Alarms and surprises

Paul Kingsnorth's LRB review of This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein and Don't Even Think About It by George Marshall is worth a read.  For example, Klein's determination to make climate change fit into her pre-existing narrative [1] is well highlighted.

But I take issue with the end of the review, which quotes something Daniel Kahneman said to George Marshall — "there is not much hope" — and appears to take this as conclusive.

I think this falls into the trap of another pre-scripted narrative — that of radical pessimism.

Not only do we not know how things will go; we cannot know how things will go.

What we do know is that we have some freedom of action, albeit with tight constraints.

Sure, the future is likely to be hot, extremely bumpy and crowded, but we should not discount surprise altogether, not least significant technological and/or social changes which reshape the landscape of possibilities.

We should not assume, as Kahneman appears to do here, that climate change can only be tackled by lowering people's standard of living. Indeed, the opposite may be true.

"Anything can happen in life, especially nothing" says Michel Houellebecq. He is right on the first point, not so much on the second.

Note [1]: On narratives, see Culture and Climate Change: Narratives edited by Joe Smith, Renata Tyszczuk and Robert Butler (pdf) for which I organised 11 responses by others to the question, "What kind of story is climate change?" and in which I discussed four stories in the "In Conversation" section (also published here).

Read this and weep

Nothing like a bit of cold hard reality on a Monday morning:

In a Washington Post/Stanford University poll last week, a large majority of Americans said global warming was happening. Equally wide margins were opposed to taking mandatory steps at home, or providing assistance overseas, to try to slow it down.

Source: Welcome to the new world of American energy
 

The worse angels of our nature

We are different from the Nazis and the Soviets not because we have more self-control -- we don't. We are different largely because postwar improvements in agricultural technology have provided the West with reliable supplies of food, our massive consumption of which says much about our limited self-control. But what if food were to become scarcer and more expensive, as seems now to be the trend? What if unfavorable climate change were to outrun our technical capacities? Or what if melting glaciers leave societies such as China without fresh water? Pinker claims, unpersuasively, that global warming poses little threat to modern ways of life. But it hardly matters whether he is right: states are already taking action to minimize its consequences. China, for example, is buying up land in Africa and Ukraine in order to compensate for its own shortage of arable soil. The fresh water of Siberia must beckon. If scientists continue to issue credible warnings about the consequences of climate change, it would be surprising if leaders did not conjure up new reasons for preemptive violent action, positioning their states for a new age of want.

-- from War No More, Timothy Snyder's review of Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature.

Durban and Kellogg-Briand

Last week, looking over various comments (including this) on COP 17, the following came to mind: 

I wonder sometimes if Durban and the COP process generally is a little like the negotiations that led up to the Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing war.  Lots of good intentions, but the real action was elsewhere.   This is not to say that trying to negotiate treaties on war and violence is totally pointless; they did, for example, lead to the Geneva conventions.

Something useful on peak oil

I have criticized wooly thinking about peak oil in the past, but I have a lot to learn, so it's good to come across some clear thinking on the topic from Jim Murray (pdf). This, for example, is quite neat:

Peak oil hypotheses 

It's not about the reserves 

It's about the production rate 

We are not close to running out of oil 

Never predict the future price of world oil or the date of world oil peak. You will only be proved wrong and discredited.

The IPPC muddle

Sensible analysis from O.M. on the IPCC renewables 'scandal'. For example:

Without really understanding costs, how can one go forward to assess the merits and believability of scenarios.

Predicting future demand is as hard if not harder. This is one of the reasons why Vaclav Smil, doyen of energy analysts, devoted a magisterial chapter in his book “Energy at the Crossroads” to the manifest failure of more or less all predictions about the future of energy markets. Closer to home, Dr Pachauri wrote a book premised on the imminent arrival of higher oil prices in the mid-1980s; it didn’t happen. [The Economist] has similar skeletons in its cupboard.

It is exactly because assessing scenarios is so hard, says [Ottmar] Edenhofer, that the IPCC authors instead chose to simply expand on the details of four particularly striking ones. The Greenpeace one was chosen for this spotlight because it had the highest renewable penetration; the median penetration in 2050 across all 164 scenarios was just 27%.

Carbon future

‘Schumpeter’ in The Economist has a sobering overview of trends and forecasts for world energy. Here are some of the key points:

* Robust growth was seen in all regions and in almost all types of energy use: the world consumed more of every main fuel bar one [that is, nuclear] than it had in any previous year. Consumption of oil, which accounts for 34% of the world’s primary energy by BP’s calculations, rose by 3.1%. Coal, at 30% the number two fuel, was up by 7.6%, growing faster than at any time since 2003. Consumption of gas, which contributes 24%, was up by 7.4%, the biggest annual growth since 1984.

* The growth in fossil fuels was so strong that although non-fossil-fuel energy also had a record year, its share of the world total primary energy decreased a little. Hydro (6.5%) saw its biggest annual increase on record, in part due to more dams and in part due to a lot of rain; Christof Rühl, BP’s chief economist, notes there was more precipitation in 2010 than in any year in the past century...Most of China’s growth came from burning more coal: in 2000 China accounted for just under a third of world coal use; in 2010 a staggering 48.2%. Repeat that sort of expansion on a smaller scale for a number of other countries and you see why coal is going up in the global mix. You also see why the world’s energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions have grown even faster than its energy use—by 5.8% last year, on BP’s figures. That is the fastest growth since 1969...

* The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook [forecasts] a new “golden age of gas” scenario for future energy production and consumption. This sees global gas demand rising by more than 50% over the next 25 years, as gas outstrips coal to come close to equalling oil in the energy mix. Meeting that demand would require an increase in production equivalent to three times the amount of gas produced by Russia today, which the agency imagines being handily met by a mixture of conventional gas and shale gas, as well as some other unconventional forms of the fuel such as coal-bed methane. China becomes both a principal producer (its shale-gas resources are reckoned the largest in the world) and perhaps the largest importer. But all this does not do anything like as much as you might expect in terms of reducing carbon emissions. This is because cheap gas does not just displace dirty coal, as it has been doing in America; it also displaces expensive renewables and nuclear...

A view from Michael Klare here.

By the numbers

Our typical math skills seem quite undeveloped relative to our nuanced language skills [perhaps because in the world in which we evolved] communication was life and death, math was not. Have you not admired, as I have, the incredible average skill and, perhaps more importantly, the high minimum skill shown by our species in driving through heavy traffic? At what other activity does almost everyone perform so well? Just imagine what driving would be like if those driving skills, which reflect the requirements of our distant past, were replaced by our average math skills!

-- Jeremy Grantham in Quarterly Letter, April 2011

An estimated 1,400 billion tons of methane is stored in [East Siberian] deposits. By comparison, total human greenhouse gas emissions (including CO2) since 1750 amount to some 350 billion tons...Release of ECS methane is already contributing to Arctic amplification resulting in temperature increase exceeding twice the global average. The rate of release from the tundra alone is predicted to reach 1.5 billion tons of carbon per annum before 2030...

-- Agnostic and Daniel Bailey on Wakening the Kraken at Skeptical science.

Best of both worlds

Tim Flannery notes:

In the 1950s the Richfield Oil Corporation was pondering whether nuclear power might play a role in helping to exploit Alberta's tar sands. The company executives reasoned that if it could expode a series of two-kiloton bombs below the 30,000 square kilometre tar-sands deposit, the heat of the explosion would vitrify the sand, coating the cavity and thus creating glass., while a peculiarity of the chemical structure o the tar would cause it to liquefy. When cooled, the tar would retain its more runny consistency and so fill the cavities. Three hundred billion barrels of crude oil would be made accessible by the process, the experts claimed, with no hazard from radioactivity.

'The Bjorn Identity'

Joe Romm rips into Lomborg.

Extreme weather in perspective

A useful summary of the state of knowledge from Peter Stott.


(Photos contrast air quality caused by Russian wildfires on 17 June and 7 August 2010)

'Severely disquieting'

'A century of phytoplankton decline suggests that ocean ecosystems are in peril.'

Tom Goreau says:

This report is correct, but as usual it is not new. In some of our papers on global satellite sea surface temperature trends published 5 years ago we point out that the places in the ocean we have identified that are warming faster than average are also the places where phytoplankton chlorophyll are decreasing, due to the thicker warm surface layer getting so thick and buoyant that upwelling of nutrients is being blocked, indeed we identified major fisheries regions where the upwelling has stopped and the fisheries are collapsing from the bottom up. There are also much smaller areas where the phytoplankton are increasing, and those are remote areas where the wind speed has increased, but the gains in those places are far less than the losses. This problem will increase with time.

P.S. 2 Aug: a colleague refers to SAHFOS which carries a link to a summary of recent research into the question of whether climate change and biodiversity of marine plankton in the North Atlantic could affect the carbon cycle.

A relevant paper by Goreau et al is here.

P.S. 6 Aug: Bill McKibben puts his spin on the findings.

Words and deeds

...some of them pointed in the right direction. Obama used his first address from the Oval office to attack corporate self-regulation and to call for a revolution in energy and environmental technology: >

The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is somehow too big and too difficult to meet. You know, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom. Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny -– our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we're unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don't yet know precisely how we're going to get there. We know we'll get there.

William Galton sees a missed opportunity:

In my judgment, the president’s speech tacitly sounded the death-knell for the inclusion of serious climate change provisions in any energy bill that Congress might enact this year.

P.S. Bradford Plumer sees a terrifying message in responses to the spill.

Pangloss

I think it is extremely unfortunate that Matt Ridley has missed many of the important points and concepts. In my view, he has also cherry-picked evidence to form opinions which are unsupported by the bulk of scientific evidence and understanding. This is demonstrated by the fact that he completely ignores the mainstream scientific literature. In my view, it is also clear that he has a very poor understanding of the core issues.

-- Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, one of the experts asked by New Scientist to comment on Matt Ridley's take on ocean acidification, which is that:

Ocean acidification looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm.

That sounds to me a bit like a PR person saying that:

the claim that smoking increases the risk of heart disease looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by anti-smoking campaigners in case smokers fail to die of lung-cancer.

On a broader point, how useful is Ridley's analogy of ideas 'having sex'? Is it more credible than the meme metaphor, which Scott Atran debunked in In Gods We Trust?

Ridley, it may be noted, is a passionate advocate of deregulation. Contrast this with a recent reality check by James Surowiecki.

P.S. 2pm: I haven't been keeping up with George's columns. He has a sound take here.

"The entire Indian subcontinent"

At the moment, virtually nowhere on Earth has a wet-bulb temperature of more than 30 °C. But with a global rise of 11 °C [by 2300], huge areas would have wet-bulb temperatures of more than 35 °C for part of the year. According to the climate model used by the team, these regions would include much of the eastern US, the entire Indian subcontinent, most of Australia and part of China.

-- Earth 2300: Too hot for humans.

Of course, it's just a model.

Gold in the tar sands

[BP] Chief executive Tony Hayward received a 41% rise in his remuneration package in 2009 - meaning he took home about £4m in salary, bonus and share awards.

This was despite the firm seeing last year's profits fall by 45% to $13.96bn(£9.2bn).

-- from a BBC report, BP oil Canada plan faces shareholder vote.

That's not entropy, man

John Gray finds fault with Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization (review). Some of his points may be well taken. But he says something rather odd:

How could human empathy possibly defeat the force of entropy, an irreversible physical process?

It seems Gray equates behaviour by human groups, nations and civilisations as a whole, and the outcomes of those behaviours, with the second law of thermodynamics. Eh? A defining characteristic of humanity and indeed life in general is that it/they exist despite the second law by using energy from outside the immediate system of which they are part (i.e. from the sun and to a lesser extent radioactivity from inside the earth).

It is not hard to find grounds for pessimism regarding progressive action on climate change and much else. But entropy is not the issue. If there is to be progress it is likely to be grounded on a whole lot of rational self interest, including the possibility that there is more money and power to be derived from generating and using energy in smarter ways. And there may, even, be a role for empathy.

Innovation and innovation

The deeper and more pernicious problem with Gates’ framing is the implication that technology is where we innovate; in all other areas of life, we just ... manage. This taps into some deep archetypes that are worth digging up...

Innovations in the way we think, interact, and structure our lives require just as much imagination, intelligence, persistence, and funding as innovations in technology.

-- David Roberts

The future of the IPCC

A New Scientist editorial suggests:

• keep intergovernmental status
• more studies on special topics (e.g. geo engineering, carbon sinks)
• yearly reports
• much more open discussion and transparency

Holes in the sky

Nature has a useful overview of The Real Holes in Climate Science. In 2007, the IPCC highlighted 54 key uncertainties:

...such [uncertainties] do not undermine the fundamental conclusion that humans are warming the climate, which is based on the extreme rate of the twentieth-century temperature changes and the inability of climate models to simulate such warming without including the role of greenhouse-gas pollution. The uncertainties do, however, hamper efforts to plan for the future. And unlike the myths regularly trotted out by climate-change denialists..., some of the outstanding problems may mean that future changes could be worse than currently projected...

An accompanying editorial says:

...Perhaps the most important lesson is that researchers must be frank about their uncertainties and gaps in understanding — but without conveying the message that nothing is known or knowable...

On 'future changes worse than currently projected,' see this.