Tag Archives: carbon emissions

climate disinformation?

The New York Times has an article about fossil fuel industry funding of a prominent critic of mainstream climate change science:

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests…

Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.

How much of what we believe is really our own conclusions, and how much of it is manufactured and manipulated without us even suspecting?

the “new Pliocene”

New evidence from fossil cores supports the idea that more greenhouse gases means warmer temperatures in a more or less linear way.

During the Pliocene, the Earth’s temperature was often several degrees higher than in pre-industrial times, while atmospheric CO2 levels were around 350-450 parts per million (ppm), similar to the levels reached in the past few years (400 ppm).

By studying the relationship between CO2 levels and climate change during a warm period in the Earth’s history, the scientists have been able to estimate how the climate will respond to increasing levels of CO2, a parameter known as climate sensitivity.

The findings suggest that climate sensitivity was similar in a warmer world to other times – allaying concerns that warming could produce positive feedbacks that would accelerate warming above that expected from modelling studies.

I wouldn’t call this great news, but it does suggest we will have a chance to adjust to gradual change, rather than being blind-sided by some sudden catastrophic change.

January 2015 in Review

I’m dropping my “Hope for the Future Index” this year. If anyone out there is particularly attached to it, you can let me know.

Negative trends and predictions:

  • According to Mikhail Gorbachev, “Today’s key global problems – terrorism and extremism, poverty and inequality, climate change, migration, and epidemics – are worsening daily.”
  • Exxon predicts the rate of greenhouse gas emissions will stop growing…by 2030…at a level that will still cause atmospheric concentrations to continue rising. They try to present this as good news, but it is clearly a pathway to collapse if you think about it just a little bit.
  • Johan Rockstrom and company have updated their 2009 planetary boundaries work. The news is not getting any better. 4 of the 9 boundaries are not in the “safe operating space”: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).
  • By several measures, 2014 was the hottest year on record.
  • The Doomsday Clock has moved from 5 minutes to 3 minutes from midnight due to “climate change and efforts to modernize nuclear weapons stockpiles”.

Positive trends and predictions:

  • Taxi medallions have been called the “best investment in America”, but now ride-sharing services may destroy them. I put this in the positive column because I think the new services are better and this is a good example of creative destruction.
  • Remote controlled, robot-assisted surgery is here.
  • The ongoing tumble in oil prices was of course a big story throughout the month. We won’t really be able to say until we look back years from now whether this was just a short-term fluctuation or the reversal of the decades-long trend toward higher energy prices. My guess is the former.
  • It is starting to seem politically possible for the U.S. to strengthen regulation of risk-taking by huge financial firms.
  • Robots can learn to perform physical tasks by watching videos.
  • Howard T. Odum was a genius who invented a “system language” that, if widely understood and applied, might give humanity the tools to solve its problems. Unfortunately, so far it is not widely understood or applied.
  • There may be a realistic chance for a de-escalation of the Middle East nuclear arms race.

hottest year on record

Thank you, junky weather site wunderground.com for this headline: 2014: Hottest Year in Recorded Human History. Actually this is a pretty good post with a lot of interesting graphs that you can stare at for a long, long time.

According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, global surface temperatures in 2014 were 1.24°F (0.69°C) above the 20th century average, highest among all years in the 1880-2014 record, easily breaking the previous records of 2005 and 2010 by 0.07°F (0.04°C). Using independent measurement techniques but mostly the same set of surface stations, NASA also rated 2014 as the warmest year on record, as did the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA).

This article talks briefly about the idea that “The rate of global warming since 2000 has been slower than in the 1980s and 1990s…” If you stare at the graphs long enough, you can understand how both of these things are true. From around 1980 to 2000, air temperatures got a lot hotter. From 2000 to now, they have stayed about the same, which is to say constantly very hot. So it is easy for a given year to edge a tiny bit higher than the year before and be the new hottest year ever.

 

Exxon’s 2015 Outlook for Energy

Here is Exxon’s 2015 Outlook for Energy report. They talk about the importance of fossil fuels in the progress in living standards over the past couple centuries. They talk about the rise of the middle class in developing Asia, and how that is going to lead to rising living standards and health, but also big increases in demand for energy, food and materials. Now, you can’t begrudge people rising living standards and health, which are wonderful things. However, I wouldn’t equate progress just with more traffic, concrete and shopping malls full of designer hand bags. I would equate it more with things like safe drinking water, affordable food and health care. And air conditioning – I would never begrudge any human being in the tropics air conditioning.

They make a crucial logical error – using the rate of carbon emissions, rather than accumulation of emissions in the atmosphere, as a proxy for ecological footprint. They say the rate of global emissions is expected to peak around 2030.

While every country faces a unique set of priorities and resource
constraints, we expect that most every nation, regardless of circumstance, will seek solutions that help curb emissions without harming the prospects of greater prosperity for its own citizens.
Toward this objective, two of the most effective solutions are improving energy efficiency across the economy (also referred to as reducing energy intensity) and reducing the CO2 content across the energy mix. Through 2040, each will play a powerful role in slowing emissions growth, and ultimately reversing what had been a decades-long rise in global CO2 emissions. In fact, we expect global energy-related CO2 emissions will rise
by about 25 percent from 2010 to 2030 and then decline approximately 5 percent to 2040.

In absolute terms, global CO2 emissions are expected to be about 6 billion tonnes higher in 2040 than they were in 2010. While that increase is significant, it is only about half the level of emissions growth seen from 1980 to 2010. This is all the more remarkable considering the growth in economic output from 2010 to 2040 will be about 150 percent more than the prior 30-year period.

Stabilizing the rate of emissions will not do the trick, unless the rate of emissions is below the rate the atmosphere can absorb without permanent harm to the environment or economy. That’s like saying the amount of credit card debt you add each month is the same each month. You are still spending more than your income, and one day this is going to “harm your prospects of greater prosperity”.

We will have really turned the corner if our rate of emissions is reduced to the point where the concentration in the atmosphere is stable or declining. And even if we manage to do that, we need to think about other impacts – nutrient pollution, soil depletion, groundwater and glacier loss, biodiversity and habitat loss, ocean acidification, and the list goes on.

sea vs. land warming

According to a guy named Ka-Kit Tung, we have seen less land surface warming than expected in the last 15 years because the heat has gone into the oceans instead. He thinks the trend of land surface warming will eventually resume. Is he worried about some sudden reversal where the heat trapped in the ocean would suddenly be released? No.

Nobody knows how long the current pause will last. Nonetheless, at some point, the natural cycles will shift; the oceans will cease to absorb the bulk of the planet’s warming; and surface temperatures will begin to climb again. When they do, we can expect the increase to resume the rapid pace observed during the late twentieth century, when surface temperature rose by about 0.17 degrees Celsius every ten years.

In the meantime, whether the overall risk to our environment has been reduced by the pause remains an open question. Some argue that what went down will eventually come back up. The sloshing back and forth of warm and cold waters – El Niño and La Niña – in the shallow layer of the equatorial Pacific Ocean will continue to produce fluctuations in surface temperatures every year. Over longer periods, however, the risk that the heat currently stored in the deep ocean will resurface is remote.

Who is this guy? He is “a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, is Professor of Applied Mathematics and an adjunct professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington.”

If we are saying some end of year thank yous, I would just like to say, thank you, ocean, for keeping our planet habitable for another year.

Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey Sachs highlights three international conferences in 2015 that may be important:

In July 2015, world leaders will meet in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to chart reforms of the global financial system. In September 2015, they will meet again to approve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide national and global policies to 2030. And in December 2015, leaders will assemble in Paris to adopt a global agreement to head off the growing dangers of human-induced climate change.

The fundamental goal of these summits is to put the world on a course toward sustainable development, or inclusive and sustainable growth. This means growth that raises average living standards; benefits society across the income distribution, rather than just the rich; and protects, rather than wrecks, the natural environment.

Growth that protects the natural environment – I think it’s theoretically possible, but we’re a long way from that and it’s easy to be pessimistic. But at least some leaders recognize that there is a problem worth discussing. His vision is essentially one of technological progress allowing decarbonization of the energy supply:

Back in 2009 and 2010, the world’s governments agreed to keep the rise in global temperature to below 2° Celsius relative to the pre-industrial era. Yet warming is currently on course to reach 4-6 degrees by the end of the century – high enough to devastate global food production and dramatically increase the frequency of extreme weather events.

To stay below the two-degree limit, the world’s governments must embrace a core concept: “deep decarbonization” of the world’s energy system. That means a decisive shift from carbon-emitting energy sources like coal, oil, and gas, toward wind, solar, nuclear, and hydroelectric power, as well as the adoption of carbon capture and storage technologies when fossil fuels continue to be used. Dirty high-carbon energy must give way to clean low- and zero-carbon energy, and all energy must be used much more efficiently.

Clean energy would be an enormous breakthrough. But would it end all our problems, allowing us to grow indefinitely from that point without consequences? In their book Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update, Donella Meadows et al. explain why that might not necessarily be the case:

in a complex, finite world, if you remove or raise one limit and go on growing, you encounter another limit. Especially if the growth is exponential, the next limit will show up surprisingly soon. There are layers of limits.

What might the next limit be? maybe depletion of the phosphorus supply, loss of fertile soil, collapse of the oceans, a catastrophic plague affecting crops or people, etc. The point is just not to think that solving the carbon emissions problem would end all the problems caused by our enormous footprint on the natural world.

Naomi Oreskes

From the New York Times, here are some attention grabbing quotes:

Steven Koonin – climate science not settled

Steven Koonin has written an article in the Wall Street Journal called Climate Science Is Not Settled. According to his bio at the end,

Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP, where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.

If I can paraphrase and oversimplify, he thinks that climate science is still too uncertain to make any decisions other than investments in “low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.” And lots more research, of course. Here is a short passage:

Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.

A second challenge to “knowing” future climate is today’s poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate’s heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.

A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate’s response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.

But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.

You don’t want legitimate scientists with alternative viewpoints to be censored or silenced, so it’s good to read through something like this and draw your own conclusions, while keeping in mind an overwhelming majority of scientists have come to the conclusion that the science is certain enough, and the potential consequences serious enough, to justify action now. His last argument makes no sense to the engineer in me at all, that we shouldn’t try to make projections now using our best understanding of the physical relationships in the system, that we just have to wait until there are changes large enough that we can measure them. If we always did that the entire fields of science, engineering and technology would pretty much grind to a halt, and the rest of our civilization with them.