The environment – Page 132 – a sibilant intake of breath

Geoengineering with lasers

This Economist article on geoengineering takes the same basic stance I have: that it is worth developing as a backup strategy, but that it is too dangerous to rely upon as an alternative to mitigation. That being said, they treat some of the options more generously than I would. On the basis of what I have read so far, ocean fertilization seems unlikely to work, and the secondary side-effects of sulfate injection seem too severe – not to mention how any geoengineering strategy that does not actually reduce carbon dioxide concentrations dooms to oceans to becoming ever-more-acidic for as long as we keep burning fossil fuels.

The strangest idea discussed in the article sounds like the kind of approach a Bond-villain would dream up:

Perhaps the most intriguing idea—which was published last year, though not discussed by the Royal Society—is to eject carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at the Earth’s poles, using the planet’s magnetic field. This may sound absurd, but oxygen already leaks out this way (the phenomenon is the subject of a paper just published by Hans Nilsson of Swedish Institute of Space Physics). Alfred Wong, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, proposes that a system involving powerful lasers and finely tuned radio waves could encourage carbon dioxide to take the same route. His calculations suggested that using lasers to ionise molecules of carbon dioxide, and radio waves to get them to spin at the correct rate, would cause those molecules to spiral away from Earth along the lines of magnetic force until they were lost for ever in space.

I have no idea whether this could actually work. Furthermore, implementing it meaningfully would require ejecting about 35 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year into space. That seems likely to have some weird consequences.

The frogs in the coal mine

A recent study conducted by the Zoological Society of London concluded that half of Europe’s amphibians could be extinct by 2050. There are two obvious ways to consider the news. Firstly, it is evidence of the enormously destructive effect human beings have on vulnerable ecosystems. Secondly, it raises questions about whether humanity itself will be able to survive the catastrophe is it creating. Amphibians have been around for 400 million years. While there have certainly been times in which a large proportion of them have died off, those times have been been listed among the catastrophic extinction events that have punctuated the history of life on Earth.

In short, the impact of the global economy is becoming comparable to that of major meteor strikes, mass volcanic events, large changes in sea level, and severe changes in atmospheric composition that have occurred in the past. For those who do not believe that humanity inhabits some special protected position in the cosmos, that seems like cause for very significant concern.

Gore on coal and civil disobedience

Al Gore has called on young people to resist the construction of new coal-fired power plants through civil disobedience. Certainly, this is not a time where we should be viewing coal as an acceptable option for electrical generation, and there have been well justified civil disobedience efforts in response to far less pressing issues than climate change. Nonetheless, it would send a rather more powerful message if Gore was willing to personally get his hands dirty on the matter. He may be reasoning that actually participating in some kind of direct action would reduce his influence, by making him easier to label as an extremist. Nonetheless, there is more than a touch of hypocrisy on calling on young people to do something that you think is right, but are unwilling to do yourself.

In any case, actions that expose just how climatically destructive coal is – as well as the simple fact that states like Britain are still planning to build more such plants – would probably be a useful element in our overall response to the climate challenge.

Video explaining runaway climate change

I have often spent time thinking about the danger of a tipping point into runaway climate change – particularly about the ways in which the concept can be conveyed to non-experts in a comprehensible manner. This eleven minute video does a good job. The script, with peer-reviewed references and additional information is at wakeupfreakout.org.

Here are some related prior posts:

I discovered the video linked above through this Gristmill post.

[Update: 4 February 2009] Here is a post on the danger of self-amplifying, runaway climate change: Is runaway climate change possible? Hansen’s take.

Graduating from Oxford

Given the following:

I am doing as much as possible to avoid air travel, due to the carbon emissions associated.
If I were going to fly, it would be (a) to deal with some kind of emergency or possibly (b) for an extended visit to a previously unseen part of the world.
You only get one chance to graduate at Oxford, either in person or in absentia.
There is no particular urgency in formally graduating.

Should I apply to have my name read in my absence and receive my diploma in the mail?

Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World

Canadian climatologist Andrew Weaver’s Keeping Our Cool provides an excellent and accessible introduction to climatic science. It also provides a great deal of useful information specific to Canada. As a result, if I had to recommend a single book to non-scientist Canadians seeking to understand the science of climate change, it would be this one. On the matter of what is to be done, the book is useful in a numerical sense but not particularly so in a policy sense. The discussion of economic instruments is superficial and the author basically assumes that a price of carbon plus new technology will address the problem.

The book covers climatic science on two levels: in terms of the contents themselves, such as you would find in textbooks and scientific papers, and in terms of the position of science within a broader societal debate. He accurately highlights the degree to which entrenched interests have seriously muddled the public debate, creating deep confusion about how certain we are about key aspects of how the climate works. Topics well covered by the book include electromagnetic radiation, time lags associated with climate change, the nature of radiative forcing, the nature and role of the IPCC, ocean acidification, the history of human emissions, the general history of the climate, climate modeling, aerosols, hurricanes, climate change impacts in general, permafrost, and the need for humanity to eventually become carbon neutral. One quibble has to do with the sequencing: while the narrative always flows well, the progression through climate science looks a bit convoluted in retrospect. That makes it a bit hard to find your way back to this or that piece of useful information. The book features some good numbers, graphs, and analysis that I have not seen elsewhere – such as a calculation of how much more carbon dioxide humanity can emit in total, given the desire to keep temperature change to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels and various plausible values for climatic sensitivity. A second quibble is that the graphics are all black and white and printed at a fairly low quality. Sometimes, that makes them hard to interpret.

On the matter of international and intergenerational equity, Weaver comes to appropriate conclusions (that we should be concerned about future generations and that the rich states that caused the problem need to act first in solving it), but he fails to examine the ethical and policy issues in great depth. That is a minor failing, given the major purpose of the book, but it would probably leave someone who read only this book with a somewhat mistaken impression about the scale of changes being advocated and the ease with which they might be achieved. The book exaggerates the difference between a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade system with 100% auctioning, and doesn’t pay sufficient attention to areas in which regulation have the potential to be more effective than taxes (building codes, transport standards, etc).

In general, Weaver’s book is a strong and useful introduction to climatic science. When it comes to the big questions about climate ethics, and the policy and technological measures that will permit the emergence of a low-carbon society, other authors have done better.

How much carbon dioxide can we release?

Climate sensitivity is the amount of warming that would arise from doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The IPCC estimates that it is between 2.0˚C and 4.5˚C, with 3.0˚C as the most likely value. They also warn that, because of feedback effects, “values substantially higher than 4.5˚C cannot be excluded.” Basically, this number refers to how many degrees of warming would arise from raising the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere from the pre-Industrial level of 290 parts per million (ppm) to 580 ppm: 50% above today’s level of 385 ppm. The higher the number, the worse the consequences from any particular level of emissions.

We can combine that figure with the maximum amount of warming we are willing to tolerate and come up with a figure for how much more carbon dioxide humanity can release, all told. Using the 2˚C ceiling adopted by the European Union and endorsed by 200 of the world’s top climate scientists, Andrew Weaver worked out what those limits would be for different climatic sensitivities:

2.0˚C sensitivity – 1314 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of carbon – 4822 gigatonnes of CO2
3.6˚C sensitivity – 661 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of carbon – 2426 gigatonnes of CO2
4.5˚C sensitivity – 484 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of carbon – 1776 gigatonnes of CO2
8.0˚C sensitivity – 163 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of carbon – 598 gigatonnes of CO2

The 2˚C and 4.5C figures are the top and bottom of the IPCC’s probable range. The 3.6˚C figure is the one considered most probable by those running the University of Victoria climate model. The 8˚C figure illustrates the impact of much higher sensitivities on how much can be emitted.

Current annual carbon dioxide emissions about ten gigatonnes of carbon (36.7 gigatonnes of CO2) per year. Note that the figures above are how much CO2 can be emitted in total before the whole world becomes carbon neutral – certainly not about how much can be emitted before we need to begin cutting. Those totals need to include all future emissions from developed and developing states alike, between this year and whichever year the world achieves carbon neutrality.

The 4.5˚C scenario implies a peak concentration of 445 ppm – slightly lower than a commonly cited ‘safe’ level. Some people – notably James Hansen – have argued that an even lower stabilization concentration is necessary to avoid runaway climate change.

Unreliable Sylvania

The two selling features of compact fluorescent bulbs are higher efficiency (more light produced per unit energy) and longer lifespan, when compared to incandescent bulbs. We have already established that the first isn’t a concern for people actively heating their homes. My recent experience with the second is also rather negative. I recently replaced as many bulbs in my house as possible with fluorescents. In the month and a half that followed, four of the bulbs failed: those in my kitchen, on my back porch, and in my front hallway.

I have never had incandescent lights fail so quickly. It’s not clear what caused these ones to die so abruptly (A manufacturing defect? Problems with my power supply?), but it will definitely prevent me from buying Sylvania brand bulbs in the future.

Ethics embedded in economics

I recently attended a presentation on economic modeling, climate change, and the social cost of carbon. Initially, this was presented as a process where we took our best scientific information, fed it into our best economic models, and ended up with our best projections about how much harm climate change would do, and thus what the ‘social cost’ of carbon really is. The point I raised was that this approach is in no way divorced from ethical assumptions. Indeed, they are deeply ingrained in the economic models and have profound effects on how they turn out.

Here are a few of the most important aspects of that:

1) The discount rate: Nicholas Stern took a lot of flak for setting this value so low. Basically, it pertains to how much we value the welfare of future generations. The lower you set it, the more the welfare of future generations will affect your calculations. In financial planning, discount rates are often in the neighbourhood of 8%. That means we would be indifferent to having $X today or $X + 8% in one year. The trouble is, with a value that high the welfare of distant future generations becomes almost completely unimportant in your calculations. If we knew that climate change would instantly kill everyone alive in 100 years, using an 8% discount rate would make this fact largely unimportant in terms of working out what the ‘social cost’ of one tonne of carbon is today.

Of course, there are problems with using a very low discount rate as well. If we care as much about all future generations as about our own, we are compelled to put all of our wealth towards investments for them. After all, current spending only benefits us, whereas investment could increase the welfare of a potentially infinite chain of future generations.

In any case, the discount rate selected has a massive effect on what social price for carbon you end up with. Stern worked it out as about $85 per tonne. William Nordhaus, another economist, came up with a figure of $7, largely because he used a higher discount rate. This one choice has the power to massively affect any economic analysis of climate change.

2) The marginal utility of income Take $100 per year from Bill Gates and he will never notice. Take it from everyone living in Sub-Saharran Africa, and you would probably kill millions. Despite this, most economic models assume that a dollar is a dollar is a dollar. If melting permafrost makes us abandon a northern community, at a cost of $20 million, but the cost to Canadian industry of avoiding the emissions that caused it would have been $21 million, the economically optimal outcome would be to allow the community to be destroyed.

To some extent, this can be built into economic models. We can create a mathematical function for how useful each extra dollar a person gets is. If we use that ‘utility’ measure in place of a dollars measure, the impact of different choices on the least well off becomes more important. Actually doing so on climate change would almost certainly hugely increase the social cost of carbon, since the welfare of those threatened by sea level rise in Bangladesh and drought in Sudan would be considered on more equal terms to wealthy Floridians with property threatened by hurricanes and oil company employees hoping to exploit new fields in the Arctic.

In addition to having economic importance, this has massive ethical importance. An approach based on potential Pareto optimality supports any move that improves overall welfare. It doesn’t matter if the people gaining are residents of suburban Toronto while those losing live in villages in Ghana. In everyday life, we recognize that we cannot go around harming people just because we gain more from doing so than they lose.

3) Valuing catastrophic risks If we manage to turn the world’s carbon sinks into net sources, we will have created self-sustaining climate change. If that occurs at an accelerating rate, we will be facing runaway climate change, which threatens to cause enormous physical changes and mass extinctions – possibly including humanity itself. Integrating such possibilities into economic models requires a number of ethical assumptions. Even a very small possibility of such an outcome can have a giant influence on certain kinds of models; likewise, choosing to ignore such outcomes has highly ethically relevant effects.

In short, we cannot combine scientific and economic models and produce a technocratic answer about how much climate change should be permitted. We need to acknowledge and consider the ethical implications built into and arising from those models, we need to choose what kind of world we want to hand over to future generations, we need to consider how important we think responsibility for the problem is when allocating costs, we need to consider the special circumstances of the very poor, and we need to consider how big a risk of catastrophe we should really tolerate.

I think an honest examination of those issues, alongside the best climatic science we have, creates a powerful and immediate ethical and economic argument for change. It is virtually certain that – if they could speak to us – people fifty or one hundred years in the future would be screaming at us to do dramatically more than we are doing now.

May on the train

Kudos to Green Party leader Elizabeth May for using her campaign to draw attention to the unsustainable character of air travel. Rather than fly all over the country to court voters, she has opted for a far less carbon-intensive train based approach. One round-trip journey from Toronto to Vancouver emits about 1,700 kilos of carbon dioxide equivalent. A train journey emits about 730kg: about 60% less. That is not enough of a reduction for trail travel as presently undertaken to be genuinely sustainable, but it is a significant step in the right direction. People would also probably think more about long-distance transport if it took a few days rather than six or seven hours.

The linked CBC article does get one thing wrong, however. It says: “Other observers have pointed out it is probably cheaper than flying, too.” As discussed here before, taking the train seems to be more expensive. At present, a return ticket between Toronto and Vancouver is running for $1,390.20 plus taxes. WestJet provide the round-trip transport for $439.25 after taxes.