Category: Science

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

Even without growth, climate change is a problem

Over at Forbes, Tim Worstall has written something rather silly about climate change:

“This might look like very bad news, that economic growth has pretty much come to an end as an important phenomenon. On the other hand we could regard it as pretty good news as well: for it means that we no longer have to worry about climate change.”

When we talk about economic growth, we are talking about gross domestic product: the sum of all the transactions that happen in an economy in a year.

Climate change isn’t caused by GDP directly, but rather through the burning of fossil fuels. What matters is how much fossil fuel gets burned, not what the size of the economy is. Even with a shrinking economy, climate change is a huge problem if we continue to get the bulk of our energy from oil, gas, and coal. Conversely, a strongly-growing economy built on nuclear or renewable sources of energy could see rising GDP with falling greenhouse gas pollution.

In The Bridge At the Edge of the World James Gustave Speth summarizes our predicament:

“How serious is the threat to the environment? Here is one measure of the problem: all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world for our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy.”

Our challenge is to find a way to leave most of the Earth’s remaining fossil fuels underground. Reducing our emphasis on economic growth may help with that, but it is not sufficient. It may not even be necessary, if we are successful at building prosperous economies based on zero-carbon sources of energy.

Illuminated timepiece and memento mori

After five years in The Service That Must Not Be Named – and with just a few days left before I leave to resume my studies – I got myself the Marathon Watch Company’s imaginatively-named General Purpose Quartz w/ Date, Type I, Class 1 watch as a kind of retirement gift to self.

The major distinguishing characteristic of the watch is the way in which it uses tritium-filled tubes for illumination. At each hour marker, as well as on the hour and minute hand, there are tiny tubes of phosphor-coated borosilicate glass containing a minute volume of radioactive tritium. This allows it to be easily read in conditions of total darkness. The tritium atoms are constantly undergoing beta decay and turning into helium-3. This process produces an electron with about 5.7 keV of energy and an electron anti-neutrino. The electrons hit the phosphors, causing the glow. The watch glows with radioactive fire, using the transmutation of hydrogen into helium for energy. It also produces antimatter that zips easily through the planet.

While I hadn’t intended it this way, the strongest impression from wearing the watch is that it is a memento mori – a token that reminds a person of their inevitable death. There are a few reasons for this. Most obviously, the tritium decay occurs with a half-life of about 12.32 years. Every time that span passes, the glow becomes half as bright. Ordinarily, watches highlight the circularity of time; we wake and sleep at similar times most days, pay our bills at the end of the month, and so on. The decay of the tritium is a reminder that time runs in only one direction, and there is no undoing what is in the past.

Tritium itself also has some rather ominous associations. For one thing, the gas in the watch was probably made in a nuclear reactor through the irradiation of lithium. For another, tritium is an integral component in modern nuclear weapons: both in the core of ‘boosted’ fission weapons and in the secondary stage of Teller-Ulam configuration thermonuclear weapons. On a more practical level, if the tritium leaks out from the glass tubes and forms tritiated water, it probably wouldn’t be especially good for a person to ingest.

I am pleased with the unexpected thoughts brought on by the watch. Too often, I think, we ignore the reality of our mortality and the urgency of the present moment. It’s easy for life to become routine and automated, with relatively trivial tasks occupying our time alongside relatively trivial thoughts. Being frequently reminded about the unidirectional nature of time – and about some of the terrors of the world – seems to force us to concentrate on what we want to do before we fade and expire.

Dark times

Bill McKibben on the state of the climate change mitigation movement:

“Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.”

It’s pretty worrisome that some of the most articulate and convincing voices calling for action on climate change are now despairing about humanity’s ability to get things under control.

McKibben’s article talks about how risky warming the planet by even 2°C would be, going on to point out that we are on track to push temperatures up by more like 6°C by 2100. If we want to stay below 2°C, we can only burn about 1/5 of the world’s proven reserves of oil, gas, and coal. Those reserves are worth about $27 trillion, which explains why fossil fuel companies are so desperate to prevent effective action on climate change.

The fossil fuel companies and the politicians that support them are winning the fight over what kind of world will exist in the future, and humanity did more in 2011 to make the problem worse than in any previous year.

Periodic Tales

Hugh Aldersey-Williams‘ book Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements shows off the author’s wide range of knowledge, willingness to investigate, and ability to tell a compelling story. Starting with gold and finishing with a pilgrimage in search of rare earth metals, Aldersey-Williams covers a fair fraction of the periodic tale – identifying the importance of elements not only in chemistry, but in diverse fields including art, literature, and theology. There are also many nice little nuggets of information, such as how Inuit steel tools were made from the nickel-containing natural stainless steel in some meteorites.

In addition to tracking down physical specimens of elements, the author tries to extract some on his own using natural materials said to be abundant sources (urine for phosphorus, kelp for iodine, even testing whether rotting herring luminesces). This admirable curiosity and willingness to undertake experiments adds much to the book.

Despite being about 400 pages, the book is a very quick read. It is well worth a look for anybody who is curious about the building blocks of the world or, alternatively, who is interested in seeing how the process of scientific discovery interacts with other human undertakings.

Thermus aquaticus and Taq DNA polymerase

Interesting fact: the hotsprings of Yellowstone Park yielded an enzyme that is critical for the DNA-copying polymerase chain reaction (PCR):

“In the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, [American microbiologist Thomas] Brock (then 40, now 85) had discovered a microbe which he christened Thermus aquaticus, a creature that could survive at temperatures as high as 80°C. At once, our sense of the life-sustaining zone on Earth expanded. “It was Brock who set the ball rolling,” says Michael Danson. “What has happened since is that the temperature has been set higher and higher. The highest temperature record at which growth has been observed is 121°C.”

Thermus aquaticus was also, serendipitously, the organism that established the enormous potential practical importance of these newly discovered life forms. The point about a thermophilic bacterium is that it needs some very tough enzymes, the catalysts of living processes. Our own enzymes break down very quickly at high temperatures, which is another reason that life outside what we consider a normal temperature range was thought impossible. An enzyme in Thermus aquaticus is now known as Taq DNA polymerase and it has become one of the most important enzymes in microbiology. It made possible the polymerase chain-reaction (PCR) technique for amplifying DNA samples. This led to the uses of DNA in forensic science and, in fact, to much of what we now know about DNA. PCR is a molecular photocopier, making it possible to take very small samples of DNA and repeatedly reproduce them. So now murderers have to be obsessively clean if they are to escape the attentions of the forensic scientist.

On a high school field trip, I once got to replicate my own DNA using PCR, at a lab in the University of British Columbia.

Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming

While the 4th Assessment Report (4AR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the causes and consequences of climate change, the report itself is not written in language that is accessible to the average person. Written by climate scientists Michael Mann and Lee Kump, Dire Predictions is an accessible illustrated guide to the conclusions of the IPCC. It also includes some discussion of the practical, political, and ethical implications of the IPCC’s findings.

The 200 page book is a quick and easy read, even for those who are not well acquainted with scientific principles and terminology. It responds directly to many issues raised in the media (such as common climate change denier talking points) and it includes a great many illuminating charts and illustrations. It covers key concepts like what climate models are, and the reasons why we expect the planet to respond to a certain amount of additional carbon dioxide with a certain amount of warming.

The book is broken into five parts, covering climate change basics, projections, impacts, vulnerability and adaptation, and solutions. It very clearly describes which areas are well-understood scientifically and which areas contain substantial remaining uncertainties. Mann and Kump convincingly explain the core mutually-reinforcing lines of evidence that support the ‘big picture’ view of a world that is being dangerously warmed by human emissions, and in which greenhouse gas pollution must be reduced if major damage to humanity and the natural world is to be avoided.

The section on impacts is detailed and wide-ranging, covering everything from different projections of future sea level rise to expected impacts on global agriculture. It covers the trade-offs associated with different mitigation and adaptation strategies, and provides a brief overview of international efforts to address the problem. The section on solutions breaks down where humanity’s greenhouse gas footprint comes from, what options exist for reducing it, and what some of the economics of the situation are. Mann and Kump also do a good job of sketching some of the ethical issues associated with climate change, including the disjoint between the people producing emissions and the people likely to suffer most and the question of what represents a fair effort on the part of countries with different histories and present circumstances.

The book will be elementary to those who already have a through grounding in climate science and policy, though it may be a good way to get a quick and balanced overview of the whole subject. For those who are new to the topic or who feel confused about what the state of the scientific consensus is, this book would be an excellent place to begin.

Climate change and conflict between generations

From what we can tell, the people alive today are putting their own welfare ahead of the integrity of the planet, worsening the prospects of those who will follow. Can anything be done about that?

The problem

The decisions of governments have always affected future generations. When a new bridge is built, it will likely remain in use for a number of decades. Today’s health research (or lack thereof) affects the fates of disease sufferers in the future. The debts accumulated by governments today affect what sort of financial environment the people of the future will live in. The legitimacy of democratic governments is grounded on the claim that they represent the interests of the people who they govern. More precisely, they are meant to implement the current wishes of those people, as identified and put in action through institutions like elections. Ideally, such a system prevents the emergence of parasitic or predatory governments that serve their own interests at the expense of those of the population at large.

Climate change complicates the situation, most importantly by creating a deep conflict between the current generation and all future generations. The choices we are making today – about how much energy we use and where we get that energy from – profoundly affect what kind of world members of future generations will live in and, by extension, what their life prospects will be. The choices we can make that seem most likely to improve their life prospects are generally deeply unpopular, given that they usually involve sacrifices. For instance, we can reduce our impact on the climate by traveling less, enduring colder homes in winter and warmer homes in summer, tolerating the presence of dangerous nuclear power stations, eating less meat, and reducing our consumption of luxury products. By contrast, many of the things which we enjoy doing cause harm to future generations.

Today’s governments necessarily respond to the preferences of the current generation. There is some extent to which those preferences include concern for the future. We generally resist proposals to clearcut national parks, for example. But the revealed pattern of our overall behaviour strongly suggests that we care a lot more about our own immediate physical comfort and convenience than we care about the prospects of the people that follow us. We might delude ourselves into thinking that buying recycled toilet paper and avoiding plastic bags represent sufficient action to protect the planet for future generations, but it seems naïve to think that anybody aside from the most ill-informed members of society seriously believe that.

Today’s governments therefore represent a generation that has chosen to be parasitic and predatory when it comes to the interests of the generations that are to come. We are choosing to impoverish their world, in order to continue to enjoy our present comforts and recreations. Even though we have been amply informed that we are emptying the seas of fish, stripping the planet of biodiversity, and flooding the atmosphere with climate-changing gas, we prefer to carry on as we have in the past. The only threats that seem to motivate large-scale action are immediate threats to the financial system (witness the eagerness with which banks are rescued) and threats to our physical security (the over-reaction to September 11th, huge ongoing investment in weapons, paranoia and mass incarceration in response to crime, etc).

Possible solutions

How are we to escape from this situation? One set of possibilities centres around ways in which the current generation could be brought to sacrifice some of its own welfare for the sake of future generations. One possibility is that the current generation will progressively become willing to accept sacrifices for the sake of the people who will follow – foregoing cheap flights and giant air conditioners for poorly insulated homes. Another possibility is that people will become sufficiently concerned about climate change affecting themselves personally that they will become willing to accept present sacrifices in exchange for a reduction in future risks. Governments could also deviate from the course of implementing the current wishes of voters by enacting policies that reduce the welfare of those alive now for the sake of those yet to come.

There are some alternative possibilities highlighted by those who see such sacrifices as either undesirable or unattainable. It is possible that technological advancement and the operation of markets will somehow make our current preferences compatible with a good world in the future, thus eliminating the conflict between generations. It is also possible that we will undergo a profound shift in what we value, moving away from a preference for resource- and energy-intensive goods and services toward a preference for things that have less of an impact on the planet.

Obviously, there are reasons to be skeptical about all of these possibilities. There are probably other possibilities not listed here. Still, it seems we are in a situation where a clear problem exists and where no clear route forward toward solving it is obvious. Indeed, several of the possible approaches to solution are in conflict with one another. Should we be covering huge areas of desert with solar panels and building hundreds of new nuclear plants to feed the energy ‘needs’ of future generations without altering the atmosphere, or should we be trying to provoke people into re-assessing their needs and living less energy-intensive lifestyles? Perhaps we should be encouraging a rapid reduction in the global population, so that the aggregate impact from a smaller number of richer people will remain within the boundaries of what the planet can tolerate. Perhaps we should be giving up on the project of reducing greenhouse gas pollution, which has been failing now for decades, and accept that our best chance of preventing catastrophic climate change is developing technologies to intentionally cool the planet. Of course, there is no guarantee these technologies will work, and it is virtually certain that they will have serious side-effects.

There are so many overlapping uncertainties that it is challenging to adjudicate between these and other options. We don’t know what the future of fossil fuel production will look like, particularly given that we don’t know what sort of investment decisions will be made. We don’t know how the technology and economics of other forms of energy will evolve during the next couple of decades, in fields as diverse as batteries, nuclear power, and solar panels. We don’t know how quickly and severely the impacts of climate change will be felt, or where in the world they will first occur. We don’t know the political future of important countries like China, or important supra-national entities like the European Union.

One possible response to uncertainty is to identify the things about which we can be most confident and focus our action on them. We now know that burning fossil fuels causes the climate to change dangerously. In response, we could devote our energies to doing whatever we can to avoid the production and use of fossil fuels. We also know that there are many opportunities around the world for improving energy efficiency while simultaneously saving money. That suggests that strategies focused on deploying more efficient technologies and approaches could be promising. We also know that people do care to some extent about the kind of world they are creating for their children and grandchildren, suggesting that further efforts to share what we are learning about the consequences of our current actions and the alternatives that exist for us may prove fruitful.

All of these responses have problems. Restricting fossil fuel use mainly involves choices that are deeply unpopular. People in rich places are accustomed to incredibly energy-intensive lifestyles which only fossil fuels can plausibly sustain in the near-term. Efficiency improvements can be hard to achieve, and tend to be negated when people invest the savings in doing more energy-intensive things, rather than achieving an overall efficiency improvement. Finally, while people do care about the prospects of their children, it is hard to convince them that a stable climate is a key part of that. Even if they can be convinced of that, people are loathe to take action when others around the world are not doing so. Also, our energy choices affect hundreds of future generations. People may care intensely about the prospects of their children and grandchildren, but they tend to behave as though they are indifferent to the prospects of people living in 500 or 1000 years, who by most accounts have an equal claim to our moral consideration.

All told, this is a murky time for the environmental movement. Progress has been blocked on most fronts. International negotiations on climate change have failed to produce meaningful action. The United States, which is arguably the most important country in the world when it comes to developing a global consensus to proceed, is immobilized by domestic politics. Nuclear power stations – one of our larger-scale low-carbon options – are explosively unpopular. Meanwhile, continued growth in rapidly-developing countries and the development of unconventional oil and gas resources keep the world on a trajectory of ever-increasing greenhouse gas pollution. It’s hard not to despair about the future.

Related:

We usually count climate pollution badly

As far as the atmosphere is concerned, it doesn’t matter if an extra molecule of carbon dioxide (CO2) comes from a recently-felled tree, from a molecule of methane in burned natural gas, from oil burned in an airplane, or from a coal-fired power plant. Regardless of the source, it adds to the already-dangerously-large stock of CO2 in the atmosphere.

This is one reason why commenters miss the point when they say things like: “the oilsands were responsible for seven per cent of Canada’s annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, while the entire oil and gas sector produced 22 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gases in the same year”. While these figures may be accurate, they convey the false notion that these are the only sources of CO2 we need to worry about and that reducing these numbers is adequate for solving the climate problem.

What matter is how much fossil fuel we burn in total across history

These figures only take into consideration the emissions that arise from the process of producing oil and gas. For instance, there is the natural gas that gets burned to make bitumen liquid enough to be processed and transported. The figured do not include the emissions that result when these fuels are burned. This is where most of the pollution actually happens and it is inevitable. Even if carbon capture and storage (CCS) was completely free and available today, it wouldn’t be possible to capture the pollution from vehicles, and that is where most of the oil from the oil sands ends up.

The key factor that will determine how much climate change the planet experiences is how much CO2 gets added to the atmosphere. Burning coal, oil, and gas inescapably contributes to that stock, which is already dangerously large. As such, Canada cannot ignore exports when it considers how to bring its economic activity in line with what the planet can withstand. The entire coal, gas, and oil industries need to be phased out in a rapid way. At the same time, we need to develop whichever carbon-neutral energy sources will sustain us in the future: some mixture of renewable forms of energy like wind and solar, biomass, and nuclear power.

Warming begets further warming

It is important to remember that the indifference of the climate to the source of CO2 molecules extends beyond direct human activities. If we warm the planet so much that the Amazon dries out and becomes grassland, the huge volume of CO2 currently stored in the rainforest will be added to the atmosphere. Similarly, if we warm the permafrost to the point where it melts and releases its gargantuan content of methane (a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, though shorter-lived), we will have another large dollop of warming to deal with, and an increased chance of catastrophic outcomes like the disintegration of the ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica.

Based on the evidence we have from millions of years of climate data, we know that the climate can be prone to violent swings when provoked. Push it a little bit and perhaps it will naturally return to about where it was before (‘pushing’ here means releasing greenhouse gas pollution). Push it enough, however, and it can tip over into a very different state, like a Coke machine tilted to the point where it falls over. All of human civilization has taken place during times of relative climatic stability. If we radically destabilize the climate, the consequences for human beings everywhere will be dire.

Our choice

To a very large degree, Canadians are missing the point about climate change. It isn’t a matter of deciding whether growth in the oil sands is pushing up the Canadian dollar in a way that hurts manufacturers. It also isn’t a matter of deciding what sort of small carbon tax would make Canada’s emissions acceptable. If we are to preserve a habitable planet for the people who will follow us, all signs indicate that we must get serious about the process of phasing out fossil fuels. Either humanity has a future or the global fossil fuel industry does – not both. That is very unwelcome news in a country that stands to make billions of dollars from fossil fuel exports, but it is the situation in which we now find ourselves.

We can choose to ignore the fact that what we are doing threatens the future habitability of the planet. We can also choose to bet that some future technology will allow us to solve or counteract the climate problem. If we make such choices, we should be entirely clear about what we are doing. If we accept the reality of climate change but choose to plow on heedlessly anyway, we should accept that we are entering into a suicide pact with countries like China and the United States that are doing the same thing. Neither has shown itself to be at all capable of moderating its demand for fossil fuels, and Canada is providing an increasing share of the oil, gas, and coal that fuels their frightening emissions.

If we choose to bet on technological salvation, we should similarly recognize that we are placing bets with lives that are not our own. We are saying that whether people in future generations inherit a planet that permits human prosperity or a planet in which civilization struggles to endure depends on whether some magic new technology appears in time to correct our mistakes – mistakes we now fully understand, but which we have so far refused to stop making.

Every barrel of oil we dig up and burn is another dangerous dart we are hurling at random at the people of the future – people who are already going to suffer substantially from the damage we have already done. We don’t need to choose that kind of irresponsible and selfish behaviour. We can turn our energy instead to building a zero-carbon energy system and an efficient society. Such a society will have a shot at long-term prosperity, which is something that cannot be said for societies that depend on fossil fuels that are ever-more scarce and which are destroying the planet.