck….). Articles that contain good information, for example, are usually full of references to peer-reviewed scientific journals. These are journals where a scientist can’t get something published until a panel of “peers” reviews it for methodology and reasonableness. Articles no with science or bad science rarely have references, and when they do, the references are to articles in non-scientific publications, to interviews with individual scientists (no peer review there!), or to “studies” by “institutes” that, it turns out, get all their funding from companies or organizations with an ax to grind. One piece I saw that was trying to debunk the science of climate change, a piece that unfortunately got a lot of air time, was full of footnotes – pretty impressive-looking until you got to the footnote list at the end and realized that the main source for the “science” was an “opinion piece” on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal.

The most insidious misinformation, I think, comes from those studies from supposed think-tanks, “institutes” with impressive sounding names like “The George C. Marshall Institute” and “The Competitive Enterprise Institute” for example. These institutes are experts at dressing up their misinformation to sound like the real thing. Taking their cue from the Republican party (no coincidence there!), they have been attempting win the argument by controlling the language of the debate.

Okay, back to the need for scientist’s to fight smoke with fire. Just recently, the Royal Society, Britain’s top scientific academy, wrote a public letter (click to read it) to ExxonMobil taking the company to task for publishing misleading scientific information, specifically naming a piece in ExxonMobil’s “Corporate Citizenship Report” that claims that there are no objective studies showing that global warming is caused by human actions. After pointing out the huge number of such objective studies that have, in fact, been published, including one co-authored by one of ExxonMobil’s own scientists, the letter says: “It is very difficult to reconcile the misrepresentations of climate change science in these documents with ExxonMobil’s claim to be an industry leader.” The letter also points out that, in addition to its own misrepresentations, the company has given $2.9 million to fund 39 different groups that routinely misrepresent the science of climate change to the public, and asks the company to stop funding such groups. [In fairness, ExxonMobil also gave money to 24 organizations who do present the climate change situation accurately.]

I applaud the Royal Society’s willingness to send (and make public) this letter, and I hope scientific organizations the world over with take heed and start to get publicly involved. Of course, it helps that the British government doesn’t have its head in the sand about global warming, unlike another large, English-speaking country I could name…..

Global Warming and the Supremes

2006-09-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear its first global warming case this session. Back in 2003, the great state of Massachusetts sued the Environmental Protection Agency for deciding not to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted by America’s cars and trucks. Now, Massachusetts has been joined by a consortium of nearly 75 cities, states and environmentally-concerned organizations in petitioning the Supreme Court to overturn the EPA’s decision, based on the fact that the EPA has a pretty broad mandate to regulate emissions that can “reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”

The EPA is defending its decision not to regulate (and has won so far through the lower courts) with arguments based on mostly on law and some on “merit.” It’s saying, basically, that it doesn’t have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, and even if it did, it wouldn’t because the science is too fuzzy.

Here’s the gist of their argument, which I present as an example of the Bush administration’s recurring strategy for stonewalling in pursuit of corporate appeasement.

First, they say the petitioners, all 75 of them, are not legally entitled to bring suit against the agency because they can’t show they’ve been harmed by the EPA’s decision not to regulate, and even if they were, they can’t show that a reversal of the EPA’s decision would remedy the problem.
Second, they maintain that the Clean Air Act (CAA) doesn’t specifically empower them to deal with greenhouse gases, and when Congress has wanted them to deal with a new category of tailpipe emissions (such as CFCs), Congress has specifically widened the CAA to deal with the issue.
Third, they say that the CAA gives them wide latitude in exercising “judgment” as to what constitutes a credible threat to public health and welfare, and that, in their judgment, there is still too much scientific uncertainty (based on a 2001 study by the National Academy of Sciences) as to whether global warming is human-induced, and if it is, by what mechanisms (i.e. to tailpipe emissions really matter?), and even if the mechanisms were known, the best remedies have yet to be identified.

Short version: the usual Bush head-in-the-sand approach of asking for more studies. And note what a small part the scientific merit plays in all this.

It will be interesting to see how the Supremes handle this issue.

On the one hand, they are distinctly “conservative” (interesting irony there – the conservatives battling conservation) and would be under pressure to side with the administration on this one. On the other hand, the amount of scientific research that supports the fact that global warming is a clear and present danger has increased dramatically in both substance and airtime in the years since this lawsuit was initiated – you’ve got to hope the Supremes have some desire to not appear utterly stupid. Best of all, the NAS, on whose 2001 report the EPA is resting the “merits” of its case, has since issued a report confirming the “hockey stick” graph, which says that, yes, Martha, global warming is human-induced.

My money, sadly, is that the Supremes will acknowledge the science but rule in favor of the EPA’s stonewalling on a technicality or two. It would be the safe thing to do.

Would that it were true

2006-09-14T07:46:00.000-07:00

When out promoting his film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore introduces himself as “The man who used to be the next president of the United States.” There’s a pause while people laugh, then Gore deadpans: “It’s not funny.”

No, it’s not funny. Think of what an intelligent president could have done with the convergence of two powerful forces: the strong, post-9/11 sentiment to be free of dependence on foreign oil, and the growing consensus that global warming is pushing our country (and the rest of the globe) toward catastrophe.

He could have pushed the twin engines of alternate fuels and greater efficiencies hard, promoting them not just as a matter of national security (which they are), not just as a moral obligation in the face of global warming (which it is), but as an unparalleled opportunity to use the US’s legendary entrepreneurial skills to seize leadership in the everyone-knows-its-coming environmental products and services industry.

He could have used the White House bully pulpit to get his energy-industry cronies to see the handwriting on the wall, telling them, in effect, “You can’t lick them – so join them.” Then, instead of giving them billions in tax-payer financed incentives to expand their petroleum-based lines of business, give them the same billions in incentives to transition to a 21st century lines of business.

By now our auto fleets would be averaging 35 miles to the gallon and the word “hybrid” would be losing some of its meaning. Wind and solar power technologies would be rapidly improving, bringing down the cost to consumers and causing another future-oriented sector of the economy to flourish. Maybe, just maybe, we’d have had one less reason to invade Iraq.

If only.

Well, CAN we do anything about it?

2006-09-12T07:52:00.000-07:00

One of the ongoing debates in the global warming biz is whether we can solve the problem with known technology or whether we have to rush to develop something revolutionary (can you say “hydrogen fuel cell”?). We need both, argue scientists Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala in a 2004 paper in Science magazine (re-presented as a well-written piece in the September issue of Scientific American): we can level off our CO2 emissions for the next fifty years using existing technology, then plan on new technologies to help us reduce our emissions substantially over the following fifty years.

One major benefit of a plan like theirs is that we actually do something while we’re waiting the 30-50 years for new technologies to be developed to the point where they can make a measurable difference.

A second is that they provide a practical reference frame for actions we can do.

Here’s the background:

To avoid disaster, we have to avoid doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. They set a target maximum of 500 parts-per-million (ppm) (vs. the 280 ppm pre-industrial level).
To stay below 500 ppm, we have to basically hold the current CO2 emission rate constant for the next 50 years, and then substantially reduce it in the 50 years after that.
The current emissions rate is 7 billions tons of carbon per year (7 GtC/yr). If we do nothing, this rate will double in the next 50 years (to 14 GtC/yr). Therefore, we have to look for solutions that will, in aggregate, reduce emissions by 7 GtC/yr by 2056.

The authors acknowledge that no single solution can accomplish this goal, so they break it up into seven more manageable chunks (which they call “wedges” from their graphical illustration) of 1 GtC/yr each. So at least seven existing, proven technologies can accomplish an emission savings that will amount to 1 GtC/yr by 2056.

Once such “wedge” can be obtained by doubling our automobile gas mileage from 30 mpg to 60 mpg. The math: assume each auto travels 10,000 miles a year and gets 30 miles to the gallon. With current fuels, each car therefore puts about ton of carbon in the atmosphere each year. Assuming 2 billion cars on the road in 2056 (a four-fold increase), they would put out 2 GtC/yr in greenhouse emissions. A doubling of the vehicles’ fuel efficiency would halve that amount – a savings of 1GtC/yr or one “wedge.”

The authors present a list of 15 such solution, including substituting natural gas for coal in power plants, capturing and storing CO2 generated by existing and future plants, using electricity more efficiently in buildings, etc. Admittedly, some of these interact, so you can’t simply do all 15 and expect a 15GtC/yr savings. For example, producing cleaner electricity means that you can’t save as much by using that electricity more efficiently.

Still, with 15 (at least) technically feasible methods at our immediate disposal to combat global warming, what are we waiting for?

The Other overpopulation

2006-09-08T07:54:00.000-07:00

It’s well known that overpopulation is one of the prime drivers of our environmental problems. Too many people are chasing too few resources, resulting in environmental degradation. We in the so-called highly-developed countries think that the solution to overpopulation is for those less-developed countries to practice population control.

Which is pretty self-serving, because it ignores the reality that sheer numbers of people is only half the story. The impact of a population on the environment is a function of both the number of people AND the amount they consume.

So its true that in many developing countries, the sheer number of people is overwhelming their own resource base, even though most of them are living in poverty.

But we highly developed nations are also contributing mightily to population/resource problem – it’s just that we’re working the other side of the equation: consumption. In fact, with 20% of the population, we consume more than half the resources. For example, according to the Worldwatch Institute highly developed nations account for:

86% of the aluminum used
76% of the timber harvested
68% of the energy used
61% of the meat eaten
42% of the fresh water consumed

Another way to look at a population’s contribution to environmental sustainability or degradation is to consider its "ecological footprint".

Scientists consider that there are about 28 billion acres of productive land and water on the planet. So for Earth's 6.5 billion people, a sustainable ecological footprint is 4.3 acres per person. The current average: 5.7 acres, which means we’re using up the planet faster than it can replenish itself.

In the US, each person's ecological footprint is a whopping 23.7 acres. To put this in perspective, we'd need about four additional planet Earth's to extend our standard of living to the rest of the world.

I'm not advocating that we all start living in poverty to solve this imbalance. But lets keep it in mind when thinking about who’s to blame for overpopulation, and start working on ways to maintain a healthy standard of living on a much smaller environmental footprint.

Credit where credit is due: much of this info came from a textbook called Environment.