Science – Page 72 – a sibilant intake of breath

The fossil fuel industry has no long-term future

Oil, gas, and coal are all – at best – transitional sources of energy, moving us from muscle power to truly renewable non-muscle sources. To see why, there are two basic facts that must be appreciated:

Only finite quantities of fossil fuels exist on Earth.
Burning all the world’s coal, oil, and gas would cause catastrophic climate change.

It is as though there are two hard barriers to fossil fuel use out there. What we don’t know is how far away they are. The first fact is self-evident, though it is more nuanced to say that there is a finite quantity of fossil fuel that can be extracted for any particular level of price or effort. If oil cost $10,000 a barrel, we would be able to find some pretty unusual geological sources for it. The second fact arises from the basics of climatic science. We have already increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses from about 290 parts per million (ppm) to 385 ppm. Continuing to run our economy as we have been (bigger every year, and largely powered by coal, oil, and gas), that figure will be approaching 1000 ppm by the end of the century. Based on the climatic sensitivity estimates of the IPCC and Met Office, that would likely produce 5.5 to 7.1 ° C of warming by 2100, with more to follow afterwards. That would be utterly catastrophic for humanity, quite possibly threatening our ability to endure as a species. We will either stop using fossil fuels, or we will die in the process of trying to burn them all. Due to lags in the climate system, we just might be able to burn them all and leave it to another generation to suffer the fatal consequences.

A useful analogy is that of a factory worker taking methamphetamines to stay awake. This is essentially what all of society is doing with fossil fuels: giving ourselves an unsustainable jolt that gets things moving faster. Of course, extended and heavy use of amphetamines will eventually kill you. If that lethal toxic effect is likely to be achieved before you run out of pills, you are presented with a barrier just as impassable and just as real as the difficulty of their eventual and total depletion.

As such, those who invest in fossil fuel infrastructure and equipment and processes that depend on fossil fuels need to appreciate that this is an industry that will need to peak and then be wound down, even though oil, gas, and coal remain in the ground to be extracted. Greater efficiency of use and technologies like carbon capture and storage can somewhat extend the timeline across which that will need to occur. All the same, a world with a stable climate will be a world that does not use fossil fuels for energy. If we want that stable climate to be one compatible with human welfare, civilization, and prosperity, we must hope that it is established sooner rather than later.

[Update: 8 March 2010]. BuryCoal.com is a site dedicated to making the case for leaving coal, along with unconventional oil and gas, underground.

What it means to stabilize climate

This speech, given to the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, contains a basic error about the nature of climate stabilization. In part, it reads:

Never losing sight of the ultimate long-term objective of the exercise – stabilizing the level of man-made greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere at non-dangerous levels not in 2020, or even 2030, but 4 decades hence in 2050. Recognizing that we are running a marathon, not a sprint; and acting accordingly. (emphasis in original)

As stated, this is a very ambitious goal. Stabilizing the global concentration of greenhouse gasses by 2050 would mean reaching the point of zero net human emissions in that year. That would require either the total elimination of fossil fuel use and deforestation, or the deployment of technologies that capture greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere and sequester them.

Right now, greenhouse gas concentrations are about 385 parts per million (ppm), and rising at 2 ppm per year. Even if they kept up that rate between now and 2050, concentrations would ‘only’ rise to 469 ppm – a figure not enormously higher than the commonly cited target of 450 ppm. Of course, it is unlikely that emissions per year would stay completely flat until 2050, then drop instantly to zero.

Given the other contents of the speech (such as affirming that 80% of North American electricity will come from oil and gas in 2020), I don’t think the literal meaning of the passage quoted is the one intended. I fear, instead, that rather than talking about stabilizing concentrations of greenhouse gasses, the speaker may have been talking about stabilizing emissions. If so, this is a disastrous suggestion. If we are to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, global emissions almost certainly need to peak between 2015 and 2020, declining sharply after that.

A simple analogy to personal debt easily explains the difference between concentration and emission stabilization. If you are going into debt because you are spending more each year than you earn, stabilizing your level of spending is not going to get you out of debt. It will just leave you in the position where your level of debt increases by the same amount every year. Stabilizing your debt requires that your expenditures match your income every year. While your level of wealth is lower than it was when you started, it is still stable. So too it will be when humanity reaches the point of zero net greenhouse gas emissions: what we already put in the atmosphere will stay there for hundreds of thousands of years, but at least we will no longer be adding to it.

Armchair iceberg tracking

In July 2008, a 27 square kilometer iceberg calved from the Petermann Glacier: between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Scientists from the CCGS Amundsen placed radio beacons on the iceberg, which has subsequently shifted position and lost some volume. You can actually track the beacon online. The larger piece remains 22 square kilometers in area, and thus may pose a risk to the offshore oil industry in spring of 2009.

Apparently, with an iceberg of this size normal ‘iceberg management’ techniques cannot be employed. You just have to hope it doesn’t run into something.

Polar bears and climate change

From the media coverage, it seems that attitudes at Canada’s recent polar bear summit clustered around two positions: that climate change is a profound threat to the species, and that the species has been doing well in recent times. While a lot of the coverage is focused on supposedly different kinds of knowledge, I am not sure if there is much factual disagreement here. The issue isn’t the current size of the polar bear population, or how it compares with the size a few decades ago. The issue is whether a major threat to the species exists and can be anticipated, as well as how polar bear populations ought to be managed in the next while.

One quote from Harry Flaherty, chair of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, seems rather telling:

[Researchers and environmental groups] are using the polar bear as a tool, a tool to fight climate change. They shouldn’t do that. The polar bear will survive. It has been surviving for thousands of years.

This sits uneasily beside the knowledge that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are already higher than they have been in more than 650,000 years and they are on track to become much higher still. In short, because of climate change, the experience of the last few thousand years may not be very useful for projecting the characteristics of the time ahead. This is especially true in the Arctic, given how the rate of climatic change there is so much higher than elsewhere.

On the matter of polar bear hunting, the appropriate course of action is less clear. Hunting in a way that does not, in and of itself, threaten polar bear populations might be considered sustainable. At the same time, it might be viewed as just another stress on a population that will be severely threatened by climate change. Given the amount of climate change already locked into the planetary system, it does seem quite plausible that the polar ice will be gone in the summertime well before 2100 and that all of Greenland may melt over the course of hundreds or thousands or years. I don’t know whether polar bears would be able to survive in such circumstances. If not, the issue of how many of them are to be hunted in the next few decades isn’t terribly important. It seems a bit like making an effort to ration food on the Titanic.

If we want to save polar bears, we will need to make an extremely aggressive effort to stabilize climate. Meeting the UNFCCC criterion of “avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system” would not be enough, since polar bears are likely to be deeply threatened by a level of overall change that doesn’t meet most people’s interpretations of that standard.

Fishing for krill

On several occasions, I have discussed the concept of ‘fishing down’ through marine food webs: starting with the top predator species, like tuna, and moving to smaller and smaller creatures as the big ones are depleted. In the waters around Antarctica, this process has come very close to reaching its logical extreme. Fishing for krill has become a big business.

Krill are shrimp-like marine invertebrates that make up a significant portion of the world’s zooplankton: the tiny creatures that eat phytoplankton algae. They, in turn, are eaten by all manner of other creatures, ranging up to large whales. Fishing them extensively risks knocking a whole tier out of the food web, with unknown but potentially severe consequences for all other forms of life in the ecosystem.

The krill that are caught are processed for fatty acids, used to make medicine, and fed to farmed fish. In particular, they are useful for giving farmed salmon more of a red colour, in contrast to the sickly looking pale pink much of farm salmon takes on. The current annual catch is estimated to be between 150 – 200,000 tonnes: much of that taken from the waters around Antarctica. Through the use of new technology, a planned new ship (the FV Saga Sea) will apparently be capable of collecting 120,000 tonnes annually. That is nearly one 1000th of the low estimate for the total global biomass of krill, and more such ships are planned.

While it may be that fishing for krill at this scale doesn’t pose a danger to marine ecosystems, it is worth noting that we have no scientific basis for being confident of that. An experiment is simply being performed in unregulated waters, which will have unknown future consequences. As with so many other instances of humanity’s engagement with the natural world, one cannot shake the sense that we are being awfully reckless.

Environmentalism: a faith or a fad?

If you want to seriously annoy environmentalists like me, there are two assertions that will rarely fail:

Environmentalism is a new religion.
Environmentalism is just a fad.

The first view generally arises from fundamental confusion on the part of the person making the assertion. Since they are used to seeing arguments about the morality of individual action presented in religious terms, they assume that anything that involves such arguments must be religious. The faulty syllogism is roughly: religion tries to tell me how to live, environmentalism tries to tell me how to live, therefore environmentalism is religion. This isn’t the case – both because the syllogism is fundamentally invalid, and because there are key differences in the basis for religion and environmentalism, respectively. The second argument does have some evidence to support it, but there is an overwhelming case for hoping it proves untrue in the long term.

Starting with the religion argument, the first step is to establish the nature of religion. The key element of ‘faith’ is a willingness to accept something without empirical evidence: whether it is the existence of a god, the existing of karma, or whatever. Religious beliefs of this kind cannot be empirically disproved. By contrast, virtually all claims made by environmentalists are dependent on their empirical correctness for strength. If mercury didn’t actually poison people, we would be wrong for avoiding it on that basis. The only non-empirical claims behind environmentalism are about what has value. If we didn’t value human life or the natural world, we would have no reason to be concerned about pollution or climate change, and we would have no reason to take action to prevent them.

Every environmental position and argument is open to as much empirical and logical scrutiny anyone cares to apply to it. Everyone is free to perform whatever experiments they like and, if those experiments produce interesting or unexpected results that can be reproduced by others, they can expect them to eventually become part of the body of scientific knowledge. Likewise, people are free to argue about the moral and logical premises of the ‘what should we value’ debate.

Moving on to the ‘fad’ argument, it is certainly the case that public interest in the environment waxes and wanes. Sometimes, catastrophic events draw special attention to the issue. At other times, people find their attention drawn to other happenings. That being said, I think Denis Hayes is right to argue that: “If environment is a fad, it’s going to be our last fad.” Right now, humanity is living with the following assumptions at least implicitly made: (a) the planet can support six billion of us, with more being added daily (b) at least for most of those people, material consumption can continue to rise at several percent per year. Even if we came up with some miracle machine to solve climate change tomorrow, some new issue would arise as the ratio between the total available mass and energy on the planet and the fraction used by human beings continued to fall.

We live in a finite world and, in at least some cases, we are starting to brush against the physical limitations that exist. For that simple reason, environmentalism is important and likely to be enduring. Thankfully, unlike religions which tend to get tangled up in their own history (witness all those trying to prove that the Bible is somehow historically accurate), environmentalism is generally scientifically grounded. As such, its content and prescriptions have the potential to improve as our understanding of the world deepens. For that, we should all be thankful.

Book on communicating climate science

Over at RealClimate, they are encouraging people to read a free book on communicating climate science: Communicating on Climate Change: An Essential Resource for Journalists, Scientists, and Educators. It was written by Bud Ward for the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting. It is available online as a PDF, and printed copies are available by mail for US$8.00.

Given how much public communication on climate change is of low quality, we should hope that good books on this topic get the attention of authors and editors.

The Economist on the dire state of the world’s oceans

A recent issue of The Economist features a leader and a special report on the state of the world’s oceans. As with a lot of their environmental coverage, it sits awkwardly beside the rest of their analysis. It is astonishing that the newspaper can argue that “the mass extinction, however remote, that should be concentrating minds is that of mankind” while not doing a lot more to advocate effective action. Like most of the policy-making community, they haven’t really internalized the fact that climate change is an issue of over-riding importance, and that nothing else can be durably achieved until it has been addressed. In addition to highlighting the dangers of climate change, their coverage includes discussion of how overfising risks rendering sharks and tuna extinct; how the oceans would require tens of thousands of years to recover from the pollution already released into them; how the Greenland is “on track” to melt completely, raising sea levels by seven metres; and how acidification, pollution, and climate change threaten to eliminate coral reefs.

Clearly, it is one thing to have accepted the collective judgment of the scientific community. It is quite another to have fully incorporated the consequences of that judgment into your structure of beliefs and behaviour.

A new Antarctic ice core

A new research station in Antarctica, being constructed by a Chinese expedition 4,093 metres above sea level, could significantly increase the length of the paloeclimatic record available to scientists. The longest previous Antarctic ice core – discussed in Richard Alley’s book The Two Mile Time Machine – provided information on temperatures and atmospheric composition going back more than 800,000 years. Given RADAR images suggesting that the ice at the new site is more than 3,000 metres deep (and the slow rate of snowfall at this location), it could lengthen that record to as much as 1.5 million years.

Having as much paleoclimatic data as possible is very important for understanding the climate system. It allows more scope for unravelling the interconnections between different feedback cycles within the climate, as well as more data on how the system responded to various kinds of forcings: from changes in the orbital characteristics of the Earth to volcanic eruptions.

While the basic physics of climate change are extremely well understood (just as the flammable properties of gasoline are very well understood), the full workings of the machine in which it is taking place remain mysterious (as the characteristics of a complex gasoline-powered machine might be). This is especially true when something unprecedented is altering the dynamics of that system. Regrettably, one piece of data that cannot be extracted from past climatic records is precisely what consequences the human emission of greenhouse gasses will have. That said, by shedding light on the history and dynamics of the climate system, better paleoclimatic data could play an important role in evolving the climatic models that provide our most informed projections.

The station from which the new core will be drilled should be finished by the end of this month.

‘Third hand smoke’

In the last couple of days, I have seen a number of news sources talking about ‘third hand smoke.’ This refers to the blindingly obvious fact that smokers stink, as do their clothes, homes, furniture, cars, etc. Before the UK smoking ban, just spending a night in a pub would leave your clothes smelling appreciably of tobacco for several days (and often several washes) afterwards. Anyone who has spent a lot of time riding in buses or airplanes will be able to tell you that a heavy smoker can usually be identified from a couple of seats away, even if they don’t happen to be smoking during the voyage. It is similarly obvious that those breathing the rank odour of stale tobacco are probably inhaling some of the toxins that come along with it, as well.

I maintain that smoking is one of the most vile habits a person can have (as well as being a singularly idiotic affront against your own health). Hopefully, the increasingly society-wide rejection of the practice will spread, become more firmly entrenched, and eventually emerge as the worldwide norm.