Category: Science

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

Food, energy, and fossil fuels

Yesterday night, I had an interesting conversation about energy, fossil fuels, agriculture, and human population. The key fact is that global agriculture is now deeply dependent on fossil fuels. They are needed for everything from running industrial farming equipment to producing fertilizer to operating the vast logistical networks through which food is processed and distributed. The key question is, what will the ramifications be when we inevitably transition from a global energy system based on fossil fuels to one based on renewable sources?

The transition is indeed inevitable, though it could happen in either of two ways. Either we can voluntarily cut back on using fossil fuels due to well-founded concerns about climate change – and awareness of the opportunities that exist in renewable energy – or we will draw down reserves to the point where it takes more energy to extract one calorie worth of fossil fuel than the fuel contains.

So, what might the post-fossil-fuel world look like? To get one idea, we can consider the world as it existed before the Industrial Revolution brought about large-scale fossil fuel use. Back in 1500, there were about half a billion people alive on Earth. The energy they relied upon was overwhelmingly from renewable sources, such as the embedded solar energy in plants. It seems plausible that returning to that kind of an energy system would return the planet’s capability of sustaining human beings to about the level that existed then: a bit higher, perhaps, because people now live in more places, and a bit lower, perhaps, because of the damage we have caused to the planet in various ways.

For an alternative, we need to consider an enhanced renewable-backed future that includes clever approaches to harnessing renewable sources of energy: solar, wind, wave, geothermal, etc. It seems to me that if we are going to have a world that does not use fossil fuels and which sustains something like as many billions as are alive now (to say nothing of in 2050 or later), such technologies are going to need to be deployed on massive scale and the world’s agricultural systems will need to be adapted to rely on them.

Fossil fuels have been an enormous energy boon for humanity. Quite possibly, they have allowed us to far overshoot where we would otherwise have been, in terms of energy use and population. Quite possibly, both of those will need to fall substantially in a post-fossil-fuel world. If there is any chance of that not taking place, it will depend on the massive deployment of the kind of advanced renewables that are already technologically feasible. That deployment will take dedication, foresight, financing, and energy. Indeed, there is surely no better use for whatever proportion of the world’s remaining fossil fuels we choose to burn than in making the solar and wind farms that will need to form most of the future energy basis for all human civilization.

Tracking what is in the atmosphere

The Economist recently published an article lamenting how little funding is devoted to tracking the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. States do produce bottom-up records of emissions, based on what various facilities and vehicles emit. But it is also possible to track the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere directly, and to infer things about emissions from regional variations in concentrations and from isotopic ratios which can help to identify the sources of gases like CO2 and methane. As explained in the article, little of this is being done, largely because of a lack of funding. The unfortunate destruction of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory is also a contributing factor.

It is both saddening and surprising that so little funding is devoted to collecting this basic information, especially given that it could provide the earliest signs of significant changes in the functioning of the carbon cycle. For instance, it could identify things like the rate of methane release in the Arctic, or changes in the world’s carbon sinks. Greenhouse gases affect the climate system, regardless of whether they are released directly by human beings or whether humans merely induce their release indirectly. As such, top-down tracking is vital for developing and maintaining a comprehensive sense of what is going on.

In Canada, at least, the state of climate science funding seems to be worsening. While promises of a ‘High Arctic Research Station’ continue to be made periodically, the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) is being shut down for lack of funding, and Canada’s climate scientists remain muzzled.

Pitfalls in statistics

Statistics are a powerful thing, but they are easily to use sloppily and incorrectly. This article identifies a few important pitfalls related to statistical significance, problems with testing multiple hypotheses simultaneously, issues with clinical trials and meta-analyses, and the usefulness of Bayes’ Theorem.

While statistics are a far sounder way of knowing about the world than anecdotes and intuition, it is definitely worrisome that they are so poorly understood. My graduate statistics course at Oxford is evidence enough of just how poorly the subject can be taught.

Ice roads and climate change

As climate change continues, the Arctic is warming more than any other part of the world. This year’s mild winter is having an effect on northern communities, by making ice roads they depend upon impassable. Now, a state of emergency has been declared:

Mild weather shut the roads down after just under a month, which cut off more than 30,000 people from the south. Normally, the 2,200 kilometres of temporary routes over frozen swamps, muskeg and lakes are open for up to eight weeks.

About 2,500 shipments of fuel, groceries, construction materials and general freight are brought in at a reasonable cost using winter roads. Otherwise, goods have to be flown in at great expense.

Of course, there has always been variation in the severity of winters, arising from the complexities of the climate system. What climate change does is shifts the distribution: making the mean winter warmer, and increasing the number of very unusually warm winters relative to very unusually cold ones.

The specific case of ice roads and Arctic communities also demonstrates a broader situation. Every community in the world has evolved into its current form based at least partly on the climate in which it exists. This includes everything from transportation and housing infrastructure to energy generation facilities and emergency response capacity. The more climate change takes place worldwide, the greater the mismatch will be between the climate communities were built for and the climate they actually experience.

CITES and bluefin tuna

Bluefin tuna, mentioned here before, are in worse trouble than ever before. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) has voted against a moratorium on fishing them, despite collapsing stocks. As a consequence: “The outlook for the bluefin tuna is not good. Scientists already agree that the population is crashing, and that quotas allocated to fishermen remain too generous to give any reasonable degree of certainty of a recovery.”

It is remarkable and disheartening that human beings are basically choosing to wipe them out, with full knowledge of the consequences of their actions. It shows how little regard we have for nature, future generations, and even ourselves in decades hence. It suggests that human intelligence and rationality operate only within strict and rather disturbing limits.

Conference on a world more than four degrees warmer

Given our increasingly slim chances of avoiding more than 2˚C of global warming, it makes sense to start thinking about what a world hotter than that could be like.

The University of Oxford recently hosted a conference on the subject: 4degrees International Climate Change Conference: Implications of a Global Climate Change of 4 plus Degrees for People, Ecosystems, and Earth Systems.

32 of the short lectures are available free, via iTunes.

As an aside, posts might be thin here for the next while. Work is busy, and I am concentrating efforts on BuryCoal. If you haven’t had a look at that site yet, please do. Some good discussions on the posts people have already written would be just the thing.

More on Singh and libel

In a development that annoys me as much as one of my favourite novels being banned in some libraries, one of my favourite authors of non-fiction has been bullied out of having time to write columns for The Guardian by the British Chiropractic Association and the awful libel laws of the United Kingdom. It also seems probable that his book projects would be more advanced, if not for this pointless and anti-democratic headache.

Singh has been courageous enough to appeal the painful initial decision against his entirely fair and justified comments, as well as try to kick off a public movement to change the laws in the UK. The need to do so is broadly recognized, with several other jurisdictions having already passed laws to protect their citizens from ‘libel tourists’ who use the UK to file baseless or frivolous claims. Newspapers including the Boston Globe and New York Times have also complained about how British law imposes on them unjustifiably.

Having a free and democratic society depends on being able to express honestly-held and justified opinions without fear that someone will exploit the law to silence you. Hopefully, the lawmakers in the UK will change tack, reform their laws, and apologize to those who have been harmed by them already. We might also hope that people will recognize that the chiropractic view that all disease is caused by ‘subluxations’ in the spine is baseless quackery (a claim far bolder and less exhaustively justified than the one that got Singh in all this trouble).

Why We Disagree About Climate Change

My review of Mike Hulme’s book Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity has been published in the most recent issue of the Saint Antony’s International Review (STAIR). It is the fourth review down, starting on the eighth page of the PDF.

I found the book interesting, but too heavily focused on the psychological ramifications of climate change, compared with the real physical effects. To summarize:

In addition to being an observable physical phenomenon, climate change has taken on a broad range of social, political, and even theological meanings. Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree About Climate Change seeks to chart out the major lines of argumentation that have emerged around the subject, as well as to consider the implications that flow from them, both in terms of climate policy and in terms of broader matters of ethics and public policy. Ultimately, Hulme argues that “climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape” (p. 326). The range of discourses Hulme considers is restricted to a particular segment of the overall climate change debate—specifically, those contributors to the debate who accept three scientific touchstones: that greenhouse gases affect the climate system, the recorded rise in global temperatures, and the possibility of non-linear responses in the climate system. Restricting the scope of consideration in this way allows Hulme to exclude viewpoints that have no scientific basis. However, doing so also precludes examination of all relevant actors in the global political discussion about climate change policy. While Hulme effectively examines the social, cultural, and political aspects of climate change, he may inappropriately downplay the observed and possible future physical consequences resulting from greenhouse gas emissions.

The book is worthwhile for those with a major interest in the subject area, but I do not consider it to be one of the key texts on the science and policy of climate change.

Previously, STAIR published an article of mine about nuclear power.

The last tree on Easter Island

One section of Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed has been haunting me a bit of late. He refers repeatedly to the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island, effectively completing the undermining the basis of their society. He ponders what the person thought while doing it – in particular, whether they had a sense of the magnitude of the progression that they were completing.

Up to this point, I have thought it highly probable that worsening climate-related disasters would eventually be sufficient to produce major mitigation effort, on the part of humanity (even if simple discussion of the facts at hand might not). From this perspective, the risk arises from lags in the climate system and feedback effects; by the time we are seeing the consequences of our emissions being manifest in the world to a frightening extent, we may no longer have time to prevent catastrophic or runaway climate change.

The Easter Island scenario presents an alternative possibility: that we might keep accelerating towards the cliff face even long after the full consequences of doing so are blatantly obvious to all but the most deluded. If there is a danger of humanity as a whole replicating that situation, then perhaps even the great majority of climate change campaigners are excessively complacent about the scale of the task before us.

To go a bit ‘meta’ for a minute, I recognize that people are of mixed views about all the recent posts about abrupt and runaway climate change scenarios, both here and on BuryCoal. Some people think they are so far outside the mainstream discussion that they confuse people and put them off, rather than making them more supportive of climate change mitigation. Partly, the increased prominence of these posts is reflective of the dire state of the climate policy debate at the moment. A well organized smear campaign against the science has combined with the paralysis of the Obama administration, ongoing concerns about jobs and the economy, and the failure of the Copenhagen talks. Together, these naturally make one pessimistic about the prospects of getting started on serious mitigation in the next few years, which is deeply troubling given how important the peak date for emissions is, in determining how aggressive a pathway we will need to follow afterward.

The best pathway forward remains unclear. That said, it seems almost tautologically true that it will involve the extension of three tracks: working with the level of public and elite support that exists to enact whatever effective policies that allows, working to build greater public and elite support for more ambitious efforts, and preparing strategies to put in place for when that level of support exists.

Emerging energy related technologies

The Economist’s latest Technology Quarterly contains a number of articles with climatic significance:

These sorts of innovations (aside from the oil and gas extraction story) would surely be driven forward if carbon pricing made people care more about the consequences of their greenhouse gas emissions.