Rapid Arctic meltdown in Siberia alarms scientists

By Isabelle Khurshudyan, Andrew Freedman and Brady Dennis

The Washington Post, July 3, 2020

Alexander Deyev can still taste the smoke from last year’s wildfires that blanketed the towns near his home in southeastern Siberia, and he is dreading their return.

“It just felt like you couldn’t breathe at all,” said Deyev, 32, who lives in Irkutsk, a Siberian region along Lake Baikal, just north of the Mongolian border.

But already this year, fires in the spring arrived earlier and with more ferocity, government officials have said. In the territory where Deyev lives, fires were three times as large this April as the year before. And the hot, dry summer lies ahead.

Much of the world remains consumed with the deadly novel coronavirus. The United States, crippled by the pandemic, is in the throes of a divisive presidential campaign and protests over racial inequality. But at the top of the globe, the Arctic is enduring its own summer of discontent.

Wildfires are raging amid ­record-breaking temperatures. Permafrost is thawing, infrastructure is crumbling and sea ice is dramatically vanishing.

Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground

In Siberia and across much of the Arctic, profound changes are unfolding more rapidly than scientists anticipated only a few years ago. Shifts that once seemed decades away are happening now, with potentially global implications.

“We always expected the Arctic to change faster than the rest of the globe,” said Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “But I don’t think anyone expected the changes to happen as fast as we are seeing them happen.”

Vladimir Romanovsky, a researcher at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, said the pace, severity and extent of the changes are surprising even to many researchers who study the region for a living. Predictions for how quickly the Arctic would warm that once seemed extreme “underestimate what is going on in reality,” he said. The temperatures occurring in the High Arctic during the past 15 years were not predicted to occur for 70 more years, he said.

Neither Dallas nor Houston has hit 100 degrees yet this year, but in one of the coldest regions of the world, Siberia’s “Pole of Cold,” the mercury climbed to 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) on June 20.

If confirmed, the record-breaker in the remote Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, about 3,000 miles east of Moscow, would stand as the highest temperature in the Arctic since record-keeping began in 1885.

The triple-digit record was not a freak event, either, but instead part of a searing heat wave. Verkhoyansk saw 11 straight days with a high temperature of 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) or above, according to Rick Thoman, a climate scientist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The average June high at that location is just 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 Celsius).

This week, Ust’-Olenek, Russia, about 450 miles north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 93.7 degrees (34.3 Celsius), about 40 degrees above average for the date. On May 22, the Siberian town of Khatanga, located well north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit — about 46 degrees above normal.

Much of Siberia experienced an exceptionally mild winter, followed by a warmer-than- average spring, and it has been among the most unusually warm regions of the world during 2020. During May, parts of Siberia saw an average monthly temperature that was a staggering 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 Celsius) above average for the month, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

“To me, these are kind of the key ingredients of things you expect in a warming climate,” Freja Vamborg, a senior scientist at Copernicus, said of the recent heat records, coupled with prolonged months of higher-than-average temperatures.

Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world

The persistent warmth has helped to fuel wildfires, eviscerate sea ice and destabilize homes and other buildings constructed on thawing permafrost. It allegedly even contributed to a massive fuel spill in Norilsk in late May that prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare a state of emergency in the environmentally sensitive region.

Already, sea ice in the vicinity of Siberia is running at record-low levels for any year since reliable satellite monitoring began in 1979.

Scientists have long maintained that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. But in reality, the region is now warming at nearly three times the global average. Data from NASA shows that since 1970, the Arctic has warmed by an average of 5.3 degrees (2.94 Celsius), compared with the global average of 1.71 degrees (0.95 Celsius) during the same period. Scientists refer to the phenomenon as “Arctic amplification.”

The melting of snow and ice earlier in the spring exposes darker land surfaces and ocean waters. This switches these areas from being net reflectors of incoming solar radiation to heat absorbers, which further increases land and sea temperatures. That means more warmth in the air, more melting of snow and ice, and drying of vegetation in a way that creates more fuel for wildfires.

What happens in the Arctic matters for the rest of the globe. Greenland ice melt is already the biggest contributor to sea-level rise worldwide, studies show. The loss of Arctic sea ice is also thought to be leading to more-
extreme weather patterns far outside the Arctic, in a complex series of ripple effects that may be partly responsible for extreme heat and precipitation events that have claimed thousands of lives in recent years.

The fires that have erupted in Siberia this summer have been massive, sending out plumes of smoke that have covered a swath of land spanning about 1,000 miles at times. While much of the fire activity has occurred in the Sakha Republic, known for such blazes, scientists are observing more fires farther north, above the Arctic Circle, in peatlands and tundra.

“This seems to be a new pattern,” said Jessica McCarty, a researcher at Miami University in Ohio. In past years, fires “were sparse if not unheard of in these regions.”

One concern is that such fires could be destabilizing peatlands and permafrost — the carbon-rich frozen soil that covers nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere’s land mass, stretching across large parts of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland.

Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said fires in Siberia are burning “in areas where we expect permafrost to be more vulnerable.” Typically, these fires would break out in July and August, but this year they spiked in May, a sign of the unusual heat and early snow melt.

Turetsky said the fires are removing the blanket of vegetation that covers permafrost, making it more vulnerable to melting.

Satellite observations of Arctic wildfires in June also showed that fires this year are emitting more greenhouse gases than the record Arctic fires in 2019, according to Mark Parrington, who tracks wildfires around the world with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

Some of these blazes appear to be what are known as “zombie fires,” which survive the winter season smoldering underground only to erupt again once snow and ice melts the following spring. Similar fires have been observed in Alaska this summer.

Ted Schuur, a professor at Northern Arizona University who researches permafrost emissions, said the rapid warming is turning the Arctic into a net emitter of greenhouse gases — a disconcerting shift that threatens to dramatically hasten global warming. The unusually mild conditions in Siberia are particularly worrisome, as the region is home to the largest zone of continuous permafrost in the world.

There has long been concern throughout the scientific community that the approximately 1,460 billion to 1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon stored in frozen Arctic soils, from Russia to Alaska to Canada, could be released as the permafrost melts. That is almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere. Recent research by Schuur and others shows that warmer temperatures allow microbes within the soil to convert permafrost carbon into carbon dioxide and methane.

A report late last year that Schuur co-authored found that permafrost ecosystems could be releasing as much as 1.1 billion to 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year — nearly as much as the annual emissions of Japan and Russia in 2018, respectively.

“A decade ago we thought more of the permafrost would be resistant to change,” said Schuur. The more scientists look for destabilizing permafrost and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, the more they find such evidence.

Rapid warming has altered their calculations. “We’re basically setting records in the Arctic year after year,” Schuur said. “These emissions are now adding to our climate change problem. What happens in Siberia is going to affect everything through the global climate system.”

Researchers have watched as the changes sweeping the Arctic threaten major infrastructure, including homes and cities in the region.

“Will roads, buildings, oil and gas pipelines be able to survive without emergency [interventions], due to permafrost degradation?” Alexander Fedorov, deputy director of the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in the regional capital of Yakutsk, said in an email. “One must live on stable lands. In Siberia and the Arctic, many settlements and infrastructure were built before global warming, before there were problems. The main thing is not to be late with the solutions, because many villages are located in dangerous and vulnerable areas.”

For all the disconcerting signals coming out of the Arctic right now, the potential for troubling events remains high in the coming months, Meier said.

Sea ice typically reaches its minimum in September, he noted. Ice melt accelerates in Greenland during June and July. Wildfires have the potential to worsen as summer drags on. Intense summer storms can cause permafrost degradation and worsen coastal erosion.

“Certainly, 2020 is a strange year all around, for a lot of reasons beyond climate,” Meier said. “But it’s certainly setting up to be an extreme year in the Arctic.”

That might seem like a distant problem to the rest of the world. But those who study the Arctic insist the rest of us should pay close attention.

“When we develop a fever, it’s a sign. It’s a warning sign that something is wrong and we stop and we take note,” Turetsky said. “Literally, the Arctic is on fire. It has a fever right now, and so it’s a good warning sign that we need to stop, take note and figure out what’s going on.”

To see photos: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/rapid-arctic-meltdown-in-siberia-alarms-scientists/2020/07/03/4c1bd6a6-bbaa-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html

Rising Seas Threaten an American Institution: The 30-Year Mortgage

Climate change is starting to transform the classic home loan, a fixture of the American experience and financial system that dates back generations.

By Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times, June 19, 2020

WASHINGTON — Up and down the coastline, rising seas and climate change are transforming a fixture of American homeownership that dates back generations: the classic 30-year mortgage.

Home buyers are increasingly using mortgages that make it easier for them to stop making their monthly payments and walk away from the loan if the home floods or becomes unsellable or unlivable. More banks are getting buyers in coastal areas to make bigger down payments — often as much as 40 percent of the purchase price, up from the traditional 20 percent — a sign that lenders have awakened to climate dangers and want to put less of their own money at risk.

And in one of the clearest signs that banks are worried about global warming, they are increasingly getting these mortgages off their own books by selling them to government-backed buyers like Fannie Mae, where taxpayers would be on the hook financially if any of the loans fail.

“Conventional mortgages have survived many financial crises, but they may not survive the climate crisis,” said Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at Tulane University. “This trend also reflects a systematic financial risk for banks and the U.S. taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill.”

The trends foreshadow a broader reckoning. The question that matters, according to researchers, isn’t whether the effects of climate change will start to ripple through the housing market. Rather, it’s how fast those effects will occur and what they will look like.

The change has already begun. It’s not only along the nation’s rivers and coasts where climate-induced risk has started to push down home prices. In parts of the West, the growing danger of wildfires is already making it harder for homeowners to get insurance.

But the threat that climate change poses to the 30-year mortgage is different, striking at an American social institution that dates from the Great Depression. Before that, many home loans required owners to pay lenders back just a few years after buying a house, which led to waves of defaults and homelessness, according to Andrew Caplin, a professor of economics at New York University.

In response, the federal government created the Federal Housing Administration, which in turn standardized the way Americans finance their homes.

There was nothing magical about a period of 30 years, Dr. Caplin said; it simply proved useful, making payments predictable and affordable by stretching them out over decades. “It was designed from a viewpoint of a consumer, who wouldn’t find it too hard to understand exactly what they had committed to,” Dr. Caplin said.

But now, as the world warms, that long-term nature of conventional mortgages might not be as desirable as it once was, as rising seas and worsening storms threaten to make some land uninhabitable. A retreat from the 30-year mortgage could also put homeownership out of reach for more Americans.

Changes to the housing market are just one of myriad ways global warming is disrupting American life, including spreading disease and threatening the food supply. It could also be one of the most economically significant. During the 2008 financial crisis, a decline in home values helped cripple the financial system and pushed almost 9 million Americans out of work.

But increased flooding nationwide could have more far-reaching consequences on financial housing markets. In 2016, Freddie Mac’s chief economist at the time, Sean Becketti, warned that losses from flooding both inland and along the coasts are “likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and the Great Recession.”

If climate change makes coastal homes uninsurable, Dr. Becketti wrote, their value could fall to nothing, and unlike the 2008 financial crisis, “homeowners will have no expectation that the values of their homes will ever recover.”

In 30 years from now, if global-warming emissions follow their current trajectory, almost half a million existing homes will be on land that floods at least once a year, according to data from Climate Central, a research organization. Those homes are valued at $241 billion.

Currently, new research shows banks rapidly shifting mortgages with flood risk off their books and over to organizations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored entities whose debts are backed by taxpayers. In a paper this month in the journal Climactic Change, Dr. Keenan and Jacob T. Bradt, a doctoral student at Harvard University, described the activity, which suggests growing awareness among banks that climate change could cause defaults.

Tellingly, the lenders selling off coastal mortgages the fastest are smaller local banks, which are more likely than large national banks to know which neighborhoods face the greatest climate risk. “They have their ears to the ground,” Dr. Keenan said.

In 2009, local banks sold off 43 percent of their mortgages in vulnerable zones, Dr. Keenan and Mr. Bradt found, about the same share as other areas. But by 2017, the share had jumped by one-third, to 57 percent, despite staying flat in less vulnerable neighborhoods.

If coastal mortgages defaulted on those loans, it could cause losses for Fannie and Freddie. That pain could spread to taxpayers: In 2008, the two firms required $187 billion in public aid to stay solvent. They later repaid the money.

In a separate working paper with Marco Tedesco and Carolynne Hultquist of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Dr. Keenan found banks protecting themselves in other ways, such as lending less money to home buyers in vulnerable areas, relative to the value of the homes.

Typically, a bank will lend about 80 percent of the cost of a house, with the buyer putting down the other 20 percent. But examining several counties particularly exposed to rising seas, the researchers found that a growing share of mortgages had required down payments between 21 percent and 40 percent — what Dr. Keenan called nonconventional loans.

In coastal Carteret County, N.C., the share of nonconventional mortgages increased by 14 percent between 2006 and 2017 in the areas most exposed to sea-level rise. That change can’t be explained by the general trend there: In the rest of Carteret County, nonconventional loans became less common during the same period.

Similarly in St. Johns County, Fla., south of Jacksonville, between 2006 and 2017, the share of nonconventional loans in the most vulnerable areas increased by 6 percent, while falling 22 percent in the rest of the county. “You’re seeing a statistically significant trend,” Dr. Keenan said.

The Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade group, declined to comment directly on the findings. Pete Mills, the association’s senior vice president of residential policy, cited the requirement for homeowners to buy insurance.

“Lenders make sure all properties are properly insured,” Mr. Mills said in a statement. “For loans in Special Flood Hazard Areas, flood insurance is required,” he added, referring to areas the Federal Emergency Management Agency has determined have a high flood risk.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac said, “Any loan located in FEMA-designated Special Flood Hazard Areas must have flood insurance in order for the loan to be purchased by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae.”

But flood insurance isn’t likely to address the problem, Dr. Keenan said, because it doesn’t protect against the risk of a house losing value and ultimately becoming unsellable.

Lenders aren’t the only ones who seem to be inching away from traditional 30-year mortgages in risky areas. More homeowners are also taking out a type of mortgage that is less financially painful for a borrower to walk away from if a home becomes uninhabitable because of rising seas. These are known as interest-only mortgages — the monthly payment covers only the interest on the loan, and doesn’t reduce the principal owed.

Under normal circumstances, this kind of loan sounds like a bad deal: It’s a loan you can never pay off with the regular monthly payments. However, it also means buyers aren’t sinking any more of their own money into the property beyond a down payment. That’s an advantage if you think the property may become unlivable.

“A household that expects the house will be flooded within a decade, say, is unlikely to value the accumulation of equity in this house,” said Amine Ouazad, an associate professor of real estate economics at HEC Montreal who has researched the practice. “The ability to walk away from a mortgage in case of major floods or sea-level rise is a feature.”

In new research this month, Dr. Ouazad found that, since the housing crash, the share of homes with fixed-rate, 30-year mortgages has declined sharply — to less than 80 percent, as of 2016 — in areas most exposed to storm surges. In the rest of the country, the rate has stayed constant, at about 90 percent of home loans.

Part of the difference was the interest-only loans, Dr. Ouazad found. More than 10 percent of homeowners in those areas had interest-only loans in 2016, compared with just 2.3 percent in other ZIP Codes. The work hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and more research is needed, Dr. Ouazad said. But he said there’s reason to think climate risks are part of the explanation.

The tougher question, according Carolyn Kousky, executive director of the Wharton Risk Center at the University of Pennsylvania, is what happens after that, when people quite simply no longer want to live in homes that keep flooding. “What happens when the water starts lapping at these properties, and they get abandoned?” she said.

Conservative climate group runs pro-environment ads on Fox News

By Rachel Frazin, The Hill, June 15, 2020

A conservative climate group is spending six figures to run an environmentally-focused ad on Fox News in an attempt to push the administration and Congress to consider environmental issues in future coronavirus recovery legislation. 

The ad, from the American Conservation Coalition, will run on the network this week, according to a statement.

It features past Republican presidents such as George H.W. Bush talking about the importance of environmental protection when looking at the future.

“How we rebuild is how we’ll be remembered,” the ad concludes. “Join the young conservatives fighting for a clean future.”

The ad comes as some lawmakers, particularly Republicans, have expressed opposition to including environmental provisions in future stimulus legislation. Earlier this year, Republican senators compared such ideas to the “Green New Deal” pushed forward by progressives. 

It also comes as the Trump administration has proposed rollbacks to several environmental regulations, including a recent executive order that would waive environmental requirements for construction and energy projects. 

Some environmentalists, however, have said that Congress should use the pandemic to pass legislation that would help the U.S. rebuild with a greater focus on clean energy. 

"Tens of millions of people are unemployed, and their jobs might never come back," ACC Campus President and founder Benji Backer said in a statement on his group’s ad buy. 

"We know that transitioning to a clean energy system will create millions of jobs, spark the innovation we need to dig ourselves out of this recession, and spare future generations the astronomical costs of delaying climate action," he added.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/502736-conservative-climate-group-runs-pro-environment-ads-on-fox-news

The Former Goldman Quant Taking On Climate Change

Now government adviser, Robert Litterman promotes steps to manage the risk of global warming

By Scott Patterson, The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2020

When he managed billions of dollars for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., GS -1.62% Robert Litterman used sophisticated mathematical models to control risk. Now he is advising the government, and he believes it isn’t doing enough to avoid serious losses, including taking drastic steps to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

The coronavirus crisis shows the cost of failing to properly assess risks. “It’s a perfect example of when you have a risk-management problem—it’s urgent, you don’t know how much time you have,” Mr. Litterman said. “With coronavirus, we wasted so many weeks.”

In his work with federal regulators, Mr. Litterman’s main focus is climate change. “We’ve got to slam on the brakes” on carbon emissions to stop climate change, he said in an interview. “It’s way past time.”

While he doesn’t invest for Goldman anymore, he is betting his personal cash that the world will more rapidly address the risks of climate change.

Mr. Litterman now chairs a group working on the risks of climate change for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In March, he testified before a congressional committee looking into the economic impact of global warming.

Mr. Litterman, who left Goldman a decade ago, told Congress that his analysis of the issue, partly based on models he used to manage risk in financial markets, shows failure to act quickly could result in a “tragic and potentially catastrophic mistake.” The way to offset that risk, he says, is to rapidly decrease emissions of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas.

Rostin Behnam, the CFTC commissioner who launched the climate-change group, said he chose Mr. Litterman to lead the effort because of his “gravitas on financial markets” and experience in the economics of global warming.

One way to curb fossil-fuel emissions, Mr. Litterman says, is through a carbon-tax proposal named after two former Republican secretaries of state, James Baker and George Shultz. The Baker-Shultz plan envisions a $40 per ton tax that would increase every year by roughly 5%. Money collected would be returned to U.S. citizens at a rate of $500 per person a year.

A goal of the tax—which Mr. Litterman thinks might be too low—is to affect incentives for consumers, business owners and investors, possibly changing their behavior. A higher price for gasoline could prompt people to drive less, and they might purchase an electric car instead of an SUV. Businesses might switch to solar- or wind-generated electricity.

Incentives granted the fossil-fuel industry today, such as state-sponsored subsidies, are wrongheaded, Mr. Litterman said in his congressional testimony. They push investments in directions, he said, “that increase emissions, causing a growing accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

He concedes that the current economic downturn likely makes a tax on fossil fuels politically unpalatable for the time being. “I don’t expect anything to happen before the [November] election,” he said.

President Trump has long played down the risk of global warming, at one time calling it a Chinese hoax. His administration has rolled back steps taken by President Obama to curb carbon emissions, such as restrictions on coal-fired power plants.

Mr. Litterman is putting his money where his mouth is. After leaving Goldman, he helped found a New York trading firm, Kepos Capital, that is planning a fund that will invest in assets related to a rapid transition to a low-carbon economy. The fund, whose launch has been delayed by the coronavirus outbreak, is based in part on his analysis of the need for action to quickly cut carbon-dioxide emissions.

In his personal account, Mr. Litterman says he owns a derivative constituting a bet that one basket of stocks—coal, tar sands and oil companies—will underperform the broader market. He says the stranded-asset total return swap has gained about 13% this year as oil prices slump world-wide. So-called stranded assets are fossil fuels some expect will be left in the ground as the world shifts toward renewable-energy sources, such as solar and wind.

Mr. Litterman, who is 68 years old, enjoyed a storied career at Goldman, working for a time alongside legendary “quant” economist Fischer Black, with whom he helped design a widely used model for managing assets. As head of a giant quantitative investment team that used mathematical models to buy and sell assets, Mr. Litterman helped manage billions of dollars’ worth of investments for Goldman.

In the late 2000s, near the end of Mr. Litterman’s 23-year stint at the New York firm, a former colleague asked him if he had given much thought to environmental issues such as climate change. The global financial crisis was still raging, and Mr. Litterman said he had other things on his mind.

After leaving Goldman, he began meeting with a variety of people in the environmental community, and joined the board of the World Wildlife Fund. He agreed about the risk of climate change but thought the potential cost wasn’t being properly calibrated.

“No one knew where to price the risk,” he said. “I took that as a challenge.”

He started applying methods he had used to assess risk in his many years of managing assets on Wall Street.

The problem with many conventional models of climate change, including other carbon-tax proposals, is that they factor too much certainty into future outcomes, according to Mr. Litterman. Because of that, they don’t apply a high enough price on carbon right now.

Instead, the models should take into account periods of extreme volatility in global circumstances—just like the stock market has seen in recent months. The world needs to do the same with climate change, Mr. Litterman argues.

A twist in Mr. Litterman’s model is that over time, as the tax influences behavior and as new carbon-free technologies are implemented, the levy on carbon should decline. But the longer the world waits to curb emissions, the longer it’s going to take to tackle the problem—and the outcome is going to be much worse.

“It’s just like Covid,” Mr. Litterman said. “The parallel is clear.”

Global warming to push billions outside climate range that has sustained society for 6,000 years, study finds

By Andrew Freedman, The Washington Post, May 4, 2020

Just like insects, birds and animals, humans have a particular climate niche, scientists have found, with 6,000 years of human history demonstrating how society thrives when we stay within it and the turbulence that ensues when it is pushed out of this zone.

In a stark new finding about the planet’s rapidly warming climate, a study finds that for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) of global average warming, 1 billion people will have to adapt or migrate to stay within climate conditions that are best suited for crop production, livestock and a sustainable outdoor work environment.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, breaks new ground by quantifying the temperature range society is most adapted to and projecting how climate change will push people outside it.

“What we have looked for is humanity’s sensitivity to warming, and that is about 1 billion people in trouble per degree [Celsius] of warming,” said study co-author and Dutch research ecologist Marten Scheffer of the Santa Fe Institute and Wageningen University.

Scheffer and his colleagues examined the history of global temperature, human population and land-use estimates from the mid-Holocene period, starting about 6,000 years ago, to 2015.

They found that people, crops and livestock have heavily concentrated in a narrow band of relatively constrained climate conditions. This range, referred to in the study as the human “climate niche,” has remained largely unchanged since 6,000 years ago.

Projecting into the future using a scenario with high emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, the researchers found that the position of the human climate niche is projected to change more in the next 50 years than it has during the past 6,000. Such a shift would leave 1 billion to 3 billion people outside the climate conditions that have nurtured human society to date.

Because of recent trends and projections in greenhouse gas emissions, which are slightly less extreme, the shifts may not reach the highest estimates by 2070, but even a less aggressive emissions scenario would still bring about radical change.

The study, from a group of anthropologists, climate scientists and ecologists, is the first of its kind to show what the optimum climatic conditions for human society have been across the past millennia, and then to project how they will shift under various global warming scenarios.

According to the study, the optimum conditions for human society to flourish have a mean annual temperature of between 51.8 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit (11 to 15 degrees Celsius). For reference, the average annual temperature in Washington is 58.2 degrees.

The study also finds a second band of temperatures that coincides with the region that benefits from the Indian monsoon, which helps support billions of people in South Asia. The average annual temperature in that region is between 68 and 77 degrees (20 to 25 degrees Celsius), the study found.

Study co-author Tim Kohler, an archaeologist at Washington State University, says that while our technological progress has allowed us to settle virtually everywhere on Earth, and even in space, the study shows, “Our preferences (as opposed to our abilities) have long been for a rather narrow band of temperatures in which we typically have our densest numbers and greatest economic success.”

In the past, when climate conditions have been pushed outside of these optimum ranges, upheaval resulted, including mass migration, famine, conflict and other disruptions that the study’s authors say we need to plan for in coming decades.

Already, about 0.8 percent of the Earth’s surface experiences mean annual temperatures above 84.2 degrees (29 degrees Celsius), mostly in the Sahara region of Africa. However, with projected increases in global average surface temperatures, this area is expected to expand significantly to cover about 19 percent of the global land, home to 3.5 billion people, in 2070.

This would not be a huge problem if few people lived in that part of the world, but it happens to be one of the fastest-growing regions on the planet.

“It’s a bit unfortunate that most population growth happens to be in the place that will be hardest to live in,” Scheffer said.

According to the study, the ideal temperature range for human society is expected to expand toward the poles “in unprecedented ways,” while population growth mainly occurs in developing countries in the tropics and sub-Saharan region, thereby exacerbating the disconnect between how humans will be distributed and the new, much warmer and more extreme climate.

The study points to the likelihood of increased climate-induced migration. If a few billion get in trouble because of climate change, Scheffer says, “The people won’t stay where the trouble is.”

The study notes multiple uncertainties, mainly concerning decisions made about reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming greenhouse gases, as well as our ability to adapt to a warmer climate.

“Populations have avoided stifling hot or freezing temperatures in large numbers, concentrating instead on the goldilocks zones,” said Neil Adger, professor of human geography at the University of Exeter. Adger reviewed an early copy of the study but was not involved in the research itself.

“It is likely climatic changes will in effect move large cities and whole countries into temperature niches that present inhabitants would find unimaginable,” he said in an email.

“So will cities move? Unlikely. But will they become less attractive destinations for people to move to? Definitely. And ultimately some present cities will stop growing and ossify,” he said.

Adger points out that questions remain about economic output in areas that are pushed outside their climate niche, as it is known.

“A key unknown is whether labor productivity for outdoor work can adapt to these new niches. Even if plant breeding technologies can solve the temperature tolerance of crops, can technologies help farming practices, which are always labor intensive, to be tolerable?” he said.

“Ultimately, we will witness imperceptible shifts that over decades will represent a profound shift in the economic geography of the human world.”

John Schellnhuber, director emeritus at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said the study is useful because it quantitatively confirms “the rather small historic habitat of humankind on Earth.” It also shows the coming, dramatic shifts to this habitat due to global warming, he said via email.

Schellnhuber, who has advised German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate change and was not involved in the study, said the new research lends support to his view that “large-scale (managed, facilitated) migration needs to be part of a global [climate] adaptation strategy.”

German companies call for COVID-19 aid to be tied to climate action

By Arno Schuetze, Reuters, April 28, 2020

FRANKFURT — German companies including ThyssenKrupp, Salzgitter, Bayer, Covestro, E.ON, HeidelbergCement, Puma, Allianz and Deutsche Telekom have called for coronavirus-related state aid to be tied to climate action, daily Handelsblatt reported.

“We appeal to the federal government to closely link economic policy measures to overcome both the climate crisis and the coronavirus crisis,” more than 60 companies said in letter, ahead of the Petersberg climate dialogue starting on Monday.

The companies are concerned that environmental issues will be put on the backburner during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Car makers are already lobbying to prevent the announced tightening of emissions limits on cars, airlines for a waiver on jet fuel taxes, and the plastics industry for an appeal of the ban on some plastics products.

“The pandemic highlights the vulnerability of our globalized economic system to threats that are not limited to regions or industries,” the appeal says. “Climate change is a comparable challenge.”

As part of the initiative, Bernhard Osburg, head of ThyssenKrupp’s steel unit, called for a climate economic stimulus programme, while Joerg Fuhrmann, Chief Executive at peer Salzgitter, said the state should encourage the replacement of coal with hydrogen in steelmaking.

Markus Steilemann, head of plastics maker Covestro said: “It is about making our economy more crisis-resistant and competitive with a view to a truly sustainable, climate-neutral future.”

The German BDI industry association said it was sticking to the European goal of climate neutrality, or net zero greenhouse gas emissions, in 2050, but warned that governments, companies and households will in future have reduced scope for investments.

“The EU’s Green Deal must therefore become a Smart Deal, in which growth, employment and ambitious climate protection targets are linked as efficiently as possible via an intelligent investment and relief package,” said BDI deputy managing director Holger Loesch.