Category: Science

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

Environmental Defence on the oil sands

Environmental Defence has issued a new report, explaining why Canada’s oil sands expansion policies risk more than cancelling out efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions in other areas:

“Emissions from the tar sands are projected to double from 2010 levels by 2020, cancelling out all other efforts across the country to reduce emissions and sending Canada soaring past the 2020 climate change target that it shares with the United States.”

Barriers to mitigating the climate impacts of the tar sands (PDF)

‘Shut down the oil sands’ is not an extreme position

Rather, it is the endpoint of joined-up thinking about climate science and energy policy.

On Twitter the other day, Suzy Waldman said: “Trying to envision middle ground between idea coalsands ought 2b shuttered and idea Canada’s economic fate depends on them”.

I think this perspective risks perpetuating one of the big problems in Canadian climate and energy politics – namely, the assumption that the oil sands have a legitimate future part to play in Canada’s economy and that any position that questions that is ‘extreme’ and outside the political middle ground. This may be true in terms of opinion polls and the positions of politicians, but this is because people haven’t really accepted that our current trajectory ends with planetary catastrophe.

We now have very clear and credible evidence that warming the planet by more than 2°C virtually guarantees big trouble for humanity. Crossing that threshold can be achieved by burning a fraction of the conventional oil, gas, and coal available on the planet. In short, then, we have a dangerous amount of fossil fuel available without even tapping unconventional sources like the oil sands.

Stabilizing the climate at any level of temperature increase means cutting greenhouse gas pollution to the point where the amount produced each year is absorbed by natural systems and so there is no net change in the concentration. Achieving that requires very deep cuts – essentially, the global phaseout of fossil fuel use. Stabilizing below the 2°C limit requires that all this happen extremely quickly. In such a world, it simply makes no sense to be building bitumen mining and in situ extraction facilities intended to operate for decades. Nor does it make sense to keep building pipelines to export fuels that we cannot afford to burn, if we wish to maintain a livable planet capable of sustaining human prosperity indefinitely.

This connects to the biggest problem with the oil sands: the way in which they contribute to a vicious cycle. We build more fossil fuel production capacity, so naturally we need to have transport and export capacity to serve it. The availability of fossil fuels then encourages people to keep investing in vehicles, power plants, and other facilities and equipment that require them. And so fossil fuel dependence is perpetuated.

If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to rapidly reverse that cycle. We need to be shutting down production capacity, and transport capacity, and facilities and equipment that depend on fossil fuels. That will probably make some things a lot more expensive and change the ways in which people live, but the alternative of a planet with a permanently hostile climate is clearly much worse.

Shutting down the oil sands is an extreme idea politically in Canada, but that is simply evidence of how poor the scientific basis for Canada’s energy politics is.

Global climate activism update

Bill McKibben in the July/August 2013 issue of Orion Magazine: United We Sweat.

Incidentally, a photo of mine may be in this magazine. It doesn’t appear in the online version, but it could be in the paper copy. If anyone happens to come across a copy of Orion, I would be grateful if they could take a peek. This is the photo in question.

What Toronto350.org is up to

We are quite busy this summer. We are working on finalizing our brief to the University of Toronto, making the case for why they should divest from fossil fuels. We could definitely use some expert assistance for some of the legal and financial sections, so if you know any lawyers or financial professionals who would be willing to have a look for us and make some suggestions, it would be much appreciated.

We are also taking part in the National Energy Board process on the reversal of the Enbridge Line 9 pipeline to carry diluted bitumen east. We have been accepted as a commenter, and will be providing written evidence in early August.

With the sponsorship of Toronto’s Pure+ Simple spas, we are also holding a massive screening of the film Do the Math on October 9th. It will be at the Bloor Cinema, which seats 700, and there will be two shows at 6:30pm and 8:30pm respectively. We are working to line up some exciting speakers, as well as food and beverage sponsors.

Finally, we are gearing up for a big recruitment drive at the beginning of the school year in September. We will be working to get the 300 endorsements we need for the completed brief, as well as swelling our ranks of supporters and volunteers.

Divest McGill arguments rejected

A committee formed by the administration of McGill University has rejected the argument from Divest McGill that the school should sell its stock in “corporations involved with the production, refining, transport and sale of fossil fuels” and “financial institutions which have not adopted a policy of making no further loans to corporations that produce, refine, transport of sell fossil fuels”.

Rather startlingly, the committee concluded that: “Since the Committee is not satisfied that ‘social injury’ has occurred, no action was considered or is recommended.”

Given that climate change is the ‘greatest market failure the world has ever seen’ the case that fossil fuel companies are doing social harm is very strong. While the committee’s decision is disappointing, it is useful for Toronto350.org insofar as it shows what sort of things the committee that will eventually be formed here is likely to focus on. For instance, no discussion of science and a strong emphasis on law. Knowledge that we derive from this response will help us make our own brief stronger.

We are also calling for a different set of actions from the University of Toronto, which I think will make it easier to establish our case. Specifically:

  • Make an immediate statement of principle, expressing its intention to divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies within five years,
  • Immediately stop making new investments in the industry,
  • Instruct its investment managers to wind down the university’s existing holdings in the fossil fuel industry over five years, and
  • Divest from Royal Dutch Shell by the end of 2013.

This seems easier than asking a Canadian university to divest from all financial institutions which invest in fossil fuel companies, which probably includes all those in Canada.

The McGill committee never got to questions of practicality or financial impact on the university, since they rejected the basic claim that fossil fuel companies are doing social harm. If we are able to establish the second point to the satisfaction of the University of Toronto, we will still need to address concerns in the first two areas.

Our brief still requires a lot of work, so if you know anyone in Toronto who would be willing to help, please encourage them to get in touch with us. We could especially benefit from anyone with expertise in law or finance.

Toronto350.org highlights climate risk to giant pandas

Climate activists at the Toronto Zoo panda opening day

Toronto350.org visited the Toronto Zoo to raise public awareness about the threat climate change poses to pandas and other endangered species. We also circulated a petition to the Chinese Ambassador to Canada and Canada’s Prime Minister, calling on both countries to do more to combat climate change and protect endangered species.

Different journalistic interpretations of the same scientific study

Google News stories about antarctic melting 2013-04-15

Here’s the actual abstract from “Acceleration of snow melt in an Antarctic Peninsula ice core during the twentieth century“, published in Nature Geoscience:

“Over the past 50 years, warming of the Antarctic Peninsula has been accompanied by accelerating glacier mass loss and the retreat and collapse of ice shelves. A key driver of ice loss is summer melting; however, it is not usually possible to specifically reconstruct the summer conditions that are critical for determining ice melt in Antarctic. Here we reconstruct changes in ice-melt intensity and mean temperature on the northern Antarctic Peninsula since AD 1000 based on the identification of visible melt layers in the James Ross Island ice core and local mean annual temperature estimates from the deuterium content of the ice. During the past millennium, the coolest conditions and lowest melt occurred from about AD 1410 to 1460, when mean temperature was 1.6 °C lower than that of 1981–2000. Since the late 1400s, there has been a nearly tenfold increase in melt intensity from 0.5 to 4.9%. The warming has occurred in progressive phases since about AD 1460, but intensification of melt is nonlinear, and has largely occurred since the mid-twentieth century. Summer melting is now at a level that is unprecedented over the past 1,000 years. We conclude that ice on the Antarctic Peninsula is now particularly susceptible to rapid increases in melting and loss in response to relatively small increases in mean temperature.”

From the full text: “The nonlinearity of melt observed in the JRI ice-core record also highlights the particular vulnerability of areas in the polar regions where daily maximum temperatures in summer are close to 0˚C and/or where summer isotherms are widely spaced, such as along the east and west coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula. In these places even modest future increases in mean atmospheric temperature could translate into rapid increases in the intensity of summer melt and in the poleward extension of areas where glaciers and ice shelves are undergoing decay caused by atmospheric-driven melting.”