Fine work from Bill McKibben and Plomomedia

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Jun 202011
 

First a video which deserves widespread attention, which you should definitely send to that uncle of yours who doesn’t get climate change. Stephen Thomson of Plomomedia.com did a fine job of narrating and illustrating a Washington Post op-ed by Bill McKibben of 350.org.

Low Carbon technology is making headway, just not fast enough. There are now over one million homes powered by solar energy in Bangladesh, increasing quality of life as well as reducing emissions. I described a clever energy storage system for offshore wind farms some time back, but here is some more detailed information. Basically a large bag is held underwater and used to store compressed air. Because of the high water pressure the bag does not have to be particularly strong. A bit further ahead, but potentially very significant is the news from MIT that they have managed to combine the flow battery idea with the chemistry of lithium-ion batteries, resulting in a 10 fold increase in the energy density compared to existing flow batteries. This could eventually lead to a car battery that can be refuelled as well as being recharged.

It does look as if the Australian government is getting cold feet about its carbon price, despite having backed itself into a corner. There is talk of significant disagreements between them and the Greens in discussions, they are under fire by the independent MP’s who are keeping the government in power, and more people are calling on the government to keep the carbon tax simple and out of the hands of financial speculators, including this article from Martin Feil. This is underscored by the countless problems with the European carbon exchange including the news that major dirty industries have gained billions of Euros by stockpiling emissions permits given out for free. Not much incentive to change market practices there… The recent Productivity Commission report concludes a price on carbon is a low cost way of reducing emissions, but it does seem to me to fudge the figures about actions in other countries. They try and calculate implicit carbon prices and conclude that this is very difficult due to the very different policies, but they then exclude from consideration Chinese efforts in energy efficiency and the replacement of multiple small wasteful power generators with a few larger and more efficient ones. This allows the commission to consider Australia’s actions as being comparable to China’s, rather than way behind it and several other countries. Ross Garnaut has a good article on the subject here where says:-

“A reduction in emissions matters more than what a country pays for it”.

“Australia stands out for the modesty of our ambition, with our bipartisan unconditional target of reducing emissions by 5 per cent by 2020. We also stand out for how much our emissions are increasing relative to our modest unconditional target. The Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency estimates that, with all the existing policies in place – the mandatory renewable energy target, solar programs and other measures – our emissions will grow by 24 per cent by 2020.”

“What matters is the reduction in emissions. This drives us back to looking at what is really happening to emissions against some standard for allocating the emissions reduction task among countries. By this standard, Australia is a laggard.”

Jared Diamond, author of the bestseller “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” has this interesting discussion video for the WWF. He makes it clear that climate change is only one of a dozen key groups of environmental problems and “we’ve got to solve them all”. Other quotes include:-

“There are so many societies in which the elite made decisions that were good for themselves in the short run and ruined themselves and societies in the long run”

“We are working so hard for our children and grandchildren. All of us parents send our kids to school; we debate endlessly about whether our kids are in the right school. We draw up our wills, and maybe we draw up trusts. We buy life insurance. It’s all wasted if what we are propelling out kids into is a world not worth living in.”

He is however optimistic that we won’t collapse the way the societies he has studied have, mainly because we have access to information and knowledge about history and about current events all over the world, mainly through television. It would be a fine irony if we were ultimately saved by the idiot box.

Finally Thomas Friedman has this opinion piece in the New York Times called “The Earth Is Full” wondering just how we can remain calm in our current conditions, and concludes we are in denial. He says:-

“You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?”

Despite increasingly robust warnings we are back on track to climate chaos

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Jun 082011
 

There was a hope that the global financial crisis and its associated recessions would cut carbon emissions and maybe give us a bit more time to get our act together. That was dashed recently with the news from the IEA that global emissions increased by a record 1.6 gigatonnes to 30.6 GT. This prompted Faith Birol the chief economist of the IEA to suggest that the chance of staying under 2 degrees is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”. Lord Stern was equally direct:-

“These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path … would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100 … Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.“

Birol made it clear however that it is still possible to stay under 2o, though the chances are decreasing each year “If we have bold, decisive and urgent action, very soon, we still have a chance of succeeding”.

So the biggest recession in 80 years failed to stop the increase, and we continue the great experiment with our environment (though I sometimes think it looks more like a problem gambler’s last desperate throw of the dice).

After decades of a few brave souls crying in the wilderness it does seem that more and different folk are adding their voices to the warnings. 17 Nobel laureates have recently signed a memorandum calling for “fundamental transformation and innovation in all spheres and at all scales in order to stop and reverse global environmental change”. They say:-

“Science makes clear that we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilization safe for the past 10,000 years. … We can no longer exclude the possibility that our collective actions will trigger tipping points, risking abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems. We cannot continue on our current path. The time for procrastination is over. We cannot afford the luxury of denial.”

Even the press, who I think have been remiss in the they way they have portrayed the issue, have some commentators who are becoming more forceful as witnessed by Richard Glover’s tongue in cheek suggestion that climate change deniers have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies so that their grandkids could take them to task. He does also suggest that those on the other side of the debate might help by not breathlessly welcoming each environmental disaster, and that we both need to get real and understand that we need only pay a relatively small price to minimise the damage. Another SMH correspondent who has been consistently calling for action is Ross Gittings who despises those who encourage people who today live in the most comfortable and prosperous of times to feel poor. This is a common cry by those opposed to a price on carbon who refuse to acknowledge that it will have a relatively minor effect and the neediest should be over compensated. Gittings says “It’s a sore test of faith when people put power bills before their children’s future.” and “The one thing humans are meant to care about above all is the survival of their young. Yet people with the highest standard of living in history are whingeing that they couldn’t possibly afford to pay a bit more for their electricity.”

Of course the person who has been the most consistent in his warnings is James Hansen who was in NZ recently. I strongly recommend you watch the video of his talk to the University of Canterbury even if you don’t think you have half an hour to spare. He covers the problem and what we need to do about it, and while not an accomplished public speaker his message resonates because he explains the issue clearly and obviously knows his subject, while as a good scientist he takes great care not to make statements he cannot support. He makes the point that we are likely to use the rest of the available oil and gas, purely because it is so convenient and cheap but that we must stop using coal and unconventional fossil fuels such as the Canadian tar sands. He is also clear about his wish for a simple rinsing carbon fee or tax rebated equally to all consumers rather than an emissions trading system. He likes the simplicity of the tax and the fact that there are no bankers to get rich on the margins as well as the fact that the major emerging economies of China and India will not agree to a cap while they are considering a carbon tax. Well worth watching.

Trading schemes have the disadvantage that the price can be very variable and easily manipulated especially in the early years as shown by the sorry history of the European trading system. As I see it the only disadvantage of the tax is that it will need annual adjustment by government in exactly the same way as income tax rates. If, as is absolutely necessary, the bulk of the proceeds are returned to the population there should be minimal pressure on government to stop them adjusting the tax as needed.

Those who believe that a market driven solution can be transparent and operate without distortion should look at the recent history of speculation in food, which increased from $13bn to $317bn between 2003 and 2008. While as I discussed in my last post the fundamentals are driving the cost increases they are being much amplified by the speculation which now represents about 80% of the total trading and thus dwarfs the real trading of basic foodstuffs, increasing the suffering of the world’s poor while making rich traders and bankers even richer.

A bitter harvest?

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May 102011
 

Worries about future food availability are on the rise again, as well as arguments about which systems are best able to cope with the increases in population, and more importantly, the rising standard of living in places like India and China which is driving a rising demand for meat. This looks to be the start of a long term problem driven by loss of topsoil, aquifer depletion and climate change, as well as the increased demand. Increased energy costs and biofuel demand are also being blamed.

A recent report published in Science magazine suggests that rising temperatures have reduced the potential wheat crop by 5.5% since 1980, and corn by 3.8%. Soybeans and rice were about neutral. The scientists advise that research into heat resistant crops is urgently needed.

The Guardian has an excellent article on the nuts and bolts of the food crisis, which comes to the conclusion that the current harvest would have to be outstanding just to keep pace with demand, which was not very likely. They also blame over-pumping and soil erosion. Grist has this post specifically on the Chinese situation, where the authorities have concentrated on boosting their grain harvest at the expense of soybeans. Unfortunately there too the soil erosion and aquifer depletion are hurting harvests, compounded by desertification and the amount of once rural land which is being developed. As a result China is importing massive amounts of soybeans (almost 60% of global exports go to China) and look as if they will need to import increasing amounts of grain.

As a result, and no doubt abetted by the odd bit of speculative trading, food prices are soaring.

The FAO Food Price Index for both March and April are similar, both 2% down from its February peak, but it is up 36% in a year. The Cereal Price Index is up 71% in a year, as are most food commodities as shown below.

The conventional opinion is that we need to pursue the gains made by industrial agriculture in recent decades, with increased use of fertilizers, pesticides, GM crops etc, an opinion exemplified by Pedro Sanchez from Columbia University who states “If you ask me point blank whether organic-based farming is better than conventional, my answer is no…. There are just too many of us, we just need too many nutrients”.

But this assumption is questionable on several counts.

Firstly the Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial has been comparing two different organic farming methods (either using animals or using nitrogen-fixing legumes to fertilise the soil) to the conventional method for over 25 years. They show that corn yields are equivalent for all three and very similar for soybeans, except during periods of moderate drought when the organic systems yield 31% more, while increasing soil fertility which by contrast declined in the conventional system. Both these advantages are likely to become important as climate change and aquifer depletion reduce available water and topsoil erosion continues apace.

Secondly we desperately need to reduce the amount of energy that goes into the production of our crops. I cannot find updated numbers for the Steinhart and Steinhart study published in Science in 1974 which showed that between 5 and ten times as much energy goes into the US food system as comes out in food energy value, but I suspect this has only got worse as more and more food is heavily processed. As much of the input energy is in the form of fossil fuels (fertilizers and pesticides are a major component) we can reduce the energy used considerably by going organic. More details on the energy breakdown here.

Here in Australia the carbon tax is fast becoming a complete farce as the government, fails to counter any of the opposition’s points, however weak. This Sydney Morning Herald article is as bemused as I, saying “The ineptitude is so blatant, one might almost wonder if the government is serious about pricing carbon at all.” All this despite the fact that after all their u turns and messing around you would thinks that the government really needed to get this through if only to ensure their own survival.

One of the common statements which has a tendency to make my blood pressure rise dangerously is “Australia shouldn’t lead on climate change” which conveniently ignores the evident fact that we are among the slowest countries and in no danger of catching up, never mind leading the pack. I have already described a study which suggests that China already has an effective price on carbon 8 ½ times greater than Australia, but Grist has another showing the legislation being actioned by 16 countries. You may note that Australia is nowhere to be seen.

The CEO’s and senior management of large corporates are usually less than keen on any mention of climate change unless it is to comment on how expensive any proposed legislation will be (for the rather obvious reason that their bonuses would be among the first casualties). So even more kudos to Ian Dunlop for the questioning of the keynote speaker at the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Excerpts below but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

”The temperature increase we’ve seen so far is about 0.8 degrees Celsius. We’ve already seen a clear trend in extreme weather events related to just that increase. We probably have locked in already a temperature increase of around 2.4 degrees. If we were to follow the path that you’re suggesting in terms of continued fossil fuel usage to 2030, the likely outcome will be a temperature increase somewhere between 4 and 6 degrees. That probably means world population drops to a carrying capacity of somewhere around a billion people (you can argue 1 to 2 billion).”

But for the last 15 years senior business people in this country have not been prepared to get out publicly and lay it on the line that this is a serious issue, and it’s one where we want leadership and we want genuine results.”

”Where is the leadership from senior corporate business people in this country? Where is it going to come from? Because if we don’t get it fairly soon, we can’t solve this. The problem is that what we do today manifests itself in terms of extreme weather on a continuing basis from now on, but we won’t see the full impact for 20 or 30 years’ time.”

Also speaking out are the climate scientists on the recent extreme weather:-

Kevin Trenberth: “It is irresponsible not to mention climate change. … The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences (global warming). Tornadoes come from thunderstorms in a wind shear environment. This occurs east of the Rockies more than anywhere else in the world. The wind shear is from southerly (SE, S or SW) flow from the Gulf overlaid by westerlies aloft that have come over the Rockies. That wind shear can be converted to rotation. The basic driver of thunderstorms is the instability in the atmosphere: warm moist air at low levels with drier air aloft. With global warming, the low level air is warm and moister and there is more energy available to fuel all of these storms and increase the buoyancy of the air so that thunderstorms are strong. There is no clear research on changes in shear related to global warming. On average the low level air is 1 degree F and 4 percent moister than in the 1970s.”

Michael Mann: “The fact remains that there is 4 percent more water vapor — and associated additional moist energy — available both to power individual storms and to produce intense rainfall from them. Climate change is present in every single meteorological event, in that these events are occurring within a baseline atmospheric environment that has shifted in favor of more intense weather events.”

Lastly Tim Jackson produced this one-liner on the consumer society which was straight to the point

“We spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to make impressions that don’t last, on people we don’t care about.”

Redefining Extreme

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May 012011
 

This recent Earth Day eCard ticked my fancy though I admit its worrying when ones taste in humour is almost entirely of a darkish tinge.

The scientific community has been working for years on the thorny question of if and how much increased levels of carbon dioxide contribute to the extreme weather that seems to be much more common of late. Not an easy task, but they are starting to make comment, with more of these very careful folk believing that we are seeing the thin edge of some very nasty weather coming our way because of our emissions.

And the weather has definitely been quite extreme of late, with the USA taking its turn after Russia, Pakistan, China, Australia, Europe and others with a massive set of tornadoes and floods driven by near-record sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico (high sea surface temperatures were the immediate cause of the Queensland floods earlier in the year) while North Carolina has had its second “500 year” rainfall in 11 years.

Water and climate scientist Peter H. Gleick has an article on the tornadoes in the Huffington post which makes his view very clear. Firstly the title is “A Cost of Denying Climate Change: Accelerating Climate Disruptions, Death, and Destruction” and he finishes with the statement

“The science community knows that we’re affecting the climate; in turn, that will affect the weather; and that, in turn, will affect humans: with death, injury, and destruction. There is a cost to tackling climate change, but there is a real, growing, and far larger cost of continuing to deny it.”

There is a clear and interesting description of how scientists are determining what effect the changing climate is having on weather on the Yale website. Basically the process is split onto two parts. The first is easy as it’s clear that what used to be highly unusual events are now becoming more common, while the second involves running climate models with and without high levels of carbon dioxide to see if there are differences. This is trickier as many of the models are not yet detailed enough to show regional rather than global weather patterns, and most scientists are not yet ready put an exact number on the increased risk though Peter Stott and his team from the UK’s Met Office did show that emissions had doubled the chances of the 2003 European heat wave. He says “Natural variability does play a role, but now so does climate change. It is about changing the odds of the event happening”.

Many more studies of this type are underway, but they are complex and time consuming but in the same way as last year was the first year many people started to comment on the changed weather, this year will be the one when many start to accept that we are to blame.

Kevin Trenberth who leads the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado told the NY Times, “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both”.

The most comprehensive study of “outsourced emissions” has just confirmed that most western countries are outsourcing their emissions by buying increasing amounts of manufactured goods from overseas. Europe has reduced CO2 emissions by 6% but this drops to 1% if outsourcing is included. Of course those countries like the US who have done very little are even worse off with a 17% increase becoming 25% when imports are included.

China is of course the main emissions exporter, meaning that they often get blamed for others sins. It is often said that they are now the worlds largest emitter, but excluding their exports reduces them by almost 20% and puts them well behind the US, despite their very much larger population. China accounts for a massive 75% of the developed world’s imported emissions.

Australia also exports more emissions than it imports though the numbers are not in China’s league. Our nett exports less imports are enough to reduce our emissions by about 15% although they have still increased by 16% since 1998 and are among the highest in the world on a per capita basis.

Hot Topic carries news of another worrying Paleoclimate study. They analysed mollusc shells dated to the early Pliocene (3.5 – 4 million years ago) from a Canadian lake which suggested that summer temperatures were as much as 15ºC higher than at present. Given that CO2 was 400 ppm at the time, not much more than our current 392 ppm this is another indication that we have increased greenhouse gas concentrations so quickly that significant warming is already “in the pipeline”. It also helps confirm climate model predictions that warming will be much more extreme at high latitudes, increasing the dangers of runaway warming due to albedo and methane release feedbacks.

Another trend towards extremes is on the way, with crude oil prices again on the rise. Not very surprising when even the very conservative International Energy Agency keeps revising the global production numbers down. The latest comment from their chief economist Fatih Birol is simple and clear. Five years ago they thought total world production might reach 120 million barrels a day, but they now believe it will only reach 96 million barrels a day. Birol states:-

“Existing fields are declining so sharply that in order to stay where we are in terms of production levels, in the next 25 years we have to find and develop four new Saudi Arabias. That is a huge challenge.”

Swedish peak oil expert Kjell Aleklett said the agency’s assumptions about future oil flow rates were impossibly optimistic and that total world production passed its peak a year ago.

This might have something to do with the fuss in the US where the putative Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is talking about the current high oil prices. Have a look at this wonderful interview which is definitely still on the title subject. His answer seems to be to threaten Saudi (and OPEC in general?) and “repossess” Iraq. Below are two quotes, though I suggest you read the whole transcript or view the video to get the complete flavour…

Look at what’s going on with your gasoline prices. They’re going to go to $5, $6, $7 and we don’t have anybody in Washington that calls OPEC and says, “Fellas, it’s time.  It’s over.  You’re not going to do it anymore.”

“George, let me explain something to you.  We go into Iraq.  We have spent thus far, $1.5 trillion.  We could have rebuilt half of the United States.  $1.5 trillion.  And we’re going to then leave.  So, in the old days, you know when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils.  You go in.  You win the war and you take it.”

In case you think this is an aberration here is a video of his speech in Las Vegas…

More Fallout

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Apr 142011
 

As the Fukushima evacuation zones are set to be expanded amid reports that worrying levels of radioactivity from caesium-137 have been found outside the current zone. Though localised some of the readings are many times higher than the level set for mandatory evacuation. The highest levels found were 64 MBq/m2 while levels in in a village 40km from the plant were 18 MBq/m2. The evacuation limit set after Chernobyl was 1.48 MBq/m2 while produce from soil with greater than 550 kBq/m2 was destroyed.

Caesium-137 has a half life of 30 odd years so this problem won’t go away quickly. Against this backdrop the background level of arguments for and against nuclear are also rising with a debate and continuing articles by George Monbiot and Helen Caldicott in the Guardian. Here George seems to have the more rational arguments with many of Helen’s sources looking very dodgy. The one unmentioned hole in George’s case is that of storage of spent fuel though he is on record as saying a good solution to this was required for his support. I suspect he feels that it is the lesser of two evils, as a retreat from nuclear is likely to lead to greater fossil fuel use at least in the short and medium term.

What is clear is that Renewable energy research is not getting the attention that it warrants with a new report from the International Energy Agency showing that funding in the last ten years was $56 billion for nuclear and $17 billion on renewables and efficiency. Ridiculously funding for fossil fuel research was $22 billion. Clearly we have yet to get serious about the problem.

New Scientist reports on another IEA study on the fatalities per unit of power of various traditional generation technologies which shows that coal is by far more deadly than nuclear, and that even hydropower has a higher death rate than nuclear due to dam failures killing large numbers of people after floods in China. No other renewables are reviewed though the New York Times reports on a study which finds that housecats kill more birds each year in the US than wind farms which have been vilified for their undoubted effect on the avian population. Nothing seems to be free of side effects though I can imagine the outcry if we proposed banning those furry little monsters. Even here in Australia where they are a definite menace this doesn’t looks at all likely.

While on the subject of wind, a couple of articles in a blog on alternate energy stocks has been looking at how reliable wind power can be made by aggregating generation over widely dispersed regions. There is not enough information in the public domain to make a conclusive case, and unfortunately I am more impressed with the negative argument which suggests there still will be periods of no wind even over a large area. The positive case only looked at a one week period, which I suspect is much too short to show the effect.

A rather extreme article in new Scientist which suggested that “Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all” has been widely criticized, and has as a result has its titled changed to the less sensationalist “Wind and wave farms could affect Earth’s energy balance”. The article correctly points out that there is a limit to the amount of wind power than can be extracted before it affects global wind circulation patterns though we are not yet anywhere near that point. However it is interesting that our total use of energy, estimated at 47 TW is in the same ballpark as his estimated maximum energy that could be drawn from wind power (70TW). Solar energy does not have the same limitation though again at the extremes the heat generated by solar panels that are darker (and therefore reflect less energy) than the average of the earth’s surface could eventually become significant. While the argument is rather out there, it does show yet another way that we are bumping up against planetary boundaries.

A Cornell University study has dented the “clean green” mantra of gas, which governments and industry have generally jumped on as good stepping stone to renewables. They looked at the direct emissions as well as estimating the low and high ends of methane leakage for shale gas (produced by fracking) , conventional gas, coal and diesel. They looked at the greenhouse effect over both 20 years and 100 years as methane, which is the major constituent of natural gas, has a very significant early effect before it decays into carbon dioxide. In the 20 year case both shale and conventional gas were worse than coal if the high estimate of leakage was taken, even if burnt in very efficient plants. This just reinforces the fact that all generation technologies have side effects but that we should put our money into those that are most sustainable over the long term, rather than allowing the market to pick those which might have a shorter term benefits. In my view the key technologies are SWES, or Solar (both thermal and photovoltaic), Wind, Efficiency and Storage, though I am not opposed to putting some money into research on fourth generation nuclear which could provide power over the long term (thousands of years) as well as possibly helping to clear up our current long lived “spent fuel” problem.

Lastly it seems the mainly Republican political classes in the US are increasingly retreating from reality. Climate Progress reports that the House of Representatives has voted 255 to 172 to reverse the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding that greenhouse gas pollution threatens the health and welfare of Americans, while Grist reports that several states are legislating to make taking undercover films of livestock facilities illegal so that folk don’t get upset at how the food they eat is produced. The only positive spin I can put on this is to echo Winston Churchill’s optimism when he said “The Americans will always do the right thing… after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”

Risk vs Reward

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Apr 012011
 

As it look increasing obvious that the Kukushima plant will take months or years to sort out, Tepco admits missing checks and storing too much spent fuel in the storage pools while the US nuclear regulator has quietly dropped the requirement for equipment to prevent hydrogen explosions which was imposed after the Three Mile Island problem. You can trust business to continue to cut costs anyway they can, and to harass governments into changing the rules. Hardly a great way to run anything that can go bang in a big way, especially as the risk and the reward are assigned to different people.

News seems to me to arrive in two main forms; that related to climate science, ecological or resource limits is almost always unremittingly bad, while there is a surprising amount of good news about new techniques and technologies which we could use to reduce the impact of the first, but somehow never quite get motivated enough to have a decent crack at. This post demonstrates the effect nicely.

Professor Ross Garnaut, the Australian government’s climate change adviser, has recently updated the 2008 report on the science of climate change. He states:-

“Observations and research outcomes since 2008 have confirmed and strengthened the position that the mainstream science then held with a high level of certainty, that the Earth is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause.”

“The statistically significant warming trend has been confirmed by observations over recent years:”

  • global temperatures continue to rise around the midpoints of the range of the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the presence of a warming trend has been confirmed;
  • the rate of sea level rise has accelerated and is tracking above the range suggested by the IPCC; and
  • rates of change in most observable responses of the physical and biological environment to global warming lie at or above expectations from the mainstream science.

“There is increasing discussion in the legitimate scientific literature of the possibility that large damage will occur at smaller increases in global average temperature than the IPCC focus and United Nations (Copenhagen and Cancun) agreement…”

“Despite the increased scientific understanding of climate change, and confidence in the science’s conclusions about climate change, public confidence in the science seems to have weakened somewhat in Australia and some other countries since 2008.”

To translate: – we are sure about what is happening and its getting worse faster than we thought. The chances of catastrophe are increasing and yet we still don’t care enough to do anything serious about it.

While on the subject of government advisors Lord Nicholas Stern has warned that his original report “underestimated the risks” and that

“On its current carbon emissions path, humanity faces a 50-percent chance of warming the planet a whopping 5.0 degrees C by the end of this century”
and

“What we’re talking about here — this the cost of inaction, the cost of not doing much — is a transformation of where we can be. Over a hundred, 120 years, we can’t be that precise, a serious risk of global war, really, because you’ve got hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions of people moving. That’s the cost of inaction. It’s potentially immense.”

Lonnie Thompson who has spent his career drilling equatorial glaciers to chart historical climate near the equator states

“There is now a very clear pattern in the scientific evidence documenting that the earth is warming, that warming is due largely to human activity, that warming is causing important changes in climate, and that rapid and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future are very possible. This pattern emerges not, as is so often suggested, simply from computer simulations, but from the weight and balance of the empirical evidence as well.”

Whether or not we are past peak oil may have become immaterial, as it is clear that minor disruptions to supply (Libya is 2% of world crude production) have major effects on price. The British Bank HSBC thinks we have les than 50 years of oil left at current consumption rates, while demand continues to surge. They don’t see any substitutes being effective below $150 per barrel. George Monbiot explains why western counties are so quiet about calls for more democracy in Saudi Arabia, and Exxon’s annual financial report states that for every 100 barrels they have pumped in the last decade they have found only 95. Interesting also that the west (and the UN) can get worked up about Libya but not, for example, about Zimbabwe. I suspect we are now in a position where any major growth in the global economy will boost the price of oil until it slows the growth. Time to think outside the box.

I have been surprised by the number of new and improved processes and techniques that are being reported at the moment, despite the relatively small amount of research funding. They are coming right across the spectrum of S.W.E.S. (Solar, Wind, Efficiency and Storage), surely the key immediate elements of a new energy industry. Nanoscale manufacturing seems key to improvements in solar cell efficiency and battery storage and allowing a breakthrough in adsorption chillers which might allow residential air conditioning to be powered by solar hot water systems while wind turbines are getting more efficient as they get larger and we may be able to generate significant amounts of power from the mixing of fresh and salt water in estuaries. A Californian company has found a cheaper way of producing LED’s and it even seems possible to reduce livestock methane emissions by changing their diet.

So we are improving the technology we need to move to a sustainable energy system, just not quickly enough.

Grist reports on a survey that might make you chuckle a bit, where the researchers found a large difference between how Democrats and Republicans responded to wording. Democrats treated the words “global warming” and “climate change” almost identically in the survey while Republicans on average showed a major difference between the two phrases with 44% of Republicans agreeing that “global warming” is real, while 60% said the same of “climate change. Wishful thinking anyone?

Nuclear or Not

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Mar 212011
 

 

Now that a bit of the dust (faintly radioactive?) has settled on the Fukushima incident it might be timely to speculate on how the accident might affect the nuclear industry and low carbon energy more broadly, though we are still missing a lot of information about contamination within the exclusion zone. It is unlikely that the plant will operate again and it is likely to lead to a substantial nuclear slowdown in the west. The Guardian put it succinctly: “When experts decide it is necessary to flood reactors in the world’s most technologically advanced nation with an improvised flow of marine muck, people will ask whether the industry’s contingency planning for disaster is really as good as we are always being promised.” and “Many nuclear-power plants are located along coastlines, because they are highly water-intensive. Yet natural disasters such as storms, hurricanes, and tsunamis are becoming more common, owing to climate change, which will also cause a rise in ocean levels, making seaside reactors even more vulnerable.”

Steam venting is thought to be the major source of Iodine-131 and Cesium-137 though there is confusion about whether some of the spent fuel storage ponds dried out and there still is little or no information on their level or temperature. If these were dry during the fires there might be serious dispersal. Certainly there will be local contamination from the amount of water sprayed onto the reactor buildings. Although the radiation levels discovered in food are relatively low they have been found up to 100km from the plant, while trace levels were found in Tokyo water supplies 250km away. Given the massive disruption in the area I suspect we will see increasing reports of contamination. Note also that we were lucky that the wind was mostly blowing out to sea during the week.

There has been a regrettable amount of hysterics from the anti nuclear brigade and an equal amount of wishful thinking from the pro-nuclear groups demonstrating the almost total polarisation of the debate. Typically the antis are emotional while the pro’s are strictly reductionist and don’t properly explore the risk envelope (an early comment on BraveNewClimate stated “There is no credible risk of a serious accident.”).

What does seem clear is that our current market driven approach which in theory delivers the highest quality at the lowest cost often delivers the second at the expense of the first, and has historically resulted in the consolidation of market power into fewer and larger players. This has come to a head in the last few decades with many industries controlled by a handful of massive companies which are powerful enough to bully governments and are “too large to fail”. In the case of the banking industry this led to the financial crisis and a large transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to those that caused the problem. In the nuclear industry it has led to the shaving of safety margins (Tepco has a long history of safety problems) and the industry does seem to have pressured governments to minimise standards.

So while I believe this accident won’t cause damage on the scale of Chernobyl, it has already led to several countries imposing a moratorium on the industry and many more reviewing the situation. It will probably be most beneficial in reviewing the operation of the older generation reactors, which are near or past their original use by date. Given that the newer reactors are probably considerably safer (and also much more expensive) a stringent review of their safety would be a good thing.

Should we continue to build new reactors? It depends. The major risks are the potential for very serious accidents, the potential for weapons proliferation and the disposal of waste from the current generation of reactors which remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. No suitable disposal facilities have been so far engineered.

However the IFR is a design of reactor which is safer, more difficult to extract weapons grade material from, nearly 100 times more efficient and so produces 100 times less waste which is only dangerous for 500 years. It has been run for decades as a test reactor, though never commercialised. But the icing on the cake is that it can (in theory) use the waste from current reactors as fuel, thus getting rid of that problem for free. In my view this is the only nuclear technology I would accept in the long term. While both China and India have plans for similar reactors, they are starting from scratch rather than building on the knowledge gained in the US, which has no such plans.

The commercial element has led to each company going off and doing its own thing, and obviously not being too keen to share any advances with others. This will continue to erode safety margins as they seek to minimise costs. Ideally one or more standard designs should be approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency with input from the major construction companies. This could benefit the companies themselves as it might considerably simplify the massive paperwork required. However I’m not holding my breath. It will also take decades to test out the commercial potential of IFR (also called generation IV) so nothing is likely to happen in a hurry.

To me this is the core of the problem. We need low carbon energy and we need it soon. Given that nuclear plants require decades of planning and approval before building starts they are an irrelevant distraction. I would welcome a commercial test of the IFR including use of existing spent fuel as this might provide worthwhile baseload power while cleaning up problem waste, but this will take even longer than new Gen III reactors. Meanwhile we should put most of our efforts into the areas which are already producing the best results – Wind and Solar. If we get on with it we will know in 10 years if we need to consider nuclear or not. Storage technology for intermittent sources is making rapid progress and countries like Spain and Portugal have already shown dramatic renewable energy increases are possible. We just need to will to get on and do it.

Carbon Constraints call for Clear Communication

 2 Responses »
Mar 032011
 

While the climate scientists are starting to communicate clearly (see below) the government is not. I know I have used this Marc Roberts cartoon before, but it’s just too perfect for this post.

Here in Australia we are going through another attempt by the government to implement a price on carbon. The previous attempt, by the Rudd government was voted down by the opposition Liberals and Nationals and the Greens either because, as conservatives, they either deny climate change or despise government intervention in the market, or because the Greens felt it overcompensated the polluters and would have had little effect. The current attempt is demonstrating an extraordinary level of vitriol, misinformation, and an amazing lack of competence on the government’s part. As such it’s a pale echo of the nastiness going on in the USA.

Julia Gillard is leading a minority government which has repeatedly flip-flopped on the subject and now has to succeed to survive. It is strange therefore that her government is not selling the project at all well, to the point where the cynical might wonder if they want to fail. While the opposition is almost rabidly attacking the project and its supporters, the government announcements have been lame and unfocused. As none of the real decisions on how much and who pays have as yet been made, only the principles of the matter can be sensibly debated.

Folk tend to think of a tax as a cost and therefore as purely a negative thing, but it is always a redistribution of wealth, taking from some and giving to others. The problem, as with many of the tragedy of the commons type problems, is that those who pay can clearly see the loss, while the gain is often diluted (and sometimes wasted) so that most folk don’t see the same benefit. This requires clear and simple communication by any government implementing a new tax, and that is exactly what we don’t have.

The key questions at this stage of the debate are:-

  • Should we put a price on carbon now or wait till other countries do more?
  • Should it be a Carbon tax or a Cap and Trade mechanism?
  • What will the money be used for?
  • It is clear we need to act now. Australia is the highest per capita emitter of carbon other than some of the much smaller Gulf States. A recent study shows that we are way behind the pack when it comes to doing anything about reducing our carbon footprint. It calculated an implicit carbon price for Australia and five of our major trading partners and concluded that Australia’s price was $2.34 while the US was $5.05, China was $8.08 and the UK was $28.46. These numbers are calculated at market exchange rates, and are even more unbalanced if purchasing power parity exchange rates are used with Australia now at $1.68 to China’s $14.22. We are also the most likely of the industrialised nations to be badly affected by climate change and are already seeing unprecedented predicted extreme weather events, while our agriculture is at serious risk.
  • While most governments initially favoured cap and trade, for its supposed efficiency, the early signs in Europe have not been good, with widespread rorting and wildly fluctuating prices just two of the problems. A tax is much simpler, and while it needs adjusting yearly to ensure carbon targets are met, we seem to be able to manage this with income tax. As such it seems a good starting point. Crucially it drives change in Australia, rather than allowing international offsets, which are usually so subject to fiddling that they are not effective in reducing emissions.
  • The government says “Every cent raised from pricing carbon will go to assisting households, helping businesses manage the transition and funding climate change programs”. But in what proportion? The previous ETS was very generous to industry of all sorts, reducing the incentive to act quickly, and allowing companies to increase both prices and profits during the transition. Given that, as shown above, our major trading partners are all doing more than we are and that our industries, far from being in danger of going overseas, are actually benefitting from our cheap dirty power and failing to keep up with overseas advances, we need minimal compensation for trade exposed industries. As for the massive giveaways to the electrical industry proposed in Rudd’s ETS, they are simply ridiculous. As in so many cases simple is good. A proportion of the money should be extracted for funding climate change programs and the rest should be returned to the human population as a cash refund. Prices will rise, but most folk will be more than compensated and the rest will have an incentive to change, which is the whole point of the exercise.

There is only one problem with this, most recent governments have acted as if they are elected by the corporates rather than the people, and the current incumbents are no exception, having recently caved in on the mining tax to the tune of about $6 billion per year. So we can expect a lot more waffling until the detail comes out later in the year and a lot more bleating from industry about how hard it will be and how many jobs will be lost. The fact that most of this is shown after the event to be the purest bullshit is conveniently ignored by the corporately owned media. The Greens will have the balance of power in the Senate during this period and are already signalling that they want to minimise industrial compensation. Hopefully they hold their nerve.

The opposition, continuing with the tactics they have used successfully since the election is against anything and everything and promising to repeal the tax if they gain power. Given the Greens balance of power in the Senate this would require a further double dissolution election.

Interesting times, but unfortunate in that we are missing out on the start of a real shift in power generation. Both Europe and China are putting real money into renewables and the effects are starting to be seen. While it was only for one day, Spain generated 75% of its electricity from renewables on January 6th. (It was 35% for the whole of 2010) and Portugal has gone from 17% renewable to nearly 45% in the last 5 years. Australia has a better supply of renewable energy than either, and our peak electricity loads come during those hot summer days when solar is going to be available, making it much more attractive.

On the dirtier side of the fence, a recent study from the Harvard Medical School quantifies the health costs of coal to the US economy at between $140 billion to $242 billion per year. This is just the health costs with no accounting for carbon emissions but would still be enough to more than double the cost of coal.

Climate Science is now able to show that global warming is responsible for exacerbating the extreme weather that we are starting to see, though it takes a considerable time to analyse the data, so they are reporting on events that are years old, rather than the recent deluge of events. One of the studies mentioned above showed that Climate change doubled the likelihood of the devastating 2000 UK floods. Separately a study shows that the risk of abnormally wet or dry seasons has doubled in the south-eastern US in the last 30 years, while the massive reinsurance company Munich Re states that the number of weather-related disasters have more than tripled in Germany over the past 40 years.

To finish, if you have an hour to spare and want a feel for the massive changes we need to make have a look at this video (it assumes we need to stabilise at 450ppm while recent thinking indicates 350ppm so the job’s rather harder than portrayed!). If you prefer a bit of dark humour try this recent bill declaring that global warming is natural and “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana”.

I don’t think I can top that.

Monebant ignorabamus patiemur

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Feb 142011
 

Please excuse my very doggy (and dodgy) Latin, which might loosely translate as “They warned, We ignored, We will suffer”.

However if the recent extraordinary range of extreme weather events continue and the very faint swing of public opinion continues towards the worried end, it might be replaced by a rather optimistic “Monēbant videmus Mutemus Mundum” or “They warned, We now see, Let us change the world”.

And the weather has been extraordinary China is going through its worst drought in 60 years, The Amazon basin has just been through its second “100 year drought” in 5 years during which it swapped from absorbing 1.5 billion tons of CO2 per year to releasing over 5 billion tons, or roughly the same as the USA economy. Thus the forest has probably emitted more CO2 than it absorbed in the last 5 years. This change from sink to source is exactly what climate science has warned would happen in a warming world. And it’s not just the big storms floods and droughts in Australia, Pakistan, Russia, Europe and the USA; it seems there is extreme weather almost everywhere as this Grist Post describes, while Arctic Ice extent over January was the lowest since satellite records began, suggesting that albedo feedback is also under way.

Craig Fugate, head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency recently stated “The term 100-year event really lost its meaning this year.”

Ross Garnaut is clear on the link, saying “The greater energy in the atmosphere and the seas can intensify extreme events and I’m afraid that we’re feeling some of that today, and we’re feeling that at a time when global warming is in its early stages” He also said “the presence of uncertainty in the range of possible climate outcomes strengthens the case for climate change action”.

I believe that we are seeing the start of the major climate feedback mechanisms, as well as a taste of the extreme weather predicted.

Now the $64 Trillion question? What are we going to do about it? So far we are rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, squabbling amongst ourselves (both within and between countries) while the climate builds up a good head of steam. Once it picks up speed we don’t have a hope of stopping it.

Here in Australia there a few hopeful signs coming out of the federal government’s Climate Change Committee, with the Greens taking a hard line on compensation to business. This is important two ways. Firstly whatever agreement is reached is just the start of what needs to be a rapidly increasing price on carbon. If the agreement is complex, susceptible to financial manipulation, or does not refund the full cost of increasing energy prices to the least well off, then there will be a backlash and government will lack the guts to push forward. Secondly our major industrial companies are massive emitters of carbon, who have so far not considered it worthwhile to make significant changes in their operations. While ever there are loopholes, offsets etc etc they will find it cheaper to fudge the figures rather than getting on with the job. Compensation in the context of an initial (and probably minor) price on carbon allows them to take their time and see what happens next. Given that we actually need a massive emergency effort similar to putting the country (and the world) on an all out war footing, a sharp shock to the commercial system is the least we can do.

Most economists are quite relaxed about environmental and climate matters, as their faith assumes a generally increasing wealth, so future generations will be better able to handle the cost of our problems than we are. Personally I find this similar to belief in the tooth fairy but never mind. Martin Weitzman is more pessimistic, arguing in a recent paper that the “Fat Tail Distribution” makes all the difference. He argues that most economic costings of climate change ignore the less likely but catastrophic options which are the fat tail of the bell curve. If these are included the potential costs become overwhelming. He says “to ignore or suppress the significance of rare tail disasters is to ignore or suppress what economic theory is telling us loudly and clearly is potentially the most important part of the analysis”. He defines a 6oC increase in temperature in the next 100 years as the extreme, and assigns a probability of 3% to this on the basis of IPCC-4. Of course IPCC-4 is now long in the tooth and almost all of the research since then has increased the risks. Given that most economic reviews have already concluded that the cost of action is less than the cost of business as usual, we would surely be truly insane to continue as we are?

While discussing rationality, a university study in the US has found that sitting in a hot room increases the number of people who think climate change is a problem. We continue to discover that our treasured rational thinking is actually nothing but a bunch of stuck together ad hoc survival rules, exactly as you would expect from evolutionary theory. Unfortunately this is the century that will require us to be not only rational but committed, consistent and efficient.

However disaster is not inevitable, however likely it looks at present. Another report, this one from the WWF, suggests that a 100% transition to renewables by 2050 is possible. They say:-

“We have found that an (almost) fully sustainable energy supply is technically and economically feasible, given ambitious but realistic growth rates of renewable energy sources.”

“However, the path to this future world will deviate significantly from ‘business as usual’ and a few (difficult) choices will need to be made on the way.”

All we have to do is transform our energy infrastructure. We’ve done it before at least twice, during the transition from wood to coal, and from coal to petroleum. Third time lucky.

Hungry Times, but not for Bankers

 1 Response »
Feb 012011
 

Folk have been predicting the collapse of our industrial food system ever since Malthus, but it does seem that the number and urgency of the warnings has increased sharply of late, on the back of major crop failures this year and last. Although agricultural production has increased steadily in the last 30 years, hunger in third world countries is now on the rise, and the price of food is now again above the peak it reached in 2007/8 which caused widespread riots, implying that the global financial crisis had only a temporary effect on prices. The immediate cause of the price rises is the unprecedented spate of “natural” disasters but the concern is that climate change will simultaneously reduce the efficiency of agriculture due to steadily rising temperatures, while increasing the frequency of extreme droughts and floods. Both Climate Progress and Grist have recent articles on the subject. A UK Government report finds that 1 billion people are hungry, 1 billion are missing key vitamins and minerals, and a further billion are “substantially overconsuming”, and concludes that a transformation on the scale of the industrial revolution is needed to continue feeding the increasing population without destroying the planet. The report is less definite when discussing the changes needed, but they point out that reducing food waste will be a key element given that 30% of food now produced is never consumed. They believe that organic agriculture will be a part of the solution but do not believe that it can satisfy demand without a major change in diet and feel that genetically modified crops and cloned animals should receive significantly more research funds. Finally protectionism (mainly in Europe and the US) must be reduced. The report has been criticized for focusing on “commercial” agriculture which has already lead to increasing hunger in third world countries as market prices for their commodities fluctuate beyond their control, rather than focusing on improving yields for subsistence agriculture. This seems to me a key problem, made worse by the relaxing of regulations on commodity markets in the 1990′s which has resulted in a major increase in price speculation on food commodities by those same investment bankers and hedge funds who appear to have enriched themselves at everyone else’s expense and almost destroyed the financial system in the process. The Guardian discusses the issue here and points out that 70-80% of trades are speculative, and the price of food is 2 to 3 times more volatile as a result. It strikes me as supremely unethical to manipulate the price of food for profit, knowing that millions of already very poor folk will go hungry as a result. Deborah Doane, director of the World Development Movement in London says “People die from hunger while the banks make a killing from betting on food”.

Unfortunately while there has been a pushback against the greedy bankers, it seems they are well entrenched in the political system, and while there have been lots of promises there is very little real change.

Thanks to Climate Progress for bringing my attention to the cartoon above. They are among a number of people to remark on the irony of the Australian Government’s response to the Queensland Floods. We have just got through the most expensive natural disaster in the country’s history which has almost certainly been exacerbated by global warming and what programs are cut to fund the flood relief? The Clean Energy initiatives of course. Joe Romm calls it “head-exploding” and while I wasn’t in favour of the Green Car Innovation Fund and the Cleaner Car Rebate Scheme, cutting the rest is just plain stupid. Unfortunately it looks like we may get another few climate lessons this year with a very large cyclone headed for north Queensland this week, and the wet season still in full swing.

Climate Progress also discusses a recent draft paper by James Hansen and Makiko Sato which suggests that sea level rise will be highly non-linear and larger than previous estimates, mainly due to polar amplification. This is supported by a number of recent studies, plus the extraordinary warming in the Canadian Arctic with areas around Hudson Bay having temperatures 21°C above the average for a whole month. They state:-

“Business as usual scenarios result in global warming of the order of 3-6°C. It is this scenario for which we assert that multi-meter sea level rise on the century time scale are not only possible, but almost dead certain.”

In Europe carbon trading seems to have collapsed after the market was shut down after extensive thefts of carbon credits by hackers. This was hard on the heals of allegations that the credits were being manipulated by business, and were meaningless in carbon abatement terms.

Lastly and only peripherally connected, I was amused by an article on Wikileaks with a reference to a speech by Hillary Clinton in January 2010, where she praised the internet and the potential of what she termed “a new nervous system for the planet”. She described a vision of semi-underground digital publishing – “the samizdat of our day” that was beginning to champion transparency and challenge the autocratic, corrupt old order of the world. But she also warned that repressive governments would “target the independent thinkers who use the tools”. Not a year later she was railing against exactly those same forces in the guise of Wikileaks.

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We must keep the global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha