Earth System Research for Global Sustainability

Some good news!

The International Mathematical Union or IMU is mainly famous for running the International Congress of Mathematicians every four years. But they do other things, too. The new vice-president of the IMU is Christiane Rousseau. Rousseau was already spearheading the Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013 project. Now she’s trying to get the IMU involved in a ten-year research initiative on sustainability.

As you can see from this editorial, she treats climate change and sustainability with the seriousness they deserve. Let’s hope more mathematicians join in!

I would like to get involved somehow, but I’m not exactly sure how.

Editorial

I had the privilege of being elected Vice-president of the IMU at the last General Assembly, and it is now five months that I am following the activities of the IMU. The subjects discussed at the Executive Committee are quite diverse, from the establishment of the permanent office to the ranking and pricing of journals, to mathematics in developing countries and the future ICM, and the members of the
Executive Committee tend to specialize on one or two dossiers. Although I am a pure mathematician myself, I am becoming more and more interested in the science of sustainability, so let me talk to you of this.

IMU is one of the international unions inside the International Council of Science (ICSU). At the Executive we regularly receive messages from ICSU asking for input from its members. While it is not new that scientists are involved in the study of climate change and sustainability issues, a new feeling of emergency has developed. The warning signs are becoming more numerous that urgent action is needed if we want to save the planet from a disastrous future, since we may not be far from a point of no return: climate change with more extreme weather events, rising of the sea level with the melting of glaciers, shortage of food and water in the near future because of the increase of the world population and the climate change, loss of biodiversity, new epidemics or invasive species, etc. This explains why ICSU is starting a new 10-year research initiative: EARTH SYSTEM RESEARCH FOR GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY, and a Steering Committee for this initiative is presently nominated. The goals of the Initiative are to:

1. Deliver at global and regional scales the knowledge that societies need to effectively respond to global change while meeting economic and social goals;

2. Coordinate and focus international scientific research to address the Grand Challenges and Belmont Challenge;

3. Engage a new generation of researchers in the social, economic, natural, health, and engineering sciences in global sustainability research.

In the same spirit, ICSU is preparing a strong scientific presence at the next United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) that will take place on June 4-6, 2012 in Rio de Janeiro. For this, ICSU is organizing a number of preparatory regional and global meetings. It is clear that mathematical sciences have an essential role in the interdisciplinary research that needs to take place in order to achieve significant impact. The other scientific disciplines concerned are numerous from physics, to biology, to economics, etc.

Let me quote Graciela Chichilnisky, the author of the carbon market of the UN Kyoto Protocol: “It is the physicists that study the climate change, but it is the economists who advise the politicians that take the decisions.” Considering the importance of the contribution of mathematical sciences in sustainability issues, IMU has asked to participate actively in these preparatory meetings and be represented at Rio+20. This should be an occasion to build partnerships with the other scientific unions inside ICSU. More and more mathematicians and research institutes around the world become interested in sustainable development as is acknowledged by the large participation in Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013 which was recently endorsed by IMU. But the world needs more than a one year initiative. The science of sustainability is full of challenging problems which are very interesting mathematically. Many of these problems require new mathematical techniques. We could hope that these initiatives will allow training a new generation of researchers in mathematical sciences who will be able to work in interdisciplinary teams to address these issues.

Christiane Rousseau
Vice-President of Executive Committee of IMU

Conferences on Math and Climate Change

Here are some conferences on climate change and related issues, specially designed to get mathematicians interacting with scientists who work on these things! If you know of any more coming up, please let me know. These ones are sponsored by the Mathematics and Climate Research Network, a US-based organization, but there are probably others.

• Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems, Snowbird, Utah, US, 22-26 May, 2011. Organized by Jonathan Dawes and Vivien Kirk.

Climate modeling and data assimilation are among the themes of this conference, which is aimed at starting communication between mathematicians who develop dynamical systems techniques and the applied scientists who use them.

• Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) Workshop on Ocean Ecologies and their Physical Habitats in a Changing Climate, Columbus, Ohio, US, June 2011. Organized by Ken Golden, Chris Jones, Hans Kaper, and Mary Lou Zeeman.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together biologists studying ocean and polar ecologies; oceanographers, biogeochemists, and climate scientists studying the changing physical habitats; and mathematicians with ecological and physical expertise. The interactions between ocean ecological systems and their physical environments may dramatically impact both marine biodiversity and the planetary response to the changing atmosphere. The types of mathematics used to model ecological and physical processes are typically quite different. The team organizing this workshop anticipates interesting new mathematical challenges arising from combining these different approaches. The workshop will focus on two main themes:

1) polar and sea ice ecologies;

2) phytoplankton and the carbon cycle.

• Minisymposium on the Dynamics of the Earth’s Climate, as part of the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), Vancouver, British Columbia, July 2011.
Organized by Hans G. Kaper, Mary C. Silber and Mary Lou Zeeman.

The speakers in this mini-symposium will highlight some interesting mathematical problems that have come from climate science and can be addressed with techniques developed in the dynamical systems community.

• Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) Conference on Mathematics of the Climate System, University of Reading, United Kingdom, 12-15 September, 2011. Organized by Paul Williams, Colin Cotter, Mike Cullen, Mike Davey, Christopher Ferro, John Huthnance and David Stainforth.

This conference is about the construction and use of mathematical models of the climate system. The conference will focus on three related topics:

1) the extraction of mathematical models from climate data and climate-model output (homogenisation, stochastic model reduction, bistability and metastable states, low frequency variability, data-driven coarse-graining, set-oriented methods, trend identification, time-series analysis);

2) reduced models and their dynamics (linear response theory, bifurcations, extreme events, uncertainty);

3) testing hypotheses about the climate system using statistical frameworks (emulators, Bayesian methods, nonparametric methods, equitability).

Equinox Summit

In response to my post asking What To Do?, Lee Smolin pointed out this conference on energy technologies:

• Equinox Summit, 5-9 June 2011, Perimeter Institute/Waterloo University, Waterloo, Canada.

The idea:

The Equinox Summit will bring together leading top scientists in low-carbon technologies with a panel of industry and policy experts and the next generation of world leaders to pool their expertise and create a realistic roadmap from the energy challenges of today to a sustainable future by 2030.

These visionary researchers and decision makers will collaborate both in closed-door sessions and in free public presentations about the next generation of low-carbon energy solutions.

The public events are free but a ticket is required. Confirmed participants include these people:

	CERN researcher Yacine Kadi, who is leading efforts to build next-generation nuclear reactors that eat their own waste.
	Canada Research Chair in Solid State Materials, Linda Nazar, who is researching new nanomaterials that could store more energy and deliver it faster.
	Harvard chemist Alan Aspuru-Guzik, recognized as one of the “Top 35 Under 35 Young Innovators” by the MIT Technology Review in 2010.
	Australian science agency chief Cathy Foley, whose research into superconductivity could lead to technological leaps in transportation and energy production.
	University of Toronto Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Ted Sargent, who has devised paint-on solar cell technology that harvests infrared energy from the Sun. His 2005 book “The Dance of the Molecules: How Nanotechnology is Changing our Lives” has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, and Arabic.

Summit advisors and speakers include:

	Robin Batterham, President, Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineers (ATSE), Former Chief Scientist of Australia, Former Chief Scientist, Rio Tinto.
	Vaclav Smil, author of “Energy Myth and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate” and “Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences” – the first non-American to receive the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

These descriptions of participants are from the conference website, so they’re a bit more gushy than anything I’d write, but it looks like an interesting crew! If you go there and learn something cool, try to remember to drop a line here.

Mathematics of Planet Earth

While struggling to prepare my talk on “what mathematicians can do”, I remembered this website pointed out by Tom Leinster:

• Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013.

The idea is to get lots of mathematicians involved in programs on these topics:

• Weather, climate, and environment
• Health, human and social services
• Planetary resources
• Population dynamics, ecology and genomics of species
• Energy utilization and efficiency
• Connecting the planet together
• Geophysical processes
• Global economics, safety and stability

There are already a lot of partner societies (including the American Mathematical Society) and partner institutes. I would love to see more details, but this website seems directed mainly at getting more organizations involved, rather than saying what any of them are going to do.

There is a call for proposals, but it’s a bit sketchy. It says:

A call to join is sent to the planet.

which makes me want to ask “From where?”

(That must be why I’m sitting here blogging instead of heading an institute somewhere. I never fully grew up.)

I guess the details will eventually become clearer. Does anyone know some activities that have been planned?

Cancún

What happened at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancún this year? I’m trying to figure that out, and I could use your help.

But if you’re just as confused as I am, this is an easy place to start:

• Climate talks wrap with hope for developing nations, Weekend Edition Saturday, National Public Radio.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

The good news is, first, that the negotiations didn’t completely collapse. That was a real fear.

Second, 190 countries agreed to start a Green Climate Fund to raise and disburse $100 billion per year to help developing countries deal with climate change… starting in 2020.

A good idea, but maybe too late. The World Bank estimates that the cost of adapting to a world that’s 2 °C warmer by 2050 will be about $75-100 billion per year. The International Energy Agency estimates that the cost of supporting clean energy technology in developing countries is $110 billion per year if we’re going to keep the temperature rise below 2 °C. But these organizations say we need to start now, not a decade from now!

And how to raise the money? The Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, leads the UN committee that’s supposed to answer this question. He told the BBC that the best approach would be a price on carbon that begins to reflect the damage it does:

Carbon pricing has a double climate effect — it’s a huge source for revenue, but also gives the right incentives for reducing emissions by making it expensive to pollute. The more ambitious we are, the higher the price will be – so there’s a very close link between the ceiling we set for emissions and the price. We estimate that we need a price of about $20/25 per tonne to mobilise the $100bn.

Third, our leaders made some steps towards saving the world’s forests. Every year, forests equal to the area of England get cut down. T This has got to stop, for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, it causes 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — about the same as transportation worldwide!

Cancun set up a framework called REDD+, which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degrading Emissions, with the cute little + standing for broader ecosystem conservation. This is supposed to create incentives to keep forests standing. But there’s a lot of work left. For example, while a $4.1 billion start-up fund is already in place, there’s no long-term plan for financing REDD+ yet.

The bad news? Well, the main bad news is that there’s still a gap between what countries have pledged to do to reduce carbon emissions, and what they’d need to do to keep the expected rise in temperature below 2 °C — or if you want a clearer goal, keeping CO₂ concentrations below 450 parts per million.

But it’s not as bad as you might think… at least if you believe this chart put out by the Center for American Progress. They say:

We found that even prior to the Copenhagen climate summit, if all parties did everything they claimed they would do at the time, the world was only five gigatons of annual emissions shy of the estimated 17 gigatons of carbon dioxide or CO₂ equivalent annual reductions needed to put us on a reasonable 2°C pathway. Since three gigatons of the projected reductions came from the economic downturn and improved projections on deforestation and peat emissions, the actual pledges of countries for additional reductions were slightly less than two-thirds of what was needed. But they were still not sufficient for the 2°C target.

and then:

After the Copenhagen Accord was finalized at the December 2009 climate summit, a January 2010 deadline was established for countries to submit pledges for actions by 2020 consistent with the accord’s 2°C goal. Two breakdowns of the pledges in February, and later in March, by Project Catalyst estimated that the five-gigaton gap had shrunk somewhat and more pledges had come in from developing countries. Part of the reason that pledges increased from developing countries was that the Copenhagen Accord had finally made a significant step forward on establishing a system of cooperation between developed and developing countries that had a chance at providing incentives for additional reductions.

And now, they say, the gap is down to 4 gigatons per year. This chart details it… click to make it bigger:

That 4-gigaton gap doesn’t sound so bad. But of course, this estimate assumes that pledges translate into reality!

So, the fingernail-biting saga of our planet continues…

2010 Singapore Energy Lecture

Yesterday morning Lisa and I took a bus downtown to see the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, give the Singapore Energy Lecture. It was part of a big annual event, the Singapore International Energy Week. We met our friend Walter Blackstock, had a last cup of coffee, and filed into a banquet room, along with about 800 businessmen, to see what the Prime Minister had to say.

His lecture was clear and precise — very different than the rhetoric-filled talk I’m used to from American politicians when it comes to energy. He began by discussing the twin problems of peak oil and global warming.

‘Peak oil’ refers to the idea that oil production, having risen, is bound to eventually fall; of course this idea gains teeth when one believes it will fall rather soon. Mr Lee gave some evidence that oil production will fall in the next few decades, but then pointed out that similar predictions had been made before, and had turned out to be wrong. He concluded in an agnostic vein, and added that there are still huge supplies of coal, which become more useful as gasification technologies improve. What interested me was his use of the term ‘peak oil’, which I’ve never heard from the lips of an American president. But of course, I’ve never seen one speak at an energy conference.

He then noted that even if there are plenty of fossil fuels, burning them leads to global warming. He mentioned the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will be held in Cancún, Mexico, from 29 November to 10 December. He said that if an agreement is reached, Singapore would abide by it and impose a price on carbon. He said:

“If there’s a global regime to curb carbon emissions, that means that Singapore will have to reduce our own emissions more sharply than we are doing now, in order to comply with international obligations, and we would have to make the carbon price explicit to send the right price signals.”

Increases in efficiency would not be enough, he noted, because of the ‘rebound effect’: more efficient energy usage just makes people use more energy. He also said:

“At present, we don’t have a carbon tax, but we calculate a shadow price for carbon in our cost-benefit analysis so that Government policies and decision making can be better-informed and rational.”

On the other hand, he said, if an agreement is not reached, uncertainty will continue to prevail about when the problem of global warming will finally be addressed. Given this, he said, Singapore supports the goal of reaching an agreement. He explicitly noted that this was a ‘commons’ problem: every individual nation stands to benefit by being the only one who continues to burn lots of carbon, but if every nation does this, the world will be harmed.

He was not optimistic about an agreement being reached in Cancún; he mentioned how Obama had begun his term in office strongly supporting climate change legislation, but was unable to stick with this intention. Nonetheless, he seemed to indicate that a price on carbon was inevitable in the long term.

He discussed three main ways to reduce carbon usage:

1) switching to sustainable forms of energy production like solar, wind and hydropower,

2) technologies such as carbon sequestration and nuclear power, and

3) conservation.

He said that Singapore is “an alternative energy-disadvantaged country”, so option 1) is limited. He explicitly mentioned that most sustainable forms of energy have a low ‘power density’, and again his correct use of jargon pleased me. He said that even if every building in Singapore was covered with solar cells, that would only generate 10% of the necessary power.

He said that the use of nuclear power was an option one cannot afford to dismiss:

“There is often strong resistance in countries – from the green movement, from populations who have witnessed accidents like Chernobyl, and are fearful and anxious about their safety. But if we look at this rationally, without nuclear energy, the world cannot make sufficient progress in dealing with global warming”.

He pointed out that America is beginning to build more nuclear plants, and that Angela Merkel, despite great pressure from the Greens, had put off the closure of such plants in Germany. He said that more plants would eventually be built in Germany, even though it’s “unspeakable” now.

He argued that it is important to start moving forward on this issue, even in a small state like Singapore where any nuclear plant would necessarily be close to densely populated areas. The crucial first step, he said, is to develop the technical know-how and the necessary “culture of safety”. When the moderator asked him whether nuclear power would be introduced during his time in office, he replied:

“I would say possibly during my lifetime.”

He also spent a lot of time discussing option 3), energy conservation. He said Singapore has a pilot program for a “smart grid” that lets households see how they’re using electrical power, and if this turns out to increase their efficiency, this would be adopted more widely.

All in all, an interesting talk.

Math and the Environment in Montreal

One last post before the Azimuth Project and Azimuth Forum open their doors on September 27th. A reader kindly pointed out that the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, or CRM, is organizing some activities to get mathematicians talking to scientists who deal with environmental issues. And some are coming up soon:

• Micromacroscopic systems: a viability approach, mini-course by Jean-Pierre Aubin (Université Paris-Dauphine), 20-24 September 2010, CRM, Montreal.

• Decision analysis and sustainable development, workshop followed by panel discussion, 27-28 September 2010, CRM, Montreal.

• Statistical methods for meteorology and climate change, 12-14 January 2011, CRM, Montreal. Workshop organized by Jean-François Angers, Anne-Catherine Favre, Reinhard Furrer, Philippe Naveau, Doug Nychka, Luc Perreault, Richard L. Smith, Claudia Tebaldi, Han von Storch and Francis Zwiers.

Here’s the abstract of the last workshop:

Climate change is already happening and represents one of the greatest environmental, social and economic challenges facing the planet. Statistical methods and models play a key role in the study of climate change. Important advances have been made in the development and application of both frequentist and Bayesian statistical approaches. However recent developments concerning both, data collection and hypotheses for investigation, require innovative approaches. This workshop aims to bring statisticians and climatologists together to talk about new statistical methodologies devoted to the study of climate change. The themes that will be addressed during the workshop include assessment of uncertainty in climate change projections, spatial patterns of climate, climate reconstruction, climate extremes, climate trend assessment, downscaling, data assimilation and stochastic weather generators.

According to International Panel on Climate Change (2007), “Observed warming over several decades has been linked to changes in the large-scale hydrological cycle such as: increasing atmospheric water vapour content; changing precipitation patterns, intensity and extremes; reduced snow cover and widespread melting of ice; and changes in soil moisture and runoff”. A session of the workshop will be devoted to statistical methods for climate change in hydrology.

Some more activities scheduled for next year are visible here:

•Climate Change and Sustainability 2010-2011, CRM.

Other are not listed yet. This program is part of joint initiative run by 14 North American mathematical institutions. The full list of programs in this initiative can be found here:

• Climate change and sustainability program, a joint initiative of north American mathematical institutions: climate change, sustainability and the mathematical sciences.

Furthermore, our friend informs us that a dozen north American mathematical institutions have named the year 2013 a special year of emphasis on the mathematics of planet Earth! For more, try this:

• Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013, a joint initiative of the North American mathematical institutions.