When NASA researchers first saw data indicating a massive cloud of methane floating over the American Southwest, they found it so incredible that they dismissed it as an instrument error.

But as they continued analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography instrument from 2002 to 2012, the ‘atmospheric hot spot’ kept appearing.

The team at NASA was finally able to take a closer look, and have now concluded that there is in fact a 2,500-square-mile cloud of methane – roughly the size of Delaware – floating over the Four Corners region, where the borders of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah all intersect.

This discovery follows the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new estimates of methane’s ‘global warming potential’ (GWP): 34 over 100 years, and 86 over 20 years. That number reflects how much more powerful methane is than CO₂.

The methane cloud’s origin? Fossil fuel production

A report published by the NASA researchers in the journal Geophysical Research Letters concludes that “the source is likely from established gas, coal, and coalbed methane mining and processing.”

Indeed, the hot spot happens to be above New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, the most productive coalbed methane basin in North America.

Methane has been the focus of an increasing amount of attention, especially in regards to methane leaks from fracking for oil and natural gas.

Pockets of natural gas, which is 95-98% methane, are often found along with oil and simply burned off in a very visible process called ‘flaring’.

But scientists are starting to realize that far more methane is being released by the fracking boom than previously thought. And it appears that much of it is venting directly to the atmosphere, rather than being flared.

Fracking and horizontal drilling in the frame

Earlier this year, Cornell environmental engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea released the results of a study of 41,000 oil and gas wells that were drilled in Pennsylvania between 2000 and 2012.

He found that newer wells using fracking and horizontal drilling methods were far more likely to be responsible for fugitive emissions of methane.

According to the NASA researchers, the region of the American Southwest over which the 2,500-square-mile methane cloud is floating emitted 590,000 metric tons of methane every year between 2002 and 2012.

That’s almost 3.5 times the widely used estimates in the European Union’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research – and none of it was from fracking.

That should prompt a hard look at the entire fossil fuel sector, not just fracking, according to University of Michigan Professor Eric Kort, the lead researcher on the study:

“While fracking has become a focal point in conversations about methane emissions, it certainly appears from this and other studies that in the US, fossil fuel extraction activities across the board likely emit higher than inventory estimates.”

Mike G writes for DeSmogBlog, where this article was originally published.

Former environment minister Owen Paterson has called for the UK to scrap its climate change targets.

In a speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, he cited “considerable uncertainty” over the impact of carbon emissions on global warming – a line that was displayed prominently in coverage by the Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

Paterson is far from alone: climate change debate has been suffused with appeals to ‘uncertainty’ to delay policy action. Who hasn’t heard politicians or media personalities use uncertainty associated with some aspects of climate change to claim that the science is ‘not settled‘?

Over in the US, this sort of thinking pops up quite often in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. Its most recent article, by Professor Judith Curry, concludes that the ostensibly slowed rate of recent warming gives us “more time to find ways to decarbonise the economy affordably.”

What we do know – inspite of ‘uncertainty’

At first glance, avoiding interference with the global economy may seem advisable when there is uncertainty about the future rate of warming or the severity of its consequences.

But delaying action because the facts are presumed to be unreliable reflects a misunderstanding of the science of uncertainty.

Simply because a crucial parameter such as the climate system’s sensitivity to greenhouse gas emissions is expressed as a range – for example, that under some emissions scenarios we will experience 2.6°C to 4.8ºC of global warming or 0.3 to 1.7 m of sea level rise by 2100 – does not mean that the underlying science is poorly understood. We are very confident that temperatures and sea levels will rise by a considerable amount.

Perhaps more importantly, just because some aspects of climate change are difficult to predict (will your county experience more intense floods in a warmer world, or will the floods occur down the road?) does not negate our wider understanding of the climate.

We can’t yet predict the floods of the future but we do know that precipitation will be more intense because more water will be stored in the atmosphere on a warmer planet.

This idea of uncertainty might be embedded deeply within science but is no one’s friend and it should be minimised to the greatest extent possible. It is an impetus to mitigative action rather than a reason for complacency.

Uncertainty means more risk – not less

There are three key aspects of scientific uncertainty surrounding climate change projections that exacerbate rather than ameliorate the risks to our future.

First, uncertainty has an asymmetrical effect on many climatic quantities. For example, a quantity known as Earth system sensitivity, which tells us how much the planet warms for each doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, has been estimated to be between 1.5°C to 4.5ºC.

However, it is highly unlikely, given the well-established understanding of how carbon dioxide absorbs long-wave radiation, that this value can be below 1ºC. There is a possibility, however, that sensitivity could be higher than 4.5ºC.

For fundamental mathematical reasons, the uncertainty favours greater, rather than smaller, climate impacts than a simple range suggests.

Uncertainty also makes adaptation harder

Second, the uncertainty in our projections makes adaptation to climate change more expensive and challenging. Suppose we need to build flood defences for a coastal English town.

If we could forecast a 1m sea level rise by 2100 without any uncertainty, the town could confidently build flood barriers 1m higher than they are today. However, although sea levels are most likely to rise by about 1m, we’re really looking at a range between 0.3m and 1.7m.

Therefore, flood defences must be at least 1.7m higher than today – 70cm higher than they could be in the absence of uncertainty. And as uncertainty increases, so does the required height of flood defences for non-negotiable mathematical reasons.

And the problem doesn’t end there, as there is further uncertainty in forecasts of rainfall occurrence, intensity and storm surges. This could ultimately mandate a 2 to 3m-high flood defence to stay on the safe side, even if the most likely prediction is for only a 1m sea-level rise.

Even then, as most uncertainty ranges are for 95% confidence, there is a 5% chance that those walls would still be too low. Maybe a town is willing to accept a 5% chance of a breach, but a nuclear power station cannot to take such risks.

Systemic uncertainties may be hiding the gravest of risks

Finally, some global warming consequences are associated with deep, so-called systemic uncertainty. For example, the combined impact on coral reefs of warmer oceans, more acidic waters and coastal run-off that becomes more silt-choked from more intense rainfalls is very difficult to predict.

But we do know, from decades of study of complex systems, that those deep uncertainties may camouflage particularly grave risks. This is particularly concerning given that more than 2.6 billion people depend on the oceans as their primary source of protein.

Similarly, warming of Arctic permafrost could promote the growth of CO₂-sequestering plants, the release of warming-accelerating methane, or both.

Warm worlds with very high levels of carbon dioxide did exist in the very distant past and these earlier worlds provide some insight into the response of the Earth system; however, we are accelerating into this new world at a rate that is unprecedented in Earth history, creating additional layers of complexity and uncertainty.

Uncertainty is not the same as ignorance

Increasingly, arguments against climate mitigation are phrased as “I accept that humans are increasing CO₂ levels and that this will cause some warming but climate is so complicated we cannot understand what the impacts of that warming will be.”

This argument is incorrect – uncertainty does not imply ignorance. Indeed, whatever we don’t know mandates caution. No parent would argue:

“I accept that if my child kicks lions, this will irritate them, but a range of factors will dictate how the lions respond; therefore I will not stop my child from kicking lions.”

The deeper the uncertainty, the more greenhouse gas emissions should be perceived as a wild and poorly understood gamble.

By extension, the only unequivocal tool for minimising climate change uncertainty is to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions.

Richard Pancost is Professor of Biogeochemistry, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol. He receives funding from the NERC, the EU and the Leverhulme Trust.

Stephan Lewandowsky is Chair of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Bristol. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the World University Network, and the Royal Society.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Yesterday I was invited to speak about ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought’ – at the Occupy Democracy Rally in Parliament Square.

The plan was to give the talk (which went well – despite being nervous) and meet up with a friend later for dinner.

Instead I ended up being threatened with arrest not once, not twice but six times and ended up sleeping rough in the open all night in Parliament Square with the amazing people seeking to establish the weeklong democracy Occupy Democracy forum !

The first near arrest was for holding on to a placard stating that “Occupy Democracy is a drug and alcohol free zone”.

Three policemen nearly broke my fingers to take it off me, whilst refusing to tell me on what grounds a peaceful protester could not have such a placard.

The second near arrest was when about 60 of us were sitting around in a circle on the grass discussing democracy and occupy. About 40 riot police surrounded about 20 of us and kettled us in. They then threatened us with arrest for refusing as peaceful citizens to give our names.

The third near arrest happened when I helped rescue one of the peaceful democracy debaters from a snatch squad.

The fourth near arrest happened when I saw the private security guard boss who disgracefully now police Parliament Square (AOS) , indicate uglily three peaceful democracy debaters whom he wanted arrested and helped grab them out of the way.

The fifth near arrest was when I argued that the police were guilty of unnecessary harassment and making a farce of the Metropolitan Police, in seeking to wake up one of the democracy debaters who was asleep, as they claimed the plastic bag he was using to keep himself dry was “an object assisting him to sleep” and that this was illegal in Parliament Square!

The sixth and final near-arrest was this morning when the police sergeant and four policement dragged me away from Occupy Democracy for the heinous crime of holding a placard with their values:

“Peaceful non-violence
No discrimination of any sort
No drugs or alcohol on-site”

They eventually tore it off me, after I exercised peacecful direct action in seeking to hold on to it, whilst asking on what grounds it was illegal to have such a sign and the sergent tore it to shreds.

Hundreds of police – but whatever for?

There were literally hundreds and hundreds of police surrounding the democracy debate.

Then another police cordon around the squares footpaths – within which the press were banned.

Then the entire boundary of the square was surrounded by police vans.

A police helicopter hovered over-head. Hundreds more police were in vans spread all around the vecinity.

This massive over-policing and attempts to shut the democratic forum down was truly shocking and outrageous.

However, despite repeated provocation the democrats remained peaceful, and with huge help from the legal team, Occupy faced down all of the attacks and is now proceeding peacefully with talks and workshops all week, including today.

Please go and support these brave protesters today or during the week if you can.

I am now going to crash … grateful for not being in jail and grateful for helping claim this space for open demoractic debate for nine days, outside the Whore of Parliaments.

Information on the week-long protest, 17th-26th October.

Evening Standard article: standard.co.uk/news/london/occupy-london-protesters-start-week-long-demonstration-9803689.html

Donnachadh McCarthy FRSA is a former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats. He can be reached via his website 3acorns.

Copies of his book ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought‘ are available from theprostitutestate.co.uk.

E-book version available from www.Lulu.com.

When NASA researchers first saw data indicating a massive cloud of methane floating over the American Southwest, they found it so incredible that they dismissed it as an instrument error.

But as they continued analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography instrument from 2002 to 2012, the ‘atmospheric hot spot’ kept appearing.

The team at NASA was finally able to take a closer look, and have now concluded that there is in fact a 2,500-square-mile cloud of methane – roughly the size of Delaware – floating over the Four Corners region, where the borders of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah all intersect.

This discovery follows the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new estimates of methane’s ‘global warming potential’ (GWP): 34 over 100 years, and 86 over 20 years. That number reflects how much more powerful methane is than CO₂.

The methane cloud’s origin? Fossil fuel production

A report published by the NASA researchers in the journal Geophysical Research Letters concludes that “the source is likely from established gas, coal, and coalbed methane mining and processing.”

Indeed, the hot spot happens to be above New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, the most productive coalbed methane basin in North America.

Methane has been the focus of an increasing amount of attention, especially in regards to methane leaks from fracking for oil and natural gas.

Pockets of natural gas, which is 95-98% methane, are often found along with oil and simply burned off in a very visible process called ‘flaring’.

But scientists are starting to realize that far more methane is being released by the fracking boom than previously thought. And it appears that much of it is venting directly to the atmosphere, rather than being flared.

Fracking and horizontal drilling in the frame

Earlier this year, Cornell environmental engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea released the results of a study of 41,000 oil and gas wells that were drilled in Pennsylvania between 2000 and 2012.

He found that newer wells using fracking and horizontal drilling methods were far more likely to be responsible for fugitive emissions of methane.

According to the NASA researchers, the region of the American Southwest over which the 2,500-square-mile methane cloud is floating emitted 590,000 metric tons of methane every year between 2002 and 2012.

That’s almost 3.5 times the widely used estimates in the European Union’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research – and none of it was from fracking.

That should prompt a hard look at the entire fossil fuel sector, not just fracking, according to University of Michigan Professor Eric Kort, the lead researcher on the study:

“While fracking has become a focal point in conversations about methane emissions, it certainly appears from this and other studies that in the US, fossil fuel extraction activities across the board likely emit higher than inventory estimates.”

Mike G writes for DeSmogBlog, where this article was originally published.

Former environment minister Owen Paterson has called for the UK to scrap its climate change targets.

In a speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, he cited “considerable uncertainty” over the impact of carbon emissions on global warming – a line that was displayed prominently in coverage by the Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

Paterson is far from alone: climate change debate has been suffused with appeals to ‘uncertainty’ to delay policy action. Who hasn’t heard politicians or media personalities use uncertainty associated with some aspects of climate change to claim that the science is ‘not settled‘?

Over in the US, this sort of thinking pops up quite often in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. Its most recent article, by Professor Judith Curry, concludes that the ostensibly slowed rate of recent warming gives us “more time to find ways to decarbonise the economy affordably.”

What we do know – inspite of ‘uncertainty’

At first glance, avoiding interference with the global economy may seem advisable when there is uncertainty about the future rate of warming or the severity of its consequences.

But delaying action because the facts are presumed to be unreliable reflects a misunderstanding of the science of uncertainty.

Simply because a crucial parameter such as the climate system’s sensitivity to greenhouse gas emissions is expressed as a range – for example, that under some emissions scenarios we will experience 2.6°C to 4.8ºC of global warming or 0.3 to 1.7 m of sea level rise by 2100 – does not mean that the underlying science is poorly understood. We are very confident that temperatures and sea levels will rise by a considerable amount.

Perhaps more importantly, just because some aspects of climate change are difficult to predict (will your county experience more intense floods in a warmer world, or will the floods occur down the road?) does not negate our wider understanding of the climate.

We can’t yet predict the floods of the future but we do know that precipitation will be more intense because more water will be stored in the atmosphere on a warmer planet.

This idea of uncertainty might be embedded deeply within science but is no one’s friend and it should be minimised to the greatest extent possible. It is an impetus to mitigative action rather than a reason for complacency.

Uncertainty means more risk – not less

There are three key aspects of scientific uncertainty surrounding climate change projections that exacerbate rather than ameliorate the risks to our future.

First, uncertainty has an asymmetrical effect on many climatic quantities. For example, a quantity known as Earth system sensitivity, which tells us how much the planet warms for each doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, has been estimated to be between 1.5°C to 4.5ºC.

However, it is highly unlikely, given the well-established understanding of how carbon dioxide absorbs long-wave radiation, that this value can be below 1ºC. There is a possibility, however, that sensitivity could be higher than 4.5ºC.

For fundamental mathematical reasons, the uncertainty favours greater, rather than smaller, climate impacts than a simple range suggests.

Uncertainty also makes adaptation harder

Second, the uncertainty in our projections makes adaptation to climate change more expensive and challenging. Suppose we need to build flood defences for a coastal English town.

If we could forecast a 1m sea level rise by 2100 without any uncertainty, the town could confidently build flood barriers 1m higher than they are today. However, although sea levels are most likely to rise by about 1m, we’re really looking at a range between 0.3m and 1.7m.

Therefore, flood defences must be at least 1.7m higher than today – 70cm higher than they could be in the absence of uncertainty. And as uncertainty increases, so does the required height of flood defences for non-negotiable mathematical reasons.

And the problem doesn’t end there, as there is further uncertainty in forecasts of rainfall occurrence, intensity and storm surges. This could ultimately mandate a 2 to 3m-high flood defence to stay on the safe side, even if the most likely prediction is for only a 1m sea-level rise.

Even then, as most uncertainty ranges are for 95% confidence, there is a 5% chance that those walls would still be too low. Maybe a town is willing to accept a 5% chance of a breach, but a nuclear power station cannot to take such risks.

Systemic uncertainties may be hiding the gravest of risks

Finally, some global warming consequences are associated with deep, so-called systemic uncertainty. For example, the combined impact on coral reefs of warmer oceans, more acidic waters and coastal run-off that becomes more silt-choked from more intense rainfalls is very difficult to predict.

But we do know, from decades of study of complex systems, that those deep uncertainties may camouflage particularly grave risks. This is particularly concerning given that more than 2.6 billion people depend on the oceans as their primary source of protein.

Similarly, warming of Arctic permafrost could promote the growth of CO₂-sequestering plants, the release of warming-accelerating methane, or both.

Warm worlds with very high levels of carbon dioxide did exist in the very distant past and these earlier worlds provide some insight into the response of the Earth system; however, we are accelerating into this new world at a rate that is unprecedented in Earth history, creating additional layers of complexity and uncertainty.

Uncertainty is not the same as ignorance

Increasingly, arguments against climate mitigation are phrased as “I accept that humans are increasing CO₂ levels and that this will cause some warming but climate is so complicated we cannot understand what the impacts of that warming will be.”

This argument is incorrect – uncertainty does not imply ignorance. Indeed, whatever we don’t know mandates caution. No parent would argue:

“I accept that if my child kicks lions, this will irritate them, but a range of factors will dictate how the lions respond; therefore I will not stop my child from kicking lions.”

The deeper the uncertainty, the more greenhouse gas emissions should be perceived as a wild and poorly understood gamble.

By extension, the only unequivocal tool for minimising climate change uncertainty is to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions.

Richard Pancost is Professor of Biogeochemistry, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol. He receives funding from the NERC, the EU and the Leverhulme Trust.

Stephan Lewandowsky is Chair of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Bristol. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the World University Network, and the Royal Society.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Yesterday I was invited to speak about ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought’ – at the Occupy Democracy Rally in Parliament Square.

The plan was to give the talk (which went well – despite being nervous) and meet up with a friend later for dinner.

Instead I ended up being threatened with arrest not once, not twice but six times and ended up sleeping rough in the open all night in Parliament Square with the amazing people seeking to establish the weeklong democracy Occupy Democracy forum !

The first near arrest was for holding on to a placard stating that “Occupy Democracy is a drug and alcohol free zone”.

Three policemen nearly broke my fingers to take it off me, whilst refusing to tell me on what grounds a peaceful protester could not have such a placard.

The second near arrest was when about 60 of us were sitting around in a circle on the grass discussing democracy and occupy. About 40 riot police surrounded about 20 of us and kettled us in. They then threatened us with arrest for refusing as peaceful citizens to give our names.

The third near arrest happened when I helped rescue one of the peaceful democracy debaters from a snatch squad.

The fourth near arrest happened when I saw the private security guard boss who disgracefully now police Parliament Square (AOS) , indicate uglily three peaceful democracy debaters whom he wanted arrested and helped grab them out of the way.

The fifth near arrest was when I argued that the police were guilty of unnecessary harassment and making a farce of the Metropolitan Police, in seeking to wake up one of the democracy debaters who was asleep, as they claimed the plastic bag he was using to keep himself dry was “an object assisting him to sleep” and that this was illegal in Parliament Square!

The sixth and final near-arrest was this morning when the police sergeant and four policement dragged me away from Occupy Democracy for the heinous crime of holding a placard with their values:

“Peaceful non-violence
No discrimination of any sort
No drugs or alcohol on-site”

They eventually tore it off me, after I exercised peacecful direct action in seeking to hold on to it, whilst asking on what grounds it was illegal to have such a sign and the sergent tore it to shreds.

Hundreds of police – but whatever for?

There were literally hundreds and hundreds of police surrounding the democracy debate.

Then another police cordon around the squares footpaths – within which the press were banned.

Then the entire boundary of the square was surrounded by police vans.

A police helicopter hovered over-head. Hundreds more police were in vans spread all around the vecinity.

This massive over-policing and attempts to shut the democratic forum down was truly shocking and outrageous.

However, despite repeated provocation the democrats remained peaceful, and with huge help from the legal team, Occupy faced down all of the attacks and is now proceeding peacefully with talks and workshops all week, including today.

Please go and support these brave protesters today or during the week if you can.

I am now going to crash … grateful for not being in jail and grateful for helping claim this space for open demoractic debate for nine days, outside the Whore of Parliaments.

Information on the week-long protest, 17th-26th October.

Evening Standard article: standard.co.uk/news/london/occupy-london-protesters-start-week-long-demonstration-9803689.html

Donnachadh McCarthy FRSA is a former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats. He can be reached via his website 3acorns.

Copies of his book ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought‘ are available from theprostitutestate.co.uk.

E-book version available from www.Lulu.com.

When NASA researchers first saw data indicating a massive cloud of methane floating over the American Southwest, they found it so incredible that they dismissed it as an instrument error.

But as they continued analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography instrument from 2002 to 2012, the ‘atmospheric hot spot’ kept appearing.

The team at NASA was finally able to take a closer look, and have now concluded that there is in fact a 2,500-square-mile cloud of methane – roughly the size of Delaware – floating over the Four Corners region, where the borders of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah all intersect.

This discovery follows the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new estimates of methane’s ‘global warming potential’ (GWP): 34 over 100 years, and 86 over 20 years. That number reflects how much more powerful methane is than CO₂.

The methane cloud’s origin? Fossil fuel production

A report published by the NASA researchers in the journal Geophysical Research Letters concludes that “the source is likely from established gas, coal, and coalbed methane mining and processing.”

Indeed, the hot spot happens to be above New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, the most productive coalbed methane basin in North America.

Methane has been the focus of an increasing amount of attention, especially in regards to methane leaks from fracking for oil and natural gas.

Pockets of natural gas, which is 95-98% methane, are often found along with oil and simply burned off in a very visible process called ‘flaring’.

But scientists are starting to realize that far more methane is being released by the fracking boom than previously thought. And it appears that much of it is venting directly to the atmosphere, rather than being flared.

Fracking and horizontal drilling in the frame

Earlier this year, Cornell environmental engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea released the results of a study of 41,000 oil and gas wells that were drilled in Pennsylvania between 2000 and 2012.

He found that newer wells using fracking and horizontal drilling methods were far more likely to be responsible for fugitive emissions of methane.

According to the NASA researchers, the region of the American Southwest over which the 2,500-square-mile methane cloud is floating emitted 590,000 metric tons of methane every year between 2002 and 2012.

That’s almost 3.5 times the widely used estimates in the European Union’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research – and none of it was from fracking.

That should prompt a hard look at the entire fossil fuel sector, not just fracking, according to University of Michigan Professor Eric Kort, the lead researcher on the study:

“While fracking has become a focal point in conversations about methane emissions, it certainly appears from this and other studies that in the US, fossil fuel extraction activities across the board likely emit higher than inventory estimates.”

Mike G writes for DeSmogBlog, where this article was originally published.

Former environment minister Owen Paterson has called for the UK to scrap its climate change targets.

In a speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, he cited “considerable uncertainty” over the impact of carbon emissions on global warming – a line that was displayed prominently in coverage by the Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

Paterson is far from alone: climate change debate has been suffused with appeals to ‘uncertainty’ to delay policy action. Who hasn’t heard politicians or media personalities use uncertainty associated with some aspects of climate change to claim that the science is ‘not settled‘?

Over in the US, this sort of thinking pops up quite often in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. Its most recent article, by Professor Judith Curry, concludes that the ostensibly slowed rate of recent warming gives us “more time to find ways to decarbonise the economy affordably.”

What we do know – inspite of ‘uncertainty’

At first glance, avoiding interference with the global economy may seem advisable when there is uncertainty about the future rate of warming or the severity of its consequences.

But delaying action because the facts are presumed to be unreliable reflects a misunderstanding of the science of uncertainty.

Simply because a crucial parameter such as the climate system’s sensitivity to greenhouse gas emissions is expressed as a range – for example, that under some emissions scenarios we will experience 2.6°C to 4.8ºC of global warming or 0.3 to 1.7 m of sea level rise by 2100 – does not mean that the underlying science is poorly understood. We are very confident that temperatures and sea levels will rise by a considerable amount.

Perhaps more importantly, just because some aspects of climate change are difficult to predict (will your county experience more intense floods in a warmer world, or will the floods occur down the road?) does not negate our wider understanding of the climate.

We can’t yet predict the floods of the future but we do know that precipitation will be more intense because more water will be stored in the atmosphere on a warmer planet.

This idea of uncertainty might be embedded deeply within science but is no one’s friend and it should be minimised to the greatest extent possible. It is an impetus to mitigative action rather than a reason for complacency.

Uncertainty means more risk – not less

There are three key aspects of scientific uncertainty surrounding climate change projections that exacerbate rather than ameliorate the risks to our future.

First, uncertainty has an asymmetrical effect on many climatic quantities. For example, a quantity known as Earth system sensitivity, which tells us how much the planet warms for each doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, has been estimated to be between 1.5°C to 4.5ºC.

However, it is highly unlikely, given the well-established understanding of how carbon dioxide absorbs long-wave radiation, that this value can be below 1ºC. There is a possibility, however, that sensitivity could be higher than 4.5ºC.

For fundamental mathematical reasons, the uncertainty favours greater, rather than smaller, climate impacts than a simple range suggests.

Uncertainty also makes adaptation harder

Second, the uncertainty in our projections makes adaptation to climate change more expensive and challenging. Suppose we need to build flood defences for a coastal English town.

If we could forecast a 1m sea level rise by 2100 without any uncertainty, the town could confidently build flood barriers 1m higher than they are today. However, although sea levels are most likely to rise by about 1m, we’re really looking at a range between 0.3m and 1.7m.

Therefore, flood defences must be at least 1.7m higher than today – 70cm higher than they could be in the absence of uncertainty. And as uncertainty increases, so does the required height of flood defences for non-negotiable mathematical reasons.

And the problem doesn’t end there, as there is further uncertainty in forecasts of rainfall occurrence, intensity and storm surges. This could ultimately mandate a 2 to 3m-high flood defence to stay on the safe side, even if the most likely prediction is for only a 1m sea-level rise.

Even then, as most uncertainty ranges are for 95% confidence, there is a 5% chance that those walls would still be too low. Maybe a town is willing to accept a 5% chance of a breach, but a nuclear power station cannot to take such risks.

Systemic uncertainties may be hiding the gravest of risks

Finally, some global warming consequences are associated with deep, so-called systemic uncertainty. For example, the combined impact on coral reefs of warmer oceans, more acidic waters and coastal run-off that becomes more silt-choked from more intense rainfalls is very difficult to predict.

But we do know, from decades of study of complex systems, that those deep uncertainties may camouflage particularly grave risks. This is particularly concerning given that more than 2.6 billion people depend on the oceans as their primary source of protein.

Similarly, warming of Arctic permafrost could promote the growth of CO₂-sequestering plants, the release of warming-accelerating methane, or both.

Warm worlds with very high levels of carbon dioxide did exist in the very distant past and these earlier worlds provide some insight into the response of the Earth system; however, we are accelerating into this new world at a rate that is unprecedented in Earth history, creating additional layers of complexity and uncertainty.

Uncertainty is not the same as ignorance

Increasingly, arguments against climate mitigation are phrased as “I accept that humans are increasing CO₂ levels and that this will cause some warming but climate is so complicated we cannot understand what the impacts of that warming will be.”

This argument is incorrect – uncertainty does not imply ignorance. Indeed, whatever we don’t know mandates caution. No parent would argue:

“I accept that if my child kicks lions, this will irritate them, but a range of factors will dictate how the lions respond; therefore I will not stop my child from kicking lions.”

The deeper the uncertainty, the more greenhouse gas emissions should be perceived as a wild and poorly understood gamble.

By extension, the only unequivocal tool for minimising climate change uncertainty is to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions.

Richard Pancost is Professor of Biogeochemistry, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol. He receives funding from the NERC, the EU and the Leverhulme Trust.

Stephan Lewandowsky is Chair of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Bristol. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the World University Network, and the Royal Society.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Family farming is a hot topic this year. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations has declared 2014 the International Year of Family Farming. And last week, family farming was the focus of World Food Day 2014.

Of course there’s is no guarantee that a family farm is well-run or sustainable. But the best farms – those that best preserve traditional food and culture, contribute to balanced and culturally appropriate diets, maintain agricultural biodiversity and use natural resources sustainably – tend to be family farms.

That is, farms that are managed, worked and often (but certainly not always) owned by a family and its members.

This year’s focus on family farming is both wise and welcome. In both ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries it is the predominant mode of food production, and it is essential in providing both national and global food security.

The FAO has found that worldwide, family farms are responsible for at least 56% of agricultural production, and that family farmers are more productive per hectare than industrial monocultures – despite receiving lower subsidies and using fewer chemical and fossil fuel inputs. Check out this great infographic for more information

But around the world, fami8ly farming is under threat

However, the future of family farming, and therefore of food security, is under threat. A World Economic Forum document from 2012 warned of a future where the contribution of small-scale farmers to world food production will drop from 40% to 0% by 2030, and be replaced with large-scale industrial monocultures.

Such reports do not address the massive effects this change will have on the local economic and social structure in countries around the world.

There is no clear policy in place to deal with the millions of farmers who have already lost their livelihoods to land grabbing and the numbers will rise if more small-scale family farms are allowed to disappear.

The UK government is a case in point. It claims to support sustainable agricultural production – yet its trade policies and international aid programme benefit multinational corporations at the expense of smallholders.

These policies facilitate corporate land grabs, the criminalisation of local seed exchange allowing companies like Monsanto and Syngenta to dominate seed markets, and favour high-input industrial monocultures of non-food cash crops for export.

Such initiatives include the G8’s New Alliance on Food Security and Nutrition and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Defra’s attack on small, sustainable farmers in the UK

Domestic policies that damage small-scale farming that have been pushed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) include the cancellation of subsidies for any agricultural holding less than five hectares / 12 acres.

This immediately excludes a large number of smallholders, many of which can be extremely productive and profitable (as shown by research from the Ecological Land Cooperative showing a livelihood can be made on 10 acres or less).

At the same time Defra was lobbying against EU proposals to cap subsidy payments to large landowners at €300,000 per year.

“Defra policy is increasingly driven by the demands of big business and large landowners”, says Dan Taylor from the Land Workers’ Alliance (LWA), a national coalition of producers and member organisation of the international peasant farming movement La Via Campesina.

“We have seen clear examples of this with their recent decision to strip small farmers of entitlements to public support while at the same time refusing to limit payments to the country’s biggest industrial producers. As a referee for UK farming, Defra is not only short sighted but inherently biased.”

Food sovereignty

If we are really serious about the future of family farming we need food sovereignty – the ‘right of peoples to define their own food systems’ – to protect family farmers and reclaim control of the world’s food supply.

Food sovereignty puts the people who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of decisions around food policy and practice, rather than the markets and corporations that have come to dominate the global food system.

A policy environment that supports food sovereignty would include measures to support small-scale farmers that ensure access to markets for their produce, strengthen land tenure rights and improve access to appropriate new technologies that can increase production and build resilience.

It would also mean improving the transparency of the food chain to allow people to know more about where their food came from and how it was produced.

The Pig Pledge

Farms Not Factories is one organisation working to engage and empower consumers to put food sovereignty into practice.

The Pig Pledge campaign, launched last week by Farms Not Factories to coincide with World Food Day, targets consumer habits as a method of supporting real farming over intensive livestock production.

It is a call to collective action, which urges people to pledge to boycott meat from animal factories and instead support real (and mostly family) farms by buying only ethically produced, high welfare pork.

The campaign focuses on the pig industry to highlight injustices in the global food system – from the unfair advantages agribusiness has over small-scale producers, to the environmental, economic and social destruction caused by intensive animal factories and big agribusiness.

Supporting food sovereignty through buying meat from real farms, not animal factories, will enable producers to prioritise animal welfare and contribute to agricultural biodiversity and the sustainable use of natural resources.

By taking the Pig Pledge, informing ourselves about the true costs of intensive industrial farming and changing our shopping habits to support the principles of food sovereignty, consumers will be sending a clear message to government, big agribusiness and retailers:

“We want to take control of our food systems. The future of sustainable family farming is in our hands – we must support the food sovereignty movement in order to create a good policy environment in which family farming can prosper.”

Take the Pig Pledge: pigpledge.org/

Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/pigbusiness

Like us on Facebook: facebook.com/FarmsNotFactories

Holly Creighton-Hird is Campaigns Coordinator at Farms Not Factories, a nonprofit organisation working through filmmaking and campaigning to support the food sovereignty movement. She is currently working on the Pig Pledge, a new campaign exposing the true costs of meat from animal factories and inspiring people to make food choices that enable fairer food and farming systems. She also campaigns on food and access to land with Transition Heathrow and the Food Sovereignty Movement UK.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations has declared 2014 the International Year of Family Farming.

When NASA researchers first saw data indicating a massive cloud of methane floating over the American Southwest, they found it so incredible that they dismissed it as an instrument error.

But as they continued analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography instrument from 2002 to 2012, the ‘atmospheric hot spot’ kept appearing.

The team at NASA was finally able to take a closer look, and have now concluded that there is in fact a 2,500-square-mile cloud of methane – roughly the size of Delaware – floating over the Four Corners region, where the borders of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah all intersect.

This discovery follows the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new estimates of methane’s ‘global warming potential’ (GWP): 34 over 100 years, and 86 over 20 years. That number reflects how much more powerful methane is than CO₂.

The methane cloud’s origin? Fossil fuel production

A report published by the NASA researchers in the journal Geophysical Research Letters concludes that “the source is likely from established gas, coal, and coalbed methane mining and processing.”

Indeed, the hot spot happens to be above New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, the most productive coalbed methane basin in North America.

Methane has been the focus of an increasing amount of attention, especially in regards to methane leaks from fracking for oil and natural gas.

Pockets of natural gas, which is 95-98% methane, are often found along with oil and simply burned off in a very visible process called ‘flaring’.

But scientists are starting to realize that far more methane is being released by the fracking boom than previously thought. And it appears that much of it is venting directly to the atmosphere, rather than being flared.

Fracking and horizontal drilling in the frame

Earlier this year, Cornell environmental engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea released the results of a study of 41,000 oil and gas wells that were drilled in Pennsylvania between 2000 and 2012.

He found that newer wells using fracking and horizontal drilling methods were far more likely to be responsible for fugitive emissions of methane.

According to the NASA researchers, the region of the American Southwest over which the 2,500-square-mile methane cloud is floating emitted 590,000 metric tons of methane every year between 2002 and 2012.

That’s almost 3.5 times the widely used estimates in the European Union’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research – and none of it was from fracking.

That should prompt a hard look at the entire fossil fuel sector, not just fracking, according to University of Michigan Professor Eric Kort, the lead researcher on the study:

“While fracking has become a focal point in conversations about methane emissions, it certainly appears from this and other studies that in the US, fossil fuel extraction activities across the board likely emit higher than inventory estimates.”

Mike G writes for DeSmogBlog, where this article was originally published.