#TBT: No, the Sun is NOT Having a Hot Flash That's Causing Global Warming

Okay, I know it's Tuesday, not Thursday, but I just ran across this older piece of mine and had to re-post it on the new blog.
In 2007, I published this column over on my Newsvine channel in response to a particularly egregious bit of science-twisting by some climate change deniers at the time. With the recently released IPCC report, and some other excellent studies solidifying the anthropogenic nature of mechanisms underlying climate change, it seemed like a fun time to re-post this piece.
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SOHO image courtesy NASA/ESA/EIT.

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Recent statements that we have data suggesting that the whole Solar System is warming are not accurate. However, I understand how some were led to this misconception, mostly by anti-global-warming types spinning a few honestly neutral stories to sound like our whole solar neighborhood is practically awash in flames. You see, now that this crowd has figured out they can no longer believably deny the existence of global warming, they have turned to muddying the "whodunit" waters. Having been intimately involved in an active planetary science research program, let me give you some facts, de-spun.

Let us take an exemplar of this crowd, Cato Institute favorite Luboš Motl, whose blog "The Reference Frame" can be found here. Mr. Motl elaborates, planetary body by planetary body, upon how the solar system is warming -- implying that it's the Sun's fault all the way 'round, including on Earth (and thus absolving humanity from responsibility). Motl's mischaracterizations range from the blatant to the almost impressively subtle, so stay sharp here.

Take a couple of the planets he discusses. He says: "Venus, our planet's evil sister, has already been identified as unusable for life because of ... yes, because of the greenhouse effect that occured [sic] in the past. Last month, the Venus express gave us some new hints why Venus has such a thick atmosphere that generated global warming." [Quote is not edited down, the ellipses are his.]

This is very sneaky wording. While it is true that Venus is "trapped in a runaway greenhouse effect," we have no data either way about Venus' climate throughout history, nor projections about its future climate. To clarify the terms here (which are somewhat confusing), perhaps it would help to think of Venus as having a *ran*-away greenhouse effect: the climate "ran away," enough to establish the current climatic regime. But we have no data about whether it's still "running." We have no reason to assume that Venus' current climatic regime isn't a completely stable one which will last into the foreseeable future. The adjective "runaway" is used here only to indicate a severe or extreme case of greenhouse-style planetary warming, *not* anything about a future trend. In short, we only know where Venus is today, we know nothing about where it is going (and very little about where it's been). Motl implies with his vague wording that Venus supports his thesis that the whole solar system has been warming up lately. He carefully says nothing incorrect -- note that he says the warming occured "in the past", but doesn't specify that we found Venus just like it is with our first probe (Magellan) thirty years ago.

Yes, Venus warmed up at some point, but "in the past," not as part of a recent warming trend as he implies. Or at least, we haven't had two sets of observations to compare in order to make such a judgement, though he implies we do, now that the Venus Express has arrived (more sneaky wording). He makes it sound like Venus Express has found the planet has warmed since our only other visit, when in fact the probe has been there so briefly, no verified data has yet been released. In reality, one of Venus Express's main objectives is to see if perhaps Venus has always been warm, and it was actually Earth that cooled down long ago (see especially paragraphs 17-20 here).

Of Saturn he says "Saturn itself has a rather warm southern pole, and the temperatures in that region suddenly jumped by 3-5 Kelvin degrees. Well, it's warm because it's been exposed to sunshine for quite some time but the magnitude of the temperature jumps is not trivial to calculate." He even admits here that the pole's warming is because of how long Saturn has been facing one direction, and is actually an expected outcome of this orbital oddity. Motl obfuscates this fact by protesting at the difficulty of the calculation, but carefully avoids saying the results suggest the temperature jump isn't caused by the planet's orientation (because that's not the case). However, Motl is happy to let you think it does. More "linguistic legerdemain," as Mr. Spock would say.

Motl notes that Saturn's moon Enceladus has warmed more than expected, even admitting that the Cassini probe indicates Enceladus possesses an internal furnace and "generates its own heat." Total non sequitur, here, folks – if Enceladus generates its own heat, then how does the moon support his argument that the Sun is heating up the whole solar system?

Motl takes USA Today's article trumpeting climate change on Jupiter as something worth reading – does anyone read this paper for actual science?!?! – and proudly points out that "nothing less than global warming is expected." If you read an article that actually describes this research, you'll see how improper and even ridiculous using this to support his conclusions really is. Nowhere, nowhere at all, does the research suggest the warming is caused by increased solar activity – quite the opposite ("Jupiter generates much of its heat from within"). All the research says is that some fluid mechanics modeler somewhere (who has "never looked through a telescope") built a computer model trying to explain/predict Jupiter's notorious storms. His modeling is based on qualitative information, *not* quantitative information (i.e., data!), and furthermore all he found is that the current system of storms seems to be in constant flux, and may collapse soon. As the storms keep Jupiter's total heat well-distributed across the planet, any such collapse halts this distribution system, allowing heat to build up in certain places like the equator. So, yes, the research suggests the *equator* might get hotter, but (a) that is not "global warming" (i.e., there is no suggestion that the whole Jovian globe will warm 1 degree K on average, only that heat will be poorly distributed), and (b) let me reiterate, the model does not imply increased solar heating!

Stick with me here, let's look at one more, Mars. It's important because there are many more articles out there about Mars, with many more distasteful spins. Stein Sigurdsson fields this one very well in about one well-cited page. The gist is that, completely contrary to right-wing spins (and Motl's assertions), all available climate data for Mars shows the atmosphere *cooling* over the past 30 years. Motl cites a recent study that Martian South Polar ice seems to be retreating as evidence of Martian "global" warming, but it is actually a well-known fact that the Martian south pole has wonky geometry/ topography that leads it to behave in slightly oddball ways compared to the rest of the planet. In Sigurdsson's words, "Colaprete et al in Nature 2005 showed, using the Mars GCM [Global Climate Model], that the south polar climate is unstable due to the peculiar topography near the pole, and the current configuration is on the instability border; we therefore expect to see rapid changes in ice cover as the regional climate transits between the unstable states. Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing." Motl goes on to provide more amusing contortions for other planetary bodies, but for the sake of not going on even longer than I already have, I'll tell you their treatments are just as disengenuous, and leave it at that.

Right-wing think-tanks like the Cato and Heartland Institutes have seized upon many of the same things as Motl to build a case that solar activity is causing solar-system-wide warming trends. They then argue that since it's not humanity's "fault," there's no point in altering our greenhouse gas production. What's really screwed up here is, regardless of whether global warming is being caused by us or the sun, *either* one is a huge problem, both with the same solution: cut CO2 production! If the sun is indeed heating up the neighborhood, how do we save the planet from toasting to a crisp? Throw off the blankets, baby – decrease CO2! In fact, if Motl's implications are correct, and the Sun is the culprit, then we have an even bigger carbon problem than before: we would need to decrease CO2 in the atmosphere to **below** the natural, pre-industrial norm. That's right, we would need to not just halt our production of CO2, but remove every molecule of it we ever put up there, and then a heckuva lot of what was up there before we ever started the first man-made fire, to boot. It's great when arguments are so bad that they defeat themselves.

Oh, and "one more thing, " dear commenter. To your credit you didn't go there , but there is a final fallback position for the anti-anthropogenic-global-warming crowd that I want to head off at the pass: that old "we're saving ourselves from the next regularly-scheduled ice age" argument. On the face of it, that may in fact be true: we are about due for an ice age, and maybe, just maybe, we've put it on hold for the time being with our extra greenhouse gases. But at what cost? We know approximately what we would be saving ourselves from – but what would we have screwed ourselves into? (For more detailed discussion of this specific sub-topic, visit the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's website, for excellent articles such as this one).

The key to answering this is an understanding of the nature of cycles such as our climate's sinusoidal one. The cycle is like a clock pendulum: if you force it out of its equilibrium by yanking the thing to one side, does it immediately return to its natural swing? No. It will first swing back nearly as widely to the other side, then swing back almost as widely as that to the first side, etc., until it regains equilibrium. This is an excellent analogy for a self-regulating system like Earth's climate cycle. That is, unless you pull the pendulum so far back that when you let go it smashes itself to bits on the other wall – another apt analogy. We don't know where the limits are to what our self-regulating climate system can take, but all self-regulating systems have such limits. This means the result of our futzing with the system has two possible outcomes: (1) a continued heating that will track our carbon emissions, breaking the climate cycle past its ability to right itself, sautéing us slowly, slowly to the Venusian death of our civilization, or (2) we won't have broken out of the cycle's ability to self-regulate, and we'll see a temporary (on the order of a few hundred years) average temperature spike which will screw things up royally, followed by an equally dramatic downswing which will freeze things just as royally, on and on, pounding our civilization for millennia until finally equilibrium is regained in a million years or so. If these folks think civilization is in danger from your regularly-scheduled garden-variety ice ages, the ones that occur when the system is "in" whack, they are in for a rude awakening about what happens when the system is thrown completely out of whack. This is all basic thermodynamics, as irrefutable and inexorable as entropy itself.

6 Environmental Issues in Asia, and What You Can Do [via Matador Network]

I don't know if you've ever stumbled across the Matador Network, but it's one of my favorite travel journalism websites. Matador goes far beyond your standard travel blogging, covering many global and local issues from boots-on-the-ground perspectives.
"6 Environmental Challenges Facing Southeast Asia (and What You Can Do to Help)"
is an excellent example. The piece has both general and specific suggestions, not mere fluff. They even hit upon one of my favorite oft-overlooked problem areas, water scarcity/security. Go check it out!

Photo courtesy Eddy Milfort and Matador Network.

Urban Nature: Spring Has Sprung on the High Line [photo]

New Yorkers and tourists alike enjoy a bit of nature and open sky this weekend on the High Line.

Photo: Kade BP Hutchinson.

Even in the City - perhaps most especially there - even short walks in the outdoors decrease stress hormone levels significantly.

Just Another Oil Leak IN A NATIONAL MONUMENT

Ho-hum. That's all. Just another oil leak. Er, actually two. So, TWO oil leaks ... One in a National Monument, another 3 miles away in a -- oh, don't worry, it's only a National Forest. They're meant to be raped, pillaged, then burned -- right? I'm not making the burning part up, either.

Photo courtesy of Leah Hogston
of the Salt Lake Tribune. Dark
sandy areas are oil/tar.

That's the way Utah -- or at least the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) -- seems to be responding to disastrous news that two leaks were recently discovered in the Dixie National Forest and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM). The first leak was found by hikers on Saturday, March 22nd in Little Valley Wash and reported to the BLM, which oversees the Grand Staircase, on Monday the 24th. Little Valley Wash is part of the headwater system of the Escalante River, a stream responsible (along with its tributaries) for carving many of the region's spectacular canyons. The hikers initially identified between three and four miles of affected streambed. The story first appeared in the press in an article for the Salt Like Tribune by reporter Brian Maffly on March 26th, and fortunately the paper appears to be keeping close track of the disaster.

The second leak was discovered by the US Forest Service on March 24th in the Upper Valley Oil Field, which supplies the pipeline responsible for the first leak. The second leak was featured on April 2nd in a Salt Lake Tribune article by Christopher Smart. This oil field is part of the Dixie National Forest, with the second leak straddling the border of the two parks; both sites are leased and operated by Citation Oil Company of Houston, Texas.

Photo courtesy of Leah Hogston of the Salt Lake
Tribune. Scorched areas around pond show where
floating crude oil was burned off the water. 

It is appalling that this has not made any national news. GSENM is supposedly the "crown jewel" of the BLM's National Landscape Conservation System, yet the agency was basically trying to give the oil company a free pass within three days of the story breaking, claiming the spill occurred 40 years ago and was only recently mobilized by flash flooding. The BLM's special informational site regarding the spill, while talking a good talk about environmental experts and remediation plans, provides few details and only four utterly useless photographs. The two Salt Lake Tribune articles mentioned above have much higher-quality photo galleries live, here and here.

Yours truly in Dixie National Forest, moments before
a hummingbird landed on my right knee. 

The Dixie National Forest is both beautiful in its own right, and adjacent to three national parks and two national monuments. The area is famous as part of "The Grand Circle" of national parks and monuments that millions of people visit annually, literally among the United States' most stunning landscapes, including the immediately adjacent Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, and other iconic Utah locales like Canyonlands and Arches National Parks.

I personally cut my teeth as a geologist in this area, so I know firsthand how almost preposterously fragile these desert ecosystems are without deadly oil pipeline leaks. Many parks in the area have signs reading "Don't Bust the Crust!," explaining that even stepping off-trail just a few feet can cause years' worth of damage to these delicate soil habitats. Many of the lovely photos you see on this blog were taken very near these leaks.

Those specks of white are my campsite amid the Paunsagunt Cliffs
of Dixie National Forest.

Local residents of Escalante, Utah, touring the Little Valley Wash spill with reporter Brian Maffly called the gruesome scene their "Little Valdez."

One perspective not discussed in any detail so far, though, is water. (For the geo-nerds, "the hydrogeologic ramifications of the mobilized contaminants.") See, the sand and sandstones that so indelibly define this region in the public consciousness are basically enormous sponges. Sandstone makes an excellent aquifer because the spaces between the sand grains, called pore spaces, can make up to 30% of the rock's volume. Unfortunately sandstones don't merely slurp up any water that happens along; they guzzle nearly any fluid that happens by -- including oil. The fact that oil was found along four miles of a stream bed, and is acknowledged by BLM to have a significant underground component at the second leak site (and leaked into a pond there to boot) means that these oil spills have already contaminated local aquifers. Every creature downstream of these leaks that drinks from a stream or pond, or pumps water from their well to their kitchen sink is now in danger of poisoning. While crude alone may not move very quickly through such materials, lighter fractions of the petroleum mixture will constantly dissolve, bit by tiny bit, ensuring a slow, excruciating poisoning of the area.

Lower Calf Creek Falls, one of my favorite spots on the planet,
is only a few  miles from these leaks.

The Forest Service and BLM are talking about removing standing water and some of the soils near the contamination sites on the ground surface, but sadly many contaminants will certainly have already infiltrated the ground and aquifers below. In order to understand how far the contamination has spread, many, many monitoring wells will have to be drilled. Water well drill rigs will have to be driven all over this delicate, parched landscape to figure out the true spatial extent of the damage. While the generally dry conditions will have slowed the capillary seepage of these petrochemicals down, out, and away, the fact that the leaks occurred an indeterminate-yet-not-short time ago means that these two agencies, already chronically underfunded, will be struggling to play catch-up, and may never truly be able to clean up all the oil spilled in this rugged, difficult terrain. Yes, Citation theoretically should be on the hook for the cleanup ... but as the last oil pipeline spill managed to glean a whopping $53,000 out of the behemoth Chevron, only a fool would expect Citation Oil will be held to the many, many millions of dollars this sort of cleanup will cost.

The BLM was quick to point out that with nearly two million acres to watch over in the Grand Staircase (and another two million in Dixie National Forest under the care of the Forest Service), they "can't be on every acre all the time." That may be true, but only a few of those acres have active oil fields -- and as these are not even Citation's first ... er, citations ... it would seem to behoove these agencies to keep vigilant eyes upon these specific locales. This oil field turns fifty this year, and with apparently no major renovations, these incidents are likely to not only continue, but increase in frequency. Local environmental group Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance stated "If BLM and the Forest Service don’t have the resources to protect our public lands, they shouldn’t be leasing them,"and I fully agree. (Quote courtesy of Christopher Smart's Tribune article.)

As profoundly as these lands have affected me, it is not only for the usual "future generations" that Utahns and all of us that love the Southwest must shout and work and cajole these agencies to do what's right -- it is for me, and for you, and your better half, and mine.

The view up the canyons of the Escalante River in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

For the full, very well-reported stories, I highly recommend you read the two pieces by Brian Maffly, and the third by Christopher Smart. Watch the Salt Lake Tribune (@SLTrib) and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance's Facebook page and Twitter feed (@SouthernUTWild) for updates on the situation.

Upcoming piece: Mexico, Petro-agriculture, NAFTA, and the Transatlantic & Transpacific Partnerships

Wanted to give a heads-up to expect in the coming days a piece about the impacts of transnational trade treaties, their impact on the sustainable "triple bottom line," and finally a bit of their personal impacts.

Geoengineering Study Concludes Global Withdrawal Symptoms Would Suck

Climate change is like the One Ring of environmental issues -- in many ways, it seeks to "rule them all." While this blog will look at everyday ways to go green and stay that way, we are all citizens of Earth -- and will each be affected by climate change more with every passing year. If citizens wish to be heard, it happens for most of us through voting (be it with our feet, our wallets, or our ballots). So I want to help my readers stay informed about how their time and their votes can best help whoop some climate change behind. All that is to say: environmental policy -- as we can relate to it as voters and perhaps volunteers -- will be an important part of this blog too.

There are nearly as many ideas about how to fight climate change as there are people working on the problem. The most proactive of these strategies are often called climate engineering (a subset of the broader term geoengineering). Rather than waiting on humans to stop giving in to their bad habits (like driving gas guzzlers or building coal-fired power plants), geoengineering projects aim to actively correct one or more aspects of the climatic imbalances manifesting themselves these days.

If you've heard of scientists dreaming up giant orbital sun shades, or distributing tiny iron shavings across the oceans' surfaces, then you've heard of a climate engineering project. One of the most plausible and probably economical of such schemes involves a different kind of shade -- one made of tiny, reflective particles. Approaches that are designed to decrease the amount of sunlight (and thus, heat) inbound to Earth's surface are called solar radiation management (SRM) strategies.  The giant sun shade is the classic SRM example.

Ginormous flying mirrors aren't exactly plentiful on the clearance rack at Target these days. But the same effect can be achieved in other, cheaper ways. One of them fairly literally fell into humanity's lap -- several times, quite memorably. When large volcanoes erupt, the ash thrown high into the atmosphere has long-recognized, well-known cooling effects the whole planet over. If there's one thing at which humans excel, it's putting crap into our atmosphere, so naturally the idea of doing it in a long-term, systematic way to cool our overheating planet has been tossed around for some time. The technical term for "crap" here is stratospheric sulfate aerosols (SSAs). Extensive computer modeling and data from eruptions like the one from Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 have shown that such a strategy would have concrete benefits for the world's thermometers. What no one has examined until recently is what would happen if our children or grandchildren ever tried to wean the planet off of a successful SSA program.

Climate scientists from the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC, Canada), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA), and the University of Washington (Seattle, WA) recently published a study of the long-term feasibility of SSAs in Environmental Research Letters, and the results are eye-opening. In a paper entitled "Rapid and extensive warming following cessation of solar radiation management," a team led by Kelly McCusker of University of Victoria details the deadly backlash their models predict if a successful SSA program were ever to falter or be halted. Given what a large-scale multinational endeavor such a project would probably be, it is all too likely that at some point beauracracy and budgets would cause hiccups, if not total breakdowns (e.g., Debt Ceiling Foolishness). 

This is an excellent study because it reminds us of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Until we are a great deal more knowledgeable about the many linked systems that shape our climate, tinkering like this is almost guaranteed to come back and haunt us. Working to mitigate the cause (excess carbon) should be our focus, not treating the symptoms (like solar heating) separately.

Think your worst ecological sin is the carbon footprint from your RAV4's poor gas mileage? Unfortunately, it's probably not.

Do you think your worst ecological sin is the ugly carbon footprint resulting from your RAV4's rather mediocre gas mileage? Unfortunately, it's probably not.

This video gives a great explanation why. Pardon me while I go give my RAV4 a ... sand bath.

Despite what the oft-ignorant commenters on YouTube may think, the point of the video isn't that we all should stop using dishwashers, showers, and washing machines. It's to raise awareness so that when we hear water conservation measures come up in political discourse -- such as efficiency standards for appliances, or charging for water based on what it's actually worth, rather than how much it costs to extract and distribute -- people will better understand why the discussion is occurring at all.

One of the better comments (by Linnel Gifford-Mahany) said, "Jeez, makes one wonder how many gallons of fresh water there are in the world." Eureka! Just the sort of question that water resource scientists hope to hear asked. The answer is that of all the water on Earth -- including oceans, ice caps, rivers, and subsurface aquifers (groundwater), etc. -- only 0.7672% is usable fresh water (h/t US Geologic Survey). Yes, that's about one quarter of one percent. And keep in mind, the vast majority of even that still has to be treated to make it safe to drink! There is other water available, of course, but it comes at much greater cost; either it must be desalinated from brackish/salty sources, or melted from snow & ice. You've probably heard our glaciers and ice caps are already dramatically endangered, and that the cost of desalination is atrocious -- even the Saudis think it's expensive!

Digging a little deeper, you'll note this isn't solely the individual citizen-consumer's fault. We only account for about 8.5% of use with our Maytags, Whirlpools, and Klean Kanteens of agua. Power plants use 41.5%, and farming accounts for 37%, so they're by far the worst offenders. The good news is that there are real-life, current fixes that could help this problem notably -- they just cost money. Most modern farms are ginormous industrial agriculture operations which irrigate using open, unlined ditches that lose nearly as much water to seepage as they actually deliver to crops. Lining those ditches would make a huge difference. Much of the water lost to thermoelectric power generation could be reclaimed and re-injected into nearby aquifers rather than discharged as as loss downstream to the ocean.

So, take home message: pay attention to water conservation measures -- they matter. Whether it's more water-efficient appliances, more electrically efficient appliances (remember the 41.5%!), or government conservation efforts -- they matter! Ignoring the issue will guarantee a future where the price of water for drinking, cooking, and washing will be so high that all but the wealthy will struggle to pay, just as many of us do now to make our car and house payments.