Month: August 2008

International emissions trading

In many quarters, there is considerable resistance to the idea of international carbon trading. Some people characterize it as shipping money abroad for no reason, or the buying of ‘Hot Air.’ While there have certainly been problems with the implementation of carbon trading so far, the principle is intellectually sound. It could serve as a strong mechanism for reducing the total costs of climate change mitigation.

To understand why, consider that the major purpose of international carbon trading is to make tonnes of greenhouse gas emission reductions into a commodity. As such, their economic characteristics would be akin to those of other internationally traded commodities. Consider, for instance, an island state that requires copper for various purposes. It is technically possible to acquire copper on their territory, but the costs of doing so are enormous. Their copper reserves are dispersed and of poor quality, making the cost per tonne of finished copper excessive. Provided that the cost of buying copper internationally is lower than that of producing it domestically, the sensible thing to do is to buy the stuff on the world market. If the situation changes somehow (international prices rise, or foreign prices fall), the economically optimal choice may change as well. In the case of copper, this is immediately clear to virtually everyone. States that can produce copper more cheaply relative to other things sell copper internationally while those in the converse situation buy it. Both states with low-cost and those with high-cost copper benefit from this arrangement.

When it comes to carbon emissions, there are still comparative advantages that differ between states. This creates the possibility of positive sum trade: an exchange where both sides end up happier than they would be without trading. A relatively wealthy state that has already eliminated all the greenhouse gas emissions that can be easily forgone can pay a developing state to cut their own emissions. The buying state spends less than they would for producing the reduction domestically, and the receiving state gets the economic incentive to mitigate.

To reach this point, a few critical things are needed. First, for emission reductions to be tradable as a commodity, they must be measurable and verifiable. They differ from other commodities in that it is much more challenging to measure the tonne of CO2 a factory does not produce than the tonne of carbon that it does. That said, the difficulty is surmountable. We know how much greenhouse gas is produced by using different fuels in different ways. We also know how much is produced through different kinds of industrial production, such as cement manufacture. All that is required is the infrastructure and personnel to quantify and ensure reductions.

A trickier problem is that of additionality. If Country X pays Country Y $Z to build a natural gas power plant that will produce ten million fewer tonnes of CO2 than a coal power plant, it can only legitimately bank those tonnes if it was only the payment that motivated the choice. If Country Y actually chose the gas plant because coal plants pollute terribly and coal prices have been rising, Country X did not produce as many ‘additional’ reductions as intended. As with simple measurement, additionality is a practical problem that can be addressed through scientific and economic tools.

Developing and deploying those kinds of tools, so as to further the emergence of a robust and effective international carbon market, should be an excellent way to cut total human greenhouse gas emissions in a relatively rapid and low-cost way.

Abbreviation confusion

Signal that you spend too much time thinking about climate change: you see a teenager wearing a shirt that says ‘THC’ and assume he is expressing concern about the integrity of the thermohaline circulation.

Incidentally, it is worth remembering the difference between acronyms (which use the first letters in a phrase to produce a word you can speak) and abbreviations, which are spoken letter by letter. As such, ‘self contained underwater breathing apparatus’ becomes the acronym SCUBA while ‘United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’ becomes the abbreviation UNFCCC.

Farewell to Emily

Emily is off today: wisely fleeing the city of Ottawa before the slide towards winter accelerates. Back in May, she was charged with assessing the ‘coolness’ of Ottawa. Her very concise conclusions are now available.

Her departure is much to be regretted, though I would surely choose the same course myself if not bound here by unique employment opportunities. In any case, some photos of the summer are available online: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII.

Climate change impacts, ranking severity

These are summer days and the blogging is slow. In the spirit of audience participation, here is a quick poll.

Which three of the following climate change impacts do you expect to be the most severe? Please answer first for 2050 and again for 2100. You can interpret ‘severity’ however you like: economic cost, number of deaths, total damage to ecosystems, etc.

  1. Sea level rise
  2. Droughts and floods
  3. Extreme weather events
  4. Ocean acidification
  5. Ecosystem changes (such as invasive species)
  6. Effects on pathogens (such as malaria)
  7. Agricultural impacts
  8. Impacts on fresh water quantity and quality
  9. Other (please specify)

Clearly, there is some overlap between the options. There are also second-order effects to be considered, like the impact of agricultural changes on inter- and intra-state conflict.

Portable artificial kidneys

As dialysis equipment demonstrates, the kidney may be the first vital organ that humanity manages to replicate with a good deal of success. That is especially true if prototype portable equipment proves effective. The present iteration of the ‘automated, wearable artificial kidney’ looks fairly bulky and inconvenient, but it is not inconceivable that implantable artificial replacement kidneys may eventually be possible.

Backing up GMail

A recent Slashdot post raised a good question: Google Has All My Data – How Do I Back It Up?

I am a pretty determined Google user myself. While I have abandoned Blogger for WordPress and never much liked Picasa, I do have a pretty packed Google Account: Alerts, Analytics, Book Search, Calendar, Custom Search, Docs, GMail, Groups, iGoogle, Talk, Web History, and Webmaster Tools are all used to differing degrees. The bolded items, I would definitely mourn if lost.

Backing up most data fed to Google is probably best done by retaining the copy you had before you uploaded one to their system. That works well enough in the case of photos and MS Office documents. It doesn’t work with emails, however. This is annoying, because they are probably the most important and irreplaceable thing most people have entrusted to Google.

Thankfully, backing up your GMail is a relatively simple process. Start on a computer that (a) you already have a regime for backing up itself and which (b) has adequate hard drive space to store all your Google Mail. Then, follow these steps:

  1. Log into GMail
  2. Click ‘Settings’
  3. Click ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’
  4. Click the button beside ‘Enable POP for all mail’
  5. Configure a mail application like Outlook or Thunderbird to access the POP version of your GMail account.
  6. Watch all your messages move from Google’s ‘cloud’ to your hard drive

My GMail archive is an extremely valuable collection of data, greatly improved by the ability to search through it with ease. That functionality doesn’t carry over to the backup, but I do feel more at ease knowing that in the event of one of their data centres burning down (with no working backup tapes to recover from), I won’t have lost the messages forever.

Virophage discovery

A while ago, I mentioned a virus that infects a fungus and in turn allows a grass to live in hot soils. Recently, scientists discovered a 21-gene virus that infects larger viruses. The virus, called ‘Sputnik,’ infects a larger virus which in turn infects amoebas.

It just goes to show how complex the lives of microscopic organisms are. It also adds additional fuel to the debate about whether viruses themselves are actually alive, or whether they can only be considered alive after they have been incorporated into the nucleus of a host cell.

The media and climate change ‘dissent’

This Ron Rosenbaum article in Slate argues that it is inappropriate for journalists to portray “the anthropogenic theory of global warming” as an undisputed fact. It cites the importance of considering dissenting views, and asserts that the history of science shows that a consensus held by most of the scientific community can be wrong. While there is some value to both arguments, I think they are weaker than the counter-arguments, in this case.

Starting with dissent, we need to appreciate the character of the consensus on climate change and the character of opposition to it. As discussed here before, there are areas of greater and lesser certainty, when it comes to climate change. What is absolutely certain is that we are increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and that, in turn, causes more energy from the sun to be absorbed. The precise consequences of that overall warming are not known with certainty, but we do know enough to have very good reason to be worried. Arguably, those dissenting from this view are a combination of the self-interested (industrial groups reliant upon heavy emissions, conservative ideologues opposed to government regulation) and conspiracy theorists. The doubts of legitimate scientists establish the areas of uncertainty within climatic science, including questions about the strength of feedback mechanisms, the effects of planetary warming on regional weather, and so forth.

On the matter of scientific consensus, the article argues that a “lone dissenting voice of that crazy guy in the Swiss patent office” overthrew the Newtonian conception of gravity. This is a relatively absurd claim. Firstly, relativistic physics essentially includes Newtonian physics as a special case, in situations where velocities are not close to the speed of light and massive objects are not close at hand. Secondly, the process through which Relativity became an established scientific theory was largely focused on the collection of empirical evidence (demonstrations of gravitational lensing, for instance) and the refinement of the theory within the scientific community. Newtonian physics, for its part, is still completely adequate for planning space voyages within our solar system – the basic relationships posited within it are close to correct in most cases. If we have done so well with our climate models, we have engineered them effectively indeed.

Relations between science and the media will always be challenging. The media generally doesn’t have the time, expertise, or interest to deal with nuance. It also lacks an audience interested in cautious and non-confrontational assessments of fact. In short, the kind of story that is demanded of the media is one in which the scientific process and the character of scientific conclusions cannot always be presented effectively. Moderating some of the incentives to distort that are inherent to the contemporary practice of journalism is thus an undertaking with some merit. It is not as though we should forbid any mention of opposition to our general understanding of climate change; rather, journalists should strive to make clear that the evidence on one side is overwhelmingly stronger than that on the other. A defendant who was seen to stab someone in the middle of the field at the Super Bowl, viewed by millions of people, surely has the right to make a defence at his trial. He does not have the right to media coverage that gives equal weight to claims that he had nothing to do with the death.

Temperature and extreme weather

A new article in Science provides observational evidence of the link between rising temperatures and extreme weather events:

These observations reveal a distinct link between rainfall extremes and temperature, with heavy rain events increasing during warm periods and decreasing during cold periods. Furthermore, the observed amplification of rainfall extremes is found to be larger than predicted by models, implying that projections of future changes in rainfall extremes due to anthropogenic global warming may be underestimated.

Of all the impacts of climate change, extreme weather seems especially likely to help spur mitigation action, especially when that weather occurs in rich states. Reasons for that include the visibility and newsworthiness of floods, droughts, hurricanes, and so forth. Another major factor is the importance of the insurance industry, especially insofar as their professional estimations of risk affect the cost and feasibility of different projects. That is, so long as policy-makers do not establish incentives for risky behaviour.