Science – Page 74 – a sibilant intake of breath

Level and rate targets for greenhouse gas mitigation

When greenhouse gas mitigation commitments are made, the standard form is to ‘reduce by a certain percentage below the level in a base year by a target year.’ For example, 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. This can be easily converted into a target in absolute emissions. Say, cutting from 1,000 megatonnes (MT) in 1990 to 950 MT in 2020.

I have criticized the process of target-setting before, arguing that the ability of organization to set targets that look ambitious can obscure the absence of plans to actually achieve those reductions. In the end, it makes sense to focus our efforts on cutting emissions, rather than haggle over whether to cut by 65% or 70% by 2050.

Given that targets won’t be vanishing any time soon, I do have a proposal for improving one aspect of them. Rather than expressing targets are just an absolute level of emissions at a set date, they should be expressed as both an absolute level and a rate of reduction to be achieved by a target date. A financial equivalent would be to say: by 2010, I will have paid off 50% of my mortgage, and will be paying more off at a rate of $10,000 per year. What this avoids is the theoretical situation in which a state or other entity limps across the finish line, meeting a 2020 target with no new ideas and initiatives for reaching their 2050 target. This would be akin to a pharmaceutical company that has all its blockbuster drugs go off-patent simultaneously, at the same time as it has no promising new ones in the pipeline (not a hypothetical scenario for a significant number of drug companies right now).

Having a double rather than a single target doesn’t affect the disjoint between commitments and achievements, but it may help foster the kind of mindset required to build a low-carbon society.

Obama and manned spaceflight

Apparently, Barack Obama is thinking of curtailing NASA’s future manned spaceflight activities. Specifically, there has been talk of canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle. If true, the news is welcome. There is very little evidence that ongoing manned programs – including the Space Shuttle and International Space Station – are generating useful science or providing other benefits. There is even greater doubt about the usefulness of returning to the moon.

Space exploration is an activity best undertaken by robots. They are cheaper to send up than humans and more capable. Given the very limited value provided by sending live people into space, it is something the United States should discontinue. At the very least, it is something that should be sharply scaled back while the government works to address America’s severe debts and other problems.

Ranking energy technologies, from wind turbines to corn ethanol

Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, headed up a study to quantitatively evaluate different electricity generation options, taking into consideration their impacts on climate, health, energy security, water supply, land use, wildlife, and more:

The raw energy sources that Jacobson found to be the most promising are, in order, wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric. He recommends against nuclear, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol, which is made of prairie grass. In fact, he found cellulosic ethanol was worse than corn ethanol because it results in more air pollution, requires more land to produce and causes more damage to wildlife.

It is naturally very difficult to assess the validity of any particular research methodology, given uncertainties about matters like the future development of technologies, the evolution of the global economy, the availability of fossil fuels, and so on. Nonetheless, it is good to see serious work being done on comparing the overall appropriateness of different energy technologies. Given the unwillingness of many states to impose serious carbon pricing solutions, and the tendency of governments to ‘pick winners’ when it comes to technologies being subsidized, the more high quality data available, the better.

While I haven’t looked over the study in detail, it does seem like the strongest objections raised against nuclear (which is ranked very badly) aren’t really about the environment or economics. The risk Jacobson highlights most is that of nuclear proliferation, and the dangers associated with making fissile material more widely available. Proponents of a nuclear renaissance probably won’t be keen to see discussion of “the emissions from the burning of cities resulting from nuclear weapons explosions potentially resulting from nuclear energy expansion.”

The entire study was published in Energy & Environmental Science, and can be accessed online.

A few Canadian climate news items

The last couple of days have been an active period in Canadian climate science and policy:

An expedition led by David Barber concluded that the Arctic is likely to be ice-free in the summer, as of 2015.
Environment Canada scientist Don MacIver resigned from the group organizing the next World Climate Congress after the federal government revoked his permission to attend and speak at the ongoing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Poznan, Poland.
Gordon McBean, a prominent Canadian climate scientist, speculated that Environment Canada is not “functioning in a way that is conducive to providing the kind of leadership that we need.”
Chief Phil Fontaine told Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl that: “The actions of Canada in Poland are designed to undermine the rights of indigenous people here and elsewhere.”

Certainly, Canada’s negotiating position has been a problematic one. Many people have pointed out the disjunction between demanding binding emissions reductions from ‘all major emitters’ (including India and China) and stating that Canada has no intention of meeting the target it chose for itself under the Kyoto Protocol.

It is very hard to say that any Canadian government has played a constructive role in the development of international climate policy. Hopefully, that will begin to change as we are dragged reluctantly into the mainstream.

Extreme environmental recklessness

As a metaphor for better understanding the relationship between humanity and nature, some people have used the image of a lifeboat. A more appropriate one is that of a submarine. It captures the complexity of our surroundings, as well as the real danger that messing around with critical systems in an unenlightened way will have dire consequences. Right now, humanity is in the process of setting fires that test the air filtration capabilities of the machine, altering the gas mixture in ways likely to produce unexpected results, and banging away at the outer hull with wrenches, based on the unthinking assumption that our ignorant pounding won’t produce critical leaks.

When one looks at the state of our resource, pollution, and climate policies and actions, one is left with little hope that the future will be a long or pleasant one for humanity. This is not a matter of protecting endangered species or pristine areas of forest; it is about not compromising the basic physical and biological systems that provide the fundamental requirements of human prosperity and existence.

Telephone call authentication

The telephone pranking of Sarah Palin by Montreal DJs demonstrates one kind of failure in the authentication of the origin of telephone calls to powerful people. The other kind of failure was demonstrated when American Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen hung up on President-Elect Obama, believing herself to be the victim of a similar prank.

A much more disturbing example was the threatening phone call made to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, supposedly from India’s foreign minister. The call resulted in Pakistani forces being put on high alert – an action that could easily have provoked counter-responses and escalation on the Indian side.

Authenticating the origin of phone calls would appear to be a challenging business. Being able to rapidly and accurately assess whether a call is genuine could prove extremely important, and yet those two goals are at odds. The more rapidly a decision must be made, the greater the possibility of error. Similarly, the greater the security of the system, the higher the chance a genuine call will be rejected as a fake. For instance, two callers that agreed on a list of passwords with which they could authenticate future calls might find themselves unable to demonstrate their identities in situations where they temporarily did not have access to the list.

Obama’s energy secretary

President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for energy secretary seems impressive: Nobel laureate Steven Chu. He is an experimental physicist, so he will be able to separate scientifically accurate information from bunk. He is also an advocate of alternative and renewable energy.

Since 2004, he was the head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and concentrated his efforts on climate change. Hopefully, the choice reflects a commitment to addressing climate change, despite all the immediate clamour and apparent urgency of economic policy-making.

On an odd side note, about two thirds of the budget of the US Department of Energy is spent on nuclear weapons research and maintenance.

Leadership on climate, viewed in retrospect

A quotation from Joseph Romm highlights the differences between current and future perceptions of leadership quality:

Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st century presidents as failures if the world doesn’t stop catastrophic global warming.

Certainly, future generations forced to endure catastrophic climate change will consider their ancestors to have failed, whether they focus the blame on political leaders or others. I doubt the leaders of the 21st or late 20th century will be able to escape severe condemnation in a world that experiences mean temperature increases of 5°C or more, loses all its glaciers and sea ice, and experiences multi-metre increases in sea level.

Unfortunately, political leaders are conditioned to be a lot more concerned about the judgment of their voters at their next election (or of their generals, the next time the possibility of a coup is raised). The consequences of that may ultimately prove horrifically damaging.

A global response to the threat of asteroids

Climate change is not the only threat to humanity that the United Nations has been called upon to deal with. Another risk that bears consideration is that of the inevitable collisions that will occur between our planet and other big rocks in space. A group called The Association of Space Explorers has raised the issue recently, arguing that the near pass of Asteroid 99942 Apophis in 2036 should prompt some coordinated global thinking on appropriate responses to possible impacts. Their report refers the the Tunguska event of 1908, a three to five megatonne explosion which started fires large enough to engulf New York City. Apophis has a 1-in-45,000 chance of striking the Earth, but would generate a 500 megatonne blast if it did so. On an astronomical timeline, it is inevitable that an object of this magnitude will eventually strike the Earth.

The group has released a fifty page report entitled Asteroid Threats: A Call for Global Response (PDF). It covers both some technological options for deflecting incoming asteroids and decision-making processes through which such plans could be put into action. It makes a strong case that the probability of successful deflection is much higher if action is taken early. An extension of that is the need to take decisions before it is certain a collision will occur: a situation that significantly increases the probability that such a decision will need to be made within the foreseeable future.

Rapid ocean acidification in the Pacific Northwest

Ocean acidification is one of the wildcard elements of climate change. While both global warming and more acidic oceans are the result of increased carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere, the mechanisms are completely independent. The warming occurs because CO2 absorbs some of the long-wave infrared radiation the Earth would otherwise broadcast out into space. The retention of that energy within the atmosphere warms the planet. Acidification occurs because more CO2 in the atmosphere causes increased hydrogen ion concentration in seawater. Both issues would be addressed through stopping net carbon dioxide emissions. In both cases, the magnitude and pacing of future harm is far from certain, even as a function of future emissions timelines.

New research by Professor Timothy Wootton of the University of Chicago has shown that acidification in the Pacific Northwest is taking place much more rapidly than expected; measurements taken off the coast of Washington state show that pH is falling 10 to 20 times faster than projected. One explanation for the discrepancy is the failure of previous models to take into account the effects of biological organisms. The research has also demonstrated that the effects of changes in pH on marine organisms are more pronounced than anticipated.

Compared to terrestrial life, scientific knowledge about the sea is very rudimentary in places. As a consequence, there is good reason to worry about important and unexpected changes arising because of our increasingly acidic oceans. This is all the more reason to keep the carbon that is so densely packed into coal and oil in the ground, rather than allowing it to be released into the atmosphere from our smokestacks, jet engines, and tailpipes.