I thought Quitting was for Losers

“They said these jobs are goin’ boys, and they ain’t coming back.” – from My Hometown by Bruce Springsteen, 1984

I was not at all surprised that President Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord.

Disappointed, but not surprised. Anyone who thought he could be persuaded otherwise was deluded.

For crying out loud, they day after Trump met with Al Gore, Trump appointed Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. Pruitt has sued the EPA at least 20 times on behalf of Oklahoma oil and gas companies and also doesn’t think much of climate science.

Trump also ignored the reasoned pleas of Bank of America, Citigroup, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Chevron, Procter & Gamble, and even ExxonMobil to remain a part of the accord.

No, Trump was just keeping a promise to his base, including the out-of-work miners in West Virginia and Kentucky, regardless of all the factually inaccurate justifications he used in his Rose Garden announcement last week.

President Trump still thinks he can bring back the coal industry by the simple fiat of cancelling the Paris Accord, as if that was the reason why the coal industry was collapsing in the first place.  As I wrote last October, coal-generated power has declined in the U.S. from 50 to 30% since 1997, right through the administration of George W Bush. If Bush could not save the coal industry, what makes Trump think he can?

Let’s put this into perspective. There are now about 50,000 coal miners in the US and perhaps another 124,000 who transport coal or work in coal-fired power plants. In 2015, the solar energy and wind energy industries employed 297,000 people and grew 20% from just the previous year.  Heck, more people work at JC Penny than mine coal.

Yet we pulled out of a voluntary international agreement signed by every other country in the world, other than Nicaragua and Syria, to keep a promise to the coal miners that Trump had their backs.

The only way the coal industry could conceivably come back would be for the price of natural gas to permanently go sky high and that is highly unlikely in the near term. The combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies which allow extraction of natural gas from vast shale formations throughout the country now means that the US has enough natural gas to last almost a century at minimum. It is doubtful that natural gas prices will ever reach levels needed to make coal economic for the next four generations, let alone the next four years.

The irony is that if Trump really wanted to blame somebody for the decline of coal, he would blame oil and gas companies.

Even if coal came back, the jobs won’t. Like many other industries, coal mining has joined the trend towards automation. The days of pick and shovel mining are long gone, especially now that coal companies can blast the tops off of mountains and use massive dragline excavators to extract coal.

Let me be clear, the voluntary Paris Accords by themselves are not sufficient to keep global temperatures below the 1.5 degree C target the agreement called for, but it’s a start, a start that should have happened a couple of decades ago, but a start nonetheless.

What I was heartened by were the announcements by state and local governments throughout the country that they will work to meet the goals of the Paris Accords, including Massachusetts and coastal cities, which have the most to lose as sea level rises.

These cities include Boston, Houston, Anchorage, Los Angeles, Charleston, Seattle, Miami, Newark, New Orleans, Tampa, and West Palm Beach. So far, 187 US cities in blue states and red have agreed to uphold the accords.

Other climate news from last week which got lost in the chatter about the US exit from the Paris Accords include:

• Carbon dioxide levels exceeding 409 ppm for this first time in the instrumental record. Geologic data indicates that levels exceeding 400 ppm last occurred more than 3 million years ago. 
• The imminent calving of an iceberg the size of Delaware from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. This event could presage the collapse of the Larsen C shelf, the way similar calving events occurred prior to the collapse of Larsen A and B, in 1995 and 2002, respectively.

 “Well I’m sorry my son but you’re too late in askin’, Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.” – from Paradise by John Prine, 1971

Published in the Westborough News, June 17, 2017

The Cost of Doing Nothing

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” - Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

In the early 20th century, Glacier National Park in Montana had 150 glaciers. By 1966, there were only 37. Today, there are 26 and many of these have shrunk by as much as 85 percent since the 1970s. This is a fact.

Based on current trends, the U.S. Geological Survey now estimates that the last remaining glaciers in the park will be gone in the next few decades. This is a prediction, based on trends that have been well-nigh inexorable.

The New York Times recently hired a new columnist, Bret Stephens, who, while acknowledging that human-caused global warming is real, thinks that the case for doing something about it is overblown because, you know, scientists have been wrong before.

By way of example, he used, and I kid you not, the results of the 2016 elections, where the pollsters apparently got it wrong. Pollsters used statistical analysis. Climate scientists use statistical analysis. After all, if the geniuses at 538, Gallup, Pew, PPP, and Quinnipiac got it wrong about the last election, couldn’t climate scientists be wrong about the impacts of climate change?

If you saying to yourself “Huh?”, then you have just been introduced to the rhetorical device known as the “straw man argument,” where misrepresentation is used to make an opponent’s argument appear weaker and thus induce uncertainty in the minds of an audience.

There is a world of difference between political polling data and temperature data. People’s opinions can change from day to day. People lie. People you talked to one day are not there the next. Polling methodology varies between different organizations. People decide not to vote and vice versa.

In contrast, temperature data collected from say, the Blue Hill Observatory on October 21st, 1953 at 4 PM will not change to another value tomorrow. It will always be the data value collected on that day at that time. The size measurements of the Sperry Glacier in Glacier National Park which were collected in 1966 and 2015 will not change either.

Apples are not oranges and political polling analysis is not climate science.
Something else Mr. Stephens said in his column was that the global average temperature change of 1.5 degrees F since the late 1880s is “modest”. Compared to the daily swings in temperature, that doesn’t seem like much, but the amount of energy required to make a 1.5 degree average global temperature increase is equivalent to 1.1 million megatons of TNT or about 71 million Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.

Bottom line is that there is nothing “modest” about a 1.5 degree F increase global average temperature. Another fact Mr. Stephens fails to mention is that two thirds of the temperature increase, in the air at least, has occurred since 1970.

I suppose it’s all about how you present the numbers.

Brett Stephens does not think that addressing climate change is worth the cost, because climate science deals with probabilities and probabilities means uncertainty.

It’s highly probable that sea level rise will drown coastal cities in a couple of centuries. It’s less probable that it will happen in our lifetimes, but not impossible.

Even with the most modest estimates of sea level rise, about 3 feet by 2100, flood risks rise dramatically. Current projections are that just between now and 2050, the costs of flooding could be as high as $1 TRILLION per year in the world’s 136 largest cities, including New York, Tampa, New Orleans, and Boston.

This is the cost of doing nothing.

Published in the Westborough News, May 26th, 2017

Science is not a Liberal Conspiracy

“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson

Scientific endeavor can be boiled down to this: It is the process of using observation and experiment to come up with explanations about how nature works. These explanations are always subject to revision as new data comes along.

A really good explanation supported by a lot of facts which makes consistent verifiable predictions becomes a scientific theory. Scientific theories do not become facts, they explain them.

Newton’s explanations for why apples always fall from trees or why planets orbit the sun worked well for centuries. In fact, they still work and we still use Newton’s laws to chart the course of NASA probes to the outer planets. But when scientists started to measure the speed of light and perform detailed measurements of the movement of stars, they found that Newton’s laws broke down.

Enter Einstein and his theories of general and special relativity which can be used to derive Newton’s laws (just don’t ask me to do it) and explain the motions galaxies or how time appears to slow the faster one goes. But even relativity has its limits at the subatomic level. We just haven’t come up with a better model . . . yet.

Scientists get things wrong a great deal of the time – that’s another definition of research, but it is through the process of finding which explanations consistently make good predictions and which ones fail, that science advances and builds a consensus about how nature works.

Do scientists screw up or become wedded to ideas that in retrospect, look silly, or even commit fraud? They sure do, because they are human. What happens though is that new information comes along or another scientist will eventually try to replicate what an earlier scientist published. Screw ups and fraud are exposed and outmoded ideas get derailed.

Case in point - geologists ridiculed Alfred Wegner back in 1912 when he proposed the idea of continental drift. Wegner had all sorts of data which showed that continents had once been joined together, but his explanation for how they moved was wrong. Not until the 1950s did geologists and oceanographers gather the data which formed the basis of plate tectonic theory, which explained how continents move and mountain ranges arose. In retrospect, previous geological explanations for how mountains and ocean basins formed now look ridiculous.

I used to be a practicing scientist. More than once I got things egregiously wrong and fell victim to my own preconceived notions, which were subsequently not born out by the facts. In all cases, either I corrected my own errors or other people did. These were learning experiences.

Critics of scientific work will point to mistakes that scientists have made as if to say “See, they messed up here so why should we trust them on anything?” Critics will cite questions or uncertainties scientists have not yet addressed.

It’s a specious argument to say that because scientists do not know everything, they therefore know nothing or that because some aspect of science turns out to be wrong means that an entire branch of science should be ignored. Still, those arguments get made.

There will always be uncertainty. There will always be questions to answer. If that weren’t the case, there would be no reason for scientific endeavor.

Science is important. It always has been. Science has gotten this country to where it is today.

Abraham Lincoln established the National Academy of Sciences because he realized how important science would be to the future of this country. Government support for scientific research has paved the way for many of the technological and medical advances that now sustain us.

As a whole, researchers and academic scientists have tried to stay out of the hurly burly of politics or become activists for fear that their field will become a target of partisan politics.

Scientists and science have become targets anyway. A century ago, and sadly to this day, the targets were biologists who either taught or researched evolution. Today, climatology is in crosshairs in the form climate change denial, which is now present at the very highest levels of our federal government.

But it is science which shows that pollution poses real risks for people or life in general. It is science which shows that our planet is billions of years old, that life has been on it for almost that long, and that life changed via the process of evolution. It is science that shows that our climate has always changed and that humans are the ones changing it now, to our detriment. It is science that shows that vaccines save lives and do not cause autism.

These scientific findings are inconvenient for certain businesses, politicians or religious groups, most of which are on one side of the political spectrum.

Still, we ignore these inconvenient findings at our peril.

I have a T-shirt that reads, “Science is not a liberal conspiracy.” It’s really sad that such a slogan is even necessary, but I really like wearing the shirt, because it’s true.

Published in the Westborough News April 28th, 2017

Politics, Pipelines, and Power

Among the many political events in an event filled third week of March, the Trump administration made good on a campaign promise and granted the permit to build the TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline. The permit was previously denied by the Obama State Department back in 2015 (FYI - TransCanada’s US headquarters is here in Westborough).

The pipeline has long been hailed as a way to make the US more independent of Middle Eastern oil, create tens of thousands of new jobs, and lower the price of oil. The reality is that it will do none of these things.

It will provide between 2,000 and 6,000 temporary jobs during construction and perhaps a few hundred permanent jobs during its lifetime. The pipeline will transport heavy bitumen mined from the Canadian Athabasca tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast where it will be processed for export, not domestic use. Even the pipeline steel will be manufactured in Russia or India.

We can also contrast this pipeline with the alternative energy industry’s record over the last several years. In 2015, the solar energy and wind energy industries employed 209,000 and 88,000 people respectively on a permanent basis and grew 20% from just the previous year.

States, communities and landowners along the pipeline will bear the risk in the event of a pipeline rupture. Pipelines that transport diluted bitumen, as this one will, break 25 times more frequently than pipelines transporting normal crude oil due to internal corrosion.

The benefits of Keystone XL to the US economy will be trivial, at best, although TransCanada will profit handsomely.

The powers that be have been dismissing solar and wind power as too intermittent, too expensive and too insufficient. In fact, I had conversation a couple of weeks ago with a retired engineer who worked at the Seabrook nuclear power plant, who was just as dismissive for the same reasons. The math says otherwise.

Seabrook is rated at 1244 Megawatts and produces 10,800 Gigawatt hours of electricity per year. The first five wind turbines of the Block Island Wind Farm are rated at 30 Megawatts and currently produce 125 Gigawatt hours per year. Simple math says that 430 such turbines would generate the equivalent of Seabrook plant.

430 is a big number until you consider that Europe currently has 3,230 offshore wind turbines and installed over 400 in 2015 alone. Texas has over 10,000 turbines, which produce up to 50% of the state’s power.

We are way behind the alternative energy curve here in the US, except in states like Texas, ironically enough. Economies of scale have brought down the price of solar and wind to the point where they are competitive with natural gas or coal and are way cheaper than nuclear power.

Approving the Keystone XL pipeline may have had great political symbolic value to the Trump administration; however, it’s a nonstarter economically. If Donald Trump really wanted to put his influence behind energy industries that are creating jobs, he wouldn’t be promoting tar-sands pipelines and a dying coal industry.

It should come as no surprise that clearly, he is listening to the wrong people.

Published in the Westborough News, March 31, 2017

Trends, Curves and Accelerations

Last weekend’s cold snap notwithstanding, I really, really expected this winter would be colder than last. The world had wound down from an El Nino of historic proportions, which helped drive global temperatures to record levels in 2015 and 2016.

But it really wasn’t. Instead, the red wing blackbirds were back the third week of the February and the spring peepers were happily chirping away in the swamps near my home on the 28^th.  February 2017 was warmer than February 2016 and it was 15 degrees warmer than the February 2015 (which was an awfully cold winter).

Saying a warm day in February is absolute proof of global warming is as ridiculous as Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma standing in the well of the Senate with a snowball saying it is absolute proof that global warming is a hoax. Indeed, you can say the same thing about a warm February. We’ve had them before. In fact, February 2017 was only the 9^th warmest on record in Massachusetts. The warmest was in 1984.

What scientists look for are trends. The trend is that an average Massachusetts February in the early 21^st century is about 4 degrees warmer than it was at the end of the 19^th century, based on records from the Blue Hill Observatory. From a climate perspective, that’s a lot. Our climate is shifting.

As an aside, the Blue Hill Observatory in Milton has the longest continuous record of weather data in the United States, and recordings are still made with the same 19^th century equipment.

OK, a warm winter isn’t so bad. Anyone want to tell me that last summer’s heat waves were fun?

In physics, the term acceleration is defined as the rate of change of velocity per unit of time. If you step on the gas pedal in your car, you increase your speed and you keep increasing it until you take your foot off the pedal.

If you want to know why the issue of climate change is a big deal now when it wasn’t 25 or 30 years ago. The answer is acceleration.

I recently looked at the “Keeling Curve”. It is so significant that the American Chemical Society designated it a “National Historic Chemical Landmark,” something only a data geek could love.

The Keeling curve is a graph displaying very careful daily measurements of CO2 collected from the summit of Mauna Loa on Hawaii since the early 1960s, started by Charles Keeling of the Scripps Institute in California. The graph is an upward trending curve with time, a classic example of acceleration.

Humans have been changing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In the mid-1960s, the rate of increase was about 0.4 parts per million (ppm) per year, then 1.4 ppm/year until the late 1990s and thereafter, over 5 ppm/year. During each of those time intervals we accelerated the rate of concentration increase by a factor of three.

It’s as if we tapped on the gas pedal during the early 20^th century, pushed on it in the 1960s and stomped on it starting in the 1990s. 

Most of the CO2 we have added to the atmosphere has been added since the 1960s.

I will grant you that five parts per million doesn’t seem like a very big number. Even 400 ppm, the current concentration in our air, is a small number. It’s just 1 part in 2,500.

Funny thing about chemistry is that the relative quantity of something can have nothing to do with It’s the absolute effect.

400 ppm of carbon monoxide from a leaky furnace will kill you in a matter of hours. 0.04 ppm of Fentanyl can kill an adult in minutes.

When C02 was at 180 ppm 25,000 years ago, the northern hemisphere looked like Antarctica.  When CO2 last was at 400 ppm, about 3 million years ago, sea level was over 20 feet higher than now.

This is why the projected impacts of climate change have become a very real, imminent, and potentially society-altering issue now when it wasn’t a generation ago.

According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration wants to cut National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's budget by 17%. The biggest single cut proposed is the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, which includes a key repository of climate and environmental information, the National Centers for Environmental Information.

Ironic, isn’t it? Black birds and small frogs seem to know what’s going on, but the administration in DC seems hell bent on not wanting to know.

Published in the Westborough News March 10, 2017

Facts are Stubborn Things

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” -John Adams, lawyer, diplomat, statesman, political theorist, Founding Father, and Second President of the United States

A few days ago, the following simple statement of fact was deleted from the Twitter account of the Badlands National Park.

"The pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). As of December 2016, 404.93 ppm. Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years.”

Since Donald Trump’s election last November, scientists and researchers have been scrambling to download and mirror as much raw data and research results from Federally-funded web sites and public data sets as they could, because they feared what the new administration would try to do.

So, the deletion of this tweet seemed to confirm these fears. It was taken by many environmental activists, politicians, and federal employees as the first salvo in a campaign to suppress the dissemination of climate science information and related data by the new administration.

It was not hard to see why people would come to this conclusion, given statements by President Trump and his nominees, as well as his chief of staff, Reince Priebus who considers climate change “a bunch of bunk.”

After the new administration removed all mention of climate change from the White House and State Department web sites, froze the social media accounts at NASA, EPA, and the Department of Agriculture, and then stated its plans to remove climate change web pages from the EPA web site, the backlash was immediate.

The “Twitter rebellion” started when “alt” versions of official federal agency Twitter accounts, over 80 in all, started popping up, such as @AltUSNatParkService, @Rogue NASA, @ungaggedEPA, even @RogueDeptOfEducation. “@NOAA (uncensored)” described itself as the “Unofficial ‘resistance’ group for NOAA. We are dedicated to the understanding and stewardship of the environment.”

The backlash and media attention garnered by the Trump administration’s actions have, ironically, made EPA’s climate change pages extremely popular in the last two weeks.

The Washington Post reported that “EPA.gov/climatechange has had a 2,700 percent increase in visitors in the five days since the inauguration, as compared with the five days before. Similarly, the agency's climate change research page has had a 500 percent increase in visitors.”

Another result is that plans to remove climate change web pages from the EPA web site have since been scrubbed, according to the Post.

There seems to be nothing that makes something more popular than telling folks that it will soon be unavailable. I am happy to report that apparently, this goes for facts, as well.

There has been a lot of discussion about how we are now living in a “post-fact” era or that there is such a thing as “alternative facts.”

Well, maybe not so fast. Facts still matter. I am very heartened that there are people in our government who are adamant in their defense of facts, in their defense of basic data.

I think it is bizarre in the extreme that anyone would think that making these facts unavailable will change anything.

Melting glaciers will not refreeze. The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will not decline by 40%. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events will not suddenly decrease. Coastal sunny day flooding will not stop. The global increase in temperatures will not reverse. Cities and states will not suddenly stop planning for rising seas and extreme weather.

Facts still matter.

Facts are stubborn things.

Published in the Westborough News, February 3rd, 2017

Black Swans in the Middle of Winter

A black swan is supposed to be a very unlikely and unexpected event. Something like temperatures above 32 degrees F at the North Pole in the middle of winter.

The high Arctic has not seen the sun since the Autumn Equinox, which occurred on September 22nd.

Yet on December 23rd, 2016, the temperatures recorded near the North Pole were 50 degrees F above normal, or about 32 degrees F, just a couple of degrees cooler than it was in Westborough that day. 

Try to wrap your head around that one. It’s about as bizarre as having the ocean freeze at the equator on June 22nd. How about this? Same thing happened last year at this time.

When unlikely and unexpected events start to repeat themselves, they become neither.

The Arctic Report Card put out by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for 2016 reads like this:

• “The average surface air temperature for the year ending September 2016 is by far the highest since 1900, and new monthly record highs were recorded for January, February, October, and November 2016” (The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet). 
•  “After only modest changes from 2013-2015, minimum sea ice extent at the end of summer 2016 tied with 2007 for the second lowest in the satellite record, which started in 1979.” 
• “Spring snow cover extent in the North American Arctic was the lowest in the satellite record, which started in 1967.” 
•  “In 37 years of Greenland ice sheet observations, only one year had earlier onset of spring melting than 2016.”

 2016 will go down as the hottest year globally since instrumental records started being kept over a century ago, slightly hotter than 2015, which beat 2014, which beat 2010 and so on. All the hottest years on record have occurred since the turn of the century.

Another little event is going on at the other end of the planet as I write this, in a region called the Antarctic Peninsula. It is an arm of Antarctic that extends north towards the southern tip of South America. Thus it is the most northerly part of that continent, equivalent in latitude to central Alaska in the northern hemisphere.

A 1,000 foot wide crack is rapidly progressing through an 1,000 foot thick floating ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula called Larsen C. When (not if) this crack connects to the ocean only 12 miles away, the ice shelf will calve an iceberg the size of Delaware.

So why should we care?

These ice shelves keep the glaciers on land from flowing into the ocean. The best analogy I can think of would be akin to a carefully constructed pile of oranges at the supermarket. Pull out an orange near the bottom of the pile and the whole thing collapses.

There used to be Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves too, but they disintegrated 1995 and 2002, respectively. If the entire Larsen C ice shelf collapses, the glaciers behind it could raise sea level about four inches when they subsequently flow into the ocean and melt.

This one iceberg from the Larsen C ice shelf will still leave plenty remaining, but given that the entire Larsen A shelf collapsed in a matter of hours, scientists are monitoring the health of Larsen C closely.

The other Larsen shelf collapses all started with the calving of large icebergs.

My last observation for the beginning of the New Year is a study just published by climate researchers at UMass Amherst that I first heard about in the Boston Globe (and yes, I actually read the journal article).

The Northeastern US is warming much faster than the rest of the continental US, and in fact, the rest of the world outside of the Arctic. They estimate that there is an 85% chance that the northeast will be 2 degrees C warmer than in 1900 by the year 2045. The rest of the world will get there about 2070.
The researchers also say this estimate is conservative. In other words, we could get there faster.

What does that mean for us?

Warmer and wetter winters in New England, but hotter summers. Also, more heatwaves, or as the authors put it “a substantial increase in summer temperature extremes in the US before global warming reaches 2 degrees C”.

Based on data from the Blue Hills Observatory I downloaded from NOAA, Eastern Massachusetts may already be 1.5 degrees C above where we were in 1900.

I am not planning to sell my snow blower just yet, but I am also not planning on retiring to Florida either. At the rate things are going, I won’t need to.

Happy New Year.

(Originally published in the Westborough News, January 20, 2017)

Underwriting and Underwater

Originally published in the Westborough News 12/16/2016.

Insurance is a huge part of the world economy. The world’s insurance companies hold about $30 Trillion in assets.  To get an idea of how much money that is, the US economy is about $17 Trillion. 

One thing all insurance companies won’t do is insure you for flooding. You have to buy a flood policy through the Federal Flood Insurance Program because insurance companies know that they will pay out more in flooding claims than the will ever receive in premiums or returns from investing those premiums. They won’t touch it. This insurance isn’t cheap. I don’t live in a flood zone and flood insurance would increase my home insurance premiums by 60 percent.

According to FEMA, $1.2 Trillion in property in coastal areas are insured by the National Flood Insurance Program. $484 Billion of that in Florida alone. Who is on the hook for losses under that program? You and me, that’s who, because the premiums for flood insurance don’t come close to covering the projected losses.

The most recent available projections are that sea level will rise by about 6 feet by the end of this century, if we do nothing to limit temperature increases to 2 degrees C (and we are already at about 1.2 C). This number does not include daily tidal fluctuations, which can be a few feet depending on location or storm surges which can be a dozen feet or more.

But you don’t have to wait for the collapse of the Antarctic or Greenland ice cap to have your whole day ruined. Just a couple of feet can render a property worthless. This isn’t speculation. It’s already happening.

According research published almost two years ago, sunny day nuisance flooding during high tide is already occurring up and down the eastern seaboard and has increased 10 fold since the 1950s.  In south Florida, daily high water levels have been increasing an inch a year. This flooding kills lawns and trees, destroys septic systems, and contaminates aquifers.

The net effect is that it is making people less likely to want to buy a property within 10 feet of sea level. Home prices in coastal areas have dropped over the last 10 years whereas they have gone up most everywhere else. This is true in coastal Massachusetts as well.

Mortgage companies are also in the risk management business, at least they are now, a decade ago, not so much, but I digress.

The mortgage industry is closely watching sea level rise. According to the chief economist of Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) “. . . between $66 billion and $160 billion worth of real estate is expected to be below sea level by 2050. By the end of the century, the range is $238 billion to $507 billion”. In Florida, the chances that up to $346 Billion in property will be submerged by 2100 is 1 in 20. I think the likelihood is far higher than that.

These trends will lead to the collapse of the coastal housing market much sooner than 2050. Within a few years, what banker in their right mind would write a 30-year mortgage for a coastal property under even the most optimistic scenarios of sea level rise, especially in places like south Florida? What home buyer would buy a home in a flood prone area? What are the knock-on effects of such a collapse on the rest of our economy?

The answers: None, no one, and nothing good.

A coalition of 29 insurance giants, including Allianz, Lloyds of London, and Swiss RE, among many others, have observed that “Since the 1950s, the frequency of weather-related catastrophes, such as windstorms and floods, has increased six-fold. As climate-related risks occur more often and predictably, previously insurable assets are becoming uninsurable, or those already underinsured further compromised.”  Losses have quintupled since the 1980s alone. There is an increasing gap between potential losses and how much insurance coverage is actually available right now.

Major multi-national insurance companies have no reason to make this stuff up and this coalition is putting its money where its mouth is, by reconsidering how they invest their vast assets which include funding projects which increase society’s ability to cope with floods, storms, and heat waves.

Insurance companies are very concerned about global warming, even if our incoming political leadership denies its existence, because they actually see what is happening.  As one insurance executive stated, “We understand climate change as underwriters, because we are trying to manage the physical consequences of the severe weather we get from climate change.”

Already, no one will insure a home that could be underwater. Soon, no one will finance a home that could be underwater, and by this I mean literally, not financially.

Do you think the incoming administration will listen to the leaders of the insurance and mortgage industries because it’s darn clear they won’t listen to scientists?

Nah – me neither.

Follow the Money

Originally published in the Westborough News on 11/28/2016)

Like a lot of people, I have been trying to make sense of the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States and its impact on US policy. Among those polices are the ones on global warming.

His views on global warming have been all over the place, ranging from “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (tweet from 11/6/2012) to “I think there is some connectivity [to human activity]. Some, something” and that what he will address it “depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies.” (NY Times, 11/22/2016).

It’s clear that Mr. Trump looks at the world through a financial lens, so regardless of his words, let’s follow the money.

Trump’s pick to head the transition at EPA is economist Myron Ebell, Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the libertarian think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which apparently gets a lot of funding from oil companies like Exxon Mobil. He is totally dismissive of climate research and, according to Politico, thinks “that alarmist environmentalists are using the specter of climate change to push through their Big Government agenda.” 

Interestingly, Ebell was also dismissive of research linking tobacco to lung cancer when he received funding from the tobacco industry in the 1990s.

Follow the money.

Trump’s senior advisor, Robert Walker, wants NASA to eliminate all funding for “politically correct environmental monitoring” which he describes as “politicized science”. Walker thinks other agencies, like NOAA, can better handle such work, although there is no indication at this time that the reduction in NASA’s budget would be shifted to those other agencies.

Follow the money.

What difference will this policy change make?  I think not much.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is still 40% higher than it was just two centuries ago and is at a level not seen since the Miocene, 3 million years ago, when palm trees could be found as far north as Alaska. The Arctic ice pack volume is still 75% lower than it was a few decades ago. Mountain glaciers are still receding at record rates. The frequency of extreme weather events is still increasing. Long term droughts still plague regions like the American south west and Australia. Western wildfires have increased three fold since the 1970s.  I could go on.

None of those impacts are going to go away, now or any time in the next several centuries.

Trump’s free market energy policies will not make the coal industry return, because it is being replaced by cheaper natural gas. Even if all Federal lands are opened up to oil and gas drilling, it’s cheaper for companies to go after petroleum resources in areas with extensive infrastructure already in place, like West Texas, where the USGS recently estimated that an existing shale formation previously ignored probably contains 20 billion barrels of oil and 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

An interesting trend is occurring though, the increase in CO2 concentrations has slowed over the last couple of years, because China has started to burn less coal. China’s major cities are choking on coal pollution and China also realizes the impact climate change is making on their country. Most of their major cities are right at sea level and the rate at which their agricultural regions are turning to desert is alarming. It is in China’s long term financial self-interest to address climate change. They know it and they are acting accordingly.

Follow the money.

Our incoming government hasn’t figured that out yet. 

However, according to the NY Times, “Hundreds of American companies, including Mars, Nike, Levi Strauss, and Starbucks, have urged . . . Trump not to abandon the Paris climate deal, saying a failure by the United States to build a clean economy endangers American prosperity . . . Failure to build a low-carbon economy puts American prosperity at risk.”

The article quotes an executive at Mars, who states that regardless of government policies, they will continue to reduce emissions. “We’re doing this because we see a real business risk. We see a real business problem.”

Follow the money.

As I wrote earlier this year, our President-elect’s representatives petitioned the Irish government to build a 1.7 mile long sea wall to protect his recently purchased Doonbeg golf resort. Why does he need this wall? According to Politico, the permit application “explicitly cites global warming and its consequences — increased erosion due to rising sea levels and extreme weather this century — as a chief justification for building the structure.”

Oh, the hypocracy. I say again . . . Follow the money.

Alternative Energy is Going Mainstream

Originally published in the Westborough News on 10/10/2016

Of the 4 trillion kilowatt hours of electric energy produced in the U.S., a third is generated by the burning of coal, down from a peak of over 50 percent in 1997. You may think that the reason for this decline is because of President Obama's "War on Coal" as Senator Mitch McConnell likes to call it.

You would also be wrong.

Obama's "Clean Power Plan", which would regulate the carbon dioxide emissions from any power plant burning fossil fuels hasn't even kicked in yet because coal producers and over 20 states are suing in Federal Court to stop it.

No, coal is declining because it is cheaper to produce, transport, and burn natural gas extracted from abundant subsurface shale formations using hydraulic fracturing technology (aka fracking) which came of age in the early 2000s.

But it's a cheaper fossil fuel that is "fueling" coal's decline and that is not such a good thing, because shale gas isn't exactly environmentally benign, far from it. That's a subject for another column, though.

Bottom line though - coal is dying.

For most of us here in Westborough, how we get the electricity that powers our homes is not something that concerns us. Out of sight, out of mind. We don't see mountaintop removal coal strip mines or massive drilling facilities used to extract gas from shales by fracking. We don't see power plant smoke stacks or the landfills and wet storage ponds used to store highly toxic coal ash and sludge.

What we do see more and more in Westborough are solar panels. Solar panels on residential roof tops and solar panel fields located at Harvey Farm, Milk Street near the railroad overpass, Fisher Street near Otis Street, and along the Massachusetts Turnpike.

It is something we will be seeing more and more of, for many reasons.

I was one of the first homeowners in Westborough to install photovoltaic solar panels on my roof back in 2008. Eight years ago, solar panels cost about $4 per watt. Each of the 24 panels on my roof could generate 195 watts of power. Today, similar sized panels can generate as much as 345 watts and cost as little as $0.50 per watt, a stunning 800% decrease in price, and 76% increase in efficiency!

My "primitive system" still replaces over 75 percent of my total electric use. Today's typical residential system costs less than half of mine and generates more electricity than most households could use. The excess is sold back to the grid.

One of the big arguments against alternative energy is that it is inconsistent. The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine and that is why large "utility scale" commercial solar systems currently account for only 1 percent of all commercial power generated in the U.S, with wind accounting for about 5 percent.

Electric grid operators also are fighting back against connecting non-commercial residential solar to the grid for the same reason. The grid is not designed to handle the highly variable load from so many homes.

But even the intermittent power hurdle is rapidly being overcome through more and more sophisticated battery technology. The Department of Energy states that grid-scale battery storage capacity has increased by a factor of 10 since 2008, while the cost has dropped almost 75 percent. The cost is expected to drop another 20 to 27 percent by 2018. The same is true at the residential level, where a battery storage system now costs the same as a new oil burner or gas furnace.

Still, alternative energy is growing as "policies in three-quarters of America's states encourage the addition of wind and solar as replacements for coal. As costs have dropped, some states are pushing a faster switch to those renewables," according to a recent Case Western Reserve University study.

There are approximately 174,000 people working in the U.S. coal industry, including mining, transport, and power plants and that number is rapidly declining. In 2015, the solar energy and wind energy industries employed 209,000 and 88,000 people respectively and grew 20 percent from just the previous year.

Add onto these numbers the fact that almost two million people are employed in the energy efficiency sector, which increased by 14 percent this last year, and you can see that far from being a job killer, moving to a low carbon energy economy is creating whole new industries, creating new, cheaper and more efficient energy production technology and making rapid inroads into our energy production.

As of 2015, solar systems in the U.S. alone generated 25 gigawatts of electricity and accounted for 29.5 percent of all new electric generating capacity that year, beating out new natural gas power plant installations. Rooftop solar alone could eventually account for 40 percent of all U.S. electric power generation.

It is not out of the realm of possibility that within the next decade, new homes will include solar power generation and storage systems just the way they now include heating, plumbing, and kitchen appliances, because the systems will be that cheap.

Alternative energy is not a pie-in-the-sky liberal fantasy. It is in fact becoming an important contributor to how we get our electric energy. Given what we know about our warming planet, alternative energy is not an alternative.

Is it dry enough for ya?

Originally published in the Westborough News on 09/20/2016

I have used my lawn mower this July about as often as I used my snow blower last January, which is to say, not much. My lawn is a lovely shade of brown.

By the time you read this, we will have come out from a multi-day heat wave in Massachusetts, where daily maximum temperatures exceed 90 degrees for 3 days or more. According to my backyard weather station (and the National Weather Service), this one lasted 8 days.

This latest heat wave is not the longest we have had in Massachusetts. That record belongs to a 9-day heat wave back in July, 1912, so we came darn close, but this heat wave is one of the top longest 10 heat waves.

The interesting this is, these long duration heatwaves used to occur on average about every 37 years. Since 1980, they occur about every 5 years.

Can we say that this PARTICULAR heat wave is a DIRECT result of climate change?

Technically no. There are all sorts of local reasons for any given weather event.

HOWEVER - the increasing frequency and extent of such heat waves is the direct result of global warming. Period.

This trend IS climate change. Right here, right now.

Summers here in Massachusetts are getting hotter too.  July average daily temperatures have increased over 3 degrees since 1900 and maximum daily temperatures by over 4 degrees. I am not making this up, you can see for yourself at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) web site and they will plot it up very nicely for you (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/state-temps/). Your tax dollars at work.

June 2016 was the 14^th straight month of record breaking monthly average temperatures. According to NASA and NOAA.  This year is on track to be another record-breaking year for global average temperatures.

This year is on track to be another record-breaking year for global average temperatures. So far, data from NOAA shows global average temperatures this year are already over 0.2 degrees higher than last year. That doesn’t seem like a lot until you realize that the amount of energy it takes to cause that global temperature increase that much is equivalent to the total energy output of the United States roughly 720,000 years which is a rather large number.

So here’s the scary thing. Last December’s Paris Climate Summit produced an agreement to limit warming to no more than 1.5 degrees C from 1900 but the current spike in global temperatures already have the world flirting with that temperature level within the next few years, even though the agreement is looking to accomplish this over the next few decades.

I look at the data and have come to my own conclusion that things are starting to move very quickly. I hope that this year’s rapid increase in global temperatures will not repeat itself. 2017 could be cooler than this year or last but unless there is a major volcanic eruption like Pinatubo in the early 1990’s, which temporarily cooled the planet, the chances of a next year being cooler are decreasing.

I am not writing this stuff to scare you. I am just stating the facts, because most of the day-to-day media aren’t doing it in a way that really emphasizes what we are facing when they pay more attention to a) whether Taylor Swift is dating Tom Hiddleston, b) whether Tom Brady was shafted by Roger Goodell, c) whether David Price was worth it, or d) whether the latest tweets from Donald Trump will finally derail his campaign.

In case you were wondering: a) who cares?,  b) yes, c) no, and d) I doubt it.

Adaptation or Retreat . . . or Both

Originally published in the Westborough News on 07/13/2016

In my last column, I asked the question - "What are we going to do about global warming?"

Fact of the matter is that no matter what we do right now, we are going to have to adapt. The window on preventing substantial changes to global climate and consequent knock-on effects probably closed about 10 years ago.

In basic physics you learn about inertia and momentum - objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects that are moving tend to stay moving. It's like when you try to push a car in neutral gear. It's really hard to get the car going but you don't want to be in front of it when it's finally moving.

Although the physics is not the same, the Earth's climate can also be described using these same two concepts from Newtonian mechanics. By increasing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere by 42 percent in less than two centuries, we have applied a very strong push to the Earth's climate unprecedented in the geologic record since the extinction of the dinosaurs and we are only now starting to see it shifting. That extra CO2 will be there for the next millennium.

We cannot take that push back, so we will have to adapt and that is not going to be easy. In this country, there are already climate refugees.

In Louisiana, a small community of 60 Native Americans are going to be relocated because the bayous they have lived in for generations are being swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi delta is not a perfect example of the impacts of sea level rise - the reasons for the disappearance of the delta are many, but sea level rise is among them. Regardless, relocating this Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw settlement will cost $48 million of our tax dollars.

In Alaska, the Inupiat village of Shishmaref voted to move their village 10 years ago as powerful winter storms eroded the melting permafrost out from underneath their homes. They are still trying to get it done a decade later.

We are no stranger to the effects of a rising ocean here in Massachusetts. Cape Cod is a relic of the ice age, a huge jumble of silt, sand, gravel, and boulders that define the furthest extent of the Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered New England.

The Cape has always been reshaped by waves and storms, but now, rising sea levels are accelerating changes to this ephemeral landscape of shifting sands. The parking lot at Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown is being destroyed as the ocean pushes inland and the National Park Service is embarking on a program called "managed retreat" to start relocating facilities on public lands further away from the ocean all around the Cape.

Quoting Professor of Law Michael Gerrard, in a recent article in the New York Times: "It reflects a sound planning approach that is regrettably uncommon so far. As sea-level rise advances [managed retreat] is going to become increasingly important in large parts of the country." It's also going to be very expensive. Just moving the Herring Cove Beach parking lot is going to cost $3 million.

Moving a parking lot is child's play compared to other areas of the US.

I was once chided by a climate change denier who asked me why people in Florida were not retreating from their coast lines. They are not retreating yet but it's getting increasingly more expensive to stay there.

According to an article in the Guardian, "Miami Beach is spending $400 million to raise roads and install pumps to drain streets that experience regularly flooding at high-tide - and to prevent salt water from contaminating fresh water storage inland, " because sea level is expected to be almost 3 feet higher by mid-century.

Even those expenditures will be dwarfed by the value of real estate that, according to NOAA, will be underwater by mid-century. In Coral Gables, 10 percent of the homes, worth $3 billion, will be flooded permanently.

Florida is in tough shape for a couple of reasons. First, it is composed of porous limestone so rising seas will come up from below, rendering sea walls ineffective. Second, large parts of the state are within 10 feet of sea level. Third, Governor Rick Scott won't allow his own state environmental officials to utter the phrase "global warming".

Now, we are a first world country and the impending impacts of sea level rise alone are presenting daunting prospects for adaptation. Imagine if you are a third world country like Bangladesh where tens of millions of desperately poor people live within 10 feet of sea level and ocean storms can flood as far as 120 miles inland.

The impacts of global warming do not, and will not, respect socio-economic status or wealth.

According to the above mentioned Guardian article, a certain real estate tycoon's crown-jewel Florida resorts will be subject to the same effects. Mar-a-lago in Palm Beach will be flooded 210 days per year by 2045.

This same real estate tycoon recently petitioned the Irish government to build a 1.7 mile long sea wall to protect his recently purchased Doonbeg golf resort. Why does he need this wall? According to Politico, the permit application "explicitly cites global warming and its consequences - increased erosion due to rising sea levels and extreme weather this century - as a chief justification for building the structure."

Same guy who says global warming is a hoax. You just cannot make this stuff up.

It's Not Your Imagination

Originally published in the Westborough News on 07/01/2016

There was an interesting article in the New York Times a couple of months back with the headline “Global Warming Feels Quite Pleasant.”

The article states that “80 percent of Americans now find themselves living in counties where the weather is more pleasant than it was four decades ago.” The reason is that temperature increases have not been even. So far, winters have gotten warmer by a bit over 1 degree F per decade whereas summers have only warmed 0.13 degrees F per decade and average humidity has decreased.

If you live in a temperate part of the US closer to the coast like we do here in Westborough, what’s not to like? 

Of course, if you live in Southern California, West Virginia, South Carolina, Texas, maybe not as much.

If you think there have been more and more news stories about such disasters as flash floods, intense storms and wild fires – it is not your imagination, it’s because that is what is happening.

I have been watching these news events and decided to do a bit of digging. I went to as unbiased a source of information as I could find, the Insurance Information Institute, for some information. They had some very helpful graphs (http://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/catastrophes-us) which show what is going on. 

The trend for severe storms has gone from roughly 30 a year in the 1980s to over 50 a year in the last decade. 

Likewise major flood events have gone from less than 5 per year in the 1980s to over 10 a year in the last decade. 

Western wild fires have increased three fold from 1970 until now and the number of fires per year is tied very closely to average annual temperatures in that region (http://www.climatecentral.org/wgts/wildfires/Wildfires2012.pdf).

The saying goes in science that correlation is not causation. It could be coincidence that as the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is increases, so does the frequency of extreme weather events. 

After all, there is an astounding correspondence between the per capital consumption of mozzarella cheese and the number of awarded civil engineering doctorates per year or the number of swimming pool drownings versus the number of films Nicolas Cage has appeared in (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations).

So why pay attention to catastrophes versus greenhouse gas concentrations and not drownings versus Nicholas Cage movies?

The answer is causation. There is no causal mechanism to make the connection between the silly correlations above, but there is one for greenhouse gases versus weather-related natural disasters.

That’s where science comes into play.

Theories in science are not hazy guesses. The throwaway line in a movie – “It’s only a theory” has always made me cringe. 

What they are, are ideas supported by a wealth of facts, which describe and PREDICT conditions in nature.

I emphasis the word “predict” because any scientific theory must make predictions that can either be tested in the lab or compared to the world at large. If the predictions are not borne out by the facts, the theory must either be rejected or modified. That’s the way science works. 

The scientific theory of human-caused climate change is based on well-known facts, the first being that carbon dioxide and methane absorb heat radiation. It makes predictions such as – global air temperatures will increase as greenhouse gas concentrations increase; the number of intense weather events will increase; the oceans will warm; drier areas will become drier; wetter areas will become wetter; glaciers will melt; sea level will rise, to name but a few. 

These predictions are exactly what we are seeing – all over the planet and these changes are happening very quickly. We are seeing changes over the course of one or two generations that are unprecedented in the 150 year instrumental weather records and as near as we can tell, unprecedented in the geologic record going back tens of millions of years.

It’s not your imagination. The question is – what are we going to do about it? Not the government, not the UN, not aliens – us. What are WE going to do about it?

I'll Sue You, You'll Sue Me . . .

Originally published in the Westborough News on 06/24/2016

Once upon a time, there was a publicly-traded multi-national company which made products used by people all over the world and they made a lot of money doing it. They hired the best scientists and engineers so that they could make sure they always had enough raw materials to continue to make these products. They even had their own fleet of ships to transport their raw materials and products all over the planet.

Some of the company’s scientists came up with the brilliant idea of using their far-traveling fleet of ships to collect scientific data during their ocean-spanning journeys. They used that data and some of the best mathematical computer models in use by premier research institutions to process the data and published their findings in widely read scientific journals. 

They were considered pioneers in their area of research.

As a result of this research, this company knew that its products were causing problems of a world spanning nature. They were so concerned about these findings that they actually decided to not extract raw materials from property they leased in Indonesia because of the effects it would cause.

Fiction? No. The company is Exxon and the year was 1980. The lease in question was an offshore gas field in Malaysia containing perhaps the largest untapped reservoir of natural gas in the world, but which also contained so much CO2 that Exxon decided to shelve the project.

In 1980, this is what Exxon research scientists were saying about CO2 in our atmosphere:

“There is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel usage and decreases in forest cover are aggravating the potential problem of increased CO2 in the atmosphere.”

In fact, Exxon’s scientists were publishing articles about the dangers of rapidly increasing CO2 on the atmosphere and weather patterns as far back as 1970.

A decade later, the company changed its tune regarding CO2. By 1989, Exxon was funding industry groups such as the “Global Climate Coalition” whose mission was to create uncertainty around climate science and oppose policies which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even though the group’s own scientists stated that “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”

Exxon is one of a number of major companies in the fossil fuel business who in aggregate spent hundreds of millions of dollars to fight legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and to sew doubt about climate science.

The end result is that 25 years later, we have a presidential candidate who tweets that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Mission accomplished, Exxon.

But there’s a problem.

Seventeen state attorneys general are now investigating Exxon for making fraudulent statements to shareholders, including our own Attorney General Maura Healey, who stated that “Fossil fuel companies that deceived investors and consumers about the dangers of climate change should be held accountable. That’s why we have joined in investigating Exxon Mobil. We can all see today the troubling disconnect between what Exxon knew and what the company shared with the public regarding the consequences of burning the fuel it markets.”

This statement really pissed off Exxon, so it has filed its own law suit (in Texas) against AG Healey to impede her own investigation into Exxon’s own research and corporate decisions.

The Massachusetts AG’s office responded to Exxon by saying that "Our investigation is based not on speculation but on inconsistencies about climate change in Exxon documents which have been made public. The First Amendment does not protect false and misleading statements in the marketplace.”

Exxon has responded that these investigations “are an attempt to limit free speech and are the antithesis of scientific inquiry.”  In addition, the investigation “. . . would still violate the First Amendment, because it burdens Exxon’s political speech . . .”

In other words, Exxon is saying that they have the right to make statements they know are fraudulent because such speech is protected under the First Amendment (quoting Mitt Romney: “Corporations are people, my friend.”). 

A person can stand up in a crowded theater and yell “Fire!”, but is it protected speech?

Me thinks not.

I leave you with this factoid: On Thursday, June 10^th, it was 75 degrees in the town Nuuk, about 30 degrees above average and 4 degrees warmer than in New York City that same day. It was the warmest day ever recorded there in June.

So what?

Nuuk is the capital of Greenland. It is located at a latitude of 64 degrees, 24 degrees further north than New York.

Anyone ready to yell “fire!”?