climate change

George Monbiot:

Well it was published on December 11 – I mean to say, December 11 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto protocol. George Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas.

Nice line of course, but given that there was one execution in Texas in December 1997 I don\’t think "busy" really captures it.

When George Bush announced, in 2001, that he would not ratify the Kyoto protocol, the world cursed and stamped its foot.

Erm, George, you do understand American politics do you? The President doesn\’t ratify treaties. The Senate does. And under Clinton there was an indicative vote something like 95-0 against ratification. It\’s simply not in the President\’s power to insist upon something like this: propose, influence, yes, but not insist.

In July 1997, the Senate had voted 95-0 to sink any treaty which failed to treat developing countries in the same way as it treated the rich ones.

He does in fact mention it, but seems not to get the implication.

But underlining his complaint is something very puzzling. He\’s against emissions trading, insisting that each country must reduce its own emissions. Why? This is vastly more expensive than trade: as emissions are a global problem we don\’t actually care where reductions come from, we just want them to come at the lowest cost.

But then George has never really understood trade, has he?

Women must stop admiring men who drive sports cars if they want to join the fight against global warming, the Government\’s chief scientist has urged.

The solution to climate change is that woomen should stop admiring alpha males?

You\’ve got a few hundred thousand yearsof evolution working against you there you know Sir David.

Sensible stuff in The Guardian about reducing carbon emissions.

Bit of a shocker really.

Nothing arouses fury like the disposable plastic supermarket bag. Gordon Brown singled them out in his first speech on climate change as prime minister. The widespread hatred now extends to almost all plastic food packaging. But although plastic bags are detestable, they are almost irrelevant to climate change. Each of us uses about 2kg a year of shopping bags, and they perform multiple useful functions in the home after they have carried our shopping from the supermarket. Food packaging of all types is no more than 5% of the weight of our groceries. Wasted food, which rots in landfill and generates methane, is a far more serious cause of global warming. Rather than getting our retailers to strip the 3g of protective polythene from our cucumbers, we need to concentrate on reducing the 30% of food that goes to waste every week.

And, of course, packaging reduces food waste….

Climate change ain\’t gonna wipe out the whities!

"We have this specimen that confirms the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago, and this basically means that the polar bear has already survived one interglacial period," explained Professor Ingolfsson.

"And what\’s interesting about that is that the Eeemian – the last interglacial – was much warmer than the Holocene (the present).

"This is telling us that despite the ongoing warming in the Arctic today, maybe we don\’t have to be quite so worried about the polar bear. That would be very encouraging."

Hurrah! So Dance people, Dance with Knut!

 

No, really, he does.

Simply, don\’t use fossil fuels.

Glad we\’ve got that sorted then.

Just one question though. Will the effects of not using oil, coal or gas by Tuesday week be better or worse than the climate change effects of continuing to use them?

This isn\’t a surprise:

The latest pull-out has annoyed rival business leaders at London-based Solar Century and local Indian operation, Orb Energy, who fear the impact of a high-profile company selling off solar business. Jeremy Leggett, chief executive of Solarcentury and a leading voice in renewable energy circles, said Shell was undermining the credibility of the business world in its fight against global warming.

If a well known and canny company gets out of a business: well, it devalues the reputations of those still in it, doesn\’t it?

You\’d think that Leggett would welcome the opportunity for his own business to step into the gap in the marketlace really, but he seems to be more worried about the wider message than that.

Wonder how Solar Century is doing?

I\’ve had a quick look for this new report but can\’t find a copy. Let me know if you can:

Britain is responsible for hundreds of millions more tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions than official figures admit, according to a new report that undermines UK claims to lead the world on action against global warming.

The analysis says pollution from aviation, shipping, overseas trade and tourism, which are not measured in the official figures, means that UK carbon consumption has risen significantly over the past decade, and that the government\’s claims to have tackled global warming are an "illusion".

This is, of course, entirely possible. The interesting question is whether it is true or not. Until I see he report I can\’t say really, but this doesn\’t fill me with a great deal of hope:

The new analysis measures the UK\’s consumption of carbon, rather than production. It includes energy consumed to make products and ship them to the UK from countries such as China, as well as the carbon footprint of British citizens abroad.

The first question has to be whether they are deducting the carbon used to manufacture goods and services for export: not to do so while counting the carbon in imports would be a fairly gross form of double counting.

Rather more mindboggling is the idea that my carbon emissions down here in Portugal (actually rather low, almost no heating, no air con, petrol usage of perhaps a tankful every fortnight) should be added to the UK\’s numbers. For if we\’re going to do that then we also have to remove from the UK numbers the emissions from non-UK citizens actually living in the UK. As migration numbers in are higher than those out, this would rather make me think that doing so would reduce total UK emissions, not increase them (plus, of course, the Lisboan banker in the City would have vastly higher emissions than I do down here).

If anyone sees a copy of that report, do let me know would you? Love to see what they\’re actually saying.

Update: I\’ve now got a copy of the paper from the author and no, he doesn\’t make those mistakes. It\’s the journalist who isn\’t clear with what\’s going on.

Measuring emissions on the consumption basis rather than the production basis makes sense (well, it\’s certainly interesting to compare the two methods) and he does use net figures (ie, imports minus exports, UK residents abroad minus non-residents in the UK etc). There\’s an interesting implication of all this though which I\’ll write up a little later, possibly at another place. I\’ve got more here now.

So Congress has passed a climate change bill:

In addition to imposing a 35mpg standard on cars, the bill would require power companies to generate 15% of their energy from renewable sources such as wind or solar power by 2020.

It would encourage the use of energy efficient light bulbs – in effect phasing out incandescent bulbs – pay for training for \’green collar\’ jobs, and offer small monthly stipends to people who ride their bicycles to work. It also calls for tax incentives to encourage the use of ethanol as a motor fuel.

More ethanol? Just when everyone is coming round to recognising that it\’s both howlingly expensive and actually emits more CO2 than it saves? Raising the CAFE standards? Are these fools unaware that it\’s CAFE that created the SUV in the first place? Paying people to ride bikes? The mind boggles.

If you think that political action is going to solve climate change you\’ve really not been paying attention now, have you?

 

 

Sets out his pudding and pie today.

When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist.

Well, no George, I don\’t actually call you a communist. A millennarian socialist perhaps, but not a communist. But I think the best phrase to use to describe you is Luddite.

The government proposes to cut the UK\’s carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. This target is based on a report published in 2000. That report was based on an assessment published in 1995, which drew on scientific papers published a few years earlier. The UK\’s policy, in other words, is based on papers some 15 years old. Our target, which is one of the toughest on earth, bears no relation to current science.

This is indeed all true. As indeed, all of the IPCC\’s work is based upon the SRES, the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios. The economic models which then feed the emissions numbers into those climate models. The SRES is also of the same vintage and now that we\’re 10% of the way through the prediction period we really ought to buck up and revisit it, for it is the very basis upon which the entire concern is built. Indeed, I can think of one insignificant blogger who suggested as much before AR4 came out but due to insignificance, no one listened.

I looked up the global figures for carbon dioxide production in 2000 and divided it by the current population. This gives a baseline figure of 3.58 tonnes of CO2 per person. An 85% cut means that (if the population remains constant) the global output per head should be reduced to 0.537 tonnes by 2050. The UK currently produces 9.6 tonnes per head and the US 23.6 tonnes. Reducing these figures to 0.537 means a 94.4% cut in the UK and a 97.7% cut in the US. But the world population will rise in the same period. If we assume a population of 9 billion, the cuts rise to 95.9% in the UK and 98.3% in the US.

The IPCC figures might also be out of date. In a footnote beneath the table, the panel admits that "emission reductions…might be underestimated due to missing carbon cycle feedbacks". What this means is that the impact of the biosphere\’s response to global warming has not been fully considered. As seawater warms, for example, it releases carbon dioxide. As soil bacteria heat up, they respire more, generating more CO2. As temperatures rise, tropical forests die back, releasing the carbon they contain. These are examples of positive feedbacks. A recent paper (all the references are on my website) estimates that feedbacks account for about 18% of global warming. They are likely to intensify.

All of which is entirely true, as far as it goes. Now, can we also wonder whether the figures might be overstated due to negative feedbacks? There are papers that insist that there are such: greater plant growth for example.

Preventing 2C of warming means stripping carbon dioxide from the air. The necessary technology already exists: the challenge is making it efficient and cheap. Last year Joshuah Stolaroff, who has written a PhD on the subject, sent me some provisional costings, of £256-£458 per tonne of carbon.

Quite possibly. So let\’s go and spend a few tens of millions on looking at the Planktos suggestion, shall we? Seeding the oceans with iron filings. No, I\’m not insisting that it will work, just that we ought to find out, for a trivial cost, don\’t you think?

The Kyoto protocol, whose replacement the Bali meeting will discuss, has failed. Since it was signed, there has been an acceleration in global emissions: the rate of CO2 production exceeds the IPCC\’s worst case and is now growing faster than at any time since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Erm, I\’m not wholly convinced that that is true actually. I\’m reasonably certain (open to correction of course) that we\’re actually following the A1 family. Thus we are still within the IPCC projections (scenarios, call them what you will).

Even the age-old trend of declining energy intensity as economies mature has gone into reverse.

Err, that I\’m entirely certain is incorrect. Carbon intensity (the amount of carbon emissions per unit of GDP) is still declining. As it has been for decades.

Underlying the immediate problem is a much greater one. In a lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineering in May, Professor Rod Smith of Imperial College explained that a growth rate of 3% means economic activity doubles in 23 years. At 10% it takes just seven years. This we knew. But Smith takes it further. With a series of equations he shows that "each successive doubling period consumes as much resource as all the previous doubling periods combined".

Trust an engineer to say something like this. On one level it\’s blindingly obvious (double the economy you double, err, the economy)  on another it\’s insane. For he\’s assuming that the only contribution to a growing economy is  growing resource use. Which, as any random passing economist will tell him, is insane.

GDP (which is what we\’re measuring with our 3% or 10%) is not a measure of resource use. It\’s a measure rather of the efficiency of resource use. More formally, it\’s the value added to the resources being used. It\’s entirely possible to have GDP growth without any increase in resource use at all.

Now, I\’ll agree, there has indeed been increased resource use, as well as increasing efficiency from the onward march of technology (see declining carbon intensity of GDP for example). But to insist that a doubling of GDP necessarily means a doubling of resource use is, I\’m sorry to have to say it, deeply ignorant.

As an example to make this clear. We\’ve got George and his friends at Tinker\’s Bottom (or whatever that commune was called). They have a turnip field. Someone invents a new form of turnip weeding. Excellent. It\’s a more efficient form. It allows either less labour to be used in the fields for the same number of turnips  or more turnips to be grown on the same land with the same labour. In the latter case we have a rise in GDP wth the same resources being deployed. In the former case we have the same GDP with fewer resources being used.

See, there is no direct link (or perhaps there is no "necessary" link) between rising GDP and increased resource use.

In other words, if our economy grows at 3% between now and 2040, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs. Then, between 2040 and 2063, we must double our total consumption again. Reading that paper I realised for the first time what we are up against.

Indeed, we\’re up against economic idiocy.

But I am not advocating despair. We must confront a challenge that is as great and as pressing as the rise of the Axis powers. Had we thrown up our hands then, as many people are tempted to do today, you would be reading this paper in German. Though the war often seemed impossible to win, when the political will was mobilised strange and implausible things began to happen. The US economy was spun round on a dime in 1942 as civilian manufacturing was switched to military production. The state took on greater powers than it had exercised before.

Hmm, the necessary solution is that the State take over the detailed direction and operation of the economy? No wonder people are calling you a communist George.

Debating these matters makes us neither saints nor communists; it shows only that we have understood the science.

Please, crack open an economics textbook would you? That\’s also a science, one that you clearly don\’t understand and also one that you desperately need to.

Mbunting we will go, Mbunting we will go…..

Hearteningly, we know it can be done – our parents and grandparents managed it in the second world war. This useful analogy, explored by Andrew Simms in his book Ecological Debt, demonstrates the critical role of government. In the early 1940s, a dramatic drop in household consumption was achieved – not by relying on the good intentions of individuals (and their ability to act on that coffee-stained pamphlet), but by the government orchestrating a massive propaganda exercise combined with a rationing system and a luxury tax. This will be the stuff of 21st-century politics – something that, right now, all the main political parties are much too scared to admit.

Rationing, planners, naught, naughty household consumption. You can actually hear her licking her lips at the prospect of this, can\’t you?

One note:

time poverty (a much overlooked aspect of environmental sustainability is how much time it requires)

Ooooh, I don\’t think it\’s been over looked. I know of at least one person who has pointed out that recycling costs us more in time alone than the amount saved by recycling.

The Guardian asks the Great and the Good what would be the single most important thing that would beat climate change.

First up, Kofi Annan.

"More money to international bureaucrats."

My, that\’s a surprising answer, isn\’t it?

Win two business class tickets to Dubai at The Guardian.

1) Which major industrial country has not endorsed the Kyoto Treaty?

2) Which major industrial country reduced total emissions last year?

Answers here.

Complete the sentence: "The Kyoto Treaty is vital because….."

It really would help if those telling us all what we should be doing about climate change actually knew what the fuck they were talking about before they did so.

Today\’s example is "The Low Carbon Kid".

The U.K. Government’s 2007 Nuclear Power Consultation accepts estimates that, across its whole life-cycle, nuclear power emits between 7 and 22 g/kWh, but empirical analysis of the energy intensity and carbon emissions at each stage of the nuclear cycle produces much higher figures.

This is shown (for instance) in the Integrated Sustainability Analysis (ISA) by The University of Sydney, which concludes that the greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity of nuclear power varies within the range 10- 130≈60 g/kWh.

 

Now note that the numbers the government are using are (just about) within the range given. The very high estimates (over about 80g) come from some highly dubious studies about likely future ore concentrations…and some decades down the pike at that. But OK, let\’s take the Low Carbon Kid\’s statement as being true. Nuclear, over the cycle, emits CO2 (which we all knew anyway) and it averages 60 g /kWh. Which, according to him, means we can\’t use it.

Umm, what are the emissions from solar? Solar PV: 100 to 280, average 190. So we can\’t use that. Hydro? 4 to 236, average 120. So we can\’t use that either.

Even if we take the very much higher figures for nuclear that he provides…..it\’s still better than hydro or solar.

Kid, want to come back to this when you\’ve caught up on your background reading?

Most, most amusing:

The MoD has admitted that FRES will have to meet rules that cut emissions from cars, vans and lorries.

That is, that the new generation of tanks and armoured vehicles will have to have fuel sipping engines. Perhaps we\’ll stick a Polo engine (90 odd grammes CO2 per km) into a 40 tonne tank? That\’ll help it get around the battlefield, won\’t it?

Compare that with the American M1 Abrams (which a buddy used to drive in the National Guard). 4 gallons a mile he told me.

Could I just point out that insisting on environmentally sound engines for tanks is simply fucking insane?

He\’s right here…

Her one-time transport adviser, Rod Eddington, says that “to seek artificially to constrain the natural growth of air travel, once carbon pricing is fully in place, would pose a significant cost to the UK economy”.

This is the very point of carbon pricing. Once people are paying the external costs of their actions then you need do nothing more. We end up with the socially optimal level of emissions. That\’s actually the point, it\’s a feature, not a bug.

So, this is another body that seems to be not fit for purpose:

Sir John Bourn, head of the NAO, said in the report that the Carbon Trust’s achievement of cutting emissions by up to two million tonnes this year was commendable but was a small one in view of the scale of the challenge ahead.

Mmmmm. 2 million tonnes a year, eh?

The Carbon Trust was created in 2001 as a private company intended to accelerate the adoption of energy efficient technology and the development of a low-carbon economy. It received more than £103 million of public funds in 2006/07.

At a cost of £103 million a year. Hmmm.

So that\’s over £50 a tonne, or some $100 a tonne CO2. Estimates of the social or environmental cost of marginal CO2 emissions range from $2.50 to $85 per tonne. So we\’re spending more to curb emissions than the emissions cost us, making us poorer.

Aren\’t we lucky to have people at the heart of Government dealing with climate change for us?

I admit that I sometimes come across as someone who simply says do nothing about climate change. However, the reality is a little more nuanced than that. Doing the things which clearly and obviously make the world better should clearly and obviously be done. It\’s in hte definitions of "better" that we usually find the problems. However, here\’s a clear example of something which does indeed make it better.

After a three-year effort and untold quantities of water, Chinese firefighters have extinguished a fire that had been burning underground in a coalmine for more than 50 years.

The blaze had consumed as much as 12.5 million tonnes of coal as it raged unchecked beneath the surface and spewed out more than 70,000 tonnes of toxic gases annually since the 1950s.

Firefighters finally beat the fire by boring into the coal seam and flooding it with water and slurry. They then capped the mine shafts to starve the flames of oxygen. As well as staving off further environmental damage, they have saved more than 651 million tonnes of coal, which will be mined to fuel the Chinese economic and industrial juggernaut.

We can argue about whether the coal being used to fuel the economy is a good idea or not but for it to be burning, spewing out CO2 without fueling the economy is clearly wasteful. Very much so in fact:

Thousands of underground coalmine fires are believed to cover an area of 720sq km (280sq miles) in China. They consume as much as 20 million tonnes of high-quality coal and another 200 million tonnes of coal storage each year.

Damage to the environment is as troubling as the economic losses. Scientists believe that the underground fires may produce as much carbon dioxide as about 1 per cent of the total burnt as fossil fuels, although estimates vary.

Some scientists say that the fires could release as much as 360 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — as much as all the cars and light lorries in the United States.

Now let\’s believe those figures for a moment. Let\’s also assume that we\’re trying to design some form of carbon tax or cap and trade system to reuce Co2 emissions. We\’ve got one source here, underground coal fires in China (often a natural process in fact) which is 1% of total fossil fuel emissions. That makes it, I think, something like 0.2 to 0.25 % of all emissions. Clearly, such a large source, we\’d like to bring it into our scheme.

Umm, but how?

There\’s no one we can tax for allowing it to happen. There\’s no one we can tax for failing to stop it happening. There\’s no one we can insist gets a permit for allowing it to happen. And if we allow people to issue permits for having stopped it then what\’s to say that someone won\’t start another to be able to issue more permits?

 

Via, I see this. Stephen Fry. I agree with his basic argument actually, the Type A, B and C, also the similarity with Pascal\’s Wager in part. However, there\’s one part left out, quite an important part.

But if A is wrong and actually there is no threat, then acting as if there was will have what consequences? It will have saved fuel bills all over the world, reduced noxious emissions which, even if one doesn’t believe in global warming, are unpleasant pollutants in anyone’s reckoning, and slowed down the day when we find that the fossil fuels have run out. Action would have given us more time to find alternatives. To be fair, it will also have slowed down world growth and inconvenienced all of us in our personal lives and if A Types do turn to have been wrong they may well owe the world an apology and it’ll be red faces (and a brake in the inexorable rise in world economic growth and fuel mineral use) all round.

But surely that’s a small price to pay for backing a losing horse when the stakes are the planet itself?

The thing is, what\’s at stake if climate change is not in fact true (not actually my own belief) and we go ahead and slow down world growth is not a certain amount of personal inconvenience.

It\’s the continued absolute poverty of billions upon billions of human beings. It\’s the continuation of parents seeing a quarter or a fifth of their children dying before their 5 th birthday, the continuation of under-, mal- and insufficient nutrition, something that blights the lives of and stunts the mental and physical development of hundreds of millions. It\’s the continuation of the peasant lifestyle for for some 2 billion across the world.

We don\’t know any way for these people to either be lifted or lift themselves up out of poverty other than economic growth (the option of sharing what we already have, even if possible, which it isn\’t, would leave us each with £4,000 a year. That\’s the NHS, the education system and perhaps £10 a week, maybe £20, to pay for food, clothes, housing and everything else).

So it isn\’t in fact Pascal\’s Wager at all.

If climate change is true (my belief) we do not have a simple solution. We are still balancing the (I would hope shared) aim of aiding those impoverished billions up out of absolute poverty (depending upon how you define it, less than $1 or $2 a day) with reducing the emissions effects of doing so.

If climate change is not true (not my belief) then we will, by slowing the growth of the world economy, condemn said poor to a perpetuation, perhaps an elongation is better, of that poverty.

So, depending upon the moral value you put on Gaia or poor human beings, we could in fact turn the entire Pascal\’s Wager thing around. If you are worried about absolute poverty and convinced of the moral righteousness of trying to end it, then the thing is to do nothing about climate change, whether it is true or not.

That, of couse, is something of a debating trick. My own view is grow the economy as fast as we can and also mitigate as much as we can without damaging that first order priority.

Worth noting that in the SRES, the economic models that underly the IPCC and thus the entirety of climate change science, the most desirable one of the potential outcomes is in fact the one with the maximal economic growth over the next century. For a given value of "desirable" of course.