Climate Change

Affect, availability and climate change

This is a reaction to readings in ENR 8150 Advanced Environment, Risk, and Decision Making.  The readings were Ch. 10 and 11, pp. 107-130, in Plous, S., The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (McGraw Hill, 1993), and Keller, C, Siegrist, M, Gutscher, H., The role of the affect and availability heuristics in risk communication (Risk Analysis, 2006, 26(3), pp. 631-639).

Continuing with the theme of trying to apply these readings to climate change communication … surveys repeatedly show that most people perceive the risk of climate change as much lower than scientists say it is.  Plous had some good explanations for this in his discussion of the availability heuristic.

One element was imagination: conditions that are easy to imagine were rated as riskier than conditions that are hard to imagine.  Climate change falls into the hard to imagine camp for several reasons.

First, it is unprecedented, so it’s not something that has happened to many people.  Not many people have told stories of living through climate change, unless you count stories of living through major floods or storms, and those aren’t so much directly caused by climate change as made worse by climate change.  There is debate about this.  What we haven’t seen yet is large scale migration of populations due to water sources drying up, for example.  Once we have more stories of people having to cope with climate change, maybe it will become more concrete.  However, of course then it will be too late to do much about it.

Second is how scientists talk about climate change.  Usually it is in abstract terms like “desertification,” “acidification,” or my favorite, “dustbowlification.”  I mean, who comes up with these words??  They also tend to use a lot of probabilities.  The IPCC reports constantly refer to 95% certainty, high confidence, etc. for the findings they are presenting and predictions they are making.  Although this is important to how statistically significant the findings are, this kind of language doesn’t make much sense to the average reader.  It doesn’t stick.

Related to imagination is vividness.  The more concrete and vivid a scenario is, the more people will see it as a high risk.  Yet scientists write in such a way as to wipe out practically any vestige of vividness.  Take this conclusion from a study on impacts of ocean acidification on marine life: “Sufficient information exists to state with certainty that deleterious impacts on some marine species are unavoidable, and that substantial alteration of marine ecosystems is likely over the next century.”  Wouldn’t it be a lot more vivid to say that if ocean pH levels continue to fall at the current rate, the shelled plankton that make up the base of the food web for all life on earth are likely to dissolve by 2100?  This kind of vividness is the strategy used by lawyers to win trials, yet it would be practically sacrilege for a scientist to do the same.

Keller’s study illustrates and develops several of Plous’s concepts, and shows why the availability heuristic works: because it attaches to affect.  Affect as we’ve seen before is what grabs people because it is processed first through the autonomic system and influences cognition.  Affect, not cognition, is what brings about action, and the Keller paper explores several ways to do this.

One lesson from Keller’s findings is that frequencies trump probabilities, unless they are very low. For example, people rated the 100-year flood motif as lower risk than a 33% probability in 40 years — yet discussion of extreme weather events almost always frames them as 100-year floods now occurring more often.  Perhaps it would be better to frame them in terms of a strong likelihood in 40 years, which is a number in most adults’ living memory.

Past experience was also found to have a significant effect on perceptions of risk from flooding.  However, as mentioned previously, very few people have directly experienced climate change in a way that’s as tangible as a flood, so this won’t really work there.  What could work, based on Keller’s research, is photos and vivid graphics.  The graphics would have to be much more vivid than the simply pie charts that Keller’s experiment presented, as those actually decreased risk perception.  Good photos could also work.

Here are some examples that I think do a pretty good job:

  • NASA posted two videos this week showing what we can expect over the next century for drought in the Western United States and Mexico under a business as usual vs moderate emissions scenario.  The moderate scenario is bad enough, but business as usual emissions would pretty much wipe out all life in these regions.
  • A recent story on new satellite measurements of ocean acidification included a global map that showed acidification pretty vividly.  Satellite measurements are new and allow us to see whole swaths of the ocean rather than taking readings at a few specific points.
  • Last summer, several news outlets ran some incredible before and after photos of how lakes in California have been affected by drought.  I don’t see how anyone could look at these and dismiss the possibility of climate change.

Hottest year on record, statistically speaking II

Last portfolio entry, I looked at the statistics showing that the odds of the earth’s warming trend since 1970 is random are infinitesimally small.  Today I’m going to look at the other side of that coin.

Climate scientists – and scientists in general – are dealing with mounds of complex data gathered from across the world in different ways.  For that reason, when they make a declaration that, for example, 2014 was the warmest year on record, or that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” they also like to quantify the confidence they have that the findings are true.

In the case of the announcement that 2014 is the warmest year on record, NOAA gave that a 48% probability and NASA gave it a 38% probability (source pdf).  On the face of it, this seems pretty low.  How can NOAA and NASA state 2014 is the warmest year with less than a 50% probability?

There are several ways this uncertainty is created.  First, there are multiple teams of scientists measuring temperatures around the world, and each may be taking readings from different weather stations or in slightly different ways.

Second, the historical record goes back to 1880, and in that time weather stations may have moved and procedures for measuring temperature may have changed.  Today’s scientists don’t have the scientists of 1900 to talk to – they have to rely on records left behind.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that any one year’s average temperature reading has an uncertainty of plus or minus 0.05 degrees C or 0.09 degrees F.

Then consider that the differences in average annual temperature we are talking about between 2014 and the next couple of hottest year contenders, 2005 and 2010, are tiny.  According to Dr. James Hansen, the former director of Goddard Institute for Space Studies:

The two agencies use slightly different methods, so they have different readings for the difference between 2014 and the previous warmest year, 2010, with N.O.A.A. putting it at 0.07 degrees Fahrenheit (0.04 degrees Celsius), while NASA got 0.036 degrees (0.02 Celsius) — which this analysis says is well “within uncertainty of measurement.” (source)

Because there are so many sources of uncertainty, it turns out that a 48% or 38% certainty that 2014 is the hottest year on record is actually pretty high.  The next most likely year is 2010, at 18%. This means that 2014 is a little more than 2.5 times more likely than 2010 to be the warmest on record.  That’s how scientists can say pretty definitely that 2014 is the hottest.

However, the 48%/38% certainty that 2014 is the hottest year on record did not escape the notice of climate skeptics – who really need to be called climate deniers because they spend their careers trying to discredit any science showing the earth is warming.

The Daily Mail published an article by David Rose, who held up the certainty figures for ridicule and acted as if NASA and NOAA had been trying to hide them, even though they were discussed publicly at the presentation of findings to the media.

Here the skeptics seem to be pouncing on an artifact of how science works which the public doesn’t understand, and playing it up in an effort to discredit the science.

While it might be only 48%/38% certain that 2014 is the warmest year ever, it is not uncertain that 2014 was among the warmest.  In fact, even with all the sources of uncertainty discussed above, scientists are 90.4% certain that 2014 is among the five warmest years, and 99.2% certain it is among the 10 warmest.

There’s also the matter of the warming trend shown in the graph from NOAA.  Whether or not 2014 sets a specific record – and indications are that it did – it is still a matter of direct observation that every year since 1978 has been warmer than average, and that temperatures are on a clear trend of increasing.

Taking scientific probabilities of certainty out of context and presenting them without any explanation of where they came from is a fundamental misrepresentation of the science.  But that is what the professional climate skeptics do, which is why the public is still so confused about climate change.

Further reading
Freedman, Andrew. Climate scientists rebuff skeptics’ arguments against 2014 ‘warmest year’ claim. Mashable. January 20, 2015.
Revkin, Andrew.  How ‘Warmest Ever’ Headlines and Debates Can Obscure What Matters About Climate Change. The New York Times. January 21, 2015.

Hottest year on record, statistically speaking

This week, NASA and NOAA announced both had calculated that 2014 was the hottest year on record for Earth.  This news was part of the ongoing public conversation about climate change, which is much more of a debate in the general public than among scientists, the vast majority of whom have come to the consensus that climate change is real, caused by humans, and an existential threat to our existence and the existence of millions of other species on the planet.

One reason it is news that 2014 is the hottest year on record is that so many recent years have also been among the hottest.  This is evidence for the reality of global climate change, which many of our current elected officials deny, and for it being caused by humans, which is even more controversial in public policy circles.  NOAA released this temperature graph:

NOAA temperatures

 

global-temp-and-co2-1880-2009Others have mapped levels of carbon dioxide onto the graph to show a strong correlative relationship.  This is from Greg Laden:

Either way, the graph shows a definite pattern from the time global temperatures started being recorded in 1880 to the present.  Since 1978 the Earth has not experienced a single year with a global temperature lower than the historical average.

Seth Borenstein, an AP science writer who I’ve been following since he was at the Miami Herald in the late 90s, wrote the main story about the NOAA and NASA announcement, including interviews with a number of climate scientists.  But he also wrote a very interesting sidebar to the story.  He decided to look at the statistical probability that the pattern of warming we see in the graphs above is random, occurring naturally, or if there is another explanation.

Borenstein talked to a number of statisticians who told him the following:

  • With global average temperature records spanning from 1880 to 2014, the odds of 2014 by itself being the warmest on record are 1 in 135.
  • The three hottest years on record — 2014, 2010 and 2005 — have occurred in the last 10 years. The odds of that happening randomly are 3,341 to 1.
  • Nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the 21st century. The odds of that being random are 650 million to 1.
  • Thirteen of the 15 the hottest years on record have occurred in the last 15 years. The odds of that being random are more than 41 trillion to 1.
  • All 15 years from 2000 on have been among the top 20 warmest years on record. They said the odds of that are 1.5 quadrillion to 1. A quadrillion is a million billion.
  • The last 358 months in a row have been warmer than the 20th-century average. The odds of that are so high — a number with more than 100 zeros — that there is no name for it.

Other than the first number, neither Borenstein nor the statisticians tell us how they made their calculations.  I assume they took the number of years in the historical record (135) and somehow multiplied this by the odds of each year considered being among the warmest.  For example, chances of the hottest three years being in the last decade would involve calculating the odds of each year being in the hottest three and of the last decade being among the hottest.

Although it would be interesting to see how the statisticians made these calculations, clearly something is going on in the earth’s climate that is way beyond random chance.  Climate scientists have considered a number of possibilities not discussed in this article, and ruled out all but human activity.  For example, it’s not the sun because the warmest temperatures are on the surface, not in the stratosphere, and the sun’s temperature has actually been cooling.  It is not natural cycles because those occur at a pace of hundreds of thousands of years, not decades.

Borenstein global pauseYet despite this evidence, climate change deniers are still denying the science.  Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-Calif.) tweeted that the findings of NOAA and NASA were “yet more fraud.”  And climate deniers descended on Seth Borenstein’s Twitter page, repeating the claim that global warming “paused” in 1997. The temperature graphs show differently, but facts don’t seem to matter to a lot of these people.  Finally an exasperated Borenstein tweeted:

It certainly is a point worth considering.  And though steadfast deniers will never change their minds, there is a large confused public in the middle who can be educated and who need to start understanding the importance of acting on climate change.

Climate camps

The reading I was most interested in this week was Wainwright and Mann on “Climate Leviathan.”  Categorizations like this help us to understand current debates and schools of thought about an issue as complicated as climate change and what to do about it.

A similar paper came out just this fall from Matthew Nisbet called “Disruptive ideas: public intellectuals and their arguments for action on climate change.” Nisbet’s paper is much more U.S. based and discusses three camps: ecological activists like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein, smart growth reformers like Al Gore and Jeffrey Sachs, and ecomodernists like Roger Pielke Jr. and Andy Revkin.

If I were to superimpose Nisbet’s analysis onto Wainwright and Mann’s, the ecological activists would likely fall into Climate X, while the smart growth reformers would fall into Climate Leviathan.  I don’t know where the economodernists would fall.  They seem to be most typified by an organization called the Breakthrough Institute, started by Ted Norhaus and Michael Shellenberger.  I finally stopped following them on Twitter because I never saw them put forward a constructive solution, but only criticisms of why anything that anyone else put forward wouldn’t work.  At some point you have to stop attacking others and advocate something of your own.  They seem to like nuclear power, but so does James Hansen, who probably belongs in the Climate Leviathan camp more than anywhere else, since his main solution is a carbon tax.

Given these considerations, I think Wainwright and Mann’s analysis of the climate debate is more comprehensive both in terms of geography and history.  Wainwright and Mann clearly trace the line of thought they discuss back to their historical origins, not just with philosophers like Marx and Hegel, but even back to the Book of Job.  They also include a discussion of non-American responses to climate change, such as a possible Asian response through Climate Mao, or even the Islamist response which falls into Climate X because it works against capitalism.

I thought their discussion of all four possible responses to climate change was really interesting and right on point.  Yesterday’s elections certainly showed Climate Behemoth.  Now that the Republicans have taken the Senate, the worst climate denier in Congress, James Inhofe, is in line to head up a key environmental committee.  Congress is likely to put bills in front of President Obama to fund the Keystone pipeline and gut the EPA’s carbon pollution standards.

Whether Obama will stand strong and veto these measures, or try to “compromise” by passing some of what the climate deniers want, is an open question.  Certainly people who care about the environment, such as the 400,000 of us who showed up to march in New York City, will need to make our wishes known.  Now is not the time to give up or go inactive.

The Climate Mao discussion was also interesting, especially in light of actions in China since this paper was published.  Wainwright and Mann point out that the major advantage to Climate Mao is the state doesn’t need the approval of Congress or anyone else to enact laws and measures to lower carbon emissions and control pollution.  They can just do it.  China did it in Beijing just before the Olympics, and they are doing more of it to address the terrible smog and pollution problems that plague the country.  The Chinese government knows it is not completely immune to civil unrest, and it doesn’t want these problems to lead to a rebellion.

I haven’t read Naomi Klein’s new book, “This Changes Everything,” yet – that’s planned for Christmas break.  But it sounds like she would fall into the Climate X camp as Wainwright and Mann call for it.  If everything went the way Wainwright and Mann describe, and a new world order could be created based in social justice and opportunity, that would be incredible.

But honestly, I just don’t see that happening, at least not in the near term.  We can certainly use the climate crisis to try to push this agenda, whether overtly or covertly.  The Green Climate Fund seems like one mechanism to do this, but as we read, it has a lot of problems – chiefly, who is going to fund it?  So I’m not getting my hopes up about a new utopia of climate justice.

Instead, I personally put my hat in with the smart growth reformers.  For now I feel like the best hope of lowering carbon emissions is a massive switch to renewable energy and a price on carbon.  You can argue both programs within the capitalist framework that so much American identity revolves around.  Renewable energy creates permanent, well paying jobs while preserving our natural resources, and it makes us energy independent while a cleaner environment improves human health.  A price on carbon addresses the market failure caused by the externalities of dirty fuels not having to pay for the costs they impose on society, and if the money is redistributed to America families, it would boost the economy and create jobs.

All of this seems like a much more palatable way to advocate for programs that would reduce carbon emissions.  Unfortunately other than on a volunteer basis, most Americans simply don’t care if Tuvalu vanishes into the sea or millions of Bangladeshis are flooded out of their homes.  The stock issues in any election are economy and jobs.  Fortunately, climate change can be addressed through those frames, and without having even to mention climate change itself, which has become politicized beyond all recognition.

The price of solar panels is continuing to come down, and soon I hope we will start to see a shift toward their use.  Of course the utility companies will try to fight this.  But letting people derive their own energy from the sun so they can be independent appeals not just to liberal environmentalists, but libertarian Tea Partiers.  There may be new alliances to be forged.

One thing is for sure: People who care about the environment will need to think openly and creatively, and not dismiss an idea or an alliance just because they haven’t used it before.  This is a time when all hands need to be on deck and all ideas on the table.

One thing Wainwright and Mann are also right about is the Climate Behemoth stance is not sustainable.  It is reactionary, but they don’t have programs or solutions of their own.  If smart growth reformers put forth real solutions, communicate them effectively, and make alliances even within the typical base of the Behemoth, they have a chance of success.

Urgency of climate change

Tuesday’s policy chapter was on energy and environment policy, which is the area of policy I hope to specialize in while at the Glenn School.  The reason I decided to get a degree at the Glenn School is because I would like to help make a difference in this policy area.  But I also have a lot to learn first, and this chapter was really helpful. However, I do not think it gave enough weight to what I and many others see as the most pressing issue facing the country, and really our entire species, today: climate change.

Over the past couple of years, I have started to become increasingly concerned with climate change.  The science is clear: The planet is warming, humans are responsible, the cause is carbon being put into the atmosphere mostly from burning of fossil fuels, and if we do not drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels in the next decade or so, we are likely to tip the planet’s environment into something totally different from what human civilization evolved in.  It will likely be beyond our ability to adapt, and beyond the ability of most other species.  We will be headed to the earth’s sixth mass extinction, with our own species as endangered as the rest.

This is not hyperbole.  If anything, the scientific community has been too conservative in how they estimate and express the threat.  But it is very real.  Much of the research on climate change has been done right here at Ohio State at Byrd Polar Research Center.  This center has sent scientists all over the world to drill ice cores in glaciers and ice sheets.  Gas bubbles trapped in these cores tell us what the atmosphere was like on earth going back 800,000 years.

At no time has there ever been as much carbon in the atmosphere as there is now, and throughout this time, temperature closely tracks carbon.  In the past 150 years – a blip in geological time – carbon has shot up beyond all previous measurements.  Temperature is following and will also go beyond previous measurements if we do not stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere.

Already the planet has warmed 0.7⁰C since the Industrial Revolution, and because carbon hangs in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, we have about another degree of warming in the pipeline.  That puts us perilously close to the 2⁰C threshold that scientists have said we cannot not go beyond.  (Even that threshold seems high, given the effects we’ve seen at less than 1⁰C.)

And yet, the science is being ignored.  Just this week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the synthesis report for its Fifth Assessment, using the strongest language yet.  Climate change is set to inflict “severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts” on people and the natural world unless carbon emissions are cut sharply and rapidly, according to the report.

Yet, the reaction of the chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) was to shrug it off as “nothing new.”  The House Science Committee is full of climate change deniers who are anti-science.  They dismiss the IPCC as baseless – thousands of scientists from all over the world who put in five years going through 30,000 pieces of research in a review process that incorporated 143,000 expert comments.  All of this work was on a volunteer basis.

Climate change denial has become a litmus test for Republicans, which is terrifying.  It’s like turning gravity or e=mc2 into a political issue.  It’s not political.  It’s science.  But what has happened over the past several years is that corporations and interest groups that don’t like the ramifications of the science have spent millions of dollars to raise doubt and impugn scientists.  The most definitive study found that a staggering $1 billion a year has been spent on climate change denial, mostly in untraceable dark money from front groups whose donors are secret.

Last week saw another key event.  A recording was leaked of a presentation by a particularly notorious front group king pin named Richard Berman at a conference of the oil and gas industry.  Berman was caught on tape telling corporations like BP, Anadarko Petroleum, Devon Energy, and others that they have to wage “endless war” by digging up dirt on environmentalists.  “You can win ugly or lose pretty,” Berman said, adding that they could donate $3 million to his front group attacking environmental groups, and he would keep their payments absolutely secret.

I personally am so happy to see Berman’s chicanery exposed to the world.  For years he has been running front groups paid with dark money to attack animal welfare groups, teachers unions, MADD, the CDC and the EPA, among others.  He has dozens of front groups, all run as nonprofits that funnel “donations” to his personal PR firm.  It’s a shady business that has made him millions, and is shockingly legal in this country.

The exposure of Berman marks a turning point in the climate wars.  No longer do we need to continue dealing with front group attacks on climate science.  Climate denial is no longer a tenable position, regardless of what Republicans think.  The problem is real, and dealing with it has been delayed for so long that it’s now extremely urgent.  There is a legitimate debate on what to do about climate change, but there is no more legitimate debate over whether it is happening.

Fortunately, a whole bevy of solutions are available and in the works.  Renewable energy is more affordable than ever.  The cost of solar has fallen from $76.67 per watt in 1977 to $0.74 per watt in 2013.  Research and development is underway for better battery storage and projects like solar roadways and solar panels that can act as windows.  Hybrid and electric vehicles are becoming common place.  Not every development will pan out, but a lot of them will, and none too soon.

Unfortunately the fossil fuels companies are not on board.  Scientists have calculated that in order to stay below the 2⁰C threshold for warming the planet (again this is high), the carbon budget for humans to burn from 2000 to 2050 is 886 Gigatons.  But from 2000 to 2010, we already used 321 Gt, leaving us a maximum of 565 Gt for the rest of the century.

Yet the fossil fuel companies have identified and made plans to extract and burn 2,795/Gt of carbon, worth $27 trillion dollars.  That is five time more than the allowable amount to keep a semi-livable planet.  And they are spending lots of money to extract increasingly extreme forms of fossil fuels such as tar sands, deep sea drilling, mountaintop removal mining, and fracking.  The fact is, if humanity is to survive beyond the next couple of generations, most of that carbon must be left in the ground.

The next 10 to 15 years are going to be a critical time for our country and for the world.  Time will tell if we can make the enormous switch from fossil fuels to renewables.  It is a switch often compared to the civil war years when so much of the country’s physical labor was performed by slaves.  One way we ended slavery was by switching to fossil fuels, and now we need to take the next step to renewables.  I want to spend the second half of my life helping to make that happen.

Getting past climate denial

This has been a seminal week both in the readings for this class and climate-related activities outside of class.  With everything said and done, I’m starting to sort all these experiences into two camps: The climate denial problem, and possible solutions.

The climate denial problem is well covered in papers by McCright, Boykoff, and Freudenberg.  I was most interested in the McCright paper, which uses concept from the study of social movements – framing, mobilizing, and political opportunity structure – to analyze the success of the climate countermovement in stopping the Kyoto protocol in 1994.  This paper is from 2003 and looks at conservative think tanks, congressional hearings, and news media coverage from 1990-97.  I did not realize until I read this how far back the roots of this countermovement go.

McCright makes a great case about how these conservative think tanks used the political opportunity of the Republican Congress elected in 1994 to mobilize the countermovement and neutralize the problem of climate change that scientists had already reached consensus on.  In short, in a direct contest between climate science and ideology, science got its pants beat off.

I feel like only now are scientists, with the help of social scientists and communicators, starting to get their footing to fight back.  This is where the solutions come in, and the paper by Groffman et al describe how to communicate science in a way people will understand.  It is not a question of a knowledge deficit – that has been clearly established by both research and events.  It is a question of framing, public engagement, and appealing to an innate sense of purpose and meaning.  The Groffman paper gives some good ways to do that, but we need more.

Personally, I am fascinated by the story of how corporate interests managed to frame and manipulate information so as to win such a long delay on climate action.  Oreskes and Conway demonstrate in Merchants of Doubt that these tactics trace back to the tobacco wars and have been going ever since.  But simply being aware of this manipulation is not enough.  We have to get beyond it to get to climate solutions, and we don’t have much time.  So we need solutions, and we need them now.  Framing climate change as an energy problem that provides an opportunity for economic growth, as a public health issue, as a national security concern, and as a question of morality and ethics of environmental stewardship are all good options.

This week on campus I saw Katharine Hayhoe speak Sunday night.  I asked her what to do about the political polarization that has come to define this issue.  She thinks climate denial is not based on the science but on fear – fear of the solutions.  That goes along with the conservative think tanks (and my climate denier at MCL) afraid of big government programs to address climate change.  But big government doesn’t have to be the solution.  Fueling economic growth, reducing risks to public health, and not propping up foreign oil regimes ought to be things that all Americans can agree on.  And Katharine pointed out that if we let the climate get to a crisis point, that is when big government will intervene, and we end up with what we fear most.

This week we also have an event tomorrow on climate change and national security, and we saw the release of another report from the Pentagon stating that climate change is an immediate national security threat.  Yet on Friday we have coming to campus the granddaddy of climate change denial himself, S. Fred Singer.  I hope to squeeze in that event between all my other obligations this week to see how it goes.  Last time he was on campus, he got a hostile reception.  I hope this time it’s either hostile or completely ignored.  It’s way past time for people like Singer to get off the stage.  We need solutions, not more misinformation and dithering.

Letter to the Editor

The Columbus Dispatch published the letter to the editor that I wrote about toxic algae in its web-only letters.  I’m not sure how many people will see it, so I’m reposting it here:

Toxic algae

Ohioans have known for years that more must be done to curb fertilizer and manure runoff that ends up in our lakes and streams, leading to toxic algae blooms.  Algae blooms make Ohio’s waterways unusable, poison pets, and result in losses of millions of dollars in tourism revenue.

Hopefully we have reached a tipping point on this issue, now that a particularly large toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie forced Toledo officials to cut off water to half a million residents at the height of the summer tourism season. Previous legislation that set up voluntary certification for applying chemical fertilizer to fields is simply not enough.  We must pass standards on application of manure to fields, including not allowing it on frozen or snow-covered ground.

Also important is the role of climate change.  Climate change not only warms the water, but contributes to heavier rains that wash more fertilizer and manure runoff into the waterways.  Both contribute to more severe toxic algae blooms.  To address this, our state officials need to support the EPA’s carbon pollution standards and promote clean renewable sources of energy.

Sadly, Ohio is moving in the wrong direction on both these points.  Besides rolling back our clean energy standards under SB 310 – the only state to do so — and enacting onerous new regulations against wind energy, Ohio is suing the EPA over its carbon emission standards – the most significant step America has taken to date to combat global climate change.

Scientists say it is highly likely that toxic algae blooms will continue to plague Ohio’s lakes until we address the conditions that create them.  That means reducing both our agriculture runoff and our contribution to climate change.

Cathy Cowan Becker, Grove City