Daily Climate Links: 4/22/2016

Earth Day 2016.

Leaders Roll Up Sleeves on Climate, but Experts Say Plans Don’t Pack a Wallop. NYTimes. Apr 21, 2016.

The Exxon climate risk resolution and the transition to a low carbon economy. Edward Mason, via Responsible Investor. Apr 21, 2016.

Putting a price on carbon is a fine idea. It's not the end-all be-all. David Roberts, vox.

It has become conventional wisdom that a price on carbon is the sine qua non of serious climate policy. But it is worth keeping carbon pricing in perspective. It has become invested with such symbolic significance that it is inspiring some unhelpful purism on policy and magical thinking on politics.

VW's diesel crisis is now a global threat. Edward Niedermeyer, Bloomberg.

Pressure Drop: Exploring—and ignoring—climate chaos in the South Pacific. Simon Winchester, Lapham's Quarterly.

Naval officers of advanced rank are usually a circumspect group, their caution born of many years of doing battle with the caprices of the sea. But in March 2013 Adm. Samuel Locklear III, the American four-star flag officer who at the time was in charge of all American forces in and around the Pacific Ocean—328,000 Navy, Army, Marine, and Air Force personnel, stationed in docks and barracks and airdromes ranged around 52 percent of the planet’s surface—made an unusual pronouncement.  

Usually, and in common with his predecessors as the chief of U.S. Pacific Command, the admiral, just winding up his fortieth year with the senior service, would recite at briefings and at hearings on Capitol Hill from a Pentagon-approved hymn sheet of threats to regional peace. There were always, in the short term, the villainous generals of North Korea, the devious graybeards of China, and the architects of various territorial disputes involving pointless islands claimed by Japan on the one hand, and by Russia, South Korea, and China on the other, all likely to trigger some kind of a brouhaha sooner or later. There were also the manifold possibilities for mayhem from the jihadists or Maoists or others known to be bent on destabilizing matters in Jakarta, or Dhaka, or southern Mindanao, or a score of other Pacific places known for their feverish political dispositions.

But in the spring of 2013, these usual suspects were not for Admiral Locklear, and at a defense conference at Harvard that spring, he broke form. Political disputations were not, he said, the principal threat to his area of responsibility (which stretches from Karachi to San Diego, from Nome to Hobart, and includes 64 million square miles of sea). Most critical was, in fact, the climate.

Significant upheaval related to the warming planet, Locklear declared, “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.”

He promptly bolstered his claim. His staff officers—most especially his weather analysts—had detected significant changes in the frequency and violence of recent Pacific typhoons. “Weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past,” he told his now-rapt listeners. “We are on super-typhoon twenty-seven or twenty-eight this year in the western Pacific. The average is about seventeen.” And such new typhoon clusterings suggest major changes to the climate in the region—changes that pose the greatest of all security threats in the region...