Global Warming: How Hot Will It Get?

Much has been made of the various promises to cut back on carbon emissions by national leaders.  The stated goal was to limit temperature rise at the end of this century to less than 2.0 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), and preferably to less than 1.5 degrees C.  The Economist paper led a recent issue with an assessment of the probabilities that those goals could be met: What’s the worst that could happen.  The lede provided this conclusion.

“Three degrees of global warming is quite plausible and truly disastrous”

It seems meeting the targets is not a given.

“Those Paris targets were, and remain, both prudent and incredibly ambitious. Right after the conference Climate Action Tracker (CAT), an NGO, set itself the task of totting up all the emission-reduction goals and other policies, like fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks and renewable-energy targets, that the various nations had made. To gauge the aggregate impact of those measures, cat calculated the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide they looked likely to produce and then used the results of climate models to see what those concentrations might mean in terms of warming. Their results showed the world was on track to be 2.7°C hotter than the pre-industrial baseline by 2100.”

Clearly, bigger and better promises were called for.

“Revised pledges formally submitted to the un over the past 12 months in the run-up to the COP26 conference to be held in November have knocked CAT’s estimate down a bit. If all government promises and targets are met, warming could be kept down to 2.4°C. Including targets that have been publicly announced but not yet formally entered into the Paris agreement’s ledgers, such as America’s net-zero-by-2050 pledge and China’s promise to be carbon-neutral by 2060, brings the number down to a tantalising 2.0°C.”

As often, making an estimate based on actions that are actually taking place can be a better strategy.

“A world which follows the policies that are actually in place right now would end up at 2.9°C, according to CAT (the UN Environment Programme, which tracks the gap between actual emissions and those that would deliver Paris, provides a somewhat higher estimate). Almost everyone expects or hopes that policies will tighten up at least somewhat. But any reasonable assessment of the future has to look at what may happen if they do not.”

The article goes on to discuss the consequences of reaching a global temperature 3.0 degrees warmer than the baseline and concludes that they are “truly disastrous.”  A problem with this approach is that every time the scientists agree on a climate model projection, they have been too conservative.  What the article describes is likely more benign than what reaching plus 3 degrees C will likely unleash.  Mark Lynas is a journalist who has spent many years tracking the latest research and modeling in the area of climate change and global warming.  He described his perception of what could happen in his book OurFinal Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency.

The Economist concludes a discussion of the threats a plus 3 degree C world’s food supply faces with this observation. 

“Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that cereal prices might be 29% higher under 3°C of warming, putting 183m people at additional risk of hunger, it also sees it as possible that they might hardly shift at all.”

Lynas provides a different take. 

“In the three-degree world, therefore, we face drastic harvest losses at the same time that the global human population is projected to rise to 10 billion.  To feed these extra mouths, and to do so at the same time as reducing poverty, requires doubling food production globally by mid-century.  Instead, in a three-degree scenario we could see food production cut by half.”

Lynas seems to make the more convincing argument.  For more on the food issue, check out Growing Food in a Warming Climate.

Lynas’s frustration with the timidity of the official proclamations that emerge from science-by-committee occasionally boil over.

“When I started writing this book I thought that we could probably survive climate change.  Now I am not so sure…we are already living in a world one degree warmer than that inhabited by our parents and grandparents.  Two degrees Celsius, which will stress human societies and destroy many natural ecosystems such as rainforests and coral reefs, looms on the near horizon.  At three degrees I now believe that the stability of human civilization will be seriously imperiled, while at four degrees a full-scale global collapse of human societies is probable, accompanied by a mass extinction of the biosphere that will be the worst on Earth for tens or even hundreds of million years.  By five degrees we will see massive positive feedbacks coming into play, driving further warming and climate impacts so extreme that they will leave most of the globe biologically uninhabitable, with humans reduced to a precarious existence in small refuges.  At six degrees we risk triggering a runaway warming process that could render the biosphere completely extinct and forever destroy the capacity of this planet to support life.” 

Consider his potential timeline for a business-as-usual approach to limiting climate change. 

“If we stay on the current business-as-usual trajectory, we could see two degrees as soon as the early 2030s, three degrees around mid-century, and four degrees by 2075 or so.  If we’re unlucky with positive feedbacks,,,from thawing permafrost in the artic or collapsing tropical rainforests, then we could be in for five or even six degrees by the century’s end.”

George Keeling is the scientist who began measuring the CO2 concentration and demonstrating its seemingly inexorable growth.  Its time-dependence is referred to as the Keeling Curve.  For Lynas this data illustrates the ineffectiveness of humanity’s paltry efforts and sets the stage for what is to come.

“…the rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is steadily increasing, from roughly 1 ppm [parts per million] in the early years to about 2 ppm annually today.  There is no visible slowdown, no sudden downwards blip, to mark the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, still less 2009’s Copenhagen ‘two degrees’ commitment or the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015.  All those smiling heads of state shaking hands, the diplomats hugging on the podium after marathon sessions of all-night negotiating—none of that actually made any identifiable difference to the Keeling Curve, which is the only thing that actually matters to the planet’s temperature.  All our solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, lithium-ion batteries, LED lightbulbs, nuclear plants, biogas digesters, press conferences, declarations, pieces of paper; all our shouting and arguing, weeping and marching, reporting and ignoring, decrying and denying; all our speeches, movies, websites, lectures and books; our announcements, carbon-neutral targets, moments of joy and despair; none of these to date have so much as made the slightest dent in the steepening upward slope of the Keeling Curve.”

If the CO2 level is “the only thing that actually matters to the planet’s temperature, a comparison of historical levels of CO2 and estimates of the Earth’s average temperature should be informative.  A Wikipedia article provides those charts.

As of 2019, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 409.8 parts per million (ppm).

Glen Fergus provides historical estimates of the Earth’s temperature.

Comparing the two curves, particularly during the Pleistocene with its recurring ice ages, suggests a close but not perfect correlation between Earth average temperature and CO2 concentration. Temperatures in the plus 2-3 degrees C range could be reached in the interglacial stages.  The last of these warm periods is known as the Eemian.  It lasted about 15,000 years and its characteristic temperature was in the plus 1-2 degrees C range, not much different than where we are today.  In that warm period, it created a much different world than what we see now: sea level was 20-30 feet higher than today, forests extended well above the Arctic Circle, and hippopotamuses were frolicking in the Rhine and Thames Rivers.  These changes were obtained with a CO2 concentration of about 280 ppm and the allowance of a little time for plants and animals to follow the climate changes.  

We have relentlessly blown past the Eemian CO2 concentration, much faster than the temperature can follow.  But it will catch up and the world will be transformed.  The changes may not come as fast as Lynas fears, but we have disrupted the world in which our civilization developed, and it will never be the same again.

  

The Extent of the Covid Tragedy: Counting the Dead

Originally, it seemed that the Covid virus was centered on the wealthy countries and many of the poorer ones were being left rather unscathed.  That assumption has proved to be false.  One of the issues in assessing the impact of the virus is the lack of accurate data available from the less-developed nations.  The most useful information would be the number of excess deaths during the pandemic compared to previous trends.  However, that data is often not available.  In an article from May of this year, The Economist attempted to provide a more useful estimate of the number of actual deaths due to the virus by looking at a range of secondary indicators.  A summary of its results can be found here, with more detailed information available here. 

“Using known data on 121 variables, from recorded deaths to demography, we have built a pattern of correlations that lets us fill in gaps where numbers are lacking. Our model suggests that covid-19 has already claimed 7.1m-12.7m lives. Our central estimate is that 10m people have died who would otherwise be living. This tally of “excess deaths” is over three times the official count, which nevertheless is the basis for most statistics on the disease, including fatality rates and cross-country comparisons.”

The number of recorded deaths in the available tallies is misleading, underestimating the severity of the pandemic.  These “official” summaries also mislead in identifying where the deaths are occurring.  

“The most important insight from our work is that covid-19 has been harder on the poor than anyone knew. Official figures suggest that the pandemic has struck in waves, and that the United States and Europe have been hit hard. Although South America has been ravaged, the rest of the developing world seemed to get off lightly.” 

“Our modelling tells another story. When you count all the bodies, you see that the pandemic has spread remorselessly from the rich, connected world to poorer, more isolated places. As it has done so, the global daily death rate has climbed steeply.”

“Death rates have been very high in some rich countries, but the overwhelming majority of the 6.7m or so deaths that nobody counted were in poor and middle-income ones. In Romania and Iran excess deaths are more than double the number officially put down to covid-19. In Egypt they are 13 times as big. In America the difference is 7.1%.”

At the time of the article, India was undergoing a tremendous increase in the number of infections and deaths due to Covid with total deaths in the 200-300 thousand range.  A current tabulation places the number of deaths at 420 thousand.

“Our model suggests the country is seeing between 6,000 and 31,000 excess deaths a day, well in excess of official figures around the 4,000 mark. This fits with independent epidemiological estimates of between 8,000 and 32,000 a day. On the basis of the model it would appear that around 1m people may have died of covid-19 in India so far this year. Again, this does not seem out of line with other estimates.”

This suggests the number of deaths in India is perhaps about four times larger than numbers being put out by India’s authorities.  A more recent estimate reported by the Associated Press, India’s pandemic death toll could be in the millions, suggests that The Economist’s estimates may be too conservative, at least for India.

The study reported looked at excess death data from seven of India’s states and estimated that if the findings were applied to India as a whole, the number of deaths would be about 10 times the official rate.

“The report released Tuesday estimated excess deaths — the gap between those recorded and those that would have been expected — to be 3 million to 4.7 million between January 2020 and June 2021. It said an accurate figure may ‘prove elusive’ but the true death toll ‘is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than the official count’.”

All those uncounted deaths indicate the number of infected individuals providing a platform for the virus to experiment with new versions of itself was vastly greater than thought.  New dangerous variants of the virus may exist that have yet to emerge.  If vaccinating 7 billion people is not practical, the only way to counter this process is to move quickly to provide vaccinations to those most at risk for infection.  Wealthier countries, trying to minimize the risk to themselves, have cornered the market on the available vaccines, often stockpiling more than they can immediately use.  This is not the best strategy in a pandemic.  If one region is undergoing runaway infections, the whole world is at risk. 

  

The Long Battle We Face with Covid-19

 If you are one of those lucky enough to live in a country with the money and the foresight to purchase significant amounts of the Covid vaccines as they were being developed, you probably feel rather secure being fully vaccinated.  The pharmaceutical companies performed wonderfully in producing effective vaccines in record time.  However, those products were tuned to version of the virus that is no longer a dominant strain.  As new mutations make the virus a more efficient infector of humans, the existing vaccines are beginning to lose some of their effectiveness.  And we still don’t know how long their protection will last.  The fact that so many choose to reject the opportunity for vaccination means that even in the best of circumstances, outbreaks will continue to occur, and new mutations will continue to appear.  Most of the world’s population is still unvaccinated, ensuring a vast breeding platform for Covid.

People seem desperate to resume their former lifestyles, and governments seem desperate to allow that to happen.  Is that a sane strategy?  Given that we have not had the resources to vaccinate the world’s population this time, and more vaccine development with boosters and redistribution will be required going forward, what does this mean for the fight to control Covid?

The journal Foreign Affairs assembled a panel of experts to address Covid issues and a possible path forward.

“LARRY BRILLIANT is an epidemiologist, CEO of Pandefense Advisory, a firm that helps organizations respond to COVID-19, and Senior Counselor at the Skoll Foundation.

LISA DANZIG is an infectious disease physician, a vaccine expert, and an Adviser at Pandefense Advisory.

KAREN OPPENHEIMER is a global health strategy and operations adviser and a Principal at Pandefense Advisory.

AGASTYA MONDAL is a doctoral student in epidemiology and computational biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

RICK BRIGHT is Senior Vice President of the Rockefeller Foundation and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response.

W. IAN LIPKIN is Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity and John Snow Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University, Founding Director of the Global Alliance for Preventing Pandemics, and an Adviser at Pandefense Advisory.”

Their findings were presented in the article The Forever Virus: A Strategy for the Long Fight Against COVID-19. 

“It is time to say it out loud: the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic is not going away. SARS-CoV-2 cannot be eradicated, since it is already growing in more than a dozen different animal species. Among humans, global herd immunity, once promoted as a singular solution, is unreachable. Most countries simply don’t have enough vaccines to go around, and even in the lucky few with an ample supply, too many people are refusing to get the shot. As a result, the world will not reach the point where enough people are immune to stop the virus’s spread before the emergence of dangerous variants—ones that are more transmissible, vaccine resistant, and even able to evade current diagnostic tests. Such supervariants could bring the world back to square one. It might be 2020 all over again.”

The authors identify the failure of the international system we thought was in place to contain pandemics.  Major nations seem to be able to cooperate when some remote population is at risk but are unable to do so when their own citizens are in danger.

“An era of rising nationalism and populism made it frustratingly difficult to mount a collaborative response to a global pandemic. Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Xi Jinping of China, Narendra Modi of India, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, and Donald Trump of the United States—all these leaders evinced some combination of parochialism and political insecurity, which caused them to downplay the crisis, ignore the science, and reject international cooperation.” 

A collection of public health institutions capable of a global response was what was needed.  What we had was weak, underfunded, and subject to the whims of the wealthier countries. 

“The pandemic is in many ways a story of magical thinking. In the early days of 2020, many leaders denied that what began as a regional outbreak in Wuhan, China, could spread far and wide. As the months went on, governments imagined that the virus could be contained with border controls and that its spread would miraculously slow with warm weather. They believed that temperature checks could identify everyone who harbored the virus, that existing drugs could be repurposed to mitigate the disease, and that natural infection would result in durable immunity—all assumptions that proved wrong. As the body count rose, many leaders remained in a state of denial. Ignoring the scientific community, they failed to encourage mask wearing and social distancing, even as the evidence mounted.”

“Now, governments must come to grips with another inconvenient truth: that what many hoped would be a short-lived crisis will instead be a long, slow fight against a remarkably resilient virus.”

 Pharmaceutical companies have been able to quickly provide effective vaccines and produce them in large numbers.  However, the need far exceeds the supply, and the distribution is weighted heavily towards a few of the wealthier countries. 

“Although the creation of the vaccines was a triumph of international cooperation, their distribution has been anything but. Hedging their bets, the United States and other rich countries bought many times the number of doses they needed from several manufacturers, essentially cornering the vaccine market as if the product were a commodity. Making matters worse, some countries imposed restrictive export regulations that have prevented the wider manufacture and distribution of the vaccines. In May, pointing out that 75 percent of the vaccine doses had so far gone to just ten countries, the WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, rightly called the distribution a ‘scandalous inequity that is perpetuating the pandemic’.”

“In fact, the barriers to access have been so profound that many low- and middle-income countries won’t have enough vaccines to inoculate even just their at-risk populations until 2023. This disparity has led to a jarring split-screen image. At the same time that Americans were taking off their masks and preparing for summer vacations, India, with only three percent of its 1.4 billion inhabitants fully vaccinated, was ablaze in funeral pyres.” 

It would help if everyone in the world would be administered an effective vaccine, but that is not going to happen, at least not as fast as necessary.  And global herd immunity will not happen either.  With such a large number of people who refuse vaccination, it is not clear that a wealthy country like the United States could ever reach that stage for itself.  Rather, there will continue to be enough infections worldwide that a string of dangerous mutations will continue to emerge, gradually eroding vaccine effectiveness and natural immunity after an infection. 

“Variants are an unavoidable byproduct of the pandemic’s exponential growth. More than half a million new cases of COVID-19 are reported every day. Each infected person harbors hundreds of billions of virus particles, all of which are constantly reproducing. Each round of replication of every viral particle yields an average of 30 mutations. The vast majority of mutations do not make the virus more transmissible or deadly. But with an astronomical number of mutations happening every day across the globe, there is an ever-growing risk that some of them will result in more dangerous viruses…” 

Is the situation hopeless?  The authors suggest that a modern version of an approach called “surveillance and containment” is needed for application across the globe. 

“In the 1970s, smallpox was rampant in Africa and India. The epidemiologist William Foege, working in a hospital in Nigeria, recognized that the small amount of vaccine he had been allocated was not enough to inoculate everyone. So he pioneered a new way of using vaccines, focusing not on volunteers or the well-connected but on the people most at risk of getting the disease next. By the end of the decade, thanks to this strategy—first called ‘surveillance and containment’ and later ‘ring vaccination’—smallpox had been eradicated. It is a twenty-first-century version of this strategy, along with faster mass vaccination, that could help make COVID-19 history.” 

“For this pandemic, epidemiology also has tools to return the world to a state of relative normalcy, to allow us to live with SARS-CoV-2 as we learned to deal with other diseases, such as influenza and measles. The key lies in treating vaccines as transferable resources that can be rapidly deployed where they are needed most: to hot spots where infection rates are high and vaccine supplies are low. The United States, flush with vaccines, is well positioned to lead this effort, using a modernized version of the strategy employed to control smallpox.” 

For such an approach to work, nations must be willing to recognize that in a pandemic, an outbreak anywhere in the world imperils the entire world.  The authors provide an appropriate conclusion.

“COVID-19 is not yet the worst pandemic in history. But we should not tempt fate. The past year and a half revealed how globalization, air travel, and the growing proximity between people and animals—in a word, modernity—have made humanity more vulnerable to infectious diseases. Sustaining our way of life thus requires deep changes in the way we interact with the natural world, the way we think about prevention, and the way we respond to global health emergencies. It also requires even populist leaders to think globally. Self-interest and nationalism don’t work when it comes to a lethal infectious disease that moves across the globe at the speed of a jet plane and spreads at an exponential pace. In a pandemic, domestic and foreign priorities converge.”

 

 

Workers’ Rights: Legislating Away At-Will Employment

 The long and brutal fight for workers’ rights extended for many decades, finally reaching a point where workers could organize and negotiate with companies on working conditions, wages, and other benefits, and have the terms contractually formalized.  One of the most desired features was the requirement that a worker could only be fired for “just cause,” not on the whim of the company.  

Times changed and workers’ rights eroded.  Few people today work under union contracts.  Few people like to think of themselves as belonging to a “worker class” even though they work for hourly wages and expect to continue to do so indefinitely.  The traditional union-negotiated contract approach may no longer apply to the current workforce, but the current workforce still recognizes that intolerable working conditions continue, and they impact each worker’s life.  Progress has been accomplished in other ways when it became clear to the general public that a wrong needed to be righted.  One of the most effective practices is to push for legislation that would apply to classes of workers in general, not just those employed by a particular company or industry.  Progress has been made in setting higher minimum wages at local and state levels, for example.  However, that old fear that one could be fired arbitrarily persists.  But that also could be changing. 

Josh Eidelson updates us on recent legislation coming out of New York City in an article for Bloomberg Businessweek: Most Americans Can Be Fired for No Reason at Any Time, But a New Law in New York Could Change That.  He begins with the story of Melody Walker who after a year working at a Chipotle with no negative feedback was suddenly told she was fired.  Her boss told her she didn’t smile the way he wanted her to smile. 

“This is how the U.S. works under at-will employment, a legal standard that allows companies to fire people for almost any reason—and sometimes for no reason at all. Unlike in other wealthy countries, where bosses generally have to provide just cause for termination, at-will positions account for most U.S. jobs. This probably includes your job, dear reader. Most white-collar and professional workers aren’t any more legally protected from their bosses’ whims than Walker was. Google software engineers, Wells Fargo & Co. bankers, and Mayo Clinic surgeons work at will. So do humble Bloomberg reporters. The only Americans with a higher standard of protection tend to be limited to the C-suite, the public sector, the nation’s dwindling unionized workplaces, and—because of a complex, decades-old compromise—Montana.”

Walker couldn’t do anything about being fired, but she wasn’t exactly powerless. 

“In 2018, a few months after Chipotle fired her, Walker began working with union organizers and local officials on a groundbreaking two-law package that will make New York City a little more like Europe. The laws, which take effect on July 5, ban at-will employment among the city’s fast-food businesses, meaning that from now on, Chipotle and its peers will have to provide just cause to fire one of their roughly 70,000 workers in the five boroughs. The standard requires employers to show workers have engaged in misconduct or failed to satisfactorily perform their duties.” 

“Workers who haven’t done anything egregious will be guaranteed a system of warnings and consistent, proportionate disciplinary actions before they can be let go. To prevent retaliatory firings under the guise of broader layoffs, companies will have to privilege seniority while shrinking their payrolls and must offer laid-off workers their jobs back before hiring new people. Workers who believe they’ve been unfairly fired will be able to pursue arbitration, complain to the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, or file a lawsuit in state court, where a judge could award punitive damages.”

Restaurant owners certainly view this legislation as intrusive on their rights as business owners and will argue that economic efficiency will be diminished, and everyone will suffer.  But will anyone care? 

“The restaurant lobby’s similar challenges to the state’s fast-food minimum wage and other labor protections were defeated in court.”

“In recent polls, 47% of Americans said they had at some point been fired for a bad reason or for no reason. Few of those surveyed knew precisely how much discretion employers have—that they can reward workers for supporting particular politicians or fire workers over tweets they don’t like. Two-thirds of respondents said they’d support a just-cause policy, including a majority of Republicans.”

New York City’s law is not a unique initiative.

“The New York legislation resembles a law that Philadelphia passed in 2019 to protect its roughly 1,000 parking attendants. Similar, pan-industry efforts are gearing up in Seattle and at the state level in Illinois and New Jersey. Senator Bernie Sanders wants to make just cause the national standard…” 

As long as the Republican Party is determined to support bosses’ rights over workers’ rights, national just-cause legislation isn’t in the near future.  However, President Biden does have some options. 

“…the Biden administration, which in April mandated a minimum wage of $15 an hour for federal contractors and created a task force charged with ensuring the federal government acts as a ‘model employer’.”

Such executive actions can have far-reaching consequences.

“…progressive groups are pushing President Joe Biden to issue an executive order that would mandate just-cause protections for federal contractors. Millions of Americans work under federal contracts, and tens of millions—about one-fifth of the national labor pool—work for companies that have them.”

At one time, the higher wages earned by union workers had the effect of forcing other employers to compete for workers by pushing their own wages up closer to the union level.  In a situation where low-wage workers are in demand, which seems to be the case today, a standard for federal workers conceivably could grow to become more a national standard.

Eidelson provides an appropriate perspective.

“A national just-cause standard, or even a majority just-cause U.S. workforce, would usher in an historic shift of negotiating power away from bosses to employees. Strong enforcement would empower workers to organize with far less fear of reprisals and stands to make the employer-employee relationship feel a bit more like a contract and a bit less like feudal serfdom.”

We must recognize, applaud, and encourage progress whenever we find it.