Global Climate Change and Natural Resources 2012: A Roberts Environmental Center Annual Snapshot

Despite what you might have heard from the lineup of overstressed Re-publican candidates vying for their party’s nomination this spring, the scientific community is essentially unanimous in believing that increasing concentrations of at-mospheric CO2 resulting from fossil-fuel burning is leading to global warming and accelerating climate change. The CO2 is also dissolving in increasing amounts in the world’s oceans, and acidifying them. Furthermore, it doesn’t look like humanity is in any mood to do much about it. The use of fossil fuels is accelerating as China and India modernize and move toward something of a resource consumption parity with Western countries. Any thought of solving the problem with nuclear power was delayed, if not destroyed, by the Fukushima-Daiichi meltdowns in Japan. The good news is that we are not running out of energy—increasing yields of natural gas and petroleum from new hydraulic fracturing technologies provide new fuel sources for both operating vehicles and generating electricity with a lower carbon footprint than coal—and if we need to turn to coal, we have plenty, as well as access to the Canadian oil sands if the Key Stone Excel Pipeline were to be built. The bad news is that all of these add more CO2 to the atmosphere. Furthermore, recent analyses make clear that there is no short-term solution to obtaining CO2-free energy: Nathan Myhrvold, a polymath late of Microsoft, and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science just published an illuminating analysis of the short-term carbon footprint of a transition to non-fossil fuel energy (Caldeira and Myhrovold 2012) and make it clear that almost every renewable source of energy is heavily front-loaded with CO2 production that will take at least decades to overcome. It has also been well understood for some years that conversion to any kind of biofuels has the same kinds of problems (Fargione et al. 2008, Searchinger et al. 2008), releasing more CO2 than is avoided for many years. So, we appear to be in the soup—an excellent position for scientists who love difficult problems and are ingeniously turning to all manner of observation, experimentation, and simulation modeling to figure out how bad it is and how bad it might become. The engineering community is also heavily involved, working on cleaner energy sources and trying to figure out what we might do about it if we actually reached one of the climate tipping points that we know have occurred many times in the past. This book is a compilation of journalistic summaries (understandable by just about anybody with a college education) of highly technical research papers about these topics published within the past year. Because of our speedy publishing pro-cess—we are in publication within a few weeks of the last word written—the material you read here will be unlikely to be referenced in any other book until at least six months from our publication date. We think it is an enjoyable way to keep abreast of some of the most interesting and important scientific developments of our time.