Category: Science

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

Responding to Kenneth Green on renewable energy

On CBC’s The Current this morning, Kenneth Green – the Senior Director for the Centre for Natural Resources at the Fraser Institute – made quite a string of erroneous claims about climate science, renewable energy, and the climate change activist movement.

His most serious error, I think, was arguing that states like Ontario and Germany are going to regret their decision to invest in climate-safe and renewable forms of energy. Like a lot of mistaken analysis about energy politics, Mr. Green’s ignores the necessity of decarbonizing the global economy if we are not going to cause so much climate change that we completely wreck human prosperity, while simultaneously endangering huge numbers of lives and critically important natural systems.

In the decades ahead, it’s going to be states like Canada that seriously regret the energy choices they made at this time. While others will have begun the necessary transition to energy sources that we can rely on indefinitely, Canada will eventually need to make the same transition more rapidly and at greater expense. We will need to scrap inappropriate high-carbon infrastructure including oil sands projects, pipelines, and tight oil and gas hydraulic fracturing projects – and do so well before the end of what their economically viable lifetimes would be in the absence of climate change. Then, we will need to build appropriate infrastructure at a greater pace and a higher cost, while suffering worse impacts from climate change. These impacts will be worsened both by Canada’s direct contribution to the severity of climate change and by the indirect way through which Canadian inaction has encouraged continued fossil fuel dependence in the rest of the world.

It’s disappointing that quality current events programs like The Current still feel the need to bring on fossil-fuel-enthusiast dinosaurs whenever they discuss climate change. As organizations from the United Nations to the World Bank to the Pentagon have long recognized, the question now is how to succeed in the transition to a climate-safe global economy, not whether there is any viable case for remaining tied to coal, oil, and gas.

Hopefully, this weekend’s People’s Climate March will help instill a sense of urgency and determination in political leaders and the general public. As the major economic assessments of climate change like the Stern Report have concluded unequivocally, the intelligent choice in purely economic terms is to do what states like Germany have begun: to stop investing in high-carbon infrastructure projects that are no longer appropriate for the world in which we live, to phase out fossil-fuel energy beginning with the most harmful forms like coal plants, and to commit to the deployment of a new energy system which is climate-safe and which can be relied upon indefinitely.

What if?

My copy of Randall Monroe’s What if? book arrived from Amazon today, and I spent a pleasant couple of hours in the Upper Library going through it. Right from the disclaimer it is quite entertaining:

The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.

Toronto friends are welcome to borrow the book and learn about bullet-sized pieces of material with neutron star density; the effects of draining Earth’s oceans; the plausibility of eradicating the common cold through global quarantine; and similarly practical matters.

These facts will not be on the exam

I was wrong a while ago when I said the QI podcast isn’t available through the iTunes Store. It simply doesn’t have a name that makes it obvious that it is the QI podcast: No Such Thing As A Fish.

One nice fact is that Lawrence Burst Sperry, the man who invented the aircraft autopilot, went flying in November 1916 with Mrs. Waldo Polk, whose husband was off driving an ambulance in France. They counted on the autopilot to keep them aloft, but ended up crashing naked into a bay and being found by duck hunters.

Also, if you get a zebrafish drunk and put it among sober companions, the sober ones will follow the drunk one:

Maybe something about the drunk fish’s one-on-one interactions with the other fish made the group as a whole move in the same direction. Or maybe the sober fish looked at their non-sober tankmate and saw a leader. “It is likely,” Porfiri says, that the drunk fish’s uninhibited behavior “is perceived as a boldness trait, thus imparting a high social status.” As they followed the drunk fish, the sober ones also sped up to keep pace, swimming roughly a third faster than they would have otherwise.

The very drunkest zebrafish, though, lost their leader status. Fish that had been exposed to the highest alcohol concentration began to lag behind the rest of the group, following instead of steering. Since higher alcohol doses have “sedative effects,” Porfiri says, the drunkest fish slow down and start to display “sluggishness in response to the rest of the group.”

I listed some fun facts from QI in a previous post.

Science and replicability

The basic claim made in published science is that something about the nature of the universe has been uncovered. That makes it distressing when other researchers attempting to isolate the same phenomenon are unable to do so:

For social ‘scientists’ with aspirations of matching the rigour of their peers in the ‘pure’ or ‘natural’ sciences. If different groups of scientists using true double-blind controlled experiments can’t reach compatible conclusions about the world, what hope is there for people trying to deduce causality from historical data?

Limits to a social cost of carbon

In some ways, the idea of a social cost of carbon is fundamentally sound. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere harms people around the world in various ways which can be measured and quantified. Applying that in the form of a carbon price should allow us to better adjudicate between activities where the total benefits exceed the total costs (including climate damage). It should also help us identify where the most cost-effective options are for reducing emissions and mitigating climate change.

At the same time, there are some issues with the approach. For one, it suggests false confidence and draws attention away from the possibility of abrupt, irreversible, and catastrophic outcomes. There are climatic thresholds out there where increased concentrations lead to dramatic global changes and major impacts on human life. Adding $50 (or whatever) to the cost of an activity that adds a tonne of CO2 to the atmosphere conceals these dangers, suggesting that the harm imposed will always be incremental and manageable. Another tonne of CO2 in the atmosphere isn’t essentially equivalent to a little fine everybody pays. Rather, it represents a threatening degradation to the stable climatic regime that has accompanied the existence of human civilization. Moving from relative stability into a realm where global weather patterns are rapidly and violently shifting involves experiences that cannot be easily equated to simple monetary costs.

The social cost of carbon approach also conceals some of the costs of carbon that aren’t easily quantifiable in financial terms. It’s a lot easier to work out the additional cost of desalinating drinking water than it is to estimate the financial value we should assign to losing an ecosystem or having an important cultural site permanently immersed in the sea.

Further, using a single price suggests that the damage from every tonne of emissions is the same. This is essentially true for emissions that happen at the same time – the tonne of CO2 emissions you produce by running your gasoline lawn mower affects the climate as much as the tonne of CO2 I produce by running my gas furnace. However, climate science has convincingly demonstrated that the total harm done by carbon accumulating in the atmosphere isn’t linear across time. Warm the planet by a degree or two and human and natural systems can adapt comparatively easily. By the time you are going from 5˚C of warming to 6˚C, you will probably be experiencing catastrophic new forms of harm that nobody can really adapt to. Using a single social cost of carbon may make this idea harder to grasp, a well.

Applied properly, a social cost of carbon may be a useful tool for helping individuals, firms, and countries internalize the climate damage associated with their choices. In the big picture, however, the challenge for humanity is to control fossil fuel use and land use change such that we don’t cause catastrophic damage to the planet’s natural systems. Achieving that requires a sustained effort to abandon fossil fuels as sources of energy, while protecting carbon sinks. Insofar as a social cost of carbon helps encourage that transition, it is to be welcomed. When it contributes to the miscategorization of the problem as a whole, however, there is cause for concern.

Open thread: energy storage

One challenge with energy sources like solar and wind is that their output varies with local environmental conditions, and not necessarily in ways that correspond to energy demand.

Hence, having energy storage capacity makes them easier to integrate into the grid. There are many options: pumped hydroelectric storage, tidal storage, batteries, compressed air, molten salt, and potentially hydrogen.

It is also possible to balance output from different kinds of renewable stations, using biomass, solar, wind, tidal, and other forms of energy to cover one another’s fallow periods.

Obama climate interview

Thomas Friedman interviews Obama on climate change, and the president explicitly states that we can’t burn all the world’s remaining fossil fuels and that we should keep to the target of keeping warming below 2˚C.

He also endorses a price on carbon.

This makes it seem that Obama does understand the key dimensions of climate change; he just hasn’t made dealing with it a high enough priority to produce the kind of progress that is necessary for achieving the 2˚C target.