A Climate Chronology
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The University of Maine DigitalCommons@UMaine School of Economics Faculty Scholarship School of Economics 3-21-2021 A Climate Chronology Sharon S. Tisher University of Maine, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/eco_facpub Part of the Climate Commons, Economic History Commons, and the Environmental Studies Commons Repository Citation Tisher, Sharon S., "A Climate Chronology" (2021). School of Economics Faculty Scholarship. 24. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/eco_facpub/24 This Monograph is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in School of Economics Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Landscape of Change by Jill Pelto A Climate Chronology Sharon S. Tisher, J.D. School of Economics and Honors College University of Maine http://umaine.edu/soe/faculty-and-staff/tisher Copyright © 2021 All Rights Reserved Sharon S. Tisher Foreword to A Climate Chronology Dr. Sean Birkel, Research Assistant Professor & Maine State Climatologist Climate Change Institute School of Earth and Climate Sciences University of Maine March 12, 2021 The Industrial Revolution brought unprecedented innovation, manufacturing efficiency, and human progress, ultimately shaping the energy-intensive technological world that we live in today. But for all its merits, this transformation of human economies also set the stage for looming multi-generational environmental challenges associated with pollution, energy production from fossil fuels, and the development of nuclear weapons – all on a previously unimaginable global scale. More than a century of painstaking scientific research has shown that Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are warming as a result of human activity, primarily through the combustion of fossil fuels (e.g., oil, coal, and natural gas) with the attendant atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and other * greenhouse gases. Emissions of co-pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides (NOx), toxic metals, and volatile organic compounds, also degrade air quality and cause adverse human health impacts. Warming from greenhouse-gas emissions is amplified through feedbacks associated with water vapor, snow and sea-ice cover, and changes in atmospheric circulation. The Arctic in particular has undergone a dramatic transformation over recent decades, where temperatures have risen twice as fast as in the middle latitudes, and where late summer sea-ice extent is now on average 50% less than in the 1980s.** We have also come to better understand natural climate variability caused by subtle changes in solar output, volcanic eruptions that eject materials that scatter sunlight, and ocean-atmosphere phenomena such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Enormous strides have been made in understanding how changes in Earth’s orbital geometry and feedbacks within the climate system have periodically produced ice ages over the past two million years. The growing body of climate science research, including sophisticated computer models of Earth’s connected atmosphere, oceanosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere, consistently indicate that climate warming driven by greenhouse-gas emissions emerged from the noisy signal of natural variability by at least the 1960s.*** Projections using these models suggest that Maine’s climate is likely to warm 2–4 °F by 2050, and up to 10 °F by 2100 depending on the trajectory of greenhouse-gas emissions controlled by humans. The warming climate also brings rising sea level, more intense storms, regional changes in precipitation and predominant weather patterns, and can facilitate the spread of vector-borne diseases. In addition to meteorological and terrestrial effects, increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations drive ocean acidification, which affects the function and health of marine ecosystems and fisheries. Researchers at the Climate Change Institute and across the University of Maine community have made significant contributions to the scientific understanding of Earth’s climate and human connections – including in the fields of abrupt climate change, climate modeling, ice core proxy records, glaciology, atmospheric chemistry, acid rain, lake ecology, environmental monitoring, and anthropology in addition to effects on marine, forest, and agricultural systems. A Climate Chronology joins this effort by providing a comprehensive timeline of climate research, climate policy, law, and some related events in society and technology. A Climate Chronology also makes clear that implementation of climate solutions currently lags far behind our understanding of the situation acquired through climate science. As highlighted in the Maine’s Climate Future reports, human-caused climate change has become the “defining environmental, economic, and social issue of the twenty-first century.”**** In keeping with the State of Maine motto, Dirigo, Maine has launched one of the most ambitious state plans in the nation to address both mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to climate change impacts already underway or expected to occur in the foreseeable future. The newly released Climate Action Plan developed by the Maine Climate Council is to be updated every four years.***** The plan has a name that underscores the urgency of responding to climate change: Maine Won’t Wait. *IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). 2014a. Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/ **IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). 2019b. Summary for Policymakers, IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC). https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/ ***Maine Climate Council, Scientific and Subcommittee report: Scientific Assessment of Climate Change and Its Effects in Maine (2020). See Natural Variability and Human Attribution, p. 30–31. ****Maine’s Climate Future reports (2009, 2015, 2020). Quoted text is from the 2015 report. *****https://climatecouncil.maine.gov/ Chro A Climate Chronology: International Policy, U.S. Policy, and Science The most challenging of all endeavors in human history will likely be that of understanding the impact of our industrial and technological enterprises on the planet’s climate and ecosystems, and responding effectively to the threats posed by that impact. I began writing this chronology while developing a climate policy course at the University of Maine. It has grown substantially during the ensuing nine years, and continues to grow. By juxtaposing developments in climate science, U.S. policy, and international policy over the previous two centuries, I hope to give the reader new insights into where we have been, where we are now, and where we may be headed in this formidable endeavor. I welcome comments, and suggested additions to this evolving work. It will be updated every January. I owe thanks to George Criner, for asking me to develop the climate policy course; to my University of Maine students, game to explore these turbulent waters and mindful of their import for their lives; to my daughter Annya, who joined me at the 2017 Boston Women’s March with the sign, “Climate Change Matters;” to my son Jacob, an outdoor adventurer who knows how it’s changed. 19th Century overview Humans begin to replace wood and other biomass fuels with a readily available fossil fuel: coal; coal fuels the Industrial Revolution. Humans in parts of Europe and the United States replace the biomass fuels such as wood and peat that had served them for hundreds of thousands of years with coal, a highly energy-intensive fossil fuel. Machine technology and the corporate form of business organization—punctuated by passage of the British Limited Liability Act of 1855—facilitate both the extraction of coal and the deployment of energy to reshape civilization’s infrastructure and ways of life. U.S. consumption of fossil fuels surpasses that of wood in the early 1880’s. During the second half of the 19th century, the average U.S. per capita supply of all energy increases by 25%; utilization of coal increases by a factor of ten.* * Vaclav Smil, Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 1. 20th Century overview Oil and gas join the arsenal of high-energy fossil fuels, spurring rapid global land, sea, and air transport; total energy consumption worldwide experiences unprecedented growth, most dramatically in the United States Oil and gas make new modes of rapid global land, sea, and air transportation possible. Coal is the predominant fuel in the production of electricity. Total energy consumption worldwide experiences unprecedented growth. Between 1900 and 2000, consumption of fossil fuels rises almost fifteenfold. As scientist and policy analyst Vaclav Smil notes,“[I]n spite of the near quadrupling of global population—from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6.1 billion in 2000—average annual per capita supply of commercial energy more than quadrupled from just 14 GJ [gigajoules] to roughly 60 GJ…” United States residents are far and away the largest consumers of energy. Between 1900 and 2000, annual per capita energy supply in the United States more than triples to about 340 GJ per capita, or more than five times the global average.* *