Category: Science

New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world

Misunderstanding Antarctic science

The other day, a friend of mine directed me towards a blog post by Chris Mounsey that does an excellent job of misunderstanding the recent scientific study that found a discernable influence from anthropogenic warming in Antarctica. The study used 100 years of Arctic data, 50 years of Antarctic data, and four computer models to demonstrate that the observations that have been made in those regions are consistent with models in which human emissions are causing mean global warming, and inconsistent with models that include only natural forcings.

As in a great many other cases, the blog author confuses different types of certainty about climatic science. For example, while we definitely know that greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere cause more of the sun’s energy to be absorbed by the Earth, it isn’t clear what effect the inter-relationships between temperature, soil moisture, evaporation, clouds, and reflected sunlight are. The climate system includes a massive number of elements that have complex inter-relations. When it is reported that a scientific study “help[ed] reveal what drives climate change,” the claim being made is that our understanding of that whole complex system has been deepened.

The blog post questions whether warming is happening (it is), whether it might not be a good thing (above a certain level, extremely unlikely), and whether this is just a repeat of the Medieval Warm Period (it isn’t).

In general, it follows the same “toss everything into the pot” strategy found in many pieces of writing that question the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. I have previously written about the inconsistency of simultaneously denying warming, denying that warming is caused by humans, and denying that warming is bad. This blog also connects to another argument made previously on this site. The blog is written by a self-identified libertarian. The need to disprove the fact that all sorts of human economic activities have important consequences on third parties is essential if climate change is not to render that entire political philosophy nonsensical.

Hard Choices

Edited by Harold Coward and Andrew Weaver, Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada is a mixed bag. The chapters vary considerably in their usefulness, as well as their contemporary relevance. Clearly, a lot has changed since the book was published in 2004. Topics covered include climatic science, projected impacts in Canada, carbon sinks, technology, economics, adaptation, legal issues, the Kyoto Protocol, and the ethics of climate change. Of those, the science section has probably held up best.

The most problematic chapters are those on technology and economics. The technology chapter criticizes renewables, boosts nuclear, and promotes the ‘hydrogen economy’ without a great deal of strong analysis or argumentation. For instance, it argues that the costs of nuclear power are almost fully internalized: a very strange position to take given the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of subsidies, loan guarantees, and liability restrictions granted to nuclear operators around the world. The chapter also singularly fails to address the many problems with hydrogen as a fuel. Finally, the assertion that crippling the world economy would be “as deadly as any climate change scenario” underscores the degree to which this volume fails in general to consider the real but unknown probability of a catastrophic outcome that threatens civilization itself.

The economics chapter basically asserts that since the Kyoto Protocol would cost money and not stop climate change in and of itself, we should simply focus on adaptation. It ignores both the fact that international action on problems like climate change (ozone, acid raid, etc) needs to be built up progressively, starting with instruments not capable of single-handedly addressing the problem. Having the international community jump instantly from no legal constraints on greenhouse gas emissions to a regime that controls all emissions in an effective way is asking far too much. The chapter also fails to take seriously the possibility of catastrophic outcomes from unchecked warming. Not all levels of change can be adapted to.

The chapter on ethics is very strange. After a brief secular portion focused on which entities are owed moral duties, it becomes a survey of world religions, arguing that each one sees selfishness as wrong. From this, it is concluded that Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc all yield an ethical obligation to fight climate change. A more practical and serious consideration of who owes what to who on account of climate change would have been a lot more useful. Even in terms of comparative religion, the chapter feels rather sloppy. Just because you can point to a few statements about selflessness in the doctrine of many different faiths does not mean they would all come to the same moral position on climate change. All kinds of real moral questions persist: from how much risk it is allowable to impose on future generations, to who should pay the costs of adapting to the additional warming already locked into the climatic system. The chapter fails to shed light on issues of this type.

In the end, I don’t think there is anything in Hard Choices that isn’t said in a better or more up-to-date way somewhere else. For those seeking to educate themselves on climate change, this book is not a good investment of time.

Pick your poison: nuclear or ‘clean coal’

One issue raised at the conference I recently attended was this: both Ontario and Germany are in the position where they want to phase out coal-fired power plants. In addition, Germany has decided to phase out nuclear power, whereas Ontario is strongly considering maintaining and expanding existing facilities. In order to phase out nuclear without continuing to rely on dirty coal, one presenter asserted that carbon capture and storage (CCS) on coal plants is the only feasible and politically acceptable option.

Assuming for the moment that maintaining adequate energy supplies in the near-term requires one or the other, which is the more suitable choice? With nuclear, the risks are largely known and the biggest uncertainties relate to costs. With CCS, there are huge uncertainties about cost, alongside big uncertainties about safety, scale, and feasibility. The worst you get with nuclear is a lot of wasted taxpayer money, more nuclear proliferation, contaminated sites, and some accidents. The worst you get by relying on CCS is wasted money, accidents, proliferation of coal plants, and the extension of the high-carbon phase in whatever countries bet wrongly that it will work.

To me, if the choice is exclusively between nuclear fission and CCS right now, it seems that nuclear is the most risk-averse option. That being said, the calculation may change a great deal when you factor in opportunities for conserving power, using it more efficiently, and generating it using renewables. That won’t make CCS more attractive, relative to nuclear, but it may mean we are presented with a less stark choice than was assumed at the outset of this discussion.

Defending the Netherlands from flooding

Among rich states, none is more threatened by sea level rise than the Netherlands. Their plans are reflective of this. Following the terrible flood of 1953, they began their Delta Works scheme for protection against storms. Now, they are contemplating how to modify that system to deal with at least 200 years of rising sea levels.

As such, they are planning to deal with 0.5 to 1 metre of sea level rise by 2100, and by 2 to 4 metres by 2200. The scheme to deal with this is expected to cost 1.2 to 1.6 billion Euros a year, between now and 2050. One can only speculate about the human and material costs of extending such defences to all the areas around the world that would be affected by such climatic changes.

Feynman on bad science

A serious section concludes Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, in which he denounces various forms of bad science. He talks about the pseudoscience of UFOs and reflexology, but also about problems with the work done by credible scientists, such as the bias towards publishing positive results and ignoring negative or inconclusive ones. He raises issues about the quality of school textbooks and the ethics of those who publish and select them. He stresses the importance of retesting your assumptions, properly calibrating new equipment, and providing detailed information on the sources of error you think exist within your experiments. He also provides an important example of scientists fudging their numbers so as not to contradict a famous result.

At the very end, he gives some advice to those who are called upon to provide scientific advice to governments:

I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.

…

So I have just one wish for you — the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.

It is a warning that is especially pertinent today – particularly where science and politics collide in relation to environmental issues. The temptation to manipulate the science can be extreme. At the same time, the importance of transmitting scientific conclusions in a way that is both accurate and comprehensible is considerable. Maintaining scientific integrity while also providing accurate and applicable advice is a key ethical and professional requirement for today’s scientists, as well as those on the political and bureaucratic side who work with them.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

This collection of Richard Feynman‘s autobiographical anecdotes is both charming and amusing. More than anything else, it conveys what a remarkable character he is, and what an astonishing variety of things he managed to do. Few Nobel Prize winning physicists can claim to have had a one man art show, learned to pick locks and crack military safes, played the drums for a percussion-only ballet, wrangled cryptographically with the mail censors at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, spent the summer after finishing his undergraduate degree as ‘chief research chemist of the Metaplast Corporation,’ juggled, deciphered Mayan hieroglyphs, defended a topless bar in court, and fixed radios while he was still a small child. One can never tell if Feynman is being entirely honest and accurate – largely because the character he draws for himself is so uncomplicated and appealing – but one is certainly grateful for the stories.

Indeed, the book provides a nice counterargument to the division of labour. While economics and societal organization have revealed specialization in knowledge and production to be highly efficient overall, Feynman demonstrates the degree to which variety is remarkable and wonderful for the individual. The question the reader is left with is whether they can experience anything comparable without Feynman’s own extensive genius and peculiar character.

Martin Hellman on the risk of nuclear war

Despite the end of the Cold War, there remains some possibility of a major nuclear exchange between some combination of those world powers with more than a couple of hundred nuclear weapons. Such an outcome could arise through accident or miscalculation, unauthorized launch, or simply through the progressive stressing of the situation, in a manner akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, of the Able Archer exercise in 1983.

Martin Hellman – one of the three civilian inventors of public key cryptography – has written a piece describing some statistical ways through which we could contemplate the risk of global nuclear war, as well as evaluate it relative to other threats. As a near-term nightmare scenario, the massive use of nuclear weapons surely exceeds the threat posed by climate change: climatic change across a decade is highly abrupt, whereas the time between the decision to use nuclear weapons and the generation of mass casualties would likely be only minutes.

Based on the frequency with which near misses have taken place, Hellman argues that the perpetuation of the current global nuclear situation carries a 1% per year risk of mass nuclear exchange. He estimates that this exceeds the risk of living beside a nuclear power plant by 1000 to 1 and has a clever rhetorical device for making that concrete:

Equivalently, imagine two nuclear power plants being built on each side of your home. That’s all we can fit next to you, so now imagine a ring of four plants built around the first two, then another larger ring around that, and another and another until there are thousands of nuclear reactors surrounding you. That is the level of risk that my preliminary analysis indicates each of us faces from a failure of nuclear deterrence.

Surely, if his estimate is anywhere near correct, all the ongoing concern about new nuclear power plants should be superseded more than one thousandfold by concern about the state of security in the face of nuclear war. After all, everybody lives with the risk associated with global thermonuclear war and nuclear winter. Only those living fairly close to nuclear power plants bear acute risks associated with meltdowns.

Hellman’s warning is akin to the one repeatedly sounded by former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who himself revised the American nuclear warplan for the Kennedy administration in 1963. In both cases, the suggestions are similar: work to reduce the number of weapons, increase the time required for anybody to use them, and avoid the complacent belief that the lack of explosive accidents or attacks since the Second World War proves them to be impossible.

The calm before the storm

Some research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States examined the behaviour of the climate in the period immediately before eight abrupt shifts. In all cases, there was a reduction in the level of climatic fluctuation immediately before the tipping point was reached. The authors argue that “the mechanism causing slowing down is fundamentally inherent to tipping points” and could thus be used to predict when such a shift is imminent.

While interesting, this probably isn’t enormously useful. If we want to mitigate to avoid abrupt shifts, the emissions cuts will need to occur long before the point when a critical threshold is being approached. A warning might provide an opportunity for more targeted adaptation, however, which might in turn reduce the amount of suffering that occurs as a result of crossing any particular climatic threshold. Certainly, learning more about the causes and consequences of abrupt climatic shifts ought to be a priority for the world’s scientific community.

The GAO on carbon capture and storage

The American Government Accountability Office has released a report (PDF) on carbon capture and storage (CCS). Some key points:

  • To make a significant contribution to fighting climate change, the International Energy Agency estimates that 6,000 CCS facilities would be required, each storing one million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
  • Integrating CCS into existing coal plants is very expensive and difficult.
  • It is easier with integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plants, but they are very expensive before you even take CCS into account.
  • Commercial scale IGCC plants (not necessarily with CCS) can’t be expected before 2020 – 5 years after global CO2 emissions need to peak.
  • Coal plants with CCS will produce 35% – 77% less electricity than those without.
  • There are questions about the long-term viability of storing carbon underground.
  • Leaks could contaminate water and suffocate people.
  • CCS will only be deployed if companies are forced to use it.

In short, people who are counting on CCS to make a big contribution to fighting climate change have a lot to prove, and cannot be reasonably permitted to assume the near-term emergence of the technology as a viable, low-cost option. Until CCS is shown to be safe and feasible on a commercial scale, we simply cannot allow new coal power plants in countries that are serious about dealing with climate change.

I found out about it via Gristmill.