Science – Page 61 – a sibilant intake of breath

Pumped hydroelectric storage in Wales

Snowdonia contains more than just some of the United Kingdom’s finest mountains. From a climate and energy perspective, the Dinorwig Power Station is rather interesting. It has a maximum output of about 1800 megawatts (MW) and was intended to store excess power from nuclear stations, during periods when their output exceeded demand.

The system takes only 16 seconds to ramp up to full output, and can maintain it for six hours. Because of backup batteries and diesel generators, Dinorwig is also able to restart itself even if the rest of the national grid has failed. The facilities two reservoirs are separated by 500m of vertical distance, and it stores about nine gigawatt-hours (GWh) of total energy. It is 75% efficient at turning surplus electrical energy into gravitational potential energy in raised water, and then back into electricity again at times of peak demand. Since it can buy electricity at times when demand is minimal (thus making the power cheap) and sell it when power was expensive, it was able to pay itself off in ten years. Along with three other British facilities, there is a total pumped storage capacity of 2.8GW.

This is a technology that could make a lot of sense for Canada. As we build more renewables – such as wind farms – there will be periods of excess energy production. By building new pumped hydroelectric facilities, or adding the capacity to existing dams, we will have a way to store some of that for when it is needed.

Climate change letters to editors

A lot of dumb things get printed about climate change in newspapers and on serious websites. People put forward dubious arguments on why it isn’t happening, isn’t caused by people, or isn’t a problem. They misrepresent policies like carbon taxes, which could play an important role in mitigating it. They make dubious moral arguments, such as saying that having emitted greenhouse gasses in the past gives you the right to do so in the future.

In order to help counter this, and advance the resistance agenda, I encourage readers to submit letters to the editors of publications that print such claims. Please include any that you write as comments here, with links to the original article and any situations in which your letters actually get published. Having a bunch in one place could serve as a useful archive of pithy rejoinders to common climate change fallacies and misrepresentations.

Could China alone add 2.7 degrees by 2050?

I would like to see the climatic model that David Sandalow, the Assistant Secretary of State for Energy in the US, used to project a 2.7°C degree temperature rise by 2050 as the result of business-as-usual emissions in China and an 80% cut elsewhere. Firstly, it seems like too early a date to see such a big rise. Lags in the climate system mean that decades pass before the full effects of emissions are felt. If we saw an increase of 2.7°C by 2050, there would presumably be a great deal more warming in the pipeline. That would probably mean hugely catastrophic impacts by 2100. Secondly, while China is important, it is still only about 20-25% of global emissions. If emissions by every other state fell by 80%, China’s would need to grow massively to compensate.

If you believe that climate sensitivity is very high it is indeed possible that such a rise could occur that quickly, and primarily as the result of emissions from one very large state. That being said, Sandalow’s analysis would be much more convincing if he provided the details on the simulation he used to get the 2.7°C figure. What does he think China’s business-as-usual emissions pathway will be? How quickly does he assume that other states will cut by 80%? What does he think the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gasses really is?

If the climate really is so sensitive that China alone could push us into seriously dangerous territory by 2050, then we have all the more reason to be deeply concerned about rising global emissions and the ineffective efforts that have been made so far to reduce them. That being said, a lot more details of Sandalow’s methodology would be necessary, before we can accept the validity of his claim.

Japan’s lacklustre 2020 target

People are right to say that Japan’s new commitment to cut emissions to 15% below 2005 levels by 2020 is inadequate. It is not in keeping with the ultimate goal of preventing dangerous anthropogenic climate change, largely because it isn’t compatible with a stabilization pathway and the need for per-capita emissions to contract everywhere and converge between developed and developing states. To avoid dangerous climate change, we probably need to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses below 450ppm (and possibly lower still). Doing that fairly will require deep cuts from developed states by 2020 – at least in the region of 25-40%.

Like Canada, Japan is failing to meet its domestic commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. Rather than being 6% below 1990 levels, it is 9% above. Canada is doing even worse, with emissions about 30% above where they were in 1990. This shows that even targets built into past international agreements weren’t taken seriously enough to be met. At Copenhagen and beyond, both developed and developing states will need to do better. Hopefully, an agreement will come together with the necessary key elements: a commitment from developing states to emit less than they would under a business-as-usual scenario, serious hard caps for all major developed states, measures to protect forests, financing and technology for global mitigation efforts, etc.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

The idea of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people who are incompetent at something often lack the skills necessary to appreciate their own incompetence, largely because the skills required for self-examination are similar to those required for competence in the task being evaluated. As discussed in this video, this effect seems to hold in areas as diverse as appreciating what people in general will find funny, grammar, and logical reasoning. A similar phenomenon shows up in surveys where the great majority of drivers claim that they are in the top 50% of drivers, ranked by skill. Obviously, many of them are overestimating their abilities, or underestimating those of their peers.

It would be interesting to see if it holds in relation to climatic science. As an experiment, people could be given a test that evaluates whether they can respond intelligently to scientific information about climate change. This could include things like whether they understand the difference between the stock of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and the flow of those gasses into it. If the pattern that emerged from scoring those tests and having people self-assess their competence held to the Dunning-Kruger pattern, that might help explain just how challenging it has been for the general public to acquire a working knowledge of climatic science, and ability to identify and reject bogus arguments about it.

An elaboration of the Dunning-Kruger experiments provides interesting additional insight. Highly competent and highly incompetent people are brought back, after having taken a test and rated their performance relative to others. They are then given a sample of other people’s responses to grade. Apparently, competent people realize that they previously overestimated the competence of their peers, and adjust their self-assessment to better match their position in the real distribution. This effect is apparently not seen in highly incompetent people, who fail to recognize their own mediocrity, even when confronted with evidence of it.

Patent reform idea

The trouble with patents is that they block people out of using the latest technologies and techniques. Sometimes, that means one manufacturer can offer things their competitors cannot. Sometimes, it means that firms can effectively block technologies that would otherwise compete with them. The question, then, is how to encourage innovation without permitting such barriers.

One idea that comes to mind is state support for innovators: invent something useful, and the state gives you a lifelong pension with a value proportionate to the value of the invention. They then distribute it for everyone to use for free. The size of the pension could be based on the number of dollars that get spent implementing your idea, with larger amounts for innovations that people really pour money into using. The state could fund the system with higher taxes on businesses and consumers. Consumers benefit because best practices spread more rapidly, and the market overall benefits because firms are less able to undertake anti-competitive behaviours.

There is, of course, the issue of pre-existing patents. One way to deal with that would be to take the age of the youngest patent holder, calculate a maximum plausible remaining lifespan, and decree that all existing patents will expire at that point, including those held by corporations. There is also the issue of dealing with international patent agreements. Indeed, that and the entrenched interests of firms that hold lots of valuable patents are probably the major forces that would block any such reform. That being said, implementation difficulties aside, it does seem possible that this would be a better system than the current practice of granting a time-limited monopoly on use to patent owners.

Algae for biofuels?

One possible feedstock for biofuel production is algae, which could be grown and processed in various ways, producing transportation fuels. Some people seem to think this is the most plausible path to affordable non-fossil transportation fuels. Others think various land-based plants and processes (cellulosic ethanol, jatropha, etc) are more viable. Another big question is how cheap biofuels could ever become. Biofuels at $100 per barrel probably wouldn’t mean the end of air travel, private cars fueled by liquid hydrocarbons, etc. Biofuels at $1,000 a barrel would push us a lot father away from their mainstream use.

I don’t know enough to decide one way or the other, though it certainly doesn’t seem like anyone is making cheap and functional biofuels from algae right now.

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller

Jeff Rubin is a Toronto-based economist for CIBC World Markets, and he has written a book predicting a future of “triple digit” oil, and some of the consequences it will have. While the book is interesting and many aspects of the hypothesis are plausible, the lack of rigour in analysis makes the work less convincing than it might otherwise have been. For one thing, “triple digit” oil covers an awfully broad range. For another, it isn’t clear whether the effects he predicts will unfold in the order he anticipates. For instance, if severe climate change impacts emerge before acute and permanent increases in the price of fossil fuels, the global consequences may look rather different.

When he says that the world is going to get ‘smaller,’ Rubin is reversing the normal sense of globalization having shrunk the world. What he really means is that the world will get larger, relative to our ability to travel and move goods, and that we will have a correspondingly more local focus as a result. That means less imports of all kinds, less travel, and the re-localization of industry. Rubin’s strongest points and arguments relate to the production and use of fossil fuels: such as the effect of domestically subsidized fuels in oil producing states, the limitations associated with energy efficiency, the problems with corn ethanol, and the importance of energy return on investment, when contemplating alternative fuels and sources of energy.

Rubin’s habit of mixing established fact with speculation, and sometimes dismissing important possibilities with a brief splash of rhetoric, makes this book more valuable as a prod to thinking than as a guide to what is likely to happen. The book also contains the occasional overt error, such as referring to prosperous South Korea as the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ – rather than the tyrannical regime to the north. The chapter on climate change was certainly lacking in ways that make me doubt the overall quality of Rubin’s understanding and analysis. He doesn’t really seem to grasp the concept of a stabilization pathway, technological wedges, or the physical realities that must accompany the stabilization of greenhouse gasses at a safe level. His discussion of electrical generation – in both fossil fuel based and alternative forms – is similarly lacking in detailed and rigorous evaluation.

In the end, Rubin’s work is an interesting way to set yourself thinking about the effect that constrained energy ability would have upon the world and your life. When it comes to evaluating the macroeconomic and societal consequences of such a development, the book would probably best be read alongside a more transparent and quantitative analysis, such as that in David MacKay’s book on sustainable energy.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

Tom Roger’s Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics teaches basic science principles in one of the most entertaining ways possible: by illustrating the ways in which elements of popular Hollywood films are hopelessly out of line with the physical laws that exist in our universe. Topics covered include the laws of motion, gravitation, vehicles, the behaviour of weapons, relativity, extreme weather, space travel, and more.

While the book may seem whimsical, Rogers makes the important point that movies are a form of vicarious experience for people. For most of us, they have provided most of our ‘knowledge’ about firearms, knives, the extreme operation and destruction of vehicles, the destruction of buildings, etc. By consistently misrepresenting these things, films leave people ill-equipped to understand the phenomena in the real world.

In addition to this, Rogers’ book includes a detailed debunking of two conspiracy theories partially fuelled by a poor understanding of physics. In the first, he discusses the physics of the JFK assassination, in the context of the popular film. He argues that the official account is convincing for a number of reasons, and that the film has helped to entrench a serious misunderstanding in the minds of many Americans. The second conspiracy theory – that the World Trade Centre was destroyed using explosives planted inside – is similarly based in a bad understanding of physics, and similarly damaging in terms of the way in which it colours people’s thinking.

The kind of people who take delight in outsmarting the people who make movies will probably find this book very entertaining. Those trying to teach physics concepts may also find it useful as a mechanism for engaging people and having them explore ideas in an imaginative but realistic way.

Steven Chu on the oil sands

Apparently, Energy Secretary Steven Chu thinks that technology will somehow make oil sands extraction compatible with climatic stability. While the The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers was quick to praise his statement, it is wrong for a series of reasons. When it comes to emissions from the extraction and upgrading of bitumen, many are to dispersed to be compatible with carbon capture and storage (CCS), even if it does emerge as a safe, effective, and affordable technology. More importantly, about 85% of the emissions associated with oil derived from the Athabasca oil sands are generated when the fuels are burned. On one hand, that means that oil from that source isn’t enormously dirtier than oil from other sources (when considering only greenhouse gas emissions). On the other, it isn’t really the relative dirtiness of fuels that will determine how much warming we experience, but rather the cumulative quantity of greenhouse gasses added to the atmosphere. Climatic stability depends on keeping most of the carbon in coal and unconventional oil buried: not putting it into fuels that will be burned in the atmosphere, with waste products emerging to warm the planet.

Chu is a good enough scientist to realize that we cannot square the circle of unrestrained hydrocarbon usage and climatic stability. Unfortunately, it seems that politics still haven’t advanced to the point where not using fossil fuel resources is seriously contemplated. That is short-sighted and a shame, not least because it perpetuates the development and emergence of techological and economic systems that are fundamentally unsustainable. Rather than coveting the hydrocarbon resources of western Canada, North American leaders need to get serious about harnessing the renewable resources of the continent, while cutting total energy consumption towards the point where it can be renewably provided.