Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Renewable energy and the budget

Tim Weis, from the Pembina Institute, does a good job of showing why Canada’s most recent budget is not well aligned with the government’s target on renewable energy, namely to move from generating 77% of our energy from non-emitting sources now (mostly hydro and nuclear) to generating over 90% that way by 2020. It’s a laudable goal, but one hardly advanced by the investment of a mere $25 million in renewable energy in the forestry sector, or continued inaction on the regulation of greenhouse gases.

If Canada is serious about becoming a “clean energy superpower,” we need to do better than this.

The Lindzen Fallacy

The Lindzen Fallacy is a sub-genre of the fallacy of petitio principii (begging the question) that I have named after MIT Meteorology Professor and climate change delayer Richard Lindzen. I define it as such:

The assumption that fears about catastrophic or runaway climate change are overblown, based on the assumption that climate change can never truly imperil humanity.

Many people have a deep, intuitive sense that the world wil remain as it is. In particular, that it will continue to provide the basic physical requirements of humanity, such as breathable air, acceptable temperatures, and conditions suitable for continued agriculture.

This perspective is clearly a bit of circular logic: climate change cannot be dangerous, because if it were truly dangerous, it would be dangerous. (Repeat as often as you like.)

Negative feedbacks

Lindzen has told the US Coast Guard Academy that: “Extreme weather events are always present. There’s no evidence it’s getting better, or worse, or changing.” He has suggested that there simply must be negative feedbacks that counter the warming effects of greenhouse gases, possibly through the increased radiation of heat into space, caused by columns of tropical cumulus convection carrying large amounts of heat high into the atmosphere. Satellite data from NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) mission raises serious doubts about this being a negative climate feedback. His perspective on climate sensitivity appears dubious both in relation to climate models and the paleoclimatic record. Lindzen also argued to the Vice President’s Climate Task Force, in the US under the Bush Administration, that action should not be taken to mitigate climate change. Climatologis James Hansen speculates that: “Lindzen’s perspective on climate sensitivity… stems from an idea of a theological or philosophical perspective that he doggedly adheres to. Lindzen is convinced that nature will find ways to cool itself, that negative feedbacks will diminish the effect of climate forcings.” Back in 1999, Hansen responded to Lindzen’s hypotheses about negative feedbacks by encouraging the scientific community to investigate two things: a) whether water vapour feedbacks can be observed, and b) whether the ocean heat content is increasing in line with the model predictions. In the view of climatologist Gavin Schmidt, subsequent evidence has been supportive of the Hansen view and has drawn into question the Lindzen perspective.

Just showing that negative feedbacks exist is not enough to prove that climate change is dangerous, or that we should do nothing about it. As I argued in a discussion with a different climate denier:

What specific mechanism counteracts the infrared absorbing effect of greenhouse gasses? If such an effect exists, why has it automatically been getting stronger as concentrations rise? Also, what proof is there that even if there were such an effect, it would protect us from any amount of increased GHG concentrations. For instance, continued business-as-usual emissions could push concentrations to over 1000 ppm of CO2 equivalent by 2100, compared to 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution and about 383 ppm now. Even if there were negative feedback effects that significantly reduced the total forcing resulting from increased GHG concentrations (that is, lowered climatic sensitivity), it is possible that they would break down when presented with such a significant change.

It is not enough to show that there are one or more negative feedbacks in the climate system. It is necessary to show that they will be sufficient in magnitude and durability to counter the warming caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The fact that concentrations of those and temperatures are still rising suggest that this is not the case in today’s climate, and the existence of massive potential positive feedbacks (Arctic sea ice albedo, permafrost methane, etc) make it dubious for future climates.

Further to that, the point I am raising here is not about the technical means by which Lindzen or anyone else thinks the climate will automatically rebalance in response to changes caused by humanity. Rather, it is to highlight the faulty assumption that such rebalancing can be taken for granted, regardless of the specific means by which it might occur.

The Lindzen Fallacy is dangerous because it offers us false comfort. If mainstream climate science is correct, and a business-as-usual course will produce far more than 2°C of warming by the end of the century, future generations will think back with regret about all those in our time (and before) who falsely believed that the world could never become inhospitable to humans.

A related bit of faulty thinking

The Lindzen fallacy relates to another flawed and potentially dangerous perspective: namely, that humanity is so adaptable that, no matter how much climate changes, humanity will be able to adapt. While it is hard to see how humanity could survive runaway climate change, it is easy to see why someone would think the empirical evidence supports this view. After all, nothing has wiped us out yet. Unfortunately, this logic suffers from the same fault as that of a chicken famously described by Bertrand Russell in The Problems of Philosophy:

And this kind of association is not confined to men; in animals also it is very strong. A horse which has been often driven along a certain road resists the attempt to drive him in a different direction. Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

In short, inductive reasoning is dangerous, whenever there is a chance of something truly unprecedented taking place.

There are good scientific reasons to believe that climate change could be just such a dangerous, unprecedented phenomenon in relation to human beings.

Ocean acidification video

Ocean acidification is one of the least appreciated elements of climate change. As the atmosphere fills with carbon dioxide, some of it dissolves into the oceans. That, in turn, makes the water more acidic. This could become a major threat to organisms that depend on being about to draw calcium from the water to make exoskeletons, such as corals and shelled creatures like crabs, lobsters, sea urchins, and shrimp. The latest research from the Carnegie Institution suggests that the world’s coral reefs will begin to disintegrate before the end of the century, if we keep releasing greenhouse gas pollutants at this rate.

Over at A Few Things Ill Considered, there is a link to a good twenty-minute video explaining the problem.

The only way to keep the oceans from getting ever-more acidic is to stop using the atmosphere as a dump for carbon dioxide pollution. The most important means of limiting that is to stop burning coal, as well as unconventional oil and gas.

While the consequences of acidification for corals may be sad, and may offend our aesthetics, it is worth remembering that all life on the planet depends indirectly on ocean life for survival. We cannot know in advance what consequences there will be for humanity, if we continue to use the atmosphere as a dump and turn the oceans to acid.

2010 SFT – climate and energy

Here are the sections from today’s Speech from the Throne (SFT) that relate to climate and energy:

  • “Our energy resource endowment provides Canada with an unparalleled economic advantage that we must leverage to secure our place as a clean energy superpower and a leader in green job creation. We are the world’s seventh largest crude oil producer with the second largest proven reserves. We are the third largest natural gas producer, the third largest hydroelectric generator, the largest producer of uranium, and by far the largest supplier of energy resources to the world’s largest marketplace. To support responsible development of Canada’s energy and mineral resources, our Government will untangle the daunting maze of regulations that needlessly complicates project approvals, replacing it with simpler, clearer processes that offer improved environmental protection and greater certainty to industry.”
  • “Our Government will continue to invest in clean energy technologies. It will review energy efficiency and emissions-reduction programs to ensure they are effective. And it will position Canada’s nuclear industry to capitalize on the opportunities of the global nuclear renaissance – beginning with the restructuring of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.”
  • “The Joint Review Panel on the Mackenzie Gas Project has completed its report. Our Government will reform the northern regulatory regime to ensure that the region’s resource potential can be developed where commercially viable while ensuring a better process for protecting our environment.”
  • “Nowhere is a commitment to principled policy, backed by action, needed more than in addressing climate change. Our Government has advocated for an agreement that includes all the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters, for that is the only way to actually reduce global emissions. And it has pursued a balanced approach to emissions reduction that recognizes the importance of greening the economy for tomorrow and protecting jobs today.”
  • “The Copenhagen Accord reflects these principles and is fully supported by the Government of Canada. Together with other industrialized countries, Canada will provide funding to help developing economies reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change. Here at home, our Government will continue to take steps to fight climate change by leading the world in clean electricity generation. And recognizing our integrated continental economic links, our Government will work to reduce emissions through the Canada-U.S. Clean Energy Dialogue launched last year with President Obama’s administration.”

None of this is very encouraging. Rather than celebrating our huge fossil fuel reserves, we should be recognizing the risks associated with burning them. Similarly, brushing aside regulations that reduce the pace of fossil fuel exploitation will hardly help us avert catastrophic climate change.

The pledge to “review energy efficiency and emissions-reduction programs to ensure they are effective” is also discouraging. Canada still hasn’t deployed any sort of carbon price: a vital component of an overall climate change response.

How not to use feed-in tariffs

As I mentioned when expressing doubt about Bloom Boxes, many environmentalists assume that distributed generation of electricity is inherently preferable to large-scale generation and transmission. As I have argued in the past, there are good reasons to argue the converse. Micro wind turbines are especially dubious, given that the energy output from turbines increases with the diameter of the blades. Those little rooftop turbines some people install just don’t make sense, unless they live in very remote and windy areas. In a place as northern and cloudy as Britain, home solar photovoltaic arrays may make even less sense, especially if investments in more cost-effective options like improving efficiency of energy use have not yet been made. Saving many kilowatt-hours a day through better insulation beats producing a trickle of electricity, especially given that it is less costly.

In a recent essay, George Monbiot argues that feed-in tariffs for small scale renewables are regressive and a waste of money:

[The government] expects this scheme to save 7m tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2020(5). Assuming, generously, that the rate of installation keeps accelerating, this suggests a saving of around 20m tonnes of CO2 by 2030. The estimated price by then is £8.6bn. This means it’ll cost around £430 to save one tonne of carbon dioxide.

Indeed, if the government is going to provide feed-in tariffs for renewable projects, they must be the sort that can actually make a difference: multi-megawatt run-of-river hydro projects, concentrating solar stations that can put out baseload power, and the like. If the government wants a sound climate policy for homes, it should be tightening building standards, encouraging retrofits, and the like.

The real story on glaciers

There has been a huge amount of talk about the claim in the IPCC’s most recent report that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. That figure is wrong, and came from a dubious source. That said, the state of the world’s glaciers is not encouraging. Germans are putting a reflective cover on their last glacier, to slow down its melting. The global glacier index shows a clear trend of decline. This graph shows the data on all glaciers, 30 reference glaciers of special importance, and a subset of North American glaciers. Not only is the decline clear, but it is clearly accelerating.

Perhaps the biggest news is from Greenland, as described in Alun Anderson’s excellent After the Ice:

If you take into account the rapid collapse of the glaciers, how much water is Greenland adding to the world’s oceans? In 2008, [Caltech glaciologist Eric] Rignot teamed up with scientists from around the world and estimated that the ice sheet had been losing 30 gigatons of ice a year from the 1970s through the 1980s, 97 gigatons in 1996, and between 239 and 305 gigatons in 2007… A gigaton is a billion metric tons, or the weight of a cubic kilometer of water. Add the latest annual figure of 305 gigatons to the oceans and the sea level rises by close to a millimeter. Keep going faster for a century on top of the natural thermal expansion of the oceans as they warm and ice melting elsewhere and that is enough for governments around the world to have to add billions to the cost of coastal defences. The acceleration is deeply worrying. Its cause appears to be those rapidly moving glaciers: the paper shows that they account for between 40 and 80 percent of the ice loss.

I called up Eric Rignot in his laboratory and asked if he was surprised too. He laughed. “Even just a couple of years ago, to state that the ice sheet was losing as much mass as it is, would make me considered a wild man. I think if you had told people in 1990 that I would make a prediction in 2008 that we were going to lose three hundred gigatons per year of ice in Greenland, everybody would have laughed. He is not serious, they would have said. There is no way you can get anything like that.” So what will happen next? “We see acceleration. It’s not a linear trend; it’s more rapid than that. I don’t know where it’s going to go. Ten years ago we thought we knew everything. Now we know we don’t.” (p.233 hardcover)

Once this ice is lost, it won’t be coming back. When bright shiny snow gets replaced with dark ground, the Arctic absorbs even more energy from the sun. Furthermore, the shrubs that replace tundra (and the forests that replace them) are progressively more absorptive of sunlight. Partly, this is because the new vegetation extends above the snow.

It is really hard to see how anybody looking at the data can conclude that glaciers provide support for the contention that climate change is not happening, or not likely to be a problem for human beings.

Bill Gates on nuclear power

Bill Gates has brushed up against climate issues before. First, he apparently considered investing in the oil sands. Later, he invested $4.5 million of his own money in geoengineering research.

Most recently, he gave a talk at the TED conference advocating that developed countries and China cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 (producing an 80% overall reduction), and do so largely on the basis of nuclear power. He thinks fast breeder reactors capable of using U-238 are the way forward, given how much more fuel would be available. His favoured version of breeder reactor is the traveling wave reactor, which is theoretically capable of using little or no enriched uranium.

Emissions equation

Gates argues that the key equation is: (population) X (services) X (energy use for services) X (greenhouse gas intensity of energy). To get down to zero, one of these elements needs to be reduced to that level. He argues that more services are important, especially for the world’s poor. Efficiency, he argues, can be improved quite substantially – perhaps increased three to sixfold, overall. The real work, he argues, needs to be done by cutting the GHG emissions associated with energy production to near zero.

Energy options

Gates argues that the energy systems of the future will need massive scale and high reliability. He singles out five he sees as especially promising, though with significant challenges:

  • Carbon capture and storage (CCS) – hampered by cost, access to suitable sites for injection, and long-term stability of stored gases (the toughest part)
  • Nuclear – with its cost, safety, proliferation, and waste issues
  • Wind
  • Solar photovoltaic
  • Solar thermal – all three limited by land use, cost, transmission requirements, and the need for energy storage to modulate fluctuations in output

Four others he describes as potentially able to make a contribution but decidedly secondary in importance:

  • Tide
  • Geothermal
  • Biomass
  • Fusion

I agree that fusion is a long shot that we cannot count on. I am more optimistic than Gates about the other three. Pumped tidal power could provide some of the energy storage he sees as so important. Enhanced geothermal looks like it has a lot of promise. Finally, combined with CCS, burning biomass offers us a mechanism to actually draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and bury it.

The big picture

Cutting from the world’s current global emissions of about 26 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of CO2 down to zero will require enormous activity. Quite possibly, nuclear will need to be part of that, despite its many flaws. That said, we need to be hedging all of our bets. One big accident could put people off nuclear, or fast breeder designs could continue to prove impractical. We need to be deploying options like huge concentrating solar farms in deserts and massive wind installations at the same time.

It is also worth noting that Gates’ assumptions about the rate at which emissions must be reduced are more lenient than those like James Hansen who are more concerned about when massive positive feedbacks will be kicked off. If the people who say we need to stabilize at 350 ppm are correct, Gates’ prescription of a 20% cut by 2020 and an 80% cut by 2050 will be inadequate to prevent catastrophic or runaway climate change.

Gates talks about this a bit during the questions. There are two risks: that his assumptions about the speed with which emissions must be cut are too lenient, or that his beliefs about the pace of technological development and deployment are overly optimistic. He thinks geoengineering could “buy us twenty or thirty years to get our act together.” Here’s hoping we never have to test whether that view is accurate.

Best books of 2009

Back in 2007, I put up a post listing my five favourite books of the year. Somehow, I missed 2008. Despite that, I am still happy to assert that the 2007 list includes some of the best books I have ever read.

Among the books I read in 2009, these are the five I most emphatically recommend:

It was a tough choice.

Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood would be a natural successor to Oryx and Crake back in 2008. Unfortunately, the better book of the two remains the original.

If I had read Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed soon after it had come out, it might have been one of my choices. That said, it is a compelling and important book.

Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution certainly deserves a nod. For anyone who wants a comprehensible account of why we know as much about evolution as we do, this is the book to read.

You can read all my book reviews here.

I may eventually cook up a retroactive 2008 list.

BoingBoing stands up to a SLAPP

It’s nice to see the initiators of a frivolous or abusive lawsuit get their comeuppance. In this case, I am referring to the failed attempt by MagicJack to silence criticism through a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) against BoingBoing and blogger Rob Beschizza. Too often, faced by the high costs of going to court and the danger of losing, people who had been legitimately expressing an honestly held opinion (often one protected by constitutional law) are bullied into withdrawing their statement, or even paying a settlement. This is a particular danger in states that have terrible libel laws, like the United Kingdom. It is sad but understandable when firms take the safe course – such as when SuicideGirls when through their bout of unprovoked self-censorship. When someone has the guts to fight back, they deserve public recognition and support.

As such, kudos to BoingBoing and Mr. Beschizza. The $50,000 in legal costs they recovered aren’t enough for them to break even, but their example may have public value in deterring some future SLAPPs. There are strong positive externalities that result when organizations like BoingBoing take the courageous course and succeed. Such outcomes help to remind others that free expression is a vital aspect of free and democratic societies, and that attempts to suppress it through legal threats are inappropriate and anti-democratic. They also make it clear to potential filers of SLAPPs that they may end up with even more public embarrassment at the end of the process than they started out with.