One element of most warming-mitigation proposals is a “cap-and-trade” system, whereby carbon emissions are “capped” at a certain level and then “permits to emit” are traded on a commodities financial marketplace. One such system is, supposedly, the European Union ETS, which went on line in 2005.

These systems seem prone to failure. Here are some reasons to think so:

1. The system only works if there is rigorous enforcement. Any fudging or lax regulation will make the supposed commodity worthless.
2. The system only works, for greenhouse gases, if there is significant cross-border and ideally worldwide compliance. I know the UN and other negotiations are trying to make this a worldwide activity, but it is hard to imagine that multiple jurisdictions will be able to come together at the level of rigor necessary.
3. The system only works if caps are progressively tightened. Caps need to be tightened or there is no point in taking this approach to mitigating global warming. However, getting any cap rigorously enforced will be hard enough, and is unlikely.
4. The system only works if there is widespread agreement on how to measure. One interesting part of the carbon system is how “carbon sinks” are part of the EUETS system. Russia, for instance, gets huge numbers of credits for its forests. But there is also very little agreement on how to measure the carbon effect of a forest.
5. The system only works if the distribution of “permits to emit” are fair. But they are not. Most schemes take the status quo as the way to hand out permits — grandfathering, basically. This makes historical polluters, paradoxically, the biggest recipients of the permits. Currently in Europe (2006-7) there is a simmering scandal about “overallocating” permits — basically, handing out more permits than pollution! This caused prices to crash on the EUETS from 30 Euros per ton to less than 4 Euros from April 2006 to January 2007.  Not only does this grandfathering occur inside countries, but across countries.  If we were to cap all emissions now, does that mean that India, China, and other developing countries are capped at current levels, and that mega-polluter USA is capped at its current level as well?  What’s the fairness in that?  But if it isn’t fair, then what is the fair system?  Extraordinarily difficult to say.
6. The system only works if pollution from all major sources is considered. However, for example, airline travel and personal car travel, for two, are not yet considered in the EU. The EUETS applies only to large installations, such as power plants and factories. It isn’t that such consideration is impossible — just, the amount of time it would take for the system to become intelligible would simply be too long.
7. The system only works if India, China, and the USA are involved.

Guess I’m a pessimist. It would be interesting to relate these 7 reasons to the Stern Report’s recommendations, and see if he shows anything but blind hope that the world could actually implement a worthwhile system. If someone does that, let me know.

It is interesting to analyze the claims of people who oppose the current discourse of climate change. One useful instance is a recent interview, published by a Pittsburgh-area newspaper (owned by Richard Scaife), with Vancouver-based scientist Dr. Timothy Ball. Though his claims about the political motives of various players seem odd, a few of his more scientific claims piqued my interest. Here are the ones which might be worth mulling over (I’ll be paraphrasing, in single quotes, and then adding my comments):

• ‘Global warming began in 1680.’ Yes, that was the beginning of the current interglacial. It reminds us that, carbon dioxide or no, the climate changes.
• ‘Global warming is caused by the sun.’ And he doesn’t mean in the obvious sense that the sun supplies the energy captured by the greenhouse effect. He means that sunspot and sun-based magnetic and radiation activity has changed enough recently to explain the vast majority of global warming. This claim I don’t know how to evaluate, but I’ll be on the lookout for sunspot data.
• ‘In the history of the earth, climate change happens all the time.’ Correct. I always return in my mind to the example, discussed in Diamond’s Collapse, of the inhabitants of Greenland, who were wiped out by a massive climate shift — but, as well, wiped out by their own resistance to adaptation.
• ‘Since 1998, the global temperature has gone down.’ Umm, well, that’s cheating. 1998 was a spike in hot weather. If you look at any trend lines, the lines go up. And pick 1997 or 1999, or any other year since the 18th century, and global temperature has gone up.
• ‘I wouldn’t mind a warmer world if I lived in Canada or Russia.’ A-hah, we catch Dr. Ball as a Canadian happy to be a potential winner in a future warmer world. He is correct — Canada and Russia will, on balance, be winners in most stages of a globally warmed world. However, Ball thinks the world is cooling…
• ‘Longer frost-free winters will lead to less energy use.’ Well, true enough, and possibly most significant in Canada and Russia. But the longer hot summers will lead to much more electricity use for cooling — air conditioning especially. And with most electricity still created by fossil fuels like coal and natural gas… you do the math.
• ‘We will be much, much cooler by 2030.’ This one is very hard to evaluate, because it completely dismisses the greenhouse effect. I suppose we’ll know in 23 years. However, it would be good to know what evidence he has in mind — that sunspot and solar radiation activity will be changing? That the earth’s orbit will be moving in a certain direction? What basis for such a prediction could he have?
• ‘Most ice is already in the ocean’. Ok. When discussing Greenland and Antarctica, I find scientists quite clear about the difference between ice-cover on oceans - whose melting does not raise the sea level - and ice-shelves/glaciers, which either sit on land or are supported by the land. We’re not worried about general ice melt; we are worried about ice-shelves giving way, or of sheets of ice sliding off Greenland’s mountains and into the ocean.
• ‘The sea level is not level.’ He’s talking about the various ways in which the ocean isn’t really a smooth equal level everywhere. This claim seems more like sand in the face to his critics — measuring sea level is no doubt complex, and involves many adjustments and averages, just like average temperature. But is this supposed to help the inhabitants of, oh, Tuvalu?
• ‘We are incorrectly taught that change always happens uniformly and gradually — I call this incorrect belief “uniformitarianism”.’ Ball has a very good point here. Change can be sudden. I seem to remember that Stephen Jay Gould made a claim about sudden change in evolution — “punctuated equilibrium” — and that important past geologist Louis Agassiz worked very hard to get people to believe that massive changes, in the form of an ice age, could have occurred.

Ball’s point about uniformitarianism cuts both ways, however. Just as easily, we as a world culture might have bumped the world - via our carbon orgy - into a non-uniform temperature and climate shift which we can no longer control.

Calling all realists! According to the Christian Science Monitor, the World Bank is looking for two specialists in adapting to global warming. Actually, by my count, as of today (February 20, 2007) there are three jobs available. Two of them are “Senior Environmental Specialists, (Climate Change)”, one of whom would work for the World Bank Environment Department and one of whom would work for the World Bank Institute. The newest post is for an Adaptation and Country Relations Officer for the Global Environment Facility — basically for committed environmentalists who want to brave the wilds of bureaucracy and try to get countries collaborating to work on problems like desertification, biodiversity loss, and water. If you try those links in March or April 2007, they may be gone.

These job postings, however small a sign, do seem good to me; the impacts of global warming are here now, and future investments have to take it into account. As well, we have committed ourselves to at least 1 degree Celsius more warming (usually called committed warming) no matter what we do. Hope the international community adapts to that.

These books came to my attention as two of the ‘best environmental books of 2006′ according to Living on Earth. Both are solid (which means, these days: worrisome) reviews of many of the existing symptoms of anthropogenic global warming. Neither point their way to solutions, let alone the political feasibility of any of those solutions.
Elizabeth Kolbert, currently on the staff of the New Yorker and previously of the New York Times, reviews the development of global warming science (Tyndall and Ahrennius, in particular), and current atmospheric (James Hansen) and permafrost (Vladmir Romanovsky) science. She assembles some field notes concerning melting Arctic ice, thawing Siberian, Greenland, and Alaskan permafrost, and current changes in Iceland and elsewhere. She discusses how non-athropogenic climate change wiped out great verdant civilizations in the place that is today’s middle east, how the Dutch already deal with rising waters (or, as the case may be, sinking land), how some scientists and economists (in particular, Princeton’s Robert Socolow) are struggling to develop an approach to minimizing carbon emissions, and how America’s dismissal of the Kyoto protocol is both understandable and bafflingly self-defeating.

I read her book as if she is somewhat amazed onlooker. As the title of the book underscores, she is doing something akin to anthropology or nature writing: watching a process unfold and describing several of its aspects. In this case, the unfolding process is a catastrophe. She does not moralize, does not directly engage you and say “Do something about it, dammit!”, and does not draw conclusions about humanity’s status as, say, an infection on Gaia (Lovelock) or a horribly myopic misfit.

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