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Home > Resources > Transcripts |
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Confronting Climate Change
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May 23, 2007
Introduction
JOANNE
MYERS: Good morning. I'm Joanne Myers, Director of Public Affairs Programs,
and on behalf of the Carnegie Council I'd like to thank you all for joining us
this morning.
Today our guest, Michael Oppenheimer, will be discussing
Confronting Climate Change. Michael is a widely acclaimed scholar and policymaker,
and I think you all will be fascinated by what he has to say.
As our planet
continues to heat up, skepticism is finally beginning to wane about the effects
of global warming and climate change. Even though these issues have become highly
politicized, increasing media coverage has made them part of our mainstream dialogue.
Today the reality of climate change is no longer a distant threat, but is seen
by many as an imminent danger.
In February of this year, a report was issued
by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. This panel was set up under the auspices of the United Nations
to produce a global consensus on the science and economics of this pressing topic.
Our guest this morning was one of the lead authors.
The report concluded
that the warming of the Earth's climate system is unequivocal, and that human
activity has very likely been the driving force in that change over the last 50
years. Additional data indicated that climate change is already having significant
impacts on certain regions, particularly in developing countries and on most ecosystems.
This study added new momentum to the debate that now seems centered less over
whether humans are warming our planet and more about what can be done to slow
down or stop this calamitous trend.
These findings come as a growing number
of policy experts warn that environmental challenges are quickly emerging as the
most important security threat in the 21st century, with the potential to affect
every portion of the planet. For example, scientists expect global warming to
trigger extreme weather events, such as long and intense droughts, which could
imperil the world's food supply, as rising temperatures render fertile areas unfit
for growing crops or for animals to graze upon.
Furthermore, increasingly
frequent and violent storms could also produce flooding, tornadoes, and cyclones.
Sea levels will continue to rise. Glaciers will retreat even further and snow
cover will decline. And a warmer world could give rise to infectious diseases
whose spread could affect thousands.
In the end, the advent of any one
of these events may will represent a challenge to international security, perhaps
just as dangerous and more intractable than the arms race between the United States
and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And, even though last week's participants
in the 166-country, United Nations-hosted talks in Germany were still struggling
to find a way to bring the United States and large developing countries to the
negotiating table in an effort to extend the Kyoto
Treaty, there is no better time than the present to make radically responsible
decisions about how we are going to live on this planet.
While some will
contend that there is a great deal left to understand about global warming and
climate change, I would claim that what is needed is effective communication.
By now we know that dialogue begins with finding the right people to convey the
message. Today our guest, Michael Oppenheimer, is one such person.
Professor
Oppenheimer is a visionary scientist who cares deeply about our planet. Although
you all should have received a copy of this c.v., which I hope you have read,
I would like to point out that his impact on the environmental movement and his
concern for global warming and climate change is far broader than his c.v. might
suggest, and his c.v. is extremely inclusive.
As this report concluded:
"Climate change may threaten mankind, but mankind has a good chance of averting
the consequences if it puts its mind to it." Professor Oppenheimer is doing
just that.
It is a pleasure to turn the floor over to our guest this morning.
Please join me in welcoming Michael Oppenheimer.
Remarks
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER:
Thank you, and thank you for inviting me here today. It's a little early in the
day to land a heavy problem on your heads like this.
What I want to do
is try to get you to understand why we arrive at the situation we do today, where,
much to the surprise of many people, and probably at least a few of you, this
issue has exploded in the public arena. Well, how did we get there, why now, and
where did this issue come from? So I am going to give kind of a historical perspective
to start out with and explain to you the origins of the issue, how it gradually
became of concern to the scientific community, and why it has become a large-scale
public concern today. Also, there is so much that has happened, I have to say
that in order for me to be able to speak off-the-cuff about this, I have to do
it historically, because that's the way I think about things, and it will help
me present, I think, a more coherent story for you.
After describing where
this issue came from, I'm going to talk a little bit about the recent scientific
findings, which situate the question as our political leaders are viewing it right
now, and then talk about the political context a little bit. And finally, how
I expect the problem will be solved and where we'll go in the future.
So
let me outline just what is this problem, what is global warming, and what is
the greenhouse effect.
There are certain gases that exist naturally in
the atmosphere—water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, swamp gas, nitrous oxide
(which you know as laughing gas)—which are transparent to sunlight. The sunlight
comes through them and warms the Earth's surface. But those same gases trap some
of that heat as it tries to radiate back into space, so they form kind of an invisible
blanket. That's the greenhouse effect—and it's a good thing, because without
the greenhouse effect, Earth would be about 60° F colder than it is today,
it would be a frozen desert, and human life and much other life would never have
evolved.
The greenhouse problem arises because human beings are adding
to the levels of these gases, causing a buildup in the greenhouse effect, and
that buildup inevitably will warm Earth. In fact, it already has. Earth is almost
a degree-and-a-half Fahrenheit warmer than it was 150 years ago, when the first
comprehensive global thermometer-based measurements of temperature were put in
place.
Now, the existence of the greenhouse effect was postulated almost
200 years ago by the famous French mathematician Fourier.
The notion that burning goal oil and natural gas, the primary sources of human-made
carbon dioxide, would lead to a buildup in the greenhouse effect and an inevitable
warming of the Earth was asserted over 100 years ago by Svante
Arrhenius, who is a Swedish scientist who won the Nobel Prize for something
entirely different, the ionic theory of liquids as solutions, in either 1901 or
1903.
I recognize some of my Swedish friends are in the audience, and
they may have heard this story. I knew Arrhenius's grandson, whose name was Erik.
He worked at the World Bank some years ago. He talked at some length about his
grandfather, who he said was a black sheep in the family, despite winning the
Nobel Prize, because the greenhouse theory was regarded as a totally crackpot
thing, and he was an embarrassment, despite his fame in the scientific community.
Nevertheless,
time has proved Arrhenius to be correct. But it took a long time, because between
the time he discovered the greenhouse theory and the mid-1960s only a very, very,
very small handful of scientists ever worked on, thought about, or mentioned it.
Most scientists never heard of it. Most average people, of course, never heard
of it. It was totally arcane and irrelevant to the main business of thinking about
climate. I'd say the number of scientific papers on the idea of global warming
between 1896, when Arrhenius did his work, and the mid-1960s was maybe 10 or 20,
that's it.
In the mid-1960s things changed. What happened? Two things happened.
First of all, the first high-speed computers became available and people were
looking around for things to do with them. One of the things that happened was
that human beings, because of all the problems that were always occurring due
to weather, decided they needed a way to predict the weather better than they
had. Previous weather prediction basically was based on looking out the window,
or a sophisticated version thereof, but still not much better than that.
Well,
you can't look out the window to project something like global warming. It's just
too far ahead and the details are too complicated. So in the mid-1960s a couple
of groups, particularly one at Princeton, started working on applying high-speed
computers to creating what are called models or simulations or approximations
of the climate, where you could actually put down all the physical equations for
how air moves around and how it is heated by the sun, et cetera, and predict what
the climate will do. These were originally conceived of as weather-forecasting
models; that is, what's going to happen over the next few days. Climate is average
weather over the long term.
One of the scientists began asking the question
of: What happens if you tweak the basic contents of the atmosphere? Starting in
1957, a scientist had started to actually measure carbon dioxide atop a mountain
in Hawaii and provided the first evidence that carbon dioxide was actually building
up. Previous to that, the reason most people had disregarded the greenhouse theory
is because they knew that the ocean can absorb dioxide, and the ocean is so vast
it was assumed that most of the carbon dioxide that humans produced by coal burning
would just dissolve in the ocean and disappear, and therefore that Arrhenius was
wrong. But [Charles]
Dave Keeling started these measurements in Hawaii and proved that carbon dioxide
in fact was building up, that humans had to be the cause.
So come to the
1960s, and the computer analysts started looking at this data and putting it into
their computer models and trying to ask "what will this do to the climate?"
And, lo and behold, the modern computer simulations verified that Arrhenius had
been correct 70 years before, and that a warming of, they reckoned, 4° F would
occur eventually if the amount of carbon dioxide doubled in the atmosphere.
In
the 1970s it was discovered that other gases could contribute to this problem.
As I said, methane. A lot of methane leaks from natural gas pipelines because
methane is the major component of natural gas. It is produced at the bottom of
swamps naturally, but it is also produced, say, at the bottom of a landfill because
the same anaerobic conditions exist. It's a byproduct of various agricultural
activities. I could go down a list of other gases, but all of a sudden there was
a whole bunch of gases that contribute to global warming.
Governments started
to get interested in the late 1970s because, if you remember the last time we
were worried about an oil supply disruption, at that time there were suggestions,
as there are today, to start making oil out of coal, synthetic fuels, as the Nazis
had done during World War II. It turns out that to do that you actually have to
put in as much energy as you will eventually get out of the liquid fuel you produce,
which would double the amount of carbon dioxide. So all of a sudden, there were
some scientists running around who had these new computer simulations in their
pockets saying, "That's a bad idea."
That first got the attention
of government officials. It got the attention of somehow—and I don't know
how—Helmut
Schmidt, who was then the Prime Minister of Germany. It got the attention
of Abe
Ribicoff, who was a senator from Connecticut you may remember. And it got
the attention of Gus
Speth, who was head of Carter's,
who was then president, Council
of Environmental Quality.
That started a whole process, which I won't
go into the details of, that got the National Academy involved, the Congress involved.
Al Gore, who
had been worried about this problem from an academic point of view since he was
in college, started holding hearings. The late Senator
Paul Tsongas actually held the first hearing, I think in 1977, in the Congress.
Some
political activity started, but it was still at the level of "this is just
a theory," until 1985, when scientists got together under UN auspices as
a group. There were by then hundreds of scientists who were interested in this
problem. Most of them don't care about politics, don't want to know about political
leaders, look askance at the whole business of public decision-making—just
it's got nothing to do with them.
But a bunch of them were what you might
call instigators—or, nicely, in the political science literature they're
called "policy entrepreneurs"—and they brought their colleagues
together at a big meeting in Austria where there were several hundred scientists.
They came out with a rather remarkable statement that said: "Global warming
is a real problem; it's going to get worse; and"—and this is the most
interesting part—"that the past has always been regarded as a guide
to what we should do in the future, to what climate is going to do, but in fact
the past is no longer a reliable guide to the future. You can rip up all your
information about what the climate has done in the past. So, for instance, insurance
companies' rating for hurricane frequency: forget it, it's all going to change.
And, most importantly, the government should go ahead and negotiate an international
treaty to limit global warming." It's a very powerful statement for scientists
to make.
A couple of years later, scientists drilling in the middle of
Antarctica, an international French/Russian team, were drilling with a device
that looks like an oil rig. They pulled up cores of ice by drilling deeper and
deeper. The center of Antarctica is about 12,000 feet deep; there's that much
ice over the continent. They pulled up this huge core, and in the core there are
little air bubbles. The reason there are air bubbles is because ice is formed
from snow, and when the snowflakes form—you know, think about it—they
have points that go like this and air gets trapped. If you look at an ice cube,
after all, which is formed from a somewhat different process, it's got air trapped
in it. Same thing. That's what an ice core looks like.
They pull this up,
and they take it into a clean room, and they shave the ice away under pristine
conditions and they release the air in the bubble. It turns out the air has the
same properties that it had when it was first laid down. How old is that ice?
The ice at the bottom of these ice cores now turns out to be over 700,000 years
old. So all of a sudden, we had out of nowhere a record of Earth's atmosphere
from 700,000 years ago and forward. The original core was actually 125,000, then
they found an older one of 400,000, and now over 700,000.
When you look
at that air, what you see is the carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases
went up and down over time and that Earth's temperature went up and down in perfect
correlation. This was a tremendous substantiation for the scientists that carbon
dioxide, methane, et cetera, were related over time. The cause and effect was
complicated, and it's still not fully understood, but what we do know is you cannot
account of the changes in Earth's temperature over the last 700,000 years unless
you include the greenhouse effect as one of the driving forces.
The reason
climate changes naturally is Earth's orbit changes periodically over thousands
of years, tens of thousands of years. This changes the pattern of sunlight on
Earth's surface. That pattern of sunlight affects the way trees use and release
carbon dioxide, and that changes the greenhouse effect.
What we also saw
over that period of time is that Earth had never been much warmer in that 700,000-year
period than it was today. We're in a very warm period. The cold periods are called
glacial ages, where ice was 1,000 feet thick over here, for instance.
Number
two, it turns out that carbon dioxide is much higher now than it ever was in the
whole 700,000-year period. The carbon dioxide level is now almost 0.4 percent
of the atmosphere's total content. It has never really been higher than about
0.3 percent. So it is about 30 percent higher than it has been in 700,000 years.
That was another indication that the temperature must inevitably increase.
The
last time carbon dioxide was this high was about 20 million years ago, and 20
million years ago it was a much warmer planet. The last time it was as high as
it's projected to get by the end of this century—if we do nothing about the
emissions, the climate will be equivalent to what it was 55 million years ago.
Fifty-five million years ago was almost as far back as dinosaurs were dominant.
Earth was semi-tropical to tropical. There were no ice sheets. If that happened
today, sea level would be hundreds of feet higher.
So there is a strong
case that we are headed in a direction which will remake the face of the Earth.
It has happened before, but it happened over tens of millions of years. We're
going to do all that in the course of 100 years if we don't stem the emissions
of these gases.
During the 1990s there was tremendous progress. All of
a sudden, there were thousands of experts involved in this problem. It grabbed
the attention of the scientific community. By the mid-1990s, we were able to demonstrate,
through very sophisticated computer techniques and other methods, that most of
the warming to date is likely due to the buildup of the greenhouse gases. That
is, the fact that Earth is more than a degree Fahrenheit warmer today than it
was 150 years ago is likely—in fact, very likely—due to the fact that
we are putting all these gases into the atmosphere.
A second thing happened
starting in the late 1990s, which is only sort of coming to full fruition today
and has a lot to do with the reason that your attention is on this problem. That
is that the actual changes in the climate that that 1.5-degree-or-so warming is
capable of bringing about have started to become so large that they have been
noticeable, not just to scientists, but to the average person in the street. It's
hotter. There are more heat waves. There's less very cold weather. Hurricanes
are more intense. Drought is more frequent in certain parts of the world.
Perhaps
most troubling over the long term, the sea level is rising. It has risen about
seven inches over the past century. Most of that rise is due to the greenhouse
gas buildup. That may not sound like a lot, but on a typical East Coast beach
here, if you raise sea level by one foot you take away 100 feet of land inland
due to submergence and erosion.
So big changes have already begun. The
climate is already changing. Really the question today is: How fast can these
political systems mobilize themselves to stem the warming, to reduce the levels
of the gases, so we don't get into a problem where we have such a large, fast
warming that we simply cannot cope?
What do the projections show today
as far as the possible level of warming? There's a lot of uncertainty about how
much Earth could warm. The uncertainty is basically for two reasons, and I think
it's pretty easy to appreciate why this is the case.
Reason number one:
In order to understand how much it is going to warm, you have to understand how
much of this gas is going to be building up in the atmosphere over the next century.
How do you do that? Well, where do these gases come from? They come from cars,
they come from using electricity, they come from cutting and burning trees (deforestation
is an important component), they come from heating your home, they come from air
conditioning, they come from industry. A lot of stuff.
Why does that activity
happen? Well, it's all driven by the rate of population growth—more people
driving more cars, using more refrigerators, cutting more trees for agriculture,
and so forth.
It's driven by the technology we use. You tell me. In 100
years, are we going to be driving cars? Is everybody going to have their own personal
levitation device? How is it going to be powered? Is it going to be powered by
gasoline, hydrogen, solar energy? I don't know.
How many people are going
to be on the surface of Earth? When I started with this problem 25 years ago,
the projections were we'd reach 15 billion. Now they're down to about 9 billion.
And that's good news, by the way. There have been big changes in fertility in
most countries.
How do you project? Well, what you do is, because there's
obviously a lot of uncertainty, you get a bunch of experts in a room. Shell Oil
is actually the company that pioneered this method. You lock the room. It's dark
and there are no windows usually. It's usually a sunny and nice day outside and
you'd really prefer to be somewhere else. You lock these people in a room for
a week or so and you say, "Give us some scenarios, give us some possibilities."
That's what has been done.
The possibilities range like this: from a modest
growth in emissions to a huge growth in emissions. I won't give you the numbers.
It's not worth thinking about. You can find them by looking at these reports from
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So that's one source of uncertainty.
The
other source of uncertainty is these wonderful computer models we've been building
for 40 years are still nowhere near up to the job of precision that they would
need to be to fully accurately project the climate for the future.
Let
me tell you the main reason. The climate system is very complex. As you warm Earth's
surface, you warm the oceans. As you warm the oceans, you put more water vapor
in the atmosphere. Water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas, but in addition it
forms clouds. Clouds can either reflect sunlight—the low, heavy clouds, fog-type
clouds, reflect sunlight—but the Sirius clouds, the light, veil-like clouds
that you see coming in ahead of a cold front, actually trap heat just like greenhouse
gases. We don't know, and we cannot really accurately say, whether we are going
to get more of this kind of cloud or more of that kind of cloud and whether we'll
get more of this kind of cloud near the equator and more of that kind of cloud
near the poles where there's less sunlight and it matters less.
It's a
mess, and it is not going to be resolved quickly. So there is a big uncertainty
in what's called the sensitivity of the climate. When you combine those two uncertainties,
over this century we will either have, at the low end, a modest warming of about
2° F, which would mean higher sea level, more intense storms, more heat waves.
But, for a country like the United States, it would be manageable. For many developing
countries, it will still create terrific problems, particularly along the coast.
At the high end, you would have about an 11.5° F warming, if these
projects are correct, which most of my colleagues think is a out-and-out disaster,
so much warming so fast we would not be able to cope with it, even in a rich country
like the United States, much less in developing countries.
We could get
either end or we could get anything in between. I can't tell you which. I'm not
even able to rank the probability. I can just tell you this is what's called a
risk management exercise. We have to deal with the fact of the reality of the
warming but the reality of the uncertainty.
Now, why has this issue gotten
such public attention lately? Actually, the global political system has been working
on this problem since 1992, where at the Earth
Summit in Rio, countries, including the United States, signed and ratified
the UN Framework Convention
on Climate Change, which was a voluntary agreement to begin the process of
reducing emissions. The United States actually ratified that treaty unanimously
in the first Bush
Administration. It has been a long time since we've ratified an environmental
treaty.
That was followed by the Kyoto Protocol, which was a child of the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has been ratified by all industrialized
countries, except the United States and Australia, and of course is being implemented
in Europe to greater or lesser success, and is providing a model for how you move
forward on this problem. It is not going to solve the problem, obviously, particularly
without U.S. participation, and certainly without the mandatory participation
by big developing country emitters, which the Kyoto Protocol does not envision.
But it was always envisioned as an experiment and a first step to start seeing
how we could reduce emissions effectively, and that it has been. It has taught
countries how to move forward.
What happened in the last few years is that
the public finally got onto this issue. The reasons for that are not fully understood.
Academics will write papers about this five or ten years from now, when it will
no longer be of interest to anybody because the world will have moved on. Eventually
we'll understand it.
But my view is—I think others see it more or
less similarly—that we had a couple of very bad hurricane seasons at the
same time scientists were able to say hurricanes were becoming more intense due
to global warming. Although those hurricanes may not have been affected—as
a statistical thing, you can never really say—it made clear what the scale
of damages can be and how climate events are very hard for humans to deal with,
even in a sophisticated society like ours.
In that way
Hurricane Katrina was a monument. It was an incredible symbolic event because
it showed—I cannot tell you, because I feel it in the depths of my heart—how
incompetent government has been at all levels at anticipating the problem; protecting
people from it in advance, a situation they knew would eventually happen; helping
them during the event; and then, even to this day, helping restore that city.
No one would have predicted that in this day and age half an American city would
disappear overnight and be still disappeared a couple of years later. Unbelievable,
just unbelievable. That's a learning experience for all of us on how difficult
it will be to deal with this problem if we don't get it under control first.
The
second thing that happened actually happened two years before. In Europe a large
heat wave occurred in 2003. Forty thousand deaths are attributed to that heat
wave. Again, it was an unusual event. It was not so clear it could have been anticipated,
but the fact that once it got going governments were incompetent at all levels
to deal with the potential fallout was an astounding lesson to everybody.
If
you had asked my colleagues in the scientific community before that event "How
many people could die if we get one of these large heat waves?" they would
have said "a few hundred."
So this just shows you how we can't even
imagine the sorts of things that really are going to be plausible in the world
we are going into.
Another thing that happened was the pictures constantly
occurring about the melting of the Arctic, about the threat to polar bears, which
is an iconic species for a lot of people. The energy price rise that started to
happen put people's attention on the whole fossil fuel problem. Al
Gore's movie and other high-quality productions that were starting to happen
at that time grabbed the attention of the public through the media. And then there
was a political change in the United States.
All these effects—there
are probably a few others I'm forgetting—fed back on each other. All of a
sudden, there's a moment that has arrived where the public's attention is on the
issue, where politicians' attention is on the issue.
At the same time,
there is a tremendous amount of political energy that has been released because
of the vacuum in Washington, where states have moved ahead to develop their own
restrictions on greenhouse gases—not just California, which you may have
heard of, but also there's a compact among Northeastern states, and about 25 of
the states in the United States actually have a planning process in place. Many
of those actions will lead to greenhouse gas limits.
This is a classic
picture in the U.S. regulatory system. Frequently—not always—activity
starts at the state level. Then, frequently, the business community, which doesn't
want to see 50 different kinds of regulation, goes to Washington and says, "Help.
Do something." I think that's what we are going to be seeing.
All
of that has been facilitated by a monumental Supreme Court decision about six
weeks ago, which not only validates some of these state actions, I think indirectly,
but also gives states and perhaps individuals standing to go into court to sue
the emitters. This will create chaos in the political system eventually, much
as the asbestos lawsuits created chaos in that industry. I think that again is
an additional pressure.
So my personal belief is we are going to see action
very, very soon in Washington on the greenhouse gas problem because there are
too many things happening from too many different directions.
At the same
time, the Kyoto parties are moving to negotiate what ought to be the new Framework
for beyond the conclusion of the Kyoto Protocol process in 2012.
I think,
again, these events are going to come together. What I anticipate is the United
States is likely to implement a serious domestic program at the federal level
over the next two years. That problem will allow the United States to go back
into the international negotiations eventually and claim that it is now the world's
leader on climate change—which it may very well be by that time—and
will facilitate an eventual grand bargain, which will involve the developing countries.
I think the United States will start to try to engage developing countries, like
China, even before they march back into the negotiations.
So an optimistic
view—and I am an optimist—is that we are at long last on the verge of
really grappling with this problem in a comprehensive, first national way, and
then a global way.
Will things happen that we don't want to see happen?
Yes. Because there are big uncertainties, are there risks of big changes, like
the loss of big chunks of the ice sheets and a spectacular sea level rise, big
changes that maybe can't be avoided, or will we cross some tipping point we didn't
even realize? It's possible. I'd say the chances are quite a bit less than 50/50
at this point. I think that every year that we wait and add emissions to the atmosphere
the chances grow. If we do nothing for the next 10 or 15 years, I think the chances
are we will miss one of those tipping points and we will have truly unfortunate
consequences.
But we do have this chance, and I think we will likely grab
it. I was born an optimist, and I could be wrong, but that's the way I see it
now.
Thank you.
Questions and Answers
QUESTION: I'm so happy that you're both honest
and an optimist.
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: I didn't say I was honest.
I said I was an optimist.
QUESTIONER: Well, it sounds like you
were honest, because you're presenting a range of possibilities. When one presents
these catastrophic possibilities, of course it's very upsetting, and what price
do you pay or where do you go? I just wonder, as an intelligent person trying
to keep up with this—we read various reports from some scientists who really
have evidence that in the billions of years the planet has been going, et cetera,
et cetera, from the Al Gore movie that has had a lot of criticism—how do
we distinguish, as nonscientists, where the truth lies in this very exaggerated
series of disputations?
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: First of all, let me just
say on Al Gore's movie, because I'm always asked about it, I've seen hundreds
of academic presentations by renowned scientists on this issue, and I have to
say that Gore made no more, and in many cases fewer, mistakes in that movie than
I've seen many scientists make. It is not possible to talk about an issue that
is so broad, that covers so many areas, and get everything right. I saw the movie
three times. I picked up one thing that I really thought was flat-out wrong.
He
said a few things that I would have said differently and that some scientists
would have said differently, but I've seen a lot of scientists give that presentation
and they've all got their view and they've all got their pitch. Nobody is without
a view, and that's fine.
So that's just on that issue.
In terms
of how you judge, there has been a lot of noise in the public space about this
problem, and it does not represent any big difference in the scientific community.
What it represents is that, as with any complex problem, there are always some
people who for honest reasons have a different opinion. It's always true of every
scientific problem.
There's a famous biologist who still thinks that AIDS
is not caused by HIV, and he talks about it publicly and frequently. That doesn't
mean he's right.
So the government set up these assessment panels to try
to figure out where the weight of the community is. The National
Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences reports frequently on
this problem. The United Nations set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change to report on the problem. This stuff is all freely available, and actually
written in something that approaches laymen's English, parts of it anyway. You
can go the websites, you can read it yourself, and you make your own judgment.
I can just say that there are about 2,500 experts that are entrained by
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they actually entrain the critics
also. If there are 2,495 that think this and five that think this, then you make
your own decision. Scientists can be wrong. But it's a risk management exercise.
Judge for yourself who you'd rather listen to in making your decisions about what
the right way to go is. That's what governments are supposed to do.
QUESTION:
I just attended a conference all day and part of the evening called Forum of the
Americas, and the theme was sustainable development. You added insights that didn't
even show up in that conference, so I thank you for that, particularly the historical
business you gave us.
But I was surprised that you said that the time would
come when we would renegotiate the Kyoto Treaty to take effect when it expires
in 2012. Why not elect Gore-Obama
and get started in two years and put it into effect much sooner?
MICHAEL
OPPENHEIMER: Obama might think it should be Obama-Gore, for instance.
First
of all, the Kyoto Treaty. I didn't say "renegotiate the Kyoto Treaty."
Kyoto is finished. The United States didn't participate.
QUESTIONER:
What is 2012?
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: 2012 is the date which is the
completion date. The countries that are participating in Kyoto have to do what
they promised to do by that date. Some will meet it. Some will not meet it.
The
issue politically on the international stage is: What do we do afterwards? If
Kyoto is a first step, what's the next step? That's what is being negotiated.
I
didn't suggest that we should wait until then. In fact, the U.S. political activity
is moving ahead now.
California is implementing these regulations. The
most interesting one would reduce emissions from their cars basically beginning
with the 2009 model year. They were sued by the auto manufacturers. The auto manufacturers'
suit had the legs were cut out from under it by the Supreme Court decision. They
still have to get permission from EPA
[Environmental Protection Agency]. They were down there this week—there
was a story in the paper today—asking EPA for what they need, which is a
waiver. If they don't get the waiver, they'll sue EPA. It's going to happen eventually.
QUESTION:
If I understand you correctly—this is maybe not a very intelligent question—there
are waves anyway. Over a long period of time, the world warms up and gets colder.
I take it that in most of the previous hundreds of thousands of years there was
no global policy there. So could you tell us a little more whether there is an
analysis why it turned back and forth from warmer to colder? Are there self-corrective
mechanisms somewhere that do make those changes back?
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER:
Excellent question.
The reason the Earth went through waves, as you put
it, of warming and cooling over long periods of time had to do with these changes
in Earth's orbit that I talked about. Earth's orbit has three different cycles
at least—actually more—that it goes through. They have to do with the
tilt of the axis of rotation, for instance, compared to the plane at which it
revolves around the sun. That's one of the changes in the orbit. There are two
other prime ones.
QUESTIONER: How does that alter them?
MICHAEL
OPPENHEIMER: There are several theories about how that generates changes in
Earth's climate. There's no doubt that it does, because the timing is just too
perfect over, as I said, 700,000 years.
One theory, for instance, is that
when Earth's orbit is in a particular inclination, the amount of sunlight reaching
the Southern Hemisphere in their summer increases the pattern. And we know this;
this does happen. The theory then is that that, for instance, increases the production
of algae at the ocean's surface. There is a particularly rich area with a lot
of nutrients where algae get produced. That algae production—of course, it's
photosynthesis—sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. When the algae
die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean. That means there's less carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere, a lower greenhouse effect, and Earth starts cooling. When the
Earth starts cooling, ice sheets start expanding. The ice sheets reflect sunlight
because they are more reflective than the ocean or land that they cover. That's
called a feedback. Earth gets get cooler. Further cooling further enhances the
process. All of a sudden, you're in an ice age. That's one theory about how these
orbital changes trigger the changes in climate.
Then it reverses itself.
Earth's orbit goes in these regular cycles, we know that for sure. It changes
the pattern of sunlight, we know that for sure. All of a sudden, the intense sunlight
in the Southern Hemisphere during the summer starts switching and goes to the
north. The carbon dioxide metabolism changes. Carbon dioxide is released back
into the atmosphere by the ocean. The Earth warms again.
Those kinds of
changes, which happen over tens of thousands of years and are triggered by changes
in Earth's orbit, are not what's going on now. What's going on now definitely
is that the greenhouse gases are building up due to human activity, not due to
these biological changes. There is nothing to reverse that except us reversing
emissions.
Nor do we know of any limit in the climate system that would
stop the warming. There could be one. Maybe when we get to 4-5 degrees warming
there's something that happens that we don't know about. There's a lot we don't
know. But we can't make policy based on a hope.
QUESTION: Thank
you for being so comprehensive and enlightening for lay people. Your students
are very fortunate to have you.
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: Thank you.
QUESTIONER:
Two areas that need more explanation.
One, you've given us an example of
how the democratic system in the United States can have a positive effect, if
enough people talk about it and get to the politicians, the business people, and
so forth. What about China, which has an enormous problem that affects everybody
else and over a billion people?
Secondly, could you touch on alternative
fuels and the possibilities, the Brazilian example and so forth?
MICHAEL
OPPENHEIMER: First of all, let me answer the second half first. How would
we solve this problem if we set out to do so?
Most analyses indicate that
we could increase the efficiency with which we use energy, and therefore decrease
the energy sector's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, by about 20 percent.
There are different views on whether it would cost anything or would be purely
cost-free, because the extra investments at the front, like in more-efficient
high-fuel-economy vehicles, pay back because you use less gasoline, for instance.
There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of individual steps like that that
can be taken. The reckoning is over the next 30 years, 25 years, we could increase
the world's efficiency by about 20 percent compared to what it would otherwise
be by taking such measures. We just have chosen not to do so. Price of fuel isn't
enough of an incentive. You need government action.
At the same time,
switching to lower-carbon-content fuels, if the supplies are available, and it's
not clear. An increase in natural gas usage temporarily to replace coal is one
suggestion.
Another suggestion is an increased used of nuclear power to
generate electricity. I myself think expansion of nuclear capacity at this point
is a bad idea because we haven't solved the waste cycle problem, with the concomitant
possibilities of diversion of fuel for nuclear proliferation and the targeting
of nuclear power plants by terrorists. Those are solvable problems. It's just
that we haven't solved them. I don't think they're going to be solved for several
decades. So I actually don't think in the United States that expansion of nuclear
power is a short-term solution, though it may be a long-term solution.
In
the long term, when you get to replacing existing generation with new technologies,
you're talking about an enhanced development of solar energy, and possibly a solar-hydrogen
economy where hydrogen is generated from solar energy and piped around for people
to use in factories, etc.
In the short term, one particularly promising
alternative in the China context and the U.S. context is what's called carbon
capture and storage, trapping carbon dioxide before it gets into the atmosphere
from power plant stacks and burying it deep underground in reservoirs called deep
saline aquifers of expended oil wells. That's a technology which we're finding
out a lot about fast and could solve about a third of the problem.
On China,
I actually have—again, I can't help it, and maybe I'm wrong; maybe I'm a
Pollyanna—I have a more optimistic view than some have.
First of all,
going directly to your point about political response, there is a developing public
sector or civil sector in China with a strong environmental movement at the local
level that the government is actually starting to listen to. China has terrible
air pollution problems. It is not too much to imagine that the agenda of cleaning
up the air pollution problem, together with the growing concern at the official
level in China about their exposure to climate change and sea level rise, which
is starting to penetrate at the highest levels of government, will come together
and converge in a solution eventually which would change the incentives and actually
see decreasing—maybe not decreasing coal use, but decreasing rates of growth
in building coal-burning power plants and some serious examination of alternatives.
So
I think China may be where we were 40 years ago, when we hadn't even touched our
air pollution problem. We then got serious about it and started to do something
about it. If you had asked people in 1950 or 1960, "Are we ever going to
clean up the air? We're dying"—people would have said, "They'll
never come to grips with it." Well, we did. These are problems that can be
come to grips with.
The expenses are not that great. We're talking about
a tenth of a percent, or maybe less. Some people think the net cost is actually
negative; that is, you save money by doing many of these things. We just don't
know.
I think China will come to grips with the problem, but this is not
something that's going to happen overnight. If the United States doesn't lead
the way and show that it can be done, I think China is less likely and will be
much slower to try to come to grips with it.
QUESTION: There seems
to be much more talk in Europe about using some form of a carbon tax as part of
an approach to this problem, and there seem to be all kinds of different notions
of what that means and what that could do. Do you have any views about whether
this kind of an approach is going to get anywhere in this country?
MICHAEL
OPPENHEIMER: In terms of policy instruments, the United States actually has
a long experience with dealing with energy and effectively limiting greenhouse
gases. For instance, the best-known example is the Corporate
Average Fuel Economy standards. When you buy a motor vehicle, it has to get
a certain mileage, or at least the fleet average has to get a certain mileage,
or else the manufacturers pay a fine. A modernization and enhancement of the Fuel
Economy standards is one thing that probably will be done.
Number two,
when you buy an air conditioner or a refrigerator, those appliances have to satisfy
standards set by the Department of Energy for electricity use and, therefore,
for greenhouse gases coming out of the power plant indirectly. Those standards
are upgraded regularly, except in the recent Administration, which stopped doing
it. There is no reason those standards can't be toughened and the process accelerated,
becoming yet more efficient. A typical refrigerator is three times more efficient
than it was 30 years ago. That process needs to continue.
But to bring
all these measures together there is another proposal, which is for a cap-and-trade
system—that is, limit emissions of greenhouse gases; give producers of the
fuels, for instance, emissions allowances; and allow them to be traded so that
the companies that can do the reductions cheapest have an incentive to find new
technologies to do so. The companies that can't do it as cheaply buy an emissions
allowance from someone else. But the cap is always descending, so emissions are
going down. That was used in Title IV of the Clean
Air Act of 1990 and has been very effective in cleaning up the sulfur dioxide/acid
rain problem.
Then there's the possibility of taxes. Taxes are an effective
instrument, just like a carbon cap would be. The trouble is they're a politically
difficult sell in this country. I was just having this discussion here at the
table. The last time we tried to do a tax related to energy use was in 1993, and
Clinton
got his head handed to him for doing it. It's one of the reasons, it is believed,
that the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994. That has not been forgotten.
It's not an easy political sell.
It doesn't matter in a way, because a
carbon cap is as effective as a tax, but it is possible that a tax will eventually—you
know, the U.S. political system may grow up in some way and we may learn to swallow
more taxes. I don't know. I wouldn't bet on it for this round. Maybe for a future
round.
One thing I say is not going to happen. Some people have talked
about a rationalized international tax on carbon. That's not going to happen.
I'll take any bet on that.
QUESTION: My question is more about the
role of the consumer and the role of the market in terms of stopping this environmental
degradation. You've spoken a lot about government initiatives, but it just seems
to me in a lot of what I've been reading lately is the role of entrepreneurship
and the educated consumer who wants to buy products that are environmentally positive,
or whatever you want to say. It just seems to me that it's actually the market
taking the lead and the government following the consumer.
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER:
Yes, certainly, that's a strong element of what's going on, and the big burst
of excitement we've had over this and other environmental issues. It's a revisitation
of something that has happened periodically before over the last few decades.
I
want to say some elements of the private sector have been in some sense been quite
progressive on this issue, and have for a long time pressed for greenhouse gas
limits. The private sector is split in three parts.
Some firms—particularly
some electric utilities, plus du Pont, more recently GE [General Electric], and
some other companies—have pressed the government to actually do something
about the problem, partly because they have reduced their own emissions, partly
because they've got some new technologies which they think they're going to get
an advantage from in a carbon-constrained world, partly for other reasons.
Then
there's another group in the middle, which is the big body of companies, which
are cautious, resistant to any change, don't take a public position on it, and,
particularly with a hostile administration, haven't wanted to say "this is
a good thing to do."
There is a third, shrinking group of companies
which has taken the lead in propagating the views of this handful of scientists
that there's really scientific controversies on this. These are the kind of "black
hats," the most famous one of which is Exxon, which recently has claimed
that now they believe in the problem and they're not going to spend money on this
sort of activity anymore. We'll see.
But beyond that there are the consumers,
and the consumers have gotten interested in this problem all of a sudden. There
are things that people can do. It's a good idea for individuals, including yourselves,
to do this sort of thing because it gives our leaders—who really don't lead,
they follow—the courage to go out and pass laws that actually solve the problem.
Individuals aren't going to solve it, but they can prove that it can be done
without great pain.
You hear a lot about compact fluorescent bulbs. Yeah,
they work. Buy the bulbs. You hear about hybrids. Yeah, they work. Buy the hybrids.
Look for the Energy STAR sticker, the EPA sticker, when you buy appliances. All
that helps. It's not going to solve the problem, but it's one brick in the wall,
and an important one.
QUESTION: On that note, if the individual
level is not going to solve the problem, does the country participation or consciousness
solve the problem too? My homework last night for this breakfast meeting was I
was reading The
Lorax with my two-year-old son. For those of you who don't know The
Lorax, it is a classic Dr. Seuss book [about the environment].
So
I started thinking about this environmental issue. One of the things that was
concerning is when you think about this in a global context it reminds you of
the parable of The
Tragedy of the Commons, where we all individualistically act in our own
self-interest.
You commented earlier that there's not going to be any
international tax or regulatory or governing body. Do we ever actually address
this problem, or is there a free-market way to address it? I work at Lehman Brothers.
We're thinking about market solutions, so anything other than a market solution
is some sort of an inefficient, short-term fix.
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER:
I think the answer is that you need both. A market doesn't exist without scarcity,
and scarcity doesn't exist unless the governments get together and say there's
going to be a limit on this stuff. That's when approaches like carbon trading
become important.
I think it's very important with this problem not to
make the mistake of thinking governments are going to mandate particular technologies.
That would be a disaster. The government—our government, at least—has
a terrible track record in the energy area of coming in and suggesting particular
ways to go, like synfuels or like breeder reactors. They made mistake after mistake.
That
doesn't mean the government shouldn't act. It means the government should take
a step back, have a hands-off approach at the most general level—for instance,
a carbon cap—and then you let companies decide what they can do. There's
the little tricky question of how you allocate the permits, which is interesting,
which is another discussion.
But your question really goes to international
coordination and can you do it unless countries get together. There are many views
on how to do this internationally.
There's the centralized view, which
is embodied in Kyoto, which I believe in, which is that you really need a firm
agreement which has specific targets and timetables. Otherwise, countries will
never do what they're supposed to do, they'll never live up to it, we'll never
get the coordination. I think that works. I think it will work.
There
have been tougher problems solved. When I was a kid, we thought we'd get blown
up in the nuclear exchange between two countries that couldn't stand each other.
To me the problem of the United States and China and greenhouse gases is nothing
compared to that problem. Somehow we've managed to survive at least this long
without doing it.
So this greenhouse problem, it's nothing. It's like
solving the air pollution problem, as far as I'm concerned, on a somewhat bigger
scale. It's affordable. The politics are manageable.
The real difficulty,
I think, is less at that level than domestically, where we have interest groups,
where we have cross-cutting interests, where, in spite of the fact that solving
the problem might be an economic good on the whole, actually reduce energy dependence
and so forth, it will certainly hurt certain constituencies, and those constituencies
are powerful, will not let go easily.
So to my mind getting international
agreement is less problematic in a way than the difficulty of getting in the United
States the political deal that is going to move us forward. But, as I said before,
I think that's on the verge of happening.
QUESTION: I'm a climatologist
as well. In my view, the climate change problem—the temperature is one issue
and sea level is one, but really the big one is the hydrological cycle, the changes
in the cycle, and the impact on the food production in particular. Could you comment
on this?
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: Yes. I'm glad you raised that.
One
of the robust findings of the climate simulations is a drying in the tropics to
sub-tropics in both hemispheres. You have a band of countries, ranging from Mexico,
parts of sub-Sahara Africa, around the world at that latitude, and a similar band
in the Southern [sic] Hemisphere, where there is projected to be less precipitation.
Even though the atmosphere as a whole is going to get moister, the moisture is
biased towards the higher latitudes when it falls.
In addition, the warming
itself dries things out. So even in some places where you're going to get more
precipitation, it will actually be dryer in terms of less available water for
runoff, for drinking, for agriculture, because water will be re-evaporated before
it has a chance to be used by human beings.
If you look at the projections
for availability of water in some of these low-latitude developing countries,
you have a very, very, very grim picture, and it affects food production. A lot
of these areas are areas where malnutrition is endemic and starvation episodically
occurs, even though we live in a world where there is on the whole enough food
for everybody. We could still have 50-to-75 years from now plenty of food on the
whole but more malnutrition and higher levels of episodic starvation in many of
these low-latitude countries because they can't provide for themselves because
the runoff isn't there. And the drinking water is getting shorter in supply too.
It's
not just them. If you look at the predictions in this country, you see the same
thing happening in Southern California and the Southwestern United States.
This
problem and the sea level rise problem are to my mind the biggies that need to
be dealt with. Again, these models are uncertain at the regional level. It's a
risk management exercise. But if you look at the risks and you think about a world
with almost twice as many people and a good chunk of them getting even less food
than today, that's something you really need to think about when you think about
international stability. So yes, it's a really big problem.
JOANNE MYERS:
Thank you so much. You really made today special.
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Transcripts have been edited for grammar and clarity, and are posted with permission from the speakers.
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"One Bed, Different Dreams: The Beijing Olympics as Seen in Tokyo," by James Farrer.
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