Science – Page 100 – a sibilant intake of breath

IPCC 4AR SPM

Yesterday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the Summary for Policymakers (PDF) for the Synthesis Report of the Fourth Assessment Review. That’s what the impenetrable ‘IPCC 4AR SPM’ signifies.

To clarify what that really means, it must be understood that there are a number of levels to the work of the IPCC. Every few years, there is an assessment review meant to evaluate the state of published scientific literature on climate change. The first was in 1990. Subsequent reports have been released in 1995, 2001, and 2007. Each report consists of contributions from three working groups. Each working group writes a report, and each of those reports includes a Summary for Policymakers (SPM). The three working group reports are also combined into a synthesis report, which gets an SPM of its own. That’s what came out yesterday for the Fourth Assessment Review. Each of these reports is negotiated by scientists and approved by the IPCC member states. The SPMs are hashed out by government representatives line by line. That’s what the meeting that just ended in Valencia was about.

The Fourth Assessment Review has examined far more studies than the Third Assessment Review did: 577 compared to 95. Partly on account of that, it marks a big step forward in scientific certainty about the issue. As piles of media coverage stresses, the news isn’t good.

Shipping and invasive species

Globalization has been profoundly associated with massive sea freight shipments. Primary commodities flow from states with rich resource endowments to others with processing facilities. Labour intensive goods are shipped from where labour is cheap to where the goods are demanded. In the process of all this activity, a lot of oceanic species have been able to move into waters they would never otherwise have reached. This unintentional human-induced migration has occurred for two major reasons: the construction of canals and the transport of ballast water. This brief discussion will focus on the latter.

Each year, ships carry 3 – 5 billion tonnes of ballast water internationally. The water is taken on in port, once a ship has been loaded. This is necessary to make the ship balanced and stable at sea. The water taken on can easily include hundreds of marine species of which many of which are capable of surviving the journey. If they get expelled in a suitable environment, these creatures can alter ecosystems and crowd out local species. Sea urchins that have arrived in this way have been extinguishing kelp beds off the west coast of North America, destroying sea otter habitat in the process. Zebra mussels are another infamous example of a problematic invasive species.

Efforts to prevent the transmission of species through ballast water take a number of forms:

Ejecting the water taken on in port in the open ocean: most of the species expelled should die, and the new waters taken on should be relatively free of living things
Poisoning the creatures in the ballast water: this can be done with degradable biocides like peracetic acid and hydrogen peroxide
Transferring ballast water to a treatment facility at the arrival port
De-oxygenating the water in ballast tanks: this kills most species, if the deoxygenated conditions are maintained for long enough

None of these approaches is completely effective. Each retains some possibility of unintentionally introducing invasive species. Several also have other environmentally relevant effects.

That said, simply making an active effort to prevent species transmission between ecosystems marks a big change in human thinking. Not long ago, species were often introduced willy-nilly into entirely new environments: for aesthetic, practical, or whimsical reasons. Infamous cases include those of Eugene Schieffelin – the man who introduced starlings to North America because he wanted to continent to contain all the birds mentioned in the works of Shakespeare – and Thomas Austin – the British landowner who introduced rabbits to Australia because he missed hunting them. Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of such introduced species.

Solving climate change by stealth

There is a lot of talk about engaging people in the fight against climate change. In the spirit of prompting thought and discussion, I propose the opposite.

Rather than trying to raise awareness and encourage voluntary changes in behaviour we should simply build a society with stable greenhouse gas emissions and do so in a way that requires little input and effort from almost everyone.

Critically, that society should emerge and exist without the need for most people in it to think about climate change at all. For the most part, it should occur by means of changes that aren’t particularly noticed by those not paying attention. In places where change is noticed, it is because the legal and economic structure of society now requires people to behave differently, without ever asking them to consider more than their own short term interests.

To do this, you need to make two big changes: decarbonize our infrastructure and price carbon.

Decarbonizing infrastructure

When a person plugs their computer or television into the wall, they don’t care whether the power it is drawing came from a dam, from a wind turbine, or from a pulverized coal power plant. Changing the infrastructure changes the emissions without the need to change behaviour. Given how dismal people are at actually carrying out behavioural change (a scant few individuals aside), this is a good thing.

The change in infrastructure needs to go way beyond electrical generation. It must take into account the transportation sector and agriculture; it must alter our land and forest management practices. People can then broadly continue to do what they have been: eat meat, drive SUVs, etc, while producing far fewer emissions in the process. We shouldn’t underestimate the scale of the changes required. Moving from a high-carbon society to a low-carbon one is a Herculean task – especially if you are trying to do it in a way that does not produce major social disruption or highly intrusive changes in lifestyles.

Pricing carbon

There are some who would argue that putting a price on carbon is all your need to do, whether you use a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system to achieve that aim. Set a high enough price for carbon and the market will change all the infrastructure for us. This is naive both in terms of economics and political science. No democratic government will introduce a carbon price draconian enough to quickly spur the required changes in infrastructure. Governments copy one another and follow the thinking of voters: if other countries are investing in ethanol and voters think it is green, governments will often pile onto the bandwagon, almost regardless of ecological merit. In economic terms, carbon pricing is inadequate because it lacks certainty across time. If one government puts in a $150 per tonne tax, industry may reason that it will be overturned by popular outrage in a short span of time; infrastructure investments will not change.

What pricing does, in combination with infrastructure change, is eliminates the kind of activities that just cannot continue, even when everything that can be decarbonized has been. The biggest example is probably air travel as we know it. There is no way we can change infrastructure and keep people jetting off to sunny Tahiti. As such, pricing will need to make air travel very rare – at least until somebody comes up with a way to do it in a carbon neutral way.

Advantages and issues

The general advantages of this approach are that it relies on people making individual selfish decisions at the margin, rather than trying to make them into altruists through moral suasion. The former is a successful strategy – consider macroeconomic management by central banks or the criminal justice system – the latter is not. People will use emissions-free electricity because it will be what’s available. They will run their cars on emission-free fuels for the same reason. Where emissions cannot be prevented, they will be buried.

The disadvantages of this approach are on two tracks. In the first place, it might be impossible to achieve. There may never be an appropriate combination of power, technical expertise, and will. Without those elements, the infrastructure will not change and carbon will remain an externality. It is also possible that decarbonizing a society like ours is simply technologically impossible. Carbon sequestration may not work, and other zero-emission and low-emission technologies may turn out to be duds. In that case, major lifestyle changes would be required to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations.

In the second place, this approach is profoundly elitist and technocratic. It treats most citizens as machines that respond to concrete personal incentives rather than their moral reasoning. Unfortunately, ever-increasing emissions in the face of ever-increasing scientific certainty suggests that the former is a better description than the latter, where climate change is concerned.

On Ethiopia and birth rates

This week’s issue of The Economist includes a briefing on Ethiopia. In many ways, it reflects the ideas I am reading in Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.. A bad neighbourhood, terrible governance, ethnic conflict, persistent poverty and poor quality of life indicators persist despite western aid and loans from China. It seems probable that Ethiopia is caught in one or more of the poverty ‘traps’ that Jeffrey Sachs, Collier, and others have written about.

What struck me most about the article, however, was the demographics. In order to keep unemployment constant, Ethiopia needs to generate hundreds of thousands of new jobs a year. This is because the average woman in Ethiopia will have seven children in the course of her life. On the basis of such growth, the population could rise from about 75 million now to over 140 million by 2050. While it is possible that such a spectacular rate of population growth is the product of free and voluntary choices, it seems more plausible that it reflects a lack of personal control over reproduction: especially on the part of women. It is both ethical and prudent to redress this balance in favour of women having more control of their reproductive lives.

Statistics suggest that such control is less common in poorer places. This scatter plot shows the relationship between GDP per capita and total fertility rate in 108 countries. The replacement rate of about 2.1 births per woman corresponds to a mean GDP per capita of about $10,000 (though countries with a wide range of incomes can be found with similar TFRs). This data doesn’t necessarily show anything causal. It neither confirms or denies that poverty causes high birth rates or, conversely, that high birth rates cause poverty. Nonetheless, it is suggestive of the fact that women have less control over reproduction in poorer places.

A sustainable world is probably one with a birth rate below the natural rate of replenishment. This is not true indefinitely, but only until the combination of total human population and total human impact upon natural systems can be indefinitely sustained. While people obviously should not be forced to reduce their fecundity by governments, their right to choose whether or not to have children should be upheld and made meaningful through policies such as the legality and availability of contraception. In 1994, the International Conference on Population and Development defined sexual and reproductive health as:

A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and…not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, in all matters relating to the reproductive system and to its functions and processes. Reproductive health therefore implies that people are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so. Implicit in this last condition are the right of men and women to be informed and to have access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planning of their choice, as well as other methods of their choice for regulation of fertility which are not against the law, and the right of access to appropriate health-care services that will enable women to go safely through pregnancy and childbirth and provide couples with the best chance of having a healthy infant.

Sexual politics have always been a terribly contentious area, but that doesn’t mean reasonable people should not be agitating for better recognition and implementation of sexual rights. The United Nations Population Fund has a good website linking to more information on reproductive rights.

Quebec rejects corn ethanol

Having decided in 2005 to authorize a corn-fed ethanol plant in Varennes, the government of Quebec has now officially said that corn ethanol has no future in the province. While the future use of alternative feedstocks is not ruled out, the Quebec Minister for Natural Resources have said that this pilot plant will be the last of its kind. An article in the Montreal Gazette supports the idea that “[b]acking away from ethanol makes sense.”

This is a good thing for a number of reasons. To begin with, ethanol made from corn probably doesn’t have any positive environmental effects. It takes as much oil to grow the corn, make the ethanol, and distribute it as it would have taken to power the ethanol cars in the first place. As such, the effect of using corn ethanol on greenhouse gas emissions is negligible. Furthermore, intensive corn agriculture has problems of its own. Pesticide use peppers the environment with toxins – including persistent organic pollutants. Fertilizer runoff causes the eutrophication of rivers and algae blooms in the sea.

Wherever a sustainable future for transportation energy lies, it is not with ethanol made from corn.

Farewell to horns

This blog has previously mentioned the process of ‘fishing down’ marine food webs: you start with big delicious predator species (tuna, salmon, etc) and fish them to local extinction. Then, you catch smaller and less tasty things until the area of sea contains only plankton and jellyfish. This is a rational thing to do in the right circumstances: where access to a certain area of sea is free and unrestricted, and where everyone else is driving the resource towards destruction anyway. The best you can do individually is cash in while you can, since the resource is getting destroyed anyhow.

It seems that something similar is happening in relation to horns used for traditional Chinese medicine. Back in 1991, conservationists concerned about the decimation of rhino populations for medicinal purposes tried to encourage the use of Saiga Antelope (Saiga tatarica) horn instead. The World Wildlife Fund tried to encourage pharmacists to substitute the horns of the less endangered antelopes for those of the more endangered rhinos. Now, antelope populations in Russia and Kazakhstan have fallen from over 1,000,000 to just 30,000 (a 97% decline).

Switching from the unrestrained usage of one resource to the unrestrained usage of another just shifts the focus of the damage being caused. In order to create sustainable outcomes, restraint must be enforced either through economic means or regulation.

As an aside, there does seem to be some scope for reducing the horn trade by reducing demand through education. While horn is apparently an effective remedy for fever (though less good than available drugs not made from endangered species), the idea that it is an effective aphrodisiac can be countered. The rigid appearance of horn hardly makes it likely that it actually has chemical aphrodisiac properties, though it may strengthen the placebo effect already bolstered by general reverence for tradition. Apparently, the advent of Viagra has reduced prices and demand for rhino horn as well as seal and tiger penises that have traditionally been employed (though less effectively) to the same end.

Treating malaria

Legend has it that the gin and tonic cocktail evolved to provide the administrators of the British Empire with both ethanol and quinine. The former would keep them happy, and the latter would help keep malaria-carrying mosquitos at bay. In the present day, chloroquinine is still a common treatment for malaria. At 20-40 cents a dose, it is dramatically cheaper than the more effective alternative: a drug called artemisinin which is derived from the Artemisia annua shrub. A course of artemisinin treatment costs between $5 and $7 – too much for many people in the developing world.

Also problematic is how using artemisinin-only treatments will rapidly lead to drug resistance in mosquito populations. Mutations that confer advantages against a particular compound are relatively common, and are strongly selected for by evolution once they occur. It is much less likely that a malarial parasite will evolve both resistance to artemisinin and to a drug used in combination before one compound or the other kills it. As such, artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs) are the preferred treatment. These are somewhat more expensive, at $6 to$10 for a course of treatment.

Several organizations are trying to tackle the cost issue. In particular, the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are cooperating on a scheme called the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm). Given that malaria continues to kill 1-3 million people per year – and sicken between 400 and 900 million – such efforts are to be applauded and encouraged.

Some nuclear facts and figures

The first nuclear reactor to generate electricity was the EBR-1 experimental reactor in Arco, Idaho. Previously, reactors had only been used to produce materials for the military: especially plutonium for bombs of the kind dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. Four years after the EBR-1 reactor became operational (producing a paltry 100 kilowatts of power), it became the first nuclear reactor to suffer a partial meltdown.

The contemporary nuclear industry includes 439 nuclear reactors worldwide, producing 6.5% of the world’s energy and 15.7% of the world’s electricity. According to the International Atomic Energy Organization, 31 different countries operate reactors. Two countries – France and Japan – produce 57% of the world’s nuclear power, with nuclear producing 80% of all French usage. In terms of sheer output, the United States produces more nuclear power than anyone else in the world. US nuclear output in 2005 was about 406 terawatt-hours. They also have the largest and safest nuclear navy (Russia has had 18 serious nuclear accidents on subs, producing seven sinkings and 241 deaths).

As far back as 1952, a Presidential commission (The President’s Materials Policy Commission) produced a pessimistic report on the prospects of nuclear power for electrical generation, suggesting that money be devoted to solar power research instead. Now, the combination of concerns about energy security and concerns about climate change is prompting a possible re-birth within the industry. Here is a map showing who is considering new nuclear facilities.

It would certainly be useful to know the true price of nuclear power, as well as whether anyone will actually open a geological storage depot for spent fuel in coming years.

The biofuels controversy

Ricardo Hausmann, over at the Financial Times, has written an article on why biofuels are wonderful, not to mention the wave of the future. He says that current oil prices guarantee the long-term viability of biofuels, that there is lots of under-utilized land to grow them on, that the market can sort out the fuel/food issue, that higher profits for farmers from biofuel production will reduce government subsidies, and that developing countries will benefit because they have the most under-utilized land. Hausmann concludes that:

Standards will have to be developed to allow the energy and automotive industries to co-ordinate technologies. To make this scenario appealing, the impact of the expansion of the agricultural frontier on the environment and biodiversity, and the distributive effects of the rise in food prices will have to be addressed.

But these problems seem solvable given the expected political benefits in terms of lower net carbon emissions, more energy security, more efficient agricultural policies and greater opportunities for sustainable development.

While there is some reason to share his enthusiasm for biofuels, it is becoming increasingly clear that they have very serious (perhaps fatal) technical and ethical problems. The idea that biofuel profits will reduce government support for agriculture is also laughably naive.

Perhaps the most outspoken critic of biofuels is George Monbiot – British journalist and author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. In his most recent article on the subject, Monbiot pans biofuels as both ecologically ineffective and ethically unsound. He argues that their purported climate change benefits are over-stated:

[Nitrous oxide emissions] alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of more than 80% of the world’s biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel. This is before you account for the changes in land use.

A paper published in the journal Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels.

He also argues that the drive towards biofuels will literally starve the poor, as farmers start using their land, water, and labour to fuel SUVs rather than feed people. He cites how Swaziland, in the grip of famine and receiving food aid, is nonetheless pushing to expand biofuel production from their main crop: cassava. His concerns do not seem unfounded, given how the amount of corn it takes to fill the tank of an SUV could feed a hungry person for a year.

Jean Ziegler, the United Nations’ independent expert on the right to food, has called biofuels “a catastrophe for the poor” and a “crime against humanity.” Such concerns deserve to be taken seriously. While it may ultimately be both possible and necessary to use biofuels for air travel (given the absence of any alternatives to liquid-fuelled engines for planes), it seems entirely possible that the drive towards biofuels for ground transport will further increase the harm being caused to the developed world and the biosphere by the unsustainable behaviours of the rich.

Climate and the rainforest

Picture a square of tropical rainforest 100m to a side. According to a study from 2000, it is heavily laden with carbon: between 155 and 187 tonnes for wet forest and between 27 and 63 tonnes for dry. That means that each square kilometre of rainforest is holding between 2,700 and 18,700 tonnes of carbon: with about 70% of that in trees, 20% in the soil, and the rest in roots, understory, and litter.

Cutting down the trees for timber and to open farmland releases some portion of that stock into the atmosphere: with the amount dependent on how the soil’s carbon absorption changes and what is done with the wood and wood waste. When the forest is burned, either intentionally to clear land or unintentionally, the bulk of that carbon gets released into the atmosphere more of less immediately. As a result of both land use change and forest burning, the World Resource Institute estimates that deforestation represents about 18.3% of all human greenhouse gas emissions. As such, tackling it is a priority.

Arguably, the best thing individuals can do is refuse to eat meat or use first-generation biofuels. A considerable amount of cattle production takes placed in cleared areas of rainforest, with additional land cleared to grow soya to feed to cattle. On the biofuels front, there are both situations where rainforest is cleared directly for biofuel plantations (palm oil) and situations where the use of agricultural land to grow biofuel crops (corn) increases the overall need for agricultural land, pushing things like soy production into previously forested areas.

One other element to be aware of is the connection between population growth, urbanization, and deforestation. Several states actively encourage people to relocate from crowded areas to more sparsely populated zones bordering forested areas. Indonesia has sought to shift people away from Java in the same way Brazil has encouraged development in the Amazon to try to reduce crowding in the south.

Addressing deforestation is thus a two-fold proposition. In the first instance, the developed world needs to be aware of how commercial activities directly encourage deforestation. Restricting the use of tropical hardwoods, encouraging vegetarianism and veganism, and improving public transit would all help. Secondly, developing states must be encouraged to value their forests at a level high enough to prevent their destruction. That will probably require some kind of international financial instrument whereby the states actually protecting forests receive payments from all the states that benefit from ecological services those forests provide. The latter is a more wide-ranging solution, but the former can be more immediately implemented. If we are to keep that carbon in rich tropical soil and majestic tree trunks, action on both fronts needs to be undertaken.

Sources:

Papdopol, C.S. “Impacts of climate warming on forests in Ontario: options for adaptation and mitigation.” Forestry Chronicle. 76(1): 139-149 (2000).
Livingston, Nigel and G. Cornelis van Kooten. “Terrestrial Carbon Sinks and Climate Change Mitigation.” in Coward, Harold and Andrew Weaver eds. Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada.