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Earth Right Now | August 12, 2015
Snapping Into a Clean Energy Future: Think You Could Do It?
“How difficult is it going to be to switch from a fossil fuel economy to a renewable energy economy?” asked a gentleman from the audience. I paused and took a deep breath.
I was giving a lecture about climate change at a retirement community, and I’d been thinking about my own parents ever since I’d stepped through the front door earlier. Situated a couple hours north of Los Angeles, the “retirement village,” as they called it, was immaculate. It resembled a glamorous apartment hotel with Spanish architecture, wide foyers and grounds that were landscaped with drought-tolerant plants for the California climate. As I was escorted to the lecture hall, I noticed a few residents peacefully walking dogs.
I took a second breath and began my answer. “My parents would love it here.” A hundred puzzled faces looked up at me, wondering what this comment about my parents had to do with the global energy economy. “When I talk with them about moving out of their burdensome three-bedroom home, they tell me that if they could just snap their fingers and be here right now,” I said, waving my arm high while making a grand snapping gesture, “they’d simply do it immediately. But, they find the idea of the transition utterly unbearable. So they’re stuck. Heels dug in, entrenched, immobile, paralyzed.”
While I was talking, an image popped, unwelcome, into my mind’s eye. I saw my parents’ fine china, stacked in a dusty credenza, untouched for 47-plus years. “They don’t want to go through their belongings and make choices,” I said. “They’re afraid of the amount of hard work.”
At this point I needed to pull away from my own emotions and check in with the people sitting in front of me. “Does any of this make sense to you? Does it seem familiar?” I saw a hundred white-haired heads nod simultaneously. I heard a hundred mumbled “Uh huhs.” In all my years of public speaking, this was the first time I’d experienced an entire room of people in agreement.
One gentleman near the front said, “That was me before I came here.” Another said, “I have some friends exactly like that right now.”
It’s easy for me to imagine a time off into the future, eventually, someday, where people will look back on all the credenzas and all the coal-fired power plants and regard them with the same quaint fondness that we have for Dick Van Dyke’s chimney sweep character from “Mary Poppins”: charming relics of a bygone era.
What I worry about, on both personal and global levels, is that it might take a catastrophic upheaval before the transition to better, cleaner, more comfortable conditions occurs. And those kinds of catastrophic events could be painful, personally and globally. I said as much to the group of seniors at the retirement village, and this time I didn’t need to ask them if they understood me. I could see it in their eyes. And the same guy in the front said quietly, “Yeah, that was me before I came here.”
Thank you for reading, and thank you for your comments.
Laura
Earth Right Now | July 20, 2015
Ed Begley Jr., The Greenest Guy Around
Ed Begley Jr. was one of the first people I met when I moved from Hong Kong to Los Angeles in the mid ‘90s, so when we sat down this week to talk about environmentalism and the new ultra-green home he’s building, I knew exactly what direction I wanted to take our conversation. I wanted to find out what made Begley different from almost every other person I’ve met. I wanted to find out what made him so completely dedicated to a green lifestyle.
A lot of people pay lip service to going green, or take a handful of actions to reduce their impact on the environment, or complain about others who should do more or go as far as a low-carbon lifestyle, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s made more of a concerted commitment to being green as Ed has. I wanted know: What was that thing that made him do it, that impetus that really got him to push through where so many others just don’t?
Begley started by explaining how he learned to be frugal from his father, Ed Begley Sr., who “was not a star, he was a working actor like I am,” even though he won an Academy Award. He told me his father was the son of Irish immigrants, lived through the Great Depression and was a factory worker who found career success as an actor later in life. “We turned off the lights, we turned off the water.” But I brushed off that explanation. Loads of people get stuck with (oops, I meant are fortunate enough to have) a thrifty father. If thriftiness were all it took, everyone would have gone green, like, forever ago.
Then he described growing up in the 1950s in Los Angeles. “When I was five or six, it hurt to breathe in the Valley. That’s the way it was in the '50s. We kids were running around playing tag and some days you’d just be sitting and you’d have trouble breathing. Burbank was crazy smoggy,” he continued, “because of the big electric power plant that burned dirty fuel. We’re in the middle of San Fernando Valley, yet you can’t see the mountains.” Instead of complaining, Ed said, “My dad would ask me: ‘What are you for? What would you do to fix it?’ He was a can-do guy.” Seeing the air quality improve taught Begley that he could do something, it taught him to have hope for a cleaner environment.
This point of view is very different from my own and from that of the current generations who can barely remember anything but news of political gridlock and constant bickering over climate science, climate change denial, and whether or not humans are to blame. It’s hard for most of us under 60 to remember a time when we felt like each of us, as individuals within our greater society, could make a difference, but Begley grew up with a deep inner belief that his actions could have impact. “Corporations, government, individuals: you need all three legs for the stool to stay steady,” he said. “We’re not waiting on government or corporations to do something on climate, we’re going to do it.”
Lifestyles of the Rich and Anxious
Another factor that helped shape his choices was his experience with rich and famous celebrities. “We would visit some of these people with fat houses and they didn’t seem one bit happier to me; in fact, they had all this stress and all these problems.” Ed saw what happened to people who were wealthy enough to buy lots and lots of material things. “I met all these movie stars and saw the anxiety that came with more stuff.”
Everything we buy, everything we own has a carbon footprint. More than just the purchase price, our things have a cost to the environment. The more possessions we have, the greater the environmental impact. The problem is, though, it’s really hard to tell people they should buy fewer possessions, especially when we’re constantly told we would be happier with more. Well, Ed spent his time with some super famous and super rich actors who actually had all that more. He observed extreme wealth, saw that more stuff didn’t make his friends happier and learned that, beyond meeting your basic needs, more and more material possessions only made his friends unhappier, and that deeply affected him. It influenced the way he decided to live and what he was willing to spend monetarily or expend environmentally.
Actions Are Louder Than Words
But perhaps the most interesting thing I found out about Ed during our chat was that he’s a natural science wonk. Who knew? I’d asked him to tell me about his transition from kid/teen/young man who thought he could make a difference to knowing that he’d become a real leader in the environmental movement. He told me a story about going on a bus caravan that went around California in 1986 with Jane Fonda and a bunch of other Hollywood people to rally students about a consumer right-to-know bill. “I had a keen interest in science,” he told me, “so it turns out I knew about PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyls] and hexavalent chromium and trichloroethylene. I had read up on these things and the knowledge gave me the ease to speak well about it. So all of a sudden all the microphones were pointed at me.” He hadn’t planned it; he had merely been interested enough in the topic to be knowledgeable about the details. “I like nuts and bolts. I’m definitely a gear-head. That’s why I love my electric car. I want to know: How many amps does this draw, how many watts is this charger?”
As he spoke, Ed paused to check his phone. “It’s Harry Dean Stanton, he just called. I help him with a crossword puzzle every day. I have the answers right here printed on post consumer recycled paper.” He pulled a piece of folded paper out of his pocket, showed it to me, then put it back and continued talking. “I didn’t like my chemistry set, I loved it. I loved my Erector Set for years.” I noticed he was focused on specifics. Details fascinate him. He could prattle on endlessly about high storage capacity batteries, or solar array voltage, or bathroom and kitchen tiles fabricated with recycled material. It occurred to me that his house is just one giant, green Erector Set.
Still, I pressed him to try to find out what made him the greenest guy around. “I just did it cause I knew it was right,” he said. “I rode my bike to the Vanity Fair big Oscars party in the ‘90s, and I was just trying to quietly and surreptitiously lock the bike up when suddenly all these paparazzi descended on me. They took all these pictures and I was a superstar. If you do something silently and deliberately people notice.”
Clearly people have noticed. So the purpose of doing this green house is to demonstrate that both electrical and water conservation efforts can be done. “If I could do it, anybody could do it,” Ed said.
You can follow Ed on Twitter @edbegleyjr.
As always, I look forward to your comments.
Laura
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TAGS: EARTH, ED BEGLEY JR., GREEN, GREEN LIFESTYLE, CLIMATE CHANGE, SMOG
Earth Right Now | June 8, 2015
Jason-3 and the Argonauts
Bring out the trumpeters! We’re preparing for another satellite launch. Woohoo! This time it’s Jason-3, an altimetry mission that will observe sea surface topography from space. It’s a legacy mission that continues the 23-year record of global sea level measurements started by TOPEX/Poseidon and carried on by Jason-1 and -2.
When I think of the word “legacy,” I normally become all melancholy ‘n’ stuff, because the word reminds me of what I was doing when those previous satellites went up and of all the people, science and stories that have influenced my life since. So this morning, on my drive to work, I tuned in to a '70s music radio station to funky disco my way out of my melancholy funkiness. (Take that, '80s music heads!)
But no, really, TOPEX/Poseidon was totally cool. (The acronym “TOPEX” comes from “TOPography EXperiment” and Poseidon is the Greek god of the sea; “Jason” is from Jason and the Argonauts, also from Greek mythology.) It launched in 1992 and was the first revolutionary precision oceanography satellite. It transformed the way we study the ocean, because the view from space is the only way to truly observe the vastness of the ocean on a global scale. Since TOPEX/Poseidon began collecting data in 1993, global sea level has risen 80 millimeters. That’s 3 inches in just over two decades. Holy moly! Now you see why it’s so important to have an uninterrupted stream of satellite data that extends far into the future.
Before TOPEX/Poseidon, there was Seasat, which was designed to find out if global satellite monitoring of Earth’s ocean was even feasible. It launched in 1978 and operated for just over 100 days. And yupity do dah, now we know that satellite observations are feasible.
Just like its predecessors, Jason-3 is a radar altimeter, an instrument that measures sea surface height by precisely knowing the satellite’s position in its orbit and by measuring the distance between itself and the top of the ocean. You see, the ocean surface is constantly changing, from waves, to tides, to El Niño, to sea level rise. As increased global warming causes more and more glacial ice and ice sheets to melt into Earth’s ocean, and as this same warming heats the ocean surface, causing the warmer water to expand and sea levels to rise higher, it’s absolutely crucial to have highly accurate, continuous global sea level measurements.
Furthermore, since the majority of Planet Earth is covered by ocean, and since water is exceptionally good at storing heat, the ocean will continue to play an enormous role in Earth’s long-term climate.
Jason-3 will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in July or August. I’ll be keeping you up-to-date on all of the goings on about the launch and its preparation. Meanwhile, you can find out more about Jason-3 and all of NASA's ocean surface topography missions here:
http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/
http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/jason3/
I look forward to your comments.
- Laura
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Jason-3 is an international partnership led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with participation from NASA, France's Centre Nationale d'Etudes Spatiales (the French space agency) and EUMETSAT, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites. JPL built Jason-3's radiometer, GPS and laser reflector; is procuring the launch; and will help oversee the science team, which is responsible for ensuring the quality of the data.
TAGS: EARTH, OCEANS, JASON-3, SATELLITES, CLIMATE CHANGE
Earth Right Now | May 4, 2015
Rainbow of Hope
When you read my blog, you’re either going to say “no way” or “finally.” And honestly, I’m kind of saying both, but definitely leaning more toward the latter.
See, normally I’m weighed down by the epic crisis known as global climate change (ugh). But this morning, I’m thinking: "finally." At last, Earth’s climate is going to get the attention it deserves. Finally, enough people are showing they care and it’s going to make a difference. Finally.
True, it’s hard to believe—even for me. But deep in my bones, I feel the tide starting to turn. (And by using that expression, I do not mean higher tides are flooding low-lying regions. That’s been going on for a while.)
What I mean is that everywhere I turn I see people paying attention to Earth’s climate. Not enough attention yet, mind you, but at least people are talking about it. And for the first time in a long time, I feel hopeful.
Maybe this optimism has something to do with the rainbow I saw while walking out in the rain over the weekend. Maybe it’s because NASA’s Global Climate Change website won both the People’s Voice and the juried Webby Awards for Best Green Site, and our Earth Now mobile app won in the Education and Reference category.
Whatever it is, I hope you’ll join me in my moment of optimism, because together—you and me—we are responsible for making this planet the kind of world we want to live in.
Bring it.
- Laura
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TAGS: EARTH, CLIMATE CHANGE, RAINBOW
Earth Right Now | April 9, 2015
Earth Day: All the Drops Add Up
A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from a high school student in Michigan. She was working on a climate change research project and wanted to ask me a few questions, so of course I said yes. She asked me about my job at NASA, what I thought were the most pressing aspects of Earth’s changing climate, and the ocean’s role in long-term climate trends.
But then there was this question: “I like to do everything I can each day to reduce my own contribution to climate change … I want to encourage my peers to take small actions each day to help our climate, but will it really matter beyond making people feel good about themselves? ... It seems like there is nothing individuals can do.”
Now I’m a pretty direct person, but I’m also fairly kind to high school students, especially those I’ve never even met. Yet this time, I let her have it:
“You are wrong,” I stated bluntly, wishing an error buzzer noise could accompany my outgoing email message. “You are wrong about your own contribution being insignificant. One person's efforts are hugely important and don't you ever forget it.”
Sure, I understand it’s easy to feel completely overwhelmed and powerless in the face of a tremendous problem such as climate change. I work on a climate change website every day—I get it. Just thinking about climate change and other environmental issues gets depressing. These problems are too big; they feel insurmountable. And then when you want to do something, it seems like whatever you do is too small, like a tiny drop in a gigantic pit.
But each and every single individual action, no matter how small it may seem, adds to what ultimately makes a difference. You may think, “One person isn’t going to make a big difference; it’s not going to be a big deal.” But taking responsibility for how your life affects the environment is a huge deal.
The Earth is amazing. And when you look at the view from space you see that the whole Earth is your home, our home. You see that what happens on the other side of the planet matters.
So go ahead: Take the journey from “there’s not much I can do” to “there are many things I will commit to doing.” Because together, our individual actions can make a bigger impact than you might ever imagine. And since Earth Day is coming up on April 22, now is the perfect time to begin that journey.
One of the things we’re doing to celebrate Earth Day this year is asking people around the world to share on social media views of their favorite place on Earth. As we rush through our busy lives, sometimes we forget to appreciate how much we care about this place we call home. We hope that if all of us take a moment to acknowledge and remember our planet, we'll feel more connected with it. And that's one small step toward making it a better place.
You can post photos, Vines and/or Instagram videos. Just be sure to include the hashtag #NoPlaceLikeHome – no matter what social media platform you’re using.
You can also get on board now by using our #NoPlaceLikeHome emoji as your profile pic. Join the Facebook or Google+ events and invite your friends to participate. Pledge to spend one day celebrating the planet that over 7 billion people call home.
Find out more at http://www.nasa.gov/likehome/.
Thanks for everything you do to care for our planet.
- Laura
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TAGS: EARTH, EARTH DAY, CLIMATE CHANGE, ENVIRONMENT
JPL | December 8, 2014
Forests and Climate Change
Riley Duren, chief systems engineer for the Earth Science and Technology Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is reporting from the 2014 United Nations Climate Conference in Lima, Peru.
I mentioned previously that Peru is home to some of the most important forests in the world in terms of their vulnerability to future impacts from climate change and development pressure as well as their potential to mitigate climate change. This underscores the importance of certain elements of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In particular, the Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) program seeks to address the second-largest human contribution to climate change after fossil fuel use (see Friday's post).
Detailed definitions vary, but deforestation generally refers to conversion of forested lands to some other use -- particularly large-scale agriculture but also mining and expansion of infrastructure and cities. Degradation is distinct and refers to a diminished capacity of forests to store carbon, support ecosystems and other services. Forest degradation is caused by human activity such as commercial logging, fuel wood collection, charcoal production, and livestock grazing as well as natural forces like storms, insect damage and wildfires.
Forests play a critical role in Earth's carbon budget because healthy, growing trees and other forest elements remove and store carbon from the atmosphere -- converting it to "biomass" in trees, shrubs and soil. This makes forests one of the most effective countermeasures for fossil fuel CO2 emissions (see graph, below).
The Earth's evolving carbon budget from the start of the Industrial Revolution through present day. Carbon dioxide (CO2) flux is shown in units of Giga (billion) tons of carbon per year (GtC/year). Fluxes of carbon emitted to the atmosphere are indicated by "+". Fluxes of carbon removed from the atmosphere are indicated by "-". The plot shows the dramatic growth in fossil fuel CO2 emissions since the mid-20th century and slight decline in emissions from deforestation and other land use change. The graph also shows the corresponding growth in the three major carbon sinks: the atmosphere, land (forests) and oceans. The variability or "jumpiness" in the land sink from year to year is likely due to changes in precipitation associated with climate variability like El Nino. The future ability of the land and oceans to remove CO2 from the atmosphere remains an area of great uncertainty. Image source: Global Carbon Project
However, when forests are degraded or destroyed, the storage potential of the forest is reduced or eliminated. Additionally, if the downed trees are burned and/or decay and forest soils are disturbed, they release their stored carbon (sometimes centuries worth) into the atmosphere. So there's an incentive to both keep forests growing to store carbon and to avoid disturbing the carbon already stored in them.
Programs like REDD+ are intended to incentivize governments and landowners to preserve and restore their forests. For example, in carbon-trading programs, governments and business can "offset" their fossil fuel CO2 emissions by purchasing credits from forest owners who can prove they're storing an equivalent amount of emissions by implementing certain protocols, including independent measurement and verification. These efforts are particularly important in the tropics, which are home to most of the world's forest carbon, as well as the countries experiencing the most rapid growth and development pressures, very similar to the period of growth the US underwent in the 1800s.
Over the weekend, I attended the Global Landscape Forum to interact with policy makers, conservation groups and scientists on the subject of forest carbon monitoring. One of the panel sessions featured JPL's Dr. Sassan Saatchi and other experts who described the current capabilities and limitations of remote-sensing tools to assess the status and health of forests, including their carbon stocks and "fluxes" (removals from and emissions to the atmosphere).
The remote-sensing methods discussed included imaging systems like the US Landsat satellites that are being used to track forest-cover change as well as future systems that will improve understanding of forest degradation such as NASA's ICESAT-2 mission, the NASA-India Synthetic Aperture Radar (NI-SAR) and the European Space Agency's BIOMASS mission. The role of flying radar and lidar (laser radar) instruments on aircraft over high priority areas was also discussed.
Of course decisions about forest management involve dimensions other than climate change mitigation -- typically involving a balance between economic growth and the value of existing ecosystem services offered by forests. Biodiversity in particular is gaining prominence in decision-making given the societal and economic value it represents. Biodiversity, which refers to the number of species in a given area, is often highest in forest ecosystems (particularly in the tropics) given they provide a combination of food, shelter and water resources. The information required to evaluate biodiversity is related to, but distinct from, the data used to assess forest carbon. (I'll try to describe the role of remote-sensing in assessing biodiversity in a future post.)
Meanwhile, closing with some personal experience, I'm posting a couple of photos I took while working on my own forest conservation and biodiversity project in Hawaii.
A cloud forest on the flank of Hualalai volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. The giant, ancient trees and native understory plants thrive in the high-altitude, moist environment provided by the persistent presence of clouds -- providing carbon storage as well as a habitat for threatened plant and bird species. The benefits of the unique Kona weather pattern are offset by the introduction of invasive weeds and destructive feral animals like pigs and sheep.Image credit: Riley Duren
A threatened I'iwi honeycreeper, endemic to the Hawaiian Islands, sips nectar from an Ohia tree blossom. Historically, this species ranged across the Hawaiian Islands but today only survive in a few high-elevation forests given the combined pressure of deforestation and avian malaria at lower elevations from non-native mosquitoes. The I'iwi, like many other Hawaiian bird and plant species, lacks the natural defenses to withstand the combined pressure from development and climate change. Management efforts focus on conserving, restoring and building resiliency in threatened forest habitats. Image credit: Riley Duren
TAGS: EARTH, FORESTS, CLIMATE CHANGE, CARBON
JPL | December 4, 2014
Earth Observations to Support Climate Decisions
Riley Duren, chief systems engineer for the Earth Science and Technology Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is reporting from the 2014 United Nations Climate Conference in Lima, Peru.
Today I'm en route to Lima, Peru, to join the United Nations climate conference. This is the 20th Conference of Parties (COP-20) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The meeting is intended to set the stage for an international agreement next year between 195 countries on actions to address climate change. For the next two weeks, diplomats, policy makers, scientists, engineers, economists, and representatives of business and non-profit organizations are convening in Lima to discuss a wide range of options to avoid dangerous climate change and/or attempt to manage the impacts to humanity and the other species that share planet Earth. (More background, here)
As it turned out, I managed to miss my flight yesterday as result of the heavy rains and jammed freeways that ensued from the latest "atmospheric river" event in Los Angeles. But I have to admit, I was far more relieved than annoyed by this break (albeit brief) in California's persistent drought - a sentiment shared by all my neighbors and fellow travelers. Yet another reminder of the critical connections between weather, climate, and society, and what's at stake in efforts aimed at planetary stewardship.
Several JPLers are participating in the meeting given the lab's contribution of applying satellite observations to improve scientific understanding of the Earth and support societal decision-making. Collectively, the efforts of us traveling this week span sea, land and air - each reflecting part of NASA's broader mission to study the Earth as an integrated system.
My colleague Dr. Michelle Gierach is part of the NASA delegation at the US Center and will be talking about the ocean and impacts of climate change on key features like the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Dr. Sassan Saatchi, who studies forest carbon, will be a panelist at this weekend's Global Landscapes Forum.
My own work these days is mostly focused on heat trapping or "greenhouse" gases in the atmosphere, like carbon dioxide and methane, and understanding the connections with human activity at the scale of countries, states, cities and individual pollution sources. I spend much of my time working with policy makers and scientists to understand stakeholder needs and design monitoring systems that can support practical decision making. It's a big challenge: These monitoring "system of systems" typically require a suite of Earth observing instruments from the ground, air and space - often fused with data from many other information sources. In addition to the technical challenges, after several years in this field, I continue to marvel at the diversity of perspectives, priorities, institutional cultures and ways of thinking, with implications on what data is required. The social dimensions are every bit as important as the bio-geophysical.
I'll say more in subsequent posts about some specific efforts that are underway and how they connect with events at the Lima conference.
TAGS: EARTH, CLIMATE CHANGE
My Big Fat Planet | November 12, 2010
Pulling for the Deniers -- Place Your Bets
I visit the NASA website and review the data. CO2: Up. Ocean and land temperature: Up. Sea level: Up. Polar ice: Down.
Oops.
But, as bizarre as this sounds ... I find myself pulling for the climate change deniers. Wouldn't it be swell if they were right? We could all just relax and ride around in huge cars, and life would be good again.
Like it was in 1970 when I showed up at the first Earth Day. Oh, wait. The smog kind of sucked back then. That might not be the best example.
But, what about the main reason the deniers give not to address climate change?: The cost.
As it turns out, a great example can be found back in smoggy Los Angeles in 1970. Many of us wanted to do something about the horrible choking smog of that era. But, we were told we couldn't afford it.
"We'd love to do something too, Ed, but ... the cost!" Fortunately, we didn't listen to them. Fortunately we also weighed healthcare costs and lost productivity into the equation, and realized the cost of doing nothing was much greater.
And, now, even though we have millions more people in L.A., and four times the cars ... we have far less smog. And, there were many jobs and tremendous wealth created by doing the things that addressed the problem.
Making catalytic converters, combined cycle gas turbines, spray paint booths, and a myriad of other clean technologies of that day - they all created new industries, and brought growth with them.
We have that same choice today. Do we want to accept the costs of doing nothing, and hope that the problem goes away?
So, please, do as I do, and direct everyone you know to reputable sources of climate data, such as NASA's Global Climate Change website. At every talk I give, I make sure that everyone is aware that this information if available. The clock is ticking, and to ignore the science on this one is the worst bet we have ever placed.
Ed Begley Jr. is an Emmy-nominated actor who is active in the environmental community and turns up to Hollywood events on his bicycle. He currently lives near Los Angeles in a self-sufficient home powered by solar energy.
TAGS: EARTH, CLIMATE CHANGE, GLOBAL WARMING, ATMOSPHERE, OCEANS, TEMPERATURE, ENVIRONMENT
JPL | August 13, 2008
It's a Sure Bet
My wife likes to gamble. She's no high roller or anything, but give her a hundred dollars, a spare weekend and a room full of slot machines and she's happy.
Not me, though. Somewhere along the way, I guess I took one too many math classes and betting against the house just isn't much fun anymore.
But I understand why she likes it. It's the ups and downs of gambling that are fun. You lose, lose, lose and then every once in a while you win a great big jackpot. Maybe you even win enough to make up for the last 30 or 40 bets you lost. But like any game in the casino, the odds are stacked against you. If you play long enough, you will eventually lose.
Global warming and climate change work in much the same way. Wait long enough and odds are, the Earth will be warmer. But will tomorrow be warmer than today? Who knows! There are plenty of things about the atmosphere and ocean that can't be predicted. Over a period of days or weeks, we call these unpredictable changes "the weather."
No one can predict the weather more than a few days in advance, any more than they can predict which slot the roulette ball will land in before the croupier spins it. Weather, like roulette, is essentially random.
But a little randomness doesn't stop casino owners from taking your bet at the roulette table. They know the odds, and they know if enough bets are laid they will eventually come out ahead. Climate scientists know that, too.
Random events happen in the atmosphere and oceans all the time. Not just the weather, but things like El Nino, La Nina and huge volcanic eruptions can make the planet warm up or cool down for years at time. There could even be a few others that we haven't discovered yet.
Still, for all its short-term ups and downs Earth's average temperature has risen dramatically over the last one hundred years. That's no accident. Like the house edge at the roulette table, human-made greenhouse gasses have tilted the odds in favor of a warming planet.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that fact when new science results come out. Like the recreational gambler, we often find it more fun to focus on the ups and downs: a short-term cooling period, a warm year during a big El Nino.
But for climate change and casino owners, it's important to remember the big picture. The roulette player might win three or four bets in a row, but that doesn't change the odds. Eventually the casino will win. Likewise, as long as humans continue to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the planet will continue to warm.
So whenever people ask me about the latest warming or cooling in the climate record, I'm always reminded of my wife and her slot machines. By the end of the weekend her hundred dollars is almost always gone, but the thrill of the ups and downs kept her entertained for the entire time. "Did you win?" people ask. She always flashes her sly smile and says, "Sometimes!"
TAGS: EARTH, CLIMATE CHANGE, GLOBAL WARMING, ATMOSPHERE, OCEANS, TEMPERATURE
