My wife just emailed me this great story. A compelling retrospective of Charles David Keeling, the scientist who measured the steadily increasing level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, transforming the scientific understanding of humanity’s relationship with the earth.
The article, A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning, written by Justin Gillis, appeared in The NY Times today. It is an excellent even-handed overview and backstory of climate change.
As Congress dithers with political inaction on climate change and investment in renewable energy, this article provides a window into the quiet work of scientists around the world who say something extraordinary is going on.
I hope you will take 5 minutes and read every word. This is our history and our future.
Keeling died in 2005, but his son Ralph continues in his footsteps. Here’s a picture of the Keeling Curve – the history of atmospheric CO2 – measured by Keeling, starting back in 1958.
The Keeling Curve
As atmospheric CO2 has increased, so has global temperature.
And with rising temperatures, we are seeing increases in extreme weather events.
For more on Climate Change, click on the Climate Change topic in the sidebar to the right.
For more on Charles David Keeling, see his biography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The most read article at the NY Times online yesterday was The U.S.S. Prius by Thomas Friedman. The thrust of the article centers around two brutal facts – we are fighting wars for oil, and wars consume a lot of oil. One of the tidbits mentioned toward the end of the article is that a gallon of gas costs up to $400 per gallon by the time it reaches the front lines. Moving beyond the economics, getting fuel to the front lines also costs lives. The U.S. military loses one soldier for every 24 fuel convoys it runs in Afghanistan.
Friedman observes “at a time when a fraudulent, anti-science campaign funded largely by Big Oil and Big Coal has blocked Congress from passing any clean energy/climate bill” the U.S. Navy and Marines are spearheading a strategy to make the military much more energy efficient. Friedman adds, “Unlike the Congress, which can be bought off by Big Oil and Big Coal, it is not so easy to tell the Marines that they can’t buy the solar power that could save lives.”
Ray Mabus, the Secretary of the Navy, has crafted a strategy to shift from oil to alternative energy, including, solar and biofuels. On Earth Day this year, the Navy flew a F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet powered by a 50-50 blend of conventional jet fuel and camelina aviation biofuel made from pressed mustard seeds.
And while congress favors boondogles like corn ethanol, which uses almost as much energy producing it as it yields:
The Navy will use only “third generation” biofuels. That means no ethanol made from corn because it doesn’t have enough energy density. The Navy is only testing fuels like camelina and algae that do not compete with food, that have a total end-to-end carbon footprint cleaner than fossil fuels and that can be grown in ways that will ultimately be cheaper than fossil fuels.
Mabus has also set a goal for the Navy to use alternative energy sources to provide 50 percent of the energy for all its war-fighting ships, planes, vehicles and shore installations by 2020.
About 60% of the oil we consume is imported from foreign nations – many of those nations are petro-dictatorships. As we shift to alternative fuels and energy, we can reduce our dependance on foreign oil.
Camelina Sativa
Though many people are familiar with solar energy, innovations in the field of biofuels are less well known. Most vehicles run on liquid fossil fuels – gasoline and diesel. Biofuels, such as camelina, provide a cleaner greener alternative to fossil fuels. Camelina Sativa is a member of the mustard family, a distant relative to canola. Camelina can grow on land unsuitable for most food crops, especially arid lands. It has yields that are roughly double that of soy. Camelina can be grown in a rotation with wheat crops. Farmers who have followed a wheat-fallow pattern can switch to a wheat-camelina-wheat pattern, and produce up to 100 gallons of camelina oil per acre, while growing up to 15 percent more wheat. And once the oil is pressed from the seed, the leftover “mash” can be used as nutritious livestock feed.
We consume more oil for transportation than anything else. Innovations in transportation fuels will have the most impact on global energy consumption and associated emissions of climate-changing CO2.
(source:DOE)
Oil production is peaking and will become increasingly expensive. It’s time to support our transition to a cleaner, greener alternative energy.
The U.S. spends more money on potato chips than energy research and development. To restore US scientific and technical leadership, Congress needs to stop bashing science and taking money from Big Oil, and start investing in our energy future.
Watch this video. It’s encouraging to see a Republican politician take a risk, saying climate change is a serious problem and the US needs to become a leader in innovating solutions.
Yesterday morning, at a House subcommittee hearing on climate change, outgoing Republican representative Bob Inglis challenged his Republican colleagues to stop mocking scientists, get busy tackling climate change, and put the US in a leadership position on innovating solutions.
A ThinkProgress analysis found that 50 percent of the incoming freshman GOP class deny the existence of manmade climate change, while a shocking 86 percent are opposed to any legislation to address climate change that increases government revenue. Meanwhile, all of the Republicans vying to chair the House Energy Committee — which handles climate and energy issues — in the new Congress are climate change deniers. They include Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), who infamously apologized to BP shortly after the company’s catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico this summer.
Here’s the transcript of Rep. Bob Inglis remarks, to the House subcommittee hearing on climate change
I’m very excited to be here Mr. Chairman, because this is on the record. And it’s a wonderful thing about Congressional hearings — they’re on the record. Kim Beaszley who’s Australia’s ambassador to the United States tells me that when he runs into a climate skeptic, he says to them, “Make sure to say that very publicly, because I want our grandchildren to read what you said and what I said. And so, we’re on the record, and our grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, are going to read. And so some are here suggesting to those children that here’s a deal: Your child is sick — this is what Tom Friedman gave me this great analogy yesterday — Your child is sick. 98 doctors say treat him this way. Two say no, this other way is the way to go. I’ll go with the two. You’re taking a big risk with those kids. Because 98 of the doctors say, “Do this thing,” two say, “Do the other.” So, it’s on the record.
And we’re here with important decision to be made. And I would also suggest to my Free Enterprise colleagues — especially conservatives here — whether you think it’s all a bunch of hooey, what we’ve talked about in this committee, the Chinese don’t. And they plan on eating our lunch in this next century. They plan on innovating around these problems, and selling to us, and the rest of the world, the technology that’ll lead the 21st century. So we may just press the pause button here for several years, but China is pressing the fast-forward button. And as a result, if we wake up in several years and we say, “geez, this didn’t work very well for us. The two doctors didn’t turn out to be so right. 98 might have been the ones to listen to.” then what we’ll find is we’re way behind those Chinese folks. ‘Cuz you know, if you got a certain number of geniuses in the population — if you’re one in a million in China, there’s 1300 of you. And you know what?
They plan on leading the future. So whether you — if you’re a free enterprise conservative here — just think: it’s a bunch of hooey, this science is a bunch of hooey. But if you miss the commercial opportunity, you’ve really missed something. And so, I think it’s great to be here on the record. I think it’s great to see the opportunity we’ve got ahead of us. And, I also — since this is sort of a swan song for me and Mr. Barrett I’d encourage scientists who are listening out there to get ready for the hearings that are coming up in the next Congress. Those will be difficult hearings for climate scientists. But, I would encourage you to welcome those as fabulous opportunities to teach.
With Bush-era tax cuts about to expire, a lot of attention is being focused on extending tax cuts for the rich – suggesting it will help the economy grow. Frank Rich, in his weekly op-ed piece at the New York Times, deconstructs that idea and examines the issue through the lens of income inequality.
The top 1 percent of American earners now have tax rates half what they were in the 1970s. And they took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pre-tax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pre-tax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. In that same period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage went down more than 7 percent and the poverty rate rose.
(source: IRS micro data, Piketty and Saez)
The rich have been getting richer as their tax rate has steadily eased. And they are taking the added wealth and using it to influence public policy, to the detriment of the middle class.
“How can hedge-fund managers who are pulling down billions sometimes pay a lower tax rate than do their secretaries?” ask the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker (of Yale) and Paul Pierson (University of California, Berkeley) in their deservedly lauded new book, Winner-Take-All Politics
…Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election.
And as Frank Rich points out, the American Dream is not well. Rather than middle class wage earners moving up the ladder, there are less and less people becoming wealthy, and more and more of the wealthy simply becoming wealthier.
Nor are the superrich helping to further the traditional American business culture that inspires and encourages those with big ideas and drive to believe they can climb to the top. Robert Frank, the writer who chronicled the superrich in the book Richistan, recently analyzed the new Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans for The Wall Street Journal and found a “hardening of the plutocracy” and scant mobility. Only 16 of the 400 were newcomers — as opposed to an average of 40 to 50 in recent years — and they tended to be in industries like coal, natural gas, chemicals and casinos rather than forward-looking businesses involving the Green Economy, tech or biotechnology. This is “not exactly the formula for America’s vaunted entrepreneurial wealth machine,” Frank wrote.
Those in the higher reaches aren’t investing in creating new jobs even now, when the full Bush tax cuts remain in effect, so why would extending them change that equation? American companies seem intent on sitting on trillions in cash until the economy reboots. Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ranks the extension of any Bush tax cuts, let alone those to the wealthiest Americans, as the least effective of 11 possible policy options for increasing employment.
The middle class is experiencing the twin stress of falling income and increasing expenses. The most significant household expense is healthcare.
(source: Congressional Budget Office)
Healthcare costs represent a stunning 17% of GDP. Politicians that cut taxes without a plan for how to cover the costs of Medicare are dooming the middle class to a future of just working to pay for out of control medical costs.
With the Income Inequality Gap growing, perhaps we can understand why, during the 2010 midterm election, only 40 percent of voters approved of an extension of all Bush tax cuts.
Measuring Income Inequality: The Gini Index
No society can sustain itself without a healthy middle class. No healthy society ignores it’s poor. As income inequality increases, social stability decreases.
Economists, the US Department of Labor, and analysts at the CIA, track Income Inequality using a metric known as the Gini Index (also known as the Gini Coefficient).
It is one of the essential metrics in the Political Instability Index, which is used to assess the level of threat posed to governments by social unrest. Zimbabwe, Chad and Congo rank most unstable, with Canada, Denmark, and Norway ranking most stable. Notably, the US, once the standard-setter of a stable democracy and middle class, has quickly fallen to an underwhelming rank 110 out of 165 countries.
The Gini Index is proportional to the Income Inequality of a nation. A Gini Index value of 0 indicates equal income for all earners. A Gini Index of 100 means that one person had all the income and nobody else had any.
A lower Gini Index indicates more equitable distribution of wealth in a society, while higher Gini Coefficients mean that wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer people. Societies with high Gini Index tend to be unstable.
The chart below shows the historic trend of the Gini Index for the US, with tax rate and pre-tax income data for the top 1% of US earners in the background. On the right are various countries, with their associated Gini Index. Developed nations that take care of their own tend to have Gini indexes in the twenties and 30s. The US Gini Index is on track to breach 50 by the end of the decade, putting the US in the dubious country club of third world dictatorships and failing nations.
(source: US Department of Labor, CIA World Factbook, IRS)
If you are a business leader, ask yourself, “Do I want to be living and building a business in world like that?” If the answer is NO, think about what public policy you are supporting through your contributions to politicians, associations and the Chamber of Commerce. Are the politicians you are supporting interested in a healthy middle class?
Business paid billions of dollars to politicians in the 2010 election. Paraphrasing W. W. Jacobs in his classic cautionary tale, The Monkey’s Paw, “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.”
So I was reading the article, and when I got to the end, I like to read the comments. And there, at comment #2, MeMeMine69 wrote the following:
Are WE not the new neocons when we condemn our kids to a CO2 death, just to get them to turn the lights off more often? Climate change has done to us what Bush did to the neocon’s reputation.
System Change, not Climate Change.
Environmentalism is strong, successful and progressive. Just remove the CO2 mistake from the equation and let’s all just carry on. Why does it seem like we WANT this crisis to happen? I can’t do this anymore.
I’m liberal. I’m progressive and a New Green Denier.
I’m ahead of the curve because this can’t continue without alienating the rest of the voters who don’t believe this “promise of unstoppable warming” to happen to the planet Earth.
My reply:
Hi MeMeMine69.
Most of the kids I know are not afraid, they are energized, and part of the solution. They give me hope.
Think back to the 70s, when it was kids that helped their parents realize the importance and opportunity of recycling.
One of my heros is Iris Parker Pavitt. Iris served as a teen delegate to the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, and is a coordinator for FEAST (Farm Education And Sustainability for Teens), and is a member of the Farm to Cafeteria Program, to bring healthy organic foods to school food programs.
NPR had a fascinating story this morning on how height equals health. Northern Europeans are now the world’s tallest people, led by the Dutch. The average Dutch man is 6 feet tall, while the average American man maxes out at 5-foot-9. What’s going on, and why does height matter?
(source: Department of Economics University of Munich)
Good health care and good nutrition during pregnancy and early childhood are two reasons why the Dutch have grown so tall, Komlos says. In addition, the Dutch guarantee equal access to critical resources like prenatal care. That’s not the case in the United States, where 17 percent of the population has no health insurance.
Highlights from NPR’s report Measuring A Country’s Health By Its Height
Through most of American history, we’ve been the tallest population on the planet. Americans were two inches taller than the Englishmen they fought in the Revolutionary War, thanks to abundant food and a healthy rural life, far from the disease-ridden cities of Europe.
But we’re no longer at the top. Northern Europeans are now the world’s tallest people, led by the Dutch. The average Dutch man is 6 feet tall, while the average American man maxes out at 5-foot-9.
The height of Americans reached a plateau in the 1960s. As a nation, we have not grown taller but we also have not lost stature. Komlos says groups of people usually don’t lose height unless they’re in the midst of a famine or a war. “It has practically never occurred in peacetime,” he says.
Economists are interested in these biological questions about nations because while height is a reflection of health and nutrition, those factors usually result from economic well-being.
Economic success and height even correlate to some degree on an individual level. Taller people tend to be smarter, and to earn more.
Andreas Schick, a graduate student at Ohio State University in Columbus, is trying to figure out why. He thinks it gets down to the fact that someone who is healthy and well-fed enough to grow tall — or to the individual’s maximum potential genetic height — is also someone who is able to grow a strong, capable brain.
“If you’ve reached your maximum height, that probably means you’ve reached your physical and mental development,” Schick says. “That helps you reach your maximum potential, be that intellectually or socially.”
But the fact that Americans aren’t getting taller means more and more children won’t have the chance to reach their maximum potential, Komlos says.
And that has ramifications for the future. “A population that is not taking care of their children and youth is going to be in difficulties in a generation or two,” he says.
At Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C., two miles northwest of the White House, Rana says he sees children in difficulty every day. Many of his young patients suffer health problems from obesity — too many empty calories and fat. Others are not getting enough to eat.
“You would be shocked by how many kids go without food in this town,” he says. “What you have to do is go to clinics like ours and ask people: Did you have a meal today?”
