The greenhouse effect and the bathtub effect

You're right about them using climate change, CO2, clean coal, wind and solar power as just more political rhetoric.
It has become so mainstream, that people are paying less attention, at least the people that have the political clout to help move things along in a more positive fashion.

Well, we can't change anything if we don't have the collective moral courage to do so. If Obama bows down to their wishes now it will be just as much his fault as theirs.

Climate change once made a political issue is now becoming just part of the political jingoism as I feared instead of the urgent crisis spanning all boundaries that it should be. And while I do agree with you that the "neocons" have done much harm regarding making real progress towards future sustainability, Democrats on the whole have not done much else to this point either.

Both parties have had control over the last thirty years, and still we sit now reading these articles. I think this comes down more to a moral epihpany than a political change at this point. Somewhere along the way ONE politician with the power to make such real change will have to take the bull by the horns and do it instead of bowing down to the very interests they claimed they wouldn't bow to. If this continues and if we continue our errant ways regarding our lack of duty to this planet, there will be no political party that escapes responsibility for it in my mind and heart.

Great post and it seems a very accurate way to describe our situation. But I wonder if the rebelling neocons will ever accept that things need to change. I'm not very hopeful, and Obama seems powerless against them (as shown in his endless concessions in his stimulus package, which didnt earn him one vote anyways). Someone needs to overthrow the neocons before any real change can come to this country or the world. Their numbers may be dwindling, but they still rule us....

Great way to explain it all, "The Bathtub Effect."

Great post!

cont.

Without greater understanding of the nature of the problem, he says, it will be hard to convince the public of the need for big, prompt, costly changes to the energy system, even when the worst impacts are projected to come later in the century.

The long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the long lifetime of sources like coal-burning power plants once built, mean that the “faucet” for CO2 is getting cranked open just when it should be going in the opposite direction. Across Cambridge at Harvard, Kimberly Thompson holds the same view.

In a recent email, she said anyone thinking effective policy can be crafted only by society’s elite is engaged in wishful thinking.

I don’t believe that experts alone can solve the climate change issue,” she said in an email. “I’m with Thomas Jefferson, who said:

“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education….”

Bottom line from my perspective - we need education that helps correct people’s mental models….

You can try an exercise Dr. Sterman created on the greenhouse bathtub problem online. He wrote a fascinating piece for the journal Science on the results of a study testing hundreds of very smart M.I.T. students to see if they could draw an emissions curve that would stop the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from rising.

From the article:

A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluding that the buildup of human-generated greenhouse gases could leave a profound millenniums-long imprint on climate and sea levels, focuses on a characteristic of global warming that the public, and many policymakers, have not absorbed — at least according to John Sterman at M.I.T.

That characteristic is the “bathtub effect” behind the human-amplified greenhouse effect. Dr. Sterman, a prominent analyst of risk perception and management at the Sloan School, has devised various tools akin to flight simulators to help corporate leaders understand the nature of a variety of problems and choose among various remedies. He recently turned this approach to climate, which he says bears much more resemblance to deficit spending and the national debt than it does to 20th-century-style pollution problems like acid rain.

Basically, the atmosphere is like a bathtub with a partially opened drain. Carbon dioxide from burning fuels and forests is flowing in twice as fast as it is being absorbed by plants and the ocean, and some of those “sinks” are in fact getting saturated, it appears, meaning that the “drain” is clogging a bit. (More on “CO2’s Long Goodbye“.) [UPDATE, 1/29: Inspired by this piece, Marc Roberts, perhaps the world's best -- and only -- climate cartoonist, reposted a hilarious take on the bathbub effect.]

In a tub, this is a recipe for a flood. In the climate system, Dr. Sterman says — echoing many climate scientists — it is a loud message that a prompt start is needed in curbing and then cutting emissions if you want to cut the chances of passing dangerous thresholds. He recently wrote a Policy Forum paper in Science reviewing his and other research on widespread misunderstanding of this kind of risk, including a 2007 study he was a co-author of in which 84 percent of 212 M.I.T. participating grad students drew curves for proposed emission trends that would result in concentrations continuing to climb.

“The erroneous belief that stabilizing emissions would quickly stabilize the climate supports wait-and-see policies but violates basic laws of physics,” Dr. Sterman concluded.

I sent him the study from the Proceedings, which was led by Susan Solomon, who also led a five-year review of science that culminated in the main report in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. His response is worth reading, and is included in toto below.

Dr. Sterman and other social scientists assessing climate science and climate policy say that a vital task for President Obama and his climate-energy team (and for scientists and the media), even as they weigh legislation and a treaty and technology, is to educate the public on the bathtub effect.