Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Climate change: Massachusetts sues EPA (again)

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I’m proud to live in a state where we’re fighting the good fight.  But, while this is so important, we just haven’t begun to turn the tide on climate change.  I heard a colleague speak this week and learned that humans are currently exceeding predicted worse case scenarios for carbon emissions from just a few years ago.  This is with the Kyoto protocol in effect. That is certainly not progress.  

There’s also “the other CO2 problem” that scientists are just starting to realize the importance of: Ocean acidification

(More here.)   Carbon dioxide is acidic, and humans have put so much up in the atmosphere that the surface oceans are becoming more acidic.  Scientists beginning to learn are learning that that has profound implications for marine life and fisheries.  

Thank you Massachusetts for leading the way.  It’s only the beginning of a long series of significant and urgent changes though.  Is there a plan for how (Massachusetts) will transition its climate change policy in the soon arriving post-Bush era?

cross-post: elemental cycles

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  2. Just reported by AP:

    “I would,” Obama said. “Not only will I, but I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem. He’s somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I’m already consulting with him in terms of these issues, but climate change is real. It is something we have to deal with now, not 10 years from now, not 20 years from now.”

  3. Great post, and a profound thanks to Martha Coakley for once again standing up to the Bush administration’s ignorance and inaction.

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    p>Massachusetts has certainly been a leader on global warming- we have RGGI, a modest but positive step to reduce CO2 from power plants, and a Governor whose administration has taken many other small but important steps in the right direction.

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    p>However, our leadership on this issue is tentative at best.  Many other states, starting with California but now including Florida, Hawaii and New Jersey have adopted economy-wide caps on global warming pollution that commit the state to do what the Bush Administration has failed to do- make science based reductions to ALL global warming pollution.

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    p>The Massachusetts state senate has passed a bold piece of legislation that would make our state a real leader on this issue and get us to work on making the pollution reductions we will need, and they should be applauded.  However, the Governor has yet to come out in support of the bill.

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    p>We’ve got to ask why the Governator, Crist and Corzine are ahead of Patrick on this.

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    p>We know we’re all going to have to take serious steps to curb global warming pollution, and that every minute we wait the problem grows larger and the solutions more expensive.

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    p>Time to get to work.

    • Bill number? Current status? House action?

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      p>Where can I learn specifics and where should I send my strongly worded letter advocating action?

  4. There’s also “the other CO2 problem” that scientists are just starting to realize the importance of: Ocean acidification

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    p>That’s not quite true.  This was on the radar when I was studying the oceanic carbon cycle in grad school 10 years ago.  What’s  new is that we’ve been learning a bit more about the likely impacts.

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    p>From the linked article:

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    p>

    . The ocean’s natural buffering capacity was assumed to be capable of preventing any changes in acidity even with a massive increase in CO2 levels.

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    p>This is simply not true.  As the following sentence (“And it is – but only if the increase happens slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years”) notes, this is only true in the long term.  Lowly grad students like me were well aware of the short-term (as in decades to centuries, vs. millenia) dynamics of ocean acidification a decade ago.

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    p>One reason why this doesn’t get more press (other than that the MSM is lame and vapid) is, as the article rightly notes, we still don’t know exactly what the consequences are.  Could be pretty ugly.

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    p>One interesting aspect of ocean acidification is that it’s that much harder to dismiss that it’s happening.  Unlike CO2’s ultimate net impact on air temperature, which skeptics can argue about three ways from Sunday, there’s no arguing around ocean acidification; it’s very basic chemistry (bad pun certainly not intended).  Of course, skeptics will argue that the impacts are tolerable, but they have no basis for that.

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    p>The linked New Scientist article is pretty good, though I think it gets a little sensational near the end.

    • syphax, I understand what you wrote, but it seems to me that the pattern of science deniers is that any degree of uncertainty is a justification for them to claim their idea is just as valid as the theory put forward in peer-reviewed journals… just recently  ABC news ran the profoundly stupid argument that because this January was cooler than the previous January global warming had stopped.

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      p>The “skeptics” will run any argument no matter what the science says, if it gets them the conclusion they want.

    • What I wanted to cite is my colleague’s article in Scientific American.  Unfortunately its not available for free. Below is the (free) abstract.  

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      p>

      The Dangers of Ocean Acidification
      Much of the carbon dioxide given off from the burning of fossil fuels goes into the ocean, where it changes the acid balance of seawater. The repercussions for marine life may be enormous
      By Scott C. Doney

      In 1956 Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, geochemists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, pointed out the need to measure carbon dioxide in the air and ocean so as to obtain “a clearer understanding of the probable climatic effects of the predicted great industrial production of carbon-dioxide over the next 50 years.” In other words, they wanted to figure out how dire the situation would be today. That they had to argue the importance of such observations now seems astonishing, but at the time scientists did not know for certain whether the carbon dioxide spewing out of tailpipes and smokestacks would indeed accumulate in the atmosphere. Some believed that it would all be absorbed benignly by the sea or be happily taken up by growing plants on land.

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