Politics – Page 115 – a sibilant intake of breath

The melt rate in Greenland and Antarctica

The latest issue of Nature Geoscience features an article by David Bromwich and Julien Nicolas, in which they produce an estimate of the rate at which the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting in response to climate change. Their estimate is based on satellite gravimetry using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission (mentioned before). They concluded that previous estimates hadn’t properly taken into account the phenomenon of isostatic rebound and that, as a consequence, the rate of ice loss is about half what was estimated before:

With glacial isostatic adjustment modelled in, the loss from Greenland is put at 104 gigatonnes, plus or minus 23 gigatonnes, and 64 gigatonnes from West Antarctica, plus or minus 32 gigatonnes.

On the basis of this, they concluded that icesheet loss accounts for about 30% of observed sea level rise, rather than the 50% estimated before. The remainder is the result of the oceans expanding as they warm up.

Inevitably, the reduced ice melt estimates will be jumped upon by climate change delayers and deniers. This once again re-enforces the asymmetry in the debate between scientists and those who argue for inaction on climate. The latter never admit their mistakes but jump on any correction, error, or update from scientists as proof that climate science is deeply uncertain, and that no action should be taken now.

Promoting energy efficiency

Recently, someone mentioned to me that they feel guilty about using twist-ties on plastic bags, because of the potential environmental consequences of doing so. To me, this seems like an extreme demonstration of how people can sometimes fail to grasp the relative scale of environmental impacts – they walk to work for a few days, rather than driving, and think that constitutes a substantial contribution to fighting climate change. At the same time, it is quite likely that they live in a home that is so poorly insulated that improvements would pay for themselves in a few years.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides some quantitative data showing that people underestimate their own energy consumption and highlight relatively insignificant activities when asked how they can improve:

When asked to rank the single most effective way to save energy, participants typically endorsed activities with small savings, such as turning off lights, while ignoring what they could economise on larger devices. This suggests that people misallocate their efforts, fretting over an unattended lamp (at 100 watts) while neglecting the energy they could save by nudging their washer settings from “hot” to “warm” (4,000 watt-hours for each load of laundry).

While it can be argued that more education is the solution, I think it is probably more effective to use approaches that do not depend on voluntary change at the user level. One option is higher energy prices, to encourage conservation. That is especially justified at times of peak demand, when inefficient power plants get turned on.

Another option is to set higher standards for buildings and appliances. It may be best to simply ban especially inefficient options. Another tatic is to levy a fee on inefficient appliances – such as dishwashers, driers, and washing machines – and use the revenues to subsidize more efficient models. That would reduce the price differential between relatively good and relatively poor choices.

The future of India and China

This briefing on the relationship between India and China makes for interesting and important reading, given the strong possibility that both countries will have major global importance in this century. Already, China and India are the world’s largest and fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitters.

Some of the climate, energy, and security issues mentioned include their shared dependence on oil imports from Africa, competition over water and natural gas, and the “bitterly contested” status of the Indian-Chinese border.

California’s Proposition 23

In California, there is a risk of further rollback of climate change mitigation policies:

IN 2006, the California assembly passed AB32, known in the vernacular as the Global Warming Act of 2006. The measure requires that the state reduce its carbon emissions below 1990 levels by 2020. In this election cycle, that has proven too tempting a political target to ignore, and in November California will vote on Proposition 23, which would suspend AB32 until the state’s employment rate falls below 5.5% for four straight quarters (a condition which has been met just three times since 1976, and which seems rather distant with the state’s unemployment rate currently running at 12%). Proposition 23 has been largely funded by multi-million-dollar donations from two Texas oil companies, Valero Services and Tesoro Companies.

The campaign is largely being funded via multi-million dollar donations from two Texas oil companies: Valero Services and Tesoro Companies.

The situation reveals some of the special dangers associated with climate change policy: big polluters will do whatever they can to block and water down effective policies. Voters are always tempted to delay the necessary transition to carbon neutrality, due to concern about jobs or growth today. Finally, the structure of the political system often effectively prevents the consideration of the welfare of future generations.

Dangerous offshore drilling

One manifestation of how we are now chasing the dregs of the world’s oil is the increasingly dangerous and expensive places and ways we are going after the stuff. The latest explosion on a Gulf Coast oil rig is a demonstration of some of the dangers.

Meanwhile, we should be expecting more leaks and spills, including in places where help is a long way off. For improved understanding of part of what that involves, there is a series from Deep Sea News that may be worth a look:

Oil dependence is all about transportation – the fuels used for electricity and industry are largely oil and gas. As such, the medium- to long-term solution to all the problems associated with offshore drilling is to reduce the global demand for oil with some combination of investments in alternative forms of transport, pricing to reduce consumption, and complementary policies.

Bad times ahead

In the wake of the failure of the current U.S. administration to pass climate legislation, Grist’s David Roberts asks ‘How bad are the next few years going to suck?‘

He predicts that “Democrats are going to get shellacked in the midterms” but that they will probably retain control of the senate. The economy will quite probably remain weak, which significantly worsens Obama’s prospects for a second term. Finally, he says “[b]y 2016 my son will be a teenager and atmospheric CO2 will be flirting with 400 ppm” and calls for people to take local action, while central leadership is lacking.

That’s more useful than saying ‘throw up your hands in despair, we are dooming the world’ but it doesn’t strike me (or Roberts) as an adequate response to the problem. Humanity’s level of collective intelligence still looks pretty low.

Two axes for the left-right political spectrum

Ubiquitously, people use the left-right spectrum to sort people, political parties, and governments according to their political views. Like any model, it has its simplifications. At the same time, it is useful enough to be worth retaining.

That being said, this categorization can conceal important axes of disagreement. Not everyone on ‘the left’ or ‘the right’ agrees. For example, this is demonstrated by the vast differences between libertarians (generally considered right wing) and social conservatives. The former want to legalize drugs, allow gay marriage, and let people have whatever kind of sex they want. The latter sometimes want to lie to children to prevent sex and drug use, use scripture as inspiration for law, and preserve existing power structures.

One more complex model that I think is useful takes two considerations into account:

How necessary do you think government is? Can it be beneficial?
How important are an individual’s own values, compared to those of their community?

On one axis, there is the range of views from ‘government is beneficial and absolutely essential’ to ‘government is harmful and not needed.’ On the other is an axis from ‘individuals should be free to live however they want’ to ‘people should live according to an external moral code’.

All combinations are possible. Anarchists agree that government is not needed and probably harmful, but disagree about whether we should all follow a particular ethical framework and, if so, what the framework should resemble. Some anarchists assume that – freed from government – people would probably arrange themselves into communistic little autonomous communities. Others prefer rather more militant notions of what anarchism might involve.

People of all political stripes disagree about the extent to which traditional or religious values should motivate how people behave, as well as the degree to which they are embedded in law. For instance, some people would like government to enforce morality by treating adultery as a criminal offence, or by criminalizing abortion, or by restricting the use of climate damaging fuels, or by forbidding companies from bribing public officials, etc, etc.

Of course, there is a big difference between enforcing ‘harm principle’ ethics, where only actions that damage unconsenting bystanders are restricted, and a more open-ended enforcement of morality by government. For people deeply concerned about how one person doing what they wish can prevent others from having the same freedom, government is often seen as an essential mechanism for preserving the overall liberty of everyone.

One element that is not well captured in this model is the range of different moral codes people want to see applied. These include everything from ‘traditional family values’ to various forms of religious fundamentalism to non-religious but dogmatic social philosophies like Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

Still, I think this framework has some use, when it comes to understanding the range of political views that exist.

[Aside] To clarify my own view, I naturally recognize that governments can be extremely harmful: even oppressive to the point of murderousness. That being said, I think they are necessary because of how interconnected the world has become and, at their best, can do enormous good.

Deployability of nuclear weapons

Being able to build a device that can produce a nuclear explosion is a significant challenge in itself. Also challenging is building such a device in a self-contained way which does not require difficult last-minute assembly, and which can be stored in a usable state for years. The first American bombs certainly did not meet this standard.

Captain William Parsons, a U.S. Navy weapons expert with the 509th Composite Group (the B-29 squadron that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan during WWII) described the complex and hazardous operation, in a letter intended to convince his superiors that dummy devices were required for practice runs:

It is believed fair to compare the assembly of the gun gadget [the uranium bomb] to the normal field assembly of a torpedo, as far as mechanical tests are involved… The case of the implosion gadget [the plutonium bomb] is very different, and is believed comparable in complexity to rebuilding an airplane in the field. Even this does not fully express the difficulty, since much of the assembly involves bare blocks of high explosives and, in all probability, will end with the securing in position of at least thirty-two boosters and detonators, and then connecting these to firing circuits, including special coaxial cables and high voltage condenser circuit… I believe that anyone familiar with advance base operations… would agree that this is the most complex and involved operation which has ever been attempted outside of a confined laboratory and ammunition depot.

Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. p.590 (paperback)

Probably the reason why the bomb had to be so substantially assembled right before use had to do with the initiator – a sub-component at the very centre of the bomb, designed to produce a handful of neutrons at the critical moment to initiate fission. At the same time, it was critical that the initator not produce even a single neutron before the bomb was to be used.

In early American bombs, initiators were apparently comprised of the alpha particle emitter Polonium 210 (half life 138.4 days) sandwiched between metal foils to keep it from reacting prematurely with the beryllium metal nearby. When the high explosive shell wrapped around the natural uranium tamper and plutonium core of the implosion bomb detonated, the components of the initiator would mix and react, producing neutrons at the same time as the explosives were producing compression.

Details on initiators are still classified, so we can only speculate on how the implosion primaries in modern bombs function.

The whole issue of deployability is relevant to questions of nuclear proliferation insofar as it is more difficult to make a stable, battlefield-usable bomb than to make a device capable of generating a nuclear explosion. That being said, many of the technical details of bomb manufacture have been made available to states contemplating the development of nuclear weapons. That has partly been the product of clandestine activities like the operation of the A.Q. Khan proliferation network. It has also been the consequence of states being insufficiently cautious when it comes to safeguarding knowledge, materials, and equipment.

Reforming the IPCC

Alternative title: What to do when everybody ignores you?

In the wake of University of East Anglia email scandal, there has been yet another review of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This one was chaired by Harold Shapiro, a Princeton University professor, and concluded that “[t]he U.N. climate panel should only make predictions when it has solid evidence and should avoid policy advocacy.”

The IPCC has certainly made some mistakes: issuing some untrue statements, and evaluating some evidence imperfectly. That being said, the details they got wrong were largely of a nitpicky character. The core claims of the IPCC reports – that climate change is real, caused by humans, and dangerous – remain supremely justified. The trouble is, governments aren’t willing to take action on anything like the appropriate scale.

The situation is akin to a doctor giving a patient a diagnosis of cancer, after which the patient decides that he will try to cut down on his consumption of sugary drinks. That might improve the patient’s health a bit, but it is not an adequate response to the problem described. At that point, it would be sensible for the doctor to engage in a bit of ‘policy advocacy’ and stress how the proposed solution is dangerously inadequate.

It can be argued that the IPCC works best when it presents the bare facts and leaves others to make policy decisions. The trouble is, people don’t take the considered opinions of this huge group of scientists sufficiently seriously. They are happy to let crackpots tell them that there is no problem or that no action needs to be taken. While scientists should not be saying: “Here is what your government’s climate change policy should be” they should definitely be saying: “Here are the plausible consequences of the policy you are pursuing now, and they don’t match with the outcomes you say you want to achieve (like avoiding over 2°C of temperature increase)”. They could also very legitimately say: “If you want to avoid handing a transformed world over to future generations, here is the minimum that must be done”. James Hansen accomplishes this task rather well:

Today we are faced with the need to achieve rapid reductions in global fossil fuel emissions and to nearly phase out fossil fuel emissions by the middle of the century. Most governments are saying that they recognize these imperatives. And they say that they will meet these objectives with a Kyoto-like approach. Ladies and gentleman, your governments are lying through their teeth. You may wish to use softer language, but the truth is that they know that their planned approach will not come anywhere near achieving the intended global objectives. Moreover, they are now taking actions that, if we do not stop them, will lock in guaranteed failure to achieve the targets that they have nominally accepted.

Scientists don’t lose their integrity when they present scientific information in a way that policy-makers and citizens can understand. Indeed, it can be argued that they show a lack of integrity when they hide behind technical language that keeps people from grasping the implications of science.

Greenland offshore oil

In a development that seems to reinforce a number of ongoing trends, it seems there may be oil to exploit off the coast of Greenland. As with other places in the Arctic, the combination of new technologies, higher oil prices, and retreating ice is making it plausible to access fossil fuels that would once have been out of reach. At least as reported by The Economist, residents seem moderately intrigued by the prospects for increased wealth, but largely disinterested in the ongoing climate change that could profoundly transform the massive island:

Most of Greenland’s 56,000 inhabitants seem persuaded [that the risk from oil spills is acceptable]. Despite the vulnerability of the country’s ice sheet to global warming, a recent Greenpeace meeting in Nuuk drew a paltry 45 people. Even this minimal interest in the environmentalists’ message could fall further as the implications of this week’s news start to sink in.

Cairn Energy, a British oil and gas firm, already has an area designated for exploration which is thought to include 4 billion barrels of oil. United States Geological Survey data suggests that a total of 17 billion barrels may lie in the waters between Canada and Greenland.

As with so many issues related to climate change, there is an important disjuncture here between different relevant timescales. Whereas it is plausible that the next few decades could see the deployment of offshore oil and gas platforms in the Arctic – and at least the beginning of significant revenues from them – the warming of the climate will largely occur over a more extended span of time. Nevertheless, we have good reasons to believe that the emissions trajectory humanity is investing in right now is incompatible with the continued existence of the Greenland icesheet, though the disappearance will probably take centuries. Of course, that change will profoundly alter life in the region. At the same time, the seven metres of sea level rise embedded in that ice would surely prove problematic for many of the cities and nations that may find themselves benefitting from the use of Greenland’s oil and gas in the interim.