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Responding to Earth's Changing Climate

Institute's Experts Work at Intersection of Science, Economics and Policy

Story By Gary Gately

A million species wiped out by mid-century. More frequent heat waves, droughts and hurricanes. Low-lying areas inundated by floodwaters. Widespread crop failures.

Such potential consequences of global climate change form the backdrop for the work of the researchers at the Joint Global Change Research Institute (JGCRI) in College Park. The institute a collaboration between the University of Maryland and the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory brings together some of the world's foremost experts on global climate change. They strive to better understand the phenomenon, its far-reaching implications, and how to reduce its impacts.

The stakes run high, says Gerald M. Stokes, the institute's director. "Global climate change is emerging as almost the defining environmental issue for this century. We're borrowing the Earth from our children. We are the ones who are going to determine what the state of the environment is going to be for them."

A daunting responsibility, to be sure, and the institute, using computer modeling, scrutinizes the many complex, interrelated aspects of global climate change. Researchers focus on a broad range of science, economics, technology and policy, with a particular emphasis on evaluating emission sources for greenhouse gases and options for stabilizing the concentration of these gases.

Greenhouse gases trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, and the rise in atmospheric concentration of these gases is widely considered a principal reason for the rise in global temperatures. However, controlling emissions of these gases is no small challenge. A primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, comes from burning cheap and abundant fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil--energy sources that have been the engines of economic growth for centuries.

"Controlling emissions means involving all the large nations--rich and poor--that emit carbon dioxide," says James A. Edmonds, chief scientist at JGCRI. "And unlike traditional pollutants, which go away when emissions stop, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and land-use change build up in the atmosphere. So today's emissions leave a legacy for thousands of years."

Global Change, Varied Impacts

Instead of the more common term "global warming," the institute refers to "global climate change," a more precise description. Some places actually get cooler even as the planet as a whole warms, and climate change causes other effects such as flooding, extreme weather and changes in precipitation patterns. The impacts of climate change likely will vary widely. Russian Siberia, for example, could become more amenable to agriculture. Elsewhere, low-lying lands could be submerged, shortages of water could become more prevalent, temperatures could become extreme, perhaps even life threatening, and the range of mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects could expand.

Across eastern China, the increased use of coal and wood for heating in the winter often leads to widespread haze, such as that seen in this Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image from the NASA Terra satellite.

Three key groups at the institute focus on climate change. The Advanced International Studies Unit looks at efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions internationally, especially in countries making the transition from planned to market economies. A Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessment Program analyzes potential impacts of climate change on agriculture, water supply and other natural resources, as well as how socio-economic systems across the globe might respond. And the Global Change Group studies the roles of technology in both creating and reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Stokes says some of the most serious consequences of global climate change likely will occur among the world's poorest places, including tropical Third World and developing countries and small island nations particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels. Thus, one of the institute's major challenges lies in identifying strategies that can simultaneously foster economic growth in poorer countries while reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

Among the energy approches JGCRI researchers are looking at:
	Nuclear power now supplies about 16 percent of the world's electricity. It could provide much more--perhaps a third--through producing hydrogen fuel for transportation as well as electricity, the institute says. That's the most optimistic outlook. But concerns about reactor stability, nuclear waste and proliferation of nuclear weapons could greatly limit the role of nuclear power.
	Wind power is emerging as one of the most used sources of renewable energy, which also includes solar power. Gigantic steel windmills that bear little resemblance to their predecessors could play a key role in reducing reliance on fossil fuels, researchers say.
	Hydrogen as a source of fuel for vehicles has generated considerable interest. This could be used through fuel cells, which create electricity from hydrogen, or hydrogen-rich fuel through an electrochemical process, or in an internal-combustion engine. But widespread use would require, among other things, a source of hydrogen, which occurs naturally with other chemicals (including carbon), and a way to transport and distribute it.
	Biotechnology includes everything from designer microbes to make hydrogen from water and sunlight, to storing carbon in soils through changing agricultural practices, to growing crops for their energy content. Corn has already been used to produce ethanol. But the institute says more efficient sources may include fast-growing grasses and trees. "We're starting to better understand how we might be able to grow our own fuels," says Director Gerald M. Stokes. "In other words, can crops be developed and profitably used to make things like ethanol?"
	Energy efficiency which has allowed the economy to grow much faster than the demand for energy.

To that end, the institute helped develop non-government "energy-efficiency centers" in the Ukraine, China, Russia, Bulgaria, Poland and the Czech Republic. In some cases, simply replacing outmoded technology has made a big difference. Russia and China, for example, had been making steel using old and extremely inefficient technology, which the United States had phased out in the 1960s. Through measures improving efficiency, steel producers in those countries not only saved money, but also halved carbon dioxide emissions, says William U. Chandler, a senior staff scientist and director of the Advanced International Studies Unit at JGCRI.

"Finding policies and measures that both improve the efficiency of steel production and enable the economies to develop is something that satisfies both the environmentalists, who want to reduce emissions, and the leaders of those countries, whose main interest is development," Chandler says. "My program is sort of a real-world lab for testing these measures."

In other countries, rapid economic growth makes it that much tougher to reduce emissions. China's economy, for instance, is growing 7 percent to 10 percent annually--a rate that translates to carbon dioxide emissions doubling in 10 years. Chandler recalls that when he first visited China in 1988, he could see bicycles almost everywhere--and hardly any cars. Today, millions of cars travel on highways, and the country is building 3-to-4 million cars a year. But these are cars are manufactured with technology similar to that used for Buicks in this country 20 years ago. So they require twice the gas of, say, a Saturn, and by 2020, China alone could be consuming more oil than Saudi Arabia produces today.

JGCRI's international unit also has worked with the World Bank to get a half-billion dollars to retrofit heating systems in Russian buildings, cutting energy use by 30 percent. But more efficient doesn't have to mean more expensive, according to Chandler. Changes as simple as more energy-efficient windows and lights can cut energy use significantly.

Fueling a Greenhouse Gas Experiment

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers are conducting groundbreaking research to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions to levels that will prevent global warming. As part of this research, scientists are testing a unique method aimed at harvesting methane gas from frozen hydrates. The concept involves using carbon dioxide to "unfreeze" the methane hydrate to release methane gas. If successful, carbon dioxide--a greenhouse gas--would remain deep underground as solid CO2-hydrate while simultaneously producing methane gas for the natural gas market.

Long-term reductions in greenhouse gas emissions also will require further development of new technologies to enhance energy efficiency, provide energy alternatives to fossil fuels and create technologies that capture and store carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, which now provide about 88 percent of the world's energy, JGCRI experts say.

Precisely how much greenhouse gas is too much--and when the most serious consequences of resulting global warming might occur--remain largely a mystery. Scientists, after all, have no historical precedent, as the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hasn't been as high as it is today for at least 400,000 years--and probably for tens of millions of years. "You're running an experiment, and you don't know what the outcome is," says Edmonds. "You can't look back and ask, 'When was the last time we did this? When did the planet last run this experiment?' "

Even so, says Stokes, "If we continue down the path we're going on right now, we will substantially increase the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And every indication is that this will have a major effect on climate."

Fossil fuels probably won't disappear from the global energy system, Edmonds says. Historically, new energy sources have been added, but haven't replaced older ones. Twice as much wood and coal are burned today as a century ago, for example, despite the addition of oil and gas and more recent energy sources such as nuclear power.

"It's like we never leave anything behind; we've just added pieces to the energy mix," Edmonds says. "That's because we've just been upping the scale of human activities. We use energy to create the lifestyle to which we've become accustomed. You have to ask yourself: Where's the energy going to come from if you want to control fossil-fuel emissions?"

Nobody's sure what combination of technology and alternative energy would best help meet rising global demand for energy while reducing use of fossil fuels and, in turn, greenhouse gas emissions. "Our job is to think about how all these pieces fit together and how these pieces change over time," Edmonds says. "That has led us to the conclusion that we've got a much better shot at getting an inexpensive solution if we have lots of options."

Taking Carbon Out of the Air

Notwithstanding the potential of alternative fuel sources, fossil fuels remain the backbone of the global energy system. Coal, for example, is so widely used in the United States that it's the country's biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions.

Researchers investigate methods for reducing engine emissions from current production vehicles and engines.

In light of the prevalence of fossil fuels, the JGCRI is analyzing ways to continue using them for now, while reducing the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. One promising possibility: genetic engineering of plants. Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, and one genetic engineering approach would be to produce plants with better uptake of carbon. Plants also might be engineered to be more easily and cheaply transformed into modern fuels like ethanol.

Institute researchers also see a lot of potential in technologies for capturing the carbon dioxide that is released when fossil fuels are burned in power plants and during the processing of fossil fuels by refineries. A chemical process can remove the carbon dioxide and compress it into a liquid. It could then be stored underground--and thus kept out of the atmosphere--in oil wells, between layers of coal and in saline reservoirs deep underground, Edmonds says. He points to a Norway experiment in which carbon dioxide is stripped from natural gas and pumped into a saline reservoir under the floor of the North Sea.

At the Weyburn oil recovery project in Saskatchewan, Canada, carbon dioxide from the Great Plains Coal Gasification Plant in North Dakota is being injected into an active oil field. And near its West Virginia coal-fired power plant, American Electric Power has drilled a well several thousand feet deep where it hopes to inject carbon dioxide.

Questions of Cost and Timing

Carbon sequestration and other strategies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions exemplify the institute's emphasis on practical, real-world approaches, says Stokes. "The thing that we try to do when we take on a problem, the single most important thing we want to do, is we want to make sure that our answers have some relevance to policy," he says. "This particular area is one where the questions that we're dealing with are of immediate interest because the weather and the climate touch us all."

But he acknowledges solutions will not come cheaply or easily, given the profound economic, political and social ramifications. "The whole question of how much mitigation we have to do is very controversial," Stokes says. "I think there's a belief on everyone's part that we have to do something eventually to slow and decrease carbon dioxide emissions over the long term to zero. But how fast we do it and by what mechanism we do it and who pays for it and who doesn't pay for it, who makes a profit and who doesn't--those are big-time questions."