The Climatic Research Unit’s leaked emails

160 megabytes worth of emails – ostensibly from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – have apparently been obtained by hackers and posted online. Being emails between colleagues, they are written in a less formal style than public documents. Some blogs and news sources critical of the mainstream scientific view are hailing the emails as proof of poor practice within the scientific community, or evidence that the consensus view on climate change is incorrect or an intentional fabrication. Various climate change blogs have put up responses to the whole event and to those allegations:

Firstly, it isn’t clear that these emails contain evidence of any wrongdoing. Secondly, it hasn’t been established whether the documents are all genuine and unaltered. Thirdly, and most importantly, the consensus on anthropogenic climate change is bigger than any one specific institution. It is based on multiple lines of evidence that support the same conclusions – something that cannot be said about alternative hypotheses, such as that nothing is happening or that observed warming is not mostly being caused by greenhouse gasses.

RealClimate probably has the best analysis on the significance of all this:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

That said, you can be sure that climate change delayers and deniers will be milking these emails for years – using them to continue to cast doubt on the strength of the scientific consensus about climate change. Thankfully, it does seem as though the world’s political elites are increasingly aware of the strength of the scientific consensus and the incoherence of the views of those who deny it.

[Update: 3 December 2009] Nature has posted an editorial about this whole incident. It makes reference to two open archives of online climate data – maintained by the IPCC (http://www.ipcc-data.org) and the US National Climatic Data Center (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html).

[Update: 14 December 2009] Newsweek has printed a comprehensive evaluation of the significance of the CRU emails, written by Jess Henig of FactCheck.org. It concludes that the emails sometimes “show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive” but that the emails do not undermine the IPCC consensus, and that: “E-mails being cited as “smoking guns” have been misrepresented.”

[Update: 20 June 2010] Wrap-up video on the CRU emails

Email and two-monitor setups

Concrete underpass, Ottawa

One thing I have discovered at work is how pleasant it is to have a monitor devoted exclusively to email. For me, email has become the central clearinghouse for virtually all information and action items. To remind myself of something, I send an email from my phone. I also track emails by applying ‘@Pending’ and ‘@Waiting For’ labels to them. Email can also be searched instantly, unlike having to search separately through blog posts, comments, wiki entries, document files, etc.

Having a second monitor exclusively for email is qualitatively different from having a window open, or even having a second desktop devoted to email use. This is because it is glanceable – you can check almost instantly and with minimal distraction whether anything new has come up. It is also easy to shift information from one screen to another: making reference to a document or website in a message, or adding information from an email to a website, calendar, etc. With a dedicated monitor, email never gets buried or left unnoticed for too long.

Much as I appreciate the 24″ screen on my iMac, I suspect I will eventually go for a two-monitor setup at home. Arguably, such a setup is a mark of excess. That being said, when your entire life is coordinated through computers, it is perhaps an acceptable area in which to devote resources (including a share of your direct and embedded greenhouse gas emissions).

Carbon Rationing Action Groups (CRAGs)

For those who despair of the possibility of reforming society wholesale to deal with climate change, a community-level alternative lies in the Carbon Rationing Action Groups (CRAGs) that have been established in the UK and elsewhere. The movement describes itself as such:

We form local groups to support and encourage one another in reducing our carbon footprints towards a sustainable and equitable level. We measure our progress against our carbon allowances. We share knowledge and skills in lower carbon living, raise awareness, and promote practical action in the wider community.

On the one hand, participation in such a group is probably preferable to living a conventional life, from a greenhouse gas emissions standpoint. On the other, this sort of turning inward is poorly suited to dealing with a global problem. We don’t each have our own little atmosphere or our own little climate. The future welfare of the world depends on convincing the mass of people to take action, either actively (by making choices motivated by concern about climate) or by passively responding to new incentives arising from public policies like carbon taxes.

Open thread: climate change and growth

Corktown Footbridge, Ottawa

One of the biggest disagreements that exists among those who believe that action is required to mitigate anthropogenic climate change is between those who see it as a problem that can be managed within existing economic systems and those who argue that it requires profoundly different ones.

The first view can be encapsulated as ‘climate change as an engineering problem.’ We just need to give people the right incentives, and enact policies to change over the energy basis of society to one that is carbon-neutral. Readily available tools for doing this include Pigouvian taxes: those meant to incorporate the societal harms associated with various actions into the prices paid by those who do them. Examples include carbon taxes, road taxes, etc.

The second view is more like ‘climate change as a symptom of the problem of capitalism.’ Indian environmentalist Sunita Narain expresses it well:

All technofixes [for climate change] – biofuels, GM crops or nuclear power – will create the next generation of crisis, because they ignore the fundamental problems of capitalism as a system that ignores injustice and promotes inequality.

In this view, changes made within existing economic systems will never be able to go far enough to produce a sustainable society.

Deciding how to act, there are risks on both sides. The engineering approach will face less resistance, meaning it can be rolled out faster, with a higher probability of getting the key elements in place soon. It may not, however, have the power required to solve the problem. The radical approach may ultimately have more capacity to effect societal change, but it would almost certainly take longer, and there is a significant risk that the new society forged wouldn’t even achieve the objective of climate stability. Capitalism’s major ideological competitor – communism – certainly wasn’t environmentally benign, or effective at managing environmental issues.

Can we cut human emissions to zero, thus stabilizing climate, while retaining the basic elements of the present economic system? If so, what mechanisms are the most important to put in place. If not, what sort of system do we need? One that is more democratic, or more authoritarian? One that alters the relations between humans and the planet how?

The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial

A number of recent articles have provided interesting commentary on the upcoming trial of alleged 9-11 plotter Khalid Shheikh Mohammed in an American federal court:

Given everything that has already happened, it is very hard to see how this can have a good outcome. The trial cannot be fair – since there have been so many rights and due process violations, and no impartial jury can be found – and the precedent seems highly likely to make bad law.

Slate contributor David Feige is probably right in summing up the likely outcome:

In the end, KSM will be convicted and America will declare the case a great victory for process, openness, and ordinary criminal procedure. Bringing KSM to trial in New York will still be far better than any of the available alternatives. But the toll his torture and imprisonment has already taken, and the price the bad law his defense will create will exact, will become part of the folly of our post-9/11 madness.

Given the situation they inherited, the Obama administration may not be able to do any better. Still, it is worrisome to think what the future consequences of this may be.

[Update: 12 February 2010] Due to the opposition he has encountered, Obama has abandoned plans to give KSM a civilian trial in New York. Disappointing.

Casting doubt on fusion power

Metal fence in front of electrical station

Looking at a diagram of a proposed fusion reactor, it is easy to get the false sense that such technologies will provide clean and inexpensive power within a few decades: fusing tritium and deuterium to produce heat, while generating new fuel from lithium using the neutrons produced.

A post on The Oil Drum enumerates the many technical challenges associated with achieving that aim, going so far as to say that dreams about fusion power should be ‘ended’ as a consequence. Written by Dr. Michael Dittmar, a researcher with the Institute of Particle Physics of ETH Zurich, the article enumerates a number of significant problems:

  • Large amounts of tritium are required and various problems exist with it as a material and a fuel.
  • Materials from which reactor walls can be made are unavailable, and far beyond anything that is available.
  • Many obstacles exist to breeding tritium from Lithium-6.
  • Similarly, obstacles exist to extracting tritium from the lithium blanket and delivering it in a pure form into the chamber where fusion is occurring.
  • Reactors may not be able to breed enough tritium to keep themselves going, much less provide excess tritium for new facilities.

While this may not be cause for declaring fusion a complete non-starter, it is at least a useful way to temper the assumption that fusion power will emerge any decade now, providing a pain-free solution to the problems of climate change and fossil fuel depletion.

The article also lists problems with fission reactors that breed plutonium or use thorium as fuel: both options mooted in response to concerns about limited availability of uranium for use in conventional reactors. All this is a reminder that – while renewables may be costly and have intermittency problems to manage – there is every reason to believe they can be practically deployed starting immediately.

Anthropogenic climate change: evidence from isotopic ratios

Back in 2003, Prosenjit Ghosh and Willi Brand described one of the more clever ways in which the link between fossil fuel combustion and the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been demonstrated. In their article “Stable isotope ratio mass spectrometry in global climate change research” (PDF), they discuss how the ratio of isotopes of carbon in the atmosphere can be used to identify the sources of atmospheric CO2. Their work was published in 2003, in the International Journal of Mass Spectrometry.

By tracking the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 in the atmosphere, the distinctive imprint of fossil fuel combustion can be identified. This is really just confirmation of the inevitable chemical fact that burning coal, oil, and natural gas produces CO2. Nevertheless, it is nice to have an independent line of evidence showing that human activities really are the major cause behind observed increases in the atmospheric concentration of CO2.

The IPCC, climate, and consensus

Leaf and branches

In addition to sketching out the borders of reasonable debate on climate change, Mike Hulme has written some intelligent things on scientific consensus, as embodied in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports:

[T]he use of consensus is merely one (structured) way of distilling evidence – evidence which might be somewhat ambiguous, incomplete or contradictory or where there is latitude for genuine differences of interpretation – into an overall agreed statement on an issue of scientific or public importance.

He also quotes an intelligent comment from a volume by P.N. Edwards and S.H. Schneider:

We have discussed earlier… why it may often be necessary for science to use consensus processes as a way of consolidating knowledge so that it can be useful for policy. Consensus knowledge, by construction, will always allow experts to disagree, with knowledgeable opinion existing at either tail of the distribution of views… Such scientific consensus is not ultimate ‘truth’ and, on occasion, may turn out to be wrong. But the alternatives to the IPCC style of consensus-building are even less likely to command widespread authority within the worlds of science and policy. ‘Vastly better [than random solicitation of views] is the work of groups like the IPCC… which although slow, deliberative, sometimes elitist and occasionally dominated by strong personalities, are nonetheless the best representation of the scientific community’s current general opinion.’

The big problem, from a policy perspective, is the number of politically influential agents who either continue to deny that potentially dangerous anthropogenic climate change is taking place, or who argue for various reasons that nothing ought to be done about it. The fact that these people don’t have views that are reconcilable with the best available evidence doesn’t mean they aren’t able to influence the public policy debate.

The boundaries of reasonable climate change debate

In his well-argued book Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Mike Hulme does a good job of establishing the boundaries of the legitimate debate about climate change and what we ought to do about it:

Many of the disagreements that we observe are not really disputes about the evidence upon which our scientific knowledge of climate change is founded. We don’t disagree about the physical theory of absorption of greenhouse gases demonstrated by John Tyndall, about the thermometer readings first collected from around the world by Guy Callendar, or about the possibility of non-linear instabilities in the oceans articulated by Wally Broecker. We disagree about science because we have different understandings of the relationship of scientific evidence to other things: to what we may regard as ultimate ‘truth,’ to the ways in which we relate uncertainty to risk, and to what people believe to be the legitimate role of knowledge in policy making.

That’s as good a concise summary as I’ve seen. If the people you are debating accept that temperatures are rising, that greenhouse gasses cause warming, and the the climate system may react to human emissions in deeply disagreeable ways, you are within the realm where reasonable discussions can occur. By contrast, if your partners in discussion assert that climate is not changing, greenhouse gasses have nothing to do with it, and that any change will surely be benevolent and gradual… well… here be dragons.

“Coal is the enemy of the human race”

Primary colours on wooden crates

The above wording is blogger David Roberts‘ attempt to summarize the relationship between humanity and coal in the 21st century. While many countries rely on it to produce electrical power and fuel other sorts of industry, there are huge negative externalities associated with it as a power source. These include:

  • Environmental destruction and contamination from coal mining.
  • Human health impacts from coal mining
  • Air pollutant emissions from coal burning, including particulate matter and mercury
  • Greenhouse gas emissions from coal burning
  • Toxic coal ash

A report from the US National Research Council found that American coal plants produce $62 billion per year in negative externalities, before climate impacts are taken into account.

Climate change is the biggest danger associated with coal. Firstly, coal produces a lot of CO2 per unit of useful energy. Secondly, coal reserves are so enormous that burning a significant fraction of what is left would essentially guarantee more than 2°C of mean warming globally, the level scientists and policy-makers have generally accepted as ‘dangerous.’

If it can prove safe, cheap, and effective, there may be a future for carbon capture and storage (CCS). Until that is demonstrated, we cannot assume that there is a future for coal as an energy source. Even before you take the climate impacts into consideration, the total costs are unfavourable compared to greener and renewable alternatives. Once climate change is factored in, the case against non-CCS coal becomes conclusive.

[16 February 2010] Now that I have a fuller understanding of the importance of not burning coal and unconventional fossil fuels, because of their cumulative climatic impact, I have launched a group blog on the topic: BuryCoal.com. Please consider having a look or contributing.