editorial on climate LO28943

From: Andrew Jones (apjones@cheta.net)
Date: 07/31/02


Dear Colleagues:

I'm growing increasingly frustrated that we are doing so little in this
country to avert global climate change. Thus, pasted below is a short
editorial I wrote with support from my colleagues at Sustainability
Institute (particularly Beth Sawin and Don Seville) that builds on some
excellent system dynamics experimental work by John Sterman and Linda
Booth Sweeney.

Please let me know if you'd like to receive occasional columns on systems
thinking and sustainability.

[Host's Note: I received Drew Jones' editorial separately and invited him
to distribute it on the LO list. The editorial is below. Drew originally
distributed it with a cartoon which is at

  http://www.learning-org.com/graphics/LO28943_cartoon.jpg

  ..Rick]

Sincerely,

Drew

Andrew Jones
Sustainability Institute
8 Lynmar Ave.
Asheville, NC 28804
w: 1 (828) 236-0884
h: 1 (828) 252-1266
fx: 1 (530) 452-3082
apjones@alum.mit.edu
sustainabilityinstitute.org

We Can't Afford to "Wait and See" on Climate Change

Andrew Jones
Sustainability Institute

Recent Bush administration statements on climate change just do not add
up. Our president and his advisers keep talking about climate as though we
can wait for overwhelming signs of trouble and then switch our course in
time, but the climate system is notoriously slow to respond to our
policies. The Bush administration talks as though we are driving a sports
car, when really we are steering an ocean liner.

For example, last week White House science adviser John Marburger briefed
a Senate Panel on climate change, saying, "We know we have to make very
large changes if this turns out to be a problem. The consequences of
human-induced global warming could be quite severe." (7/10/02)

Yet at the same briefing the Administration stood behind its "wait and
see" policy: we should only "slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions
(GHGs), and - as the science justifies - stop, and then reverse that
growth." (G. Bush, 2/14/02)

Climate change could be severe and yet we should wait before acting. How
can one reconcile these two statements?

MIT professor John Sterman and Harvard's Linda Booth Sweeney explain how
this "wait and see" approach feels right if you expect the climate to be a
non-delayed, responsive system - one that handles like a sports car.
Their recent experiments confirm that many mathematically and
scientifically competent people see climate behaving much this way. The
majority of their student subjects predicted that if humans reduced
emissions of GHGs, the storehouse of GHGs in the atmosphere and global
temperature would promptly decline, roughly following emissions.

However, Sterman and Booth Sweeney explain that the climate system
actually has significant delays. They suggest we think of GHGs in the
atmosphere as water in a bathtub. The more water, the more the gasses
trap heat and contribute to warming; less water, less warming. The faucet
filling the tub is global emission of GHGs, primarily from burning fossil
fuels. The drain is the removal of GHGs as they are taken up by plants
and absorbed into the oceans.

Right now the tub is the fullest it has been in 420,000 years and the
water flowing in is about double the rate of what is flowing out the
drain. In order for us to lower the level of the water, we will need to
reduce the inflow first by half to match the outflow, and then by more to
begin to reduce the level of water.

The bottom line of the "bathtub perspective" is this - if we "stopped and
reversed" the growth of emissions, it could take several decades to
actually reduce global temperature.

If we believe Mr. Marburger that climate change could be bad, we need
insurance to cover that possibility. The Bush administration's insurance
plan - reducing emissions once we confirm negative effects - is a sports
car kind of plan. It's a plan that assumes rapid response and great
steering, but it is not the kind of plan that can work with a
slow-responding system.

The more prudent insurance plan is to go even further than the Kyoto
accord and reduce GHG emissions below the rate of absorption and do it
before we see negative effects in full force. This will not be easy,
technologically, culturally, or politically. But it has to be easier than
steering an ocean liner while expecting it to respond like a sports car.

Jones works for Sustainability Institute, a non-profit research and
consulting center founded by Donella Meadows and located in Hartland,
Vermont - sustainabilityinstitute.org. You can view Sterman and Booth
Sweeney's full results at web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/cloudy_skies.html

-- 

"Andrew Jones" <apjones@cheta.net>

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