The New York Times
Climate Fwd:
Automakers Shift Gears on Climate Change
By Hiroko Tabuchi, Livia Albeck-Ripka and Kendra Pierre-Louis
March 21, 2018
Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
This week, we ask auto companies for their climate positions, we talk with the oceanographer Sylvia Earle, and we look forward to spring (during a snowstorm here in New York).
Automakers and climate science
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CreditPhoto illustration by The New York Times; photo via Keystone/Getty Images
By Hiroko Tabuchi
At auto shows and on dealership floors, automakers are quick to talk about the latest green technology — electric vehicles, hybrids, even hydrogen cars.
But in Washington, the industry is sending a different message. Last month, one of the largest lobbying groups argued in a regulatory filing that the basic science behind climate change is not to be trusted.
In the same filing, the lobbying group, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, also cast doubt on the negative effects of tailpipe pollution on human health.
Both arguments go against well-established, widely accepted scientific research. And they represent a significant escalation of the industry’s fight to roll back aggressive rules adopted by the Obama administration to rein in tailpipe emissions, a major contributor to air pollution and global warming. The industry argues those rules cost too much and must be relaxed.
Quoting news articles and studies, the Alliance’s filing suggests that climate scientists may be “tuning” their models to achieve desired results.
“Nearly every model has been calibrated precisely to the 20th century climate records — otherwise it would have ended up in the trash,” reads a quote from a 2016 story in Science magazine on climate modeling. “Choices and compromises made during the tuning exercise may significantly affect model results,” reads another quote from a 2017 study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
But the Alliance appears to have cherry-picked such quotes to support its argument against the tailpipe emission standards.
“Those quotes are accurate, but they are selective and do not accurately represent the entirety of the news story,” Paul Voosen, the author of the Science article, said in an email. Any uncertainty in climate modeling, he said, “is about the speed of warming — how fast sea level and temperature will rise — not uncertainty about warming’s direction or cause.”
“No, climate scientists do not tune their data to support their conclusions,” added Frédéric Hourdin, the lead author of the Bulletin study and a researcher at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique in Paris.
The Alliance’s document also quotes a study in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, which says that “most of the hundreds of papers on the relationship between air quality and mortality have serious statistical problems.”
Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology has been criticized for publishing studies funded by the tobacco industry that blur the links between tobacco smoke and health. The publication lists Dr. Gio B. Gori, an epidemiologist and former tobacco industry consultant now at the Health Policy Center in Bethesda, Md., as its editor. Calls to the center, a private company with no website, went unanswered.
“This is a deliberate attempt to cast doubt on this science,” said Janice Nolen, assistant vice president for national policy at the American Lung Association. “It’s well established that particulate matter shortens human life. It’s a settled issue.”
Automakers have a long history of fighting regulations on tailpipe emissions. But in 2009, they seemed to turn over a new leaf, working with the Obama administration to design new emissions standards that are some of the toughest in the world.
But just a day after Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016, the Alliance wrote to the president-elect and urged a reassessment of emissions rules the group said posed a “substantial challenge” for the auto industry. The Trump administration is now reviewing those rules, with a decision expected at the end of the month.
“Automakers have invested billions of dollars to address the climate challenge by successfully increasing fuel efficiency and reducing carbon emissions,” Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance, said in a statement. She declined to comment on whether automakers accept climate science.
We asked the automakers the Alliance represents for their own positions on climate change. General Motors, Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Volkswagen, Toyota, Mazda, Mitsubishi Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar Land Rover and Porsche all either did not respond or referred the query to the Alliance.
A BMW spokeswoman, Rebecca Kiehne, said the automaker was committed to reducing emissions through improvements in fuel economy but did not address climate science.
Honda, which is not an Alliance member, was the only automaker we contacted that clearly acknowledged the reality of human-caused climate change. A spokesman, Chris Martin, said Honda supported the stricter Obama-era rules as well as “efforts to curb climate change caused by carbon emissions.”
A conversation with ‘Her Deepness’
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Left, Sylvia Earle in a submersible in the Gulf of Mexico in 2009, and in a scene from the Netflix documentary “Mission Blue” in 2013.CreditLeft, Kip Evans; right, Bryce Groark/Netflix, via Associated Press
By Livia Albeck-Ripka
Sylvia Earle, 82, is an oceanographer who has spent thousands of hours underwater studying corals, algae and wildlife. She was the first person to walk untethered on the ocean floor a quarter of a mile deep and once lived underwater for two weeks in a NASA experiment. She also spent two years as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s chief scientist.
I interviewed Dr. Earle to ask her whether, having seen what she has seen, she thinks we have time to mitigate climate change. (The following has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
What is the single most profound change you’ve witnessed in a lifetime diving?
There was a period in the 1970s when I dived in an area called Lee Stocking Island, in the Bahamas. We got to know the individual fish and there was one giant boulder, a big brain coral, that was just thriving with life. It was a destination: “Let’s go see Rainbow Reef and admire that monstrous coral.” It was in 1980 that it turned into a snowball [it bleached]. It was shocking. That was climate change in action.
What do you say to people who are not convinced by the evidence?
I think about poor Galileo, 500 years ago or so, when he had evidence that Earth is not the center of the universe and was ostracized. Now, we have evidence that we are totally dependent on the natural systems that hold the planet steady within the temperature range that is safe for us. You can measure the shrinking Arctic and Antarctic ice. Half the coral reefs have either gone or are in a state of sharp decline. I think it’s getting easier, because the ocean is beginning to speak for herself.
You helped persuade President George W. Bush to create an ocean monument 100 times the size of Yosemite. Now, the Trump administration is trying to shrink similar protected areas. How does that make you feel?
Quoting a former Republican president who was not widely celebrated for his environmental ethic, Ronald Reagan: Protecting the environment is not a liberal or conservative thing, it’s just common sense. He at least could see the connection between the economy and the environment. When you lose the quality of a place environmentally — the trees, the water, the space, the air — there are economic and human social consequences. It’s taken a longer time for people to realize that the ocean is vast and resilient, but it’s not too big to fail.
What do you tell people who tell you that they don’t have hope, or they don’t know what they can do?
This is the best time ever to be around, because we have the power of knowing. Look in the mirror to recognize your personal power. It’s a matter of using what you’ve got. Take a kid out to some wild place and see the world through that child’s eyes. Look at the future and imagine you’re there, 50 years out. We’ve reached a time when we really have to choose between our wants and our needs, and we need a planet that works.
The latest spring trends
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CreditPhoto illustration by The New York Times; photo via Flickr Commons
By Kendra Pierre-Louis
Last week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued its Spring Outlook, a prediction of broad weather patterns expected in the United States over the next three months.
But for much of the country, that look through a climate crystal ball was like looking out the window. Many of the weather patterns in the forecast were already underway before spring’s arrival this week.
For example, NOAA’s outlook for the Ohio River Valley and lower Mississippi River calls for minor to moderate flooding over the next few weeks. But the Mississippi has already reached flood stage, a month earlier than usual. Similarly, the Ohio River flooded in February, which was one of the wettest on record in the region.
Even as those regions dealt with too much water, too little water plagued Southern California and the Southwest. Ordinarily winter in the region is a relatively wet season, building up water supplies. But this year’s winter ended in drought, likely aided by the La Niña conditions that began at the end of 2017.
La Niña is the yin to El Niño’s yang. During a La Niña year, winter temperatures are warmer and drier than normal in the South and cooler than normal in the Northwest. NOAA predicts that parts of California, the Great Plains and the Southeast will remain in drought through at least June.
NOAA also expects that the spring will be warmer than usual for the southern two-thirds of the United States, stretching from California into the Northeast. This comes on the heels of a February that was 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average nationwide, and a January that was 2.1 degrees above average.
That February was warmer than average may come as a surprise to Northeastern states now slogging through the fourth nor’easter in a month. It’s perhaps less surprising to those in northern Alaska. On Feb. 20 the temperature in Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow and the northernmost town in the United States, was 40 degrees warmer than the historical average.
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Hiroko Tabuchi is a climate reporter. She joined The Times in 2008, and was part of the team awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. She previously wrote about Japanese economics, business and technology from Tokyo. @HirokoTabuchiFacebook
Livia Albeck-Ripka is a reporting fellow at The New York Times. @livia_ar
Kendra Pierre-Louis is a reporter on the climate team. Before joining The Times in 2017, she covered science and the environment for Popular Science. @kendrawrites
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