Category: Politics

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

Climate change: the solar hypothesis

There are some who assert that the global warming that has been observed on all continents is caused by changes in the output of the sun. This hypothesis does not stand up to scrutiny in either the short or the long-term, as made clear in James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren as well as published papers of his, including “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?.” It is important to remember that what follows does not come from climate models, but rather from data on the paleoclimatic history of the planet, collected from ice and ocean cores and other sources.

The 12-year solar cycle

The sun dims and brightens across a twelve year cycle. While each square metre of the planet absorbs about 240 watts of sunlight averaged over day and night, the recorded magnitude of these cycles is about 0.2 watts. Not all forcings have the same effect on the climate. Taking the forcing caused by carbon dioxide (CO2) as the baseline, it can be calculated that the solar cycle forcing has an effective strength of between 0.2 and 0.4 watts. The climate forcing due to the 1750-2000 CO2 increase is about 1.5 watts. Other human-caused changes, such as adding methane, nitrous oxide, CFCs, and ozone to the atmosphere, make the total greenhouse gas forcing about 3 watts.

Each year, we are increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about 2 parts per million (ppm). That equates to an effective forcing of 0.03 watts. As such, seven years of carbon dioxide emissions at the current level would offset the cooling effect of the sun being at the lowest ebb of its cycle. As a consequence, human-made climate change now overwhelms this natural cycle.

Long-term trends

Longer-term data also shows how greenhouse gases are more important to the climate than changes in solar output. The geological era spanning the last 65 million years is called the Cenozoic. Over that time, the sun’s output has increased by 0.4%. This corresponds to an increase of about 1 watt since the dinosaurs died out. Over this time period, the planet has actually cooled considerably: with mean global temperature more than 8°C higher at the end of the time of the dinosaurs. This, despite the increased solar output.

Over this timespan, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has ranged from between 1,000 and 2,000 ppm during those hot years of the early Cenozoic and as little as 170ppm during recent ice ages. This range corresponds to a climate forcing of about 12 watts: at least ten times more than the forcings from the sun and from changes in the configuration of continents. As Hansen says: “It follows that changing carbon dioxide is the immediate cause of the large climate swings over the last 65 million years.”

The following diagram deserves consideration:

It shows temperatures from the Cenozoic: data that was obtained by examining the shells of microscopic animals called foraminifera. It shows the slow decline in mean global temperature over the whole span, as well as evidence that abrupt changes in temperature are possible.

What we’re doing now

One thing to consider is that if we keep increasing our greenhouse gas emissions, we will push carbon dioxide concentrations way above pre-industrial levels and into the range that existed at the beginning of the Cenozoic. While the cooling trend that we are living at the end of happened over tens of millions of years, temperature increases of well over 4°C could occur by the end of the century, with further warming beyond. While life has had ages to adapt to climate change as it was occurring before humanity, we are presiding over a spike in temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations.

This graph shows CO2 concentrations from the last 400,000 years, as measured in ice core samples:

Atmospheric concentration of CO2

Keeping all that in mind, it seems very sensible to be working hard to keep the tip of that spike from getting too high. We should be worrying about our emissions, not blaming the warming we have observed on the sun and moving on.

Why we cannot wait for climate science to be completely settled

To those who say that we should just wait and see how the climate changes, without taking action to reduce our emissions, I offer the following analogy:

To assume the best possible outcome, and to make plans only on that basis, is akin to the United States assuming they would be ‘greeted as liberators’ in Iraq. Even if things had unfolded that way, it would have been irresponsible to make plans only on that basis. If they had drawn up contingency plans, and taken pre-emptive actions, on the grounds that serious opposition was possible, nobody would have thought that behaviour inappropriate, even if the outcome ended up being better than feared.

Arguing that we should wait for the science to be completely settled means waiting until climate change has actually taken place. Given the complexity of the climate system, and the fact that we only have one planet to work with, there is no way we can ever be 100% confident that our models and projections are correct. Therefore, to delay action until we have certainty is to delay action until it can no longer have any effect. It is akin to starting your contingency planning long after the war has ended.

Bright-Sided

From Oprah to New Age philosophy, ‘positive thinking’ has become a hugely influential movement in business circles, the religious sphere, in pop medicine, and elsewhere. In Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich makes the case that the movement is poorly thought out and damaging. Her arguments are convincing, especially when it comes to situations where positive thinking is used to blame the victim when they suffer as the result of developments beyond their control: be it the movement towards corporate downsizing (which corresponded with the rise of motivational speakers in the workplace) or the unjustified assertion that cancer patients are responsible for their own worsening or recovery, on the basis of the mental attitudes they maintain.

Ehrenreich highlights how relentless optimism leads to dangerous groupthink, in which risks are downplayed and those who raise legitimate worries are sidelined. She provides ample evidence that these factors played a role in the inflation of the global house price bubble, and have continued to have important economic and political effects. These include the weird state of deluded isolation in which society’s richest people now reside. She also spends considerable time discussing the warped theology in which god is seen as a sort of mail-order service, happy to send you whatever good things (houses, cars, promotions) you are able to ‘manifest’ for yourself, simply by fervently desiring them.

Positive thinking involves a weird reversal, when it comes to dealing with risks. They cease to be external (concern that your company might fire you to improve their short-term profitability) and become entirely internal (fears about what your state of mind might do to you). It is also tied fundamentally to the notion that happiness is not most important in itself, but rather insofar as it influences events: “Nothing underscores the lingering Calvinism of positive psychology more than this need to put happiness to work – as a means to health and achievement, or what the positive thinkers call ‘success.'” The former tendency puts people in danger of worrying about the wrong things, while the latter strategy puts them at risk of seeking to achieve particular outcomes in nonsensical ways. That is especially dangerous when it comes to making big purchases on credit, firm in your belief that the universe will provide you with the means of dealing with it later.

Ehrenreich’s points are well-taken, though the book can be a bit tedious to read at times. There are also some partial contradictions. It is repeatedly asserted that there is no medical evidence that thinking positively improves health outcomes, yet it is taken as plausible that George Beecher was able to speed his demise through negative thinking. In the course of her analysis on the medical evidence, Ehrenreich claims to be “not in a position to evaluate” evidence that those with a positive outlook may have some protection against heart disease, but is seemingly happy to evaluate research on other illnesses that confirms her hypothesis.

All told, Ehrenreich makes important points about the poisonous institutional culture that accompanies an excessive focus on positivism – and the view that individuals are almost entirely responsible for what happens to them. Her concluding call for ‘realistic’ thinking is certainly appropriate enough, though perhaps she does not go far enough in suggesting how the empire of positive thinking she has mapped the outlines of might be deconstructed. As the world continues to grapple with real problems, magical thinking cannot be a substitute for dispassionate analysis, risk management, and contingency planning. How we get from our world to one more like that, however, remains mysterious.

Risk and reward

Depressing fact: apparently, one third of global banks still offer multi-year guaranteed bonuses to new hires. It is fantastically absurd that they are still able to convince shareholders that such payments are justified by the need to acquire ‘top talent.’

One cannot escape the feeling that banks and bankers have come out of the credit crunch having successfully bilked taxpayers out of billions of dollars, while avoiding reforms that would make future crises more rare or less severe.

Four instruments, to understand aerosols

One of the enduring uncertainties about climate change is the importance of aerosols. Their chemistry and effect on the climate is complex. Some of them reflect sunlight immediately back into space, having a net cooling effect on the planet; others (like black carbon have a warming effect. Some aerosols interact with one another, and with other chemicals in the atmosphere, in ways that affect the climate. All of this ought to be better understood, if we want to understand how human activities (and natural phenomena) are affecting the climate, and so that we can prioritize on what sorts of emissions to reduce.

I was surprised to learn, from James Hansen’s recent book, Storms of My Grandchildren, that we have known since the 1970s what sort of instruments would be necessary to understand how aerosols affect the climate system, including whether their net effect is a warming or a cooling one. We need:

  1. A polarimeter, measuring the polarization of sunlight reflected off of aerosols
  2. An interferometer, measuring the infrared radiation being emitted by the Earth
  3. An instrument to measure the sun’s irradiance
  4. An instrument to measure aerosols and gases in the highest layers of Earth’s atmosphere, by observing the sun shining through them at sunlight and sunset.

The first two would have to be on the same small satellite. The other two would be on small satellites of their own. Together, these would allow us to determine the total forcing effect of aerosols on the climate.

The fact that we apparently aren’t rushing to get these devices built and launched has to be considered a massive failure of intelligence, far beyond the WMD-tomfoolery that preceded the Iraq war. These four instruments could be producing key data to let us understand our climate, at a time when we are running a dangerous global experiment on how it responds to our pollution.

Getting this data must become an international priority.

Overreacting to fears of terrorism

Writing for Salon.com, pilot Patrick Smith makes some excellent points about the breathless paranoia we now display about terrorism:

What has become of us? Are we really in such a confused and panicked state that a person haplessly walking through the wrong door can disrupt air travel nationwide, resulting in mass evacuations and long delays? “The terrorists have won” is one of those waggish catch-alls that normally annoy me, but all too often it seems that way. Our reactionary, self-defeating behavior has put much at stake — our time, our tax dollars and our liberties.

…

In fact, over the five-year span between 1985 and 1989 we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks against commercial planes or airports. In addition to those above were the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772, the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people, and the saga of TWA Flight 847.

…

Here in this proclaimed new “age of terrorism,” we act as if the clock began ticking on Sept. 11, 2001. In truth we’ve been dealing with this stuff for decades. Not only in the 1980s, but throughout the ’60s and ’70s as well. Acts of piracy and sabotage are far fewer today.

Imagine the Karachi attack happening tomorrow. Imagine TWA 847 happening tomorrow. Imagine six successful terror attacks against commercial aviation in a five-year span. The airline industry would be paralyzed, the populace frozen in abject fear. It would be a catastrophe of epic proportion — of wall-to-wall coverage and, dare I suggest, the summary surrender of important civil liberties.

What is it about us, as a nation, that has made us so unable to remember, and unable to cope?

The message is similar to that of the excellent essay “Milksop Nation,” which won an Economist essay contest in 2002. Namely, that we do a poor job individually of assessing risks. We obsess over rare risks in which malicious actors want to do us harm, and we downplay common risks that are enormously more likely to injure or kill us. Worse, our political systems amplify our fears to the point of absurdity.

One thing we certainly need are people with the clear-sightedness and bravery to point out that we are fearful about the wrong things, and that we have real, pressing problems that we ought to be concentrating on instead.

Fight censorship, join TOR

Google’s decision to challenge the Chinese government on their censorship policy is a bold one. It remains to be seen whether it will end up doing more harm or good. In the mean time, there is at least one thing that ordinary computer users can do in order to fight censorship around the world: set up a TOR relay. TOR is a project that allows for anonymous internet browsing through a system called onion routing. It is maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

By setting up a relay, you allow people whose internet access is censored by their governments to access sites that would otherwise be blocked; you also facilitate important democratic processes, such as the actions of whistleblowers. The process of installation is relatively simple, and you can easily cap how much of your bandwidth is given over to the TOR network. By sharing a bit of your bandwidth, you could be helping out human rights activists in China or Myanmar, or just helping some ordinary computer user circumvent annoying restrictions imposed from above. Systems like TOR help the internet to retain some of its vast potential, even in the face of fearful governments that want to control it or shut it down.

One thing to watch out for is that acting as a webserver may be forbidden by your internet service provider (ISP). I checked with mine (TekSavvy), and they have no objections to customers running any kind of webserver, provided they stay within their bandwidth limits.

People interested in this sort of thing may also want to learn about Project Honeypot – a distributed mechanism for fighting spammers.

My fantasy climate change policy

Even once you have reached agreement that there must be a cost associated with dumping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, there are countless ways in which you can choose to do so. Many different instruments could be combined in many different ways.

Some argue that the simplest policy that corrects for the market failure is the best. I think there are multiple interlinked market failures, which require multiple policies to correct them.

If I had the power to dictate a climate policy for a developed state, it would look something like this:

1) Ban coal

Coal has no place in our energy future, given the terrible climatic effects that would result from burning the world’s massive reserves of the stuff. As such, no new coal-fired facilities should be allowed. Existing facilities should be subjected to the same carbon pricing mechanism as the rest of the economy, with no refunds, exemptions, or special treatment.

If someone wants to build a coal-fired facility that captures and stores its greenhouse gas emissions, they can be free to do so, provided:

  1. The firm pays the full cost for the equipment;
  2. They demonstrate that the technology is safe and environmentally effective;
  3. They continue to pay the market price for any greenhouse gas emissions not captured.

In practical terms, the demand for subsidies may be impossible to resist. At the very least, they should be directed towards research and demonstration projects, not towards commercial ventures.

2) Set a hard cap

This could be done in either of two ways. You could calculate the quantity of emissions likely to be produced by burning a unit of any particular fuel, then cap how much can be extracted or imported. Alternatively, you could require permits for the emission of greenhouse gases and only sell a set number.

Some intermediate system could also be possible: with fuels capped upstream and certain emission-generating activities capped at the point of emission (such as cement production). The important thing is that the cap should include all activities that occur within a country, and which lead to greenhouse gas emissions. This would also include things like land use changes, as well as the emissions embedded in imports. The latter should be addressed with a carbon tariff applied at the border. This could be waived in the case of imports from states that have robust carbon pricing systems of their own.

To get the level for the cap, you would start by choosing an overall temperature target (such as keeping the increase to less than 2°C), then work out a fair way to distribute the global cap that generates between nations. Some kind of contraction and convergence approach would likely be the most fair, with emissions in rich states falling soonest and fastest, but with everyone eventually reaching carbon neutrality.

3) Auction all permits

The revenue from the production/import/emission permits should be used in several ways. Firstly, some should be recycled back to taxpayers. In the event that refunds are granted for children, the level of the benefit should be capped at two per family, as an incentive to constrain population growth in emissions-intensive societies.

Some of the income should be used for basic research into low-carbon technologies, including renewable forms of energy, air capture of greenhouse gases, etc. Some could also be used for feed-in tariffs, to encourage the deployment of zero-carbon forms of energy.

4) Establish rising floor prices for transportation fuels

Fossil fuels were never going to last forever, and volatility in their prices leads to inefficiency and other problems.

As such, the government should set minimum prices for transportation fuels including diesel and gasoline. These should rise predictably over time. In the event that market prices are above the minimum, market prices would prevail. If those fall below the mandated minimum, the government would collect the difference.

The funds that accumulated would go into a fund from which payments would be made to all citizens, without ever drawing down the principle. That way, future generations will benefit from the bounty of fossil fuels, even if they live long after we’ve stopped using them.

5) Coordinate with other policies

Even all together, these approaches might not be sufficient to drive society aggressively in the direction of carbon neutrality. They could be supplemented with additional policies, as the effect of those already enacted becomes clearer. Also, the rate at which the overall cap is tightened could be increased or decreased, as necessitated by improved understanding of climate science or economics. Other policies and incentive schemes may well be necessary to ensure that the costs of complying with the declining cap do not become excessive. These would include support for research and international cooperation on zero-carbon energy projects.

Other existing policies that promote high emissions should be scrapped, such as subsidies to fossil fuel producers or emissions-intensive industries. Climate change must also be taken into account when making policy in areas like urban and transportation planning.

It would also be appropriate to participate in international efforts in areas like climate change adaptation and preventing deforestation.

India’s booming airlines

There are few elements of global climate change policy trickier than the relationship between climate change and development. Developing states insist that they have a right to get rich as fast as they can, with no particular heed paid to their greenhouse gas emissions. The figures for air travel in India show one small part of this:

According to the Airports Authority of India, the total number of domestic and international passengers was 10.7 million in October 2009, up 23% on the same month a year earlier.

Aircraft movements climbed by almost 59% in the same period.

And yet, if billions of people in the developing world follow a high-carbon path to development, the eventual emergence of catastrophic climate change is all but assured.

The future of human prosperity depends fundamentally on a stable climate. Achieving that end will require the recognition in developing states that they cannot pursue a high-carbon form of development indefinitely. To do so would be to grant a bit more wealth to those working now, while undermining the basis of prosperity for all future generations. At the same time, developed states need to show that it is politically and economically possible to have a society with rapidly falling emissions.

Pro-photography protest in London

Yesterday’s pro-photography protest in London was rather encouraging. Amateur and professional photographers came together to protest the restrictions and harassment of photographers that has developed in response to concerns about terrorism. The protest follows a European Court of Human Rights ruling that police don’t have the right to indiscriminately search people, just because they are taking photos. The “I’m a photographer, not a terrorist” campaign has objected specifically to police using Section 44 of the UK’s Terrorism Act to harass photographers. High-profile recent incidents include “7 armed police detaining an award winning architectural photographer in the City of London, the arrest of a press photographer covering campaigning santas at City Airport and the stop and search of a BBC photographer at St Paul’s Cathedral and many others.”

In addition to creating art and a historical record, photography has an important role to play in keeping security entities accountable for their actions. As I have said before, photography is an important mechanism for maintaining oversight over the police and private security forces. Restrictions on photograpy allow for power to be used with less oversight, probably leading to more incidents of abuse and fewer cases in which abusers are punished. Indeed, it has been shown repeatedly that only photo or video evidence is sufficient to produce convictions for police brutality. In short, restricting photography makes us less safe.

Both casual photographers and those with a more substantial connection to the practice should be aware of their rights as photographers, and be willing to stand up when people try to bully them out of taking pictures. The British campaign has produced a pocket sized card outlining what rights individuals have when stopped by a police officer. I have been meaning to print off and laminate a card with the relevant sections of Canadian law, for use next time someone insists that taking photos in public spaces is forbidden.