Science – Page 63 – a sibilant intake of breath

Coal cancellations in the US

The Economist has been bold enough to suggest that ‘the writing is on the wall’ for coal-fired power plants in the United States, unless they can be converted to run on biomass or incorporated into other ‘green’ compromises. While there have apparently been 97 coal plants cancelled since 2001 (and nine so far this year), those that are operating now are long lived; their contribution to US emissions will barely fall between now and 2030. Unusually, the article makes no mention of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which many supporters of fossil-fuel based power hope will soon emerge as a cheap, safe, and effective mechanism for preventing greenhouse gas emissions. The omission is actually a welcome one, given how tempted industry groups, governments, and commenters in general have been to see CCS as a simple silver-bullet mechanism for maintaining the status quo.

Worldwide, there must be an ever-increasing determination to prevent the construction of new coal capacity, except where it incorporates safe and effective CCS technology (if that proves possible). Meeting climate change mitigation targets (including avoiding a temperature increase of more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels) probably also means a fair bit of existing coal capacity will need to be converted to biomass or brought offline before the end of its economical lifetime. That will provoke the fierce opposition of those who have invested in such projects, though that may be a necessary signal to the market at large that coal-fired power is no longer acceptable – the carbon in the world’s coal beds needs to remain there, rather than being added to an atmospheric stock that is already dangerously high.

States like Canada and the US should be working to rebuild the basis of their energy system on the basis of non-emitting and renewable options. In so doing, they will establish the prerequisites for their own prosperity in the future, as well as help develop the technologies and approaches that will make the same transition possible in rapidly growing developing states.

Cloud cover and climate change

According to research published back in April, the biggest climate changes in the 21st century may occur more due to changes in high altitude cloud cover, in response to increased temperatures from rising greenhouse gas concentrations, rather than due to the initial temperature increases themselves: Global warming due to increasing absorbed solar radiation, published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Reduced cloud cover would reduce the amount of sunlight that gets reflected back into space, rather than striking the surface of the Earth. As such, it would produce further warming. Based on evaluation of simulations used in preparing the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, this effect may be of greater magnitude than the initial warming due to increased absorption of outgoing long-wave radiation by greenhouse gasses.

While the result certainly cannot be considered definitive now, it underscores the importance of improving climate models and incorporating the key feedback effects into them. Only when that has been done can more precise estimates of the climatic sensitivity of the planet be produced, as well as more accurate regional projections.

New research on the meridional overturning circulation

Recent research undertaken by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Duke University suggests that ocean currents work differently from how they were previously considered to, with implications for climate change. Using a combination of two years worth of observations from underwater sensors and computer models, they determined that “much of the southward flow of cold water from the Labrador Sea moves not along the deep western boundary current, but along a previously unknown path in the interior of the North Atlantic.” If the results of this study are accurate, it could mean that previous attempts to model the climate system incorporated inappropriate behaviour for this current. As a result, they could have generated less accurate projections of how warming due to greenhouse gas concentrations will affect different parts of the climate system.

More information about the study is available in Nature: Interior pathways of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. For those lacking time or access to Nature, here is the abstract:

To understand how our global climate will change in response to natural and anthropogenic forcing, it is essential to determine how quickly and by what pathways climate change signals are transported throughout the global ocean, a vast reservoir for heat and carbon dioxide. Labrador Sea Water (LSW), formed by open ocean convection in the subpolar North Atlantic, is a particularly sensitive indicator of climate change on interannual to decadal timescales. Hydrographic observations made anywhere along the western boundary of the North Atlantic reveal a core of LSW at intermediate depths advected southward within the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC). These observations have led to the widely held view that the DWBC is the dominant pathway for the export of LSW from its formation site in the northern North Atlantic towards the Equator. Here we show that most of the recently ventilated LSW entering the subtropics follows interior, not DWBC, pathways. The interior pathways are revealed by trajectories of subsurface RAFOS floats released during the period 2003–2005 that recorded once-daily temperature, pressure and acoustically determined position for two years, and by model-simulated ‘e-floats’ released in the subpolar DWBC. The evidence points to a few specific locations around the Grand Banks where LSW is most often injected into the interior. These results have implications for deep ocean ventilation and suggest that the interior subtropical gyre should not be ignored when considering the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.

Improving our understanding of ocean currents should help to improve the accuracy of predictions from general circulation climate change models, and may be helpful in producing regionally specific projections of climate change impacts.

Australia’s coal and China

All regular readers of this site are familiar with Canada’s energy dilemma, as far as the oil sands, the United States, and climate change are concerned. The US has a huge appetite for oil, and is increasingly anxious about getting it from the Middle East. From a short-term perspective, this positions Canada’s unconventional oil very nicely. Of course, when you think long-term and realize the importance of climate stability, you become a lot more likely to think we would be better off leaving the stuff in the ground.

A similar dynamic seems to exist when it comes to coal, Australia, and China. In March 2009, China imported 1,716,802 tons of Australian coal. All told, it imported 211% more coal between January and March as in the previous year. Like Canada, Australia has extremely high per-capita emissions, a poor record on greenhouse gas mitigation, and a lot of export-oriented resource extraction industry. Also like Canada, it may well be the case that long-term climatic stability requires leaving most of that coal underground.

As such, it is disappointing that Australia has delayed plans to institute carbon pricing. When it comes to the negotiations at Copenhagen in December, dealing with the complexities of energy imports and exports will certainly be among the trickier issues that need to be sorted out in negotiations. While the climatic requirements are clear (sharply reduce global emissions), the economic and moral ones are trickier. After all, a fair bit of the coal China is burning is being used to make products for people in other states. Who, then, bears the moral responsibility for the emissions associated with extracting, shipping, and burning the coal? What sort of legal regime can be established to effectively incentivize decarbonization throughout such complex international production chains?

Questions for the IPCC AR5

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is asking governments what sort of policy-related questions they would like to have examined in the Fifth Assessment Report (5AR), due out in 2014. Here are a few ideas that come to mind:

How will fossil fuel production likely change over the next century? What effect will that have on climate change?
Which strong positive feedback effects are likely to emerge at the lowest levels of warming? At what levels will they take place?
Would any of the current proposed geoengineering strategies effectively combat climate change? What side-effects would they have?
How will the regional impacts of climate change vary across time?
What will the effects of ocean acidification be?

Do readers have other suggestions?

Incidentally, the fact that we need to wait five years for another IPCC report demonstrates one disadvantage of its complex and process-heavy approach to evaluation. It’s a real shame that, despite all these efforts, so many people continue to reject out of hand the fact that there is a robust scientific consensus on the issue.

How climate change is like fisheries depletion

Fisheries and climate change are both areas where severe common property failures exist: that is, individuals have an incentive to exploit the system, to the detriment of all. A recent RealClimate post ties the two together in a neat analogy, which also covers the evolving practice of climate change denial (or delay). Specifically, it is alluding to the North-South issues in the ongoing UNFCCC negotiations, and the tensions between developing world states who want the rich world to cut first and most deeply and developed states concerned about seeing any emissions reductions they produce overwhelmed by growth in developing states. Beyond the state-to-state negotiations, the tension also provides cover for those who want to avoid taking any action, no matter how severe the long-term consequences of doing so will be.

Both positions have validity, and the mechanisms for resolving the views remain under debate. That being said, the outlines are clear. Every significant emitter will have to take action. Rich states need to start doing so first and more sharply. They also need to provide assistance to developing states, in the form of technology and funding. Through coordinated global action, dangerous climate change can be avoided, and the world economy can be set on a path where it maintains climatic stability in the long term.

Capping or taxing fossil fuels at import or production

Responding to a Nature article mentioned here before, George Monbiot has raised the issue of limiting fossil fuel extraction as a way to gauge the seriousness of governments in fighting climate change. It’s an idea with some virtues, both on climate change and energy security grounds.

Targeting emissions means keeping track of a mind-boggling array of activities: from cement manufacture to vehicle use to landfill gasses. By contrast, targeting fossil fuels would mean dealing with a modest number of firms. Instead of applying a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system to emissions, the alternative would be to use those instruments for fossil fuel imports and production. Doing so would require only that the output from gas fields, oil fields, and coal mines be recorded, along with imports of fuels. In the tax scenario, each fuel would require payments proportional to the greenhouse gasses it will produce when burned. In a cap-and-trade scheme, a set amount of carbon would be permitted to be extracted from the ground or imported, with firms competing for the permits in auctions. This would have the same prioritization effect as a carbon tax on emissions: firms that absolutely needed particular fuels would be willing to bid for permits, while those with alternatives would start to employ them.

Ideally, the scheme would also incorporate land-use change. Those wanting to convert land rich in biomass into something else would need to pay a tax or buy credits equivalent to the gasses being released. Conversely, firms planting forests on land previously poor in biomass could be given grants (under a tax scheme) or permits (under a cap-and-trade scheme).

It might also make political sense to differentiate between imports and domestic production, with the former getting stricter treatment. That would somewhat lessen the opposition of domestic industry, while also accelerating the movement of the state imposing the policy towards energy independence. It would probably be less economically and environmentally effective, but it might be a mechanism for gaining domestic support, while still making it clear that the overall objective is to reduce fossil fuel use to zero. Such a policy could also be justified with reference to higher volatility in fossil fuel prices and availability from abroad, as well as the implicit subsidies to users of imported fossil fuels in the form of military aid and military operations in oil-producing regions. Of course, there is a good chance that it would violate the equal treatment provisions in agreements like NAFTA and the enabling legislation for the WTO.

In the event that carbon capture and storage proves to be a safe, economically viable, and effective technology, it could easily be incorporated into such a system. You would simply make payments or grant permits to firms doing the storing, contingent on them providing whatever maintenance the sites require.

By creating incentives for an unending push towards the non-use of fossil fuels, such policies would make it clear that our ultimate objective must be complete global carbon neutrality. Nothing else is compatible with long-term climatic stability.

[Update: 8 March 2010]. BuryCoal.com is a site dedicated to making the case for leaving coal, along with unconventional oil and gas, underground.

A steady state economy

One key tenet of ecological economics is that we need to move from a political and economic system focused on the growth of production (GDP) to one focused on constant biophysical throughput. The latter concept is basically an amalgamation of everything humanity takes from the physical world and all the wastes that are returned to it. On the first side of the ledger are withdrawals like ore and hydrocarbons; on the other are wastes including greenhouse gasses and other forms of pollution. While it could not be expressed in the form of a single number, it is fairly easy to imagine a suite of key physical and energy flows through which the aggregate size of human throughput could be summarized.

The basic idea has appeal for several reasons. Most obviously, it addresses the concerns that exist about how much impact humanity can have on the world without causing key biological and physical systems to fail. It also partially addresses the question of how to ensure that human lives become sustainable without becoming unnecessarily unpleasant. It’s the human throughput that actually weighs on the world, not GDP. Even in a situation where the throughput was constant, welfare per person could still increase in many ways: things could become more technologically advanced, better designed, more elegant, etc. They could also be improved significantly by more effectively eliminating situations of needless suffering, as with the treatable diseases that continue to take a terrible toll in the developing world. Of course, per-capita improvements could also be achieved with constant throughput and a falling population.

One objection to the idea is that, when it comes to renewable power, we are nowhere near the physical limits of what is possible. The total quantity of solar, wind, and tidal energy available is momentous, and it doesn’t seem sensible to focus on the total size of human withdrawals from those flows. As such, perhaps the steady-state approach is better suited to non-energy resources, while on the topic of energy, the drive must be from unsustainable forms (oil, gas, coal) to semi-sustainable forms (nuclear fission, etc) and eventually to fully sustainable options like concentrating solar thermal, hydroelectric, and geothermal.

In the end, the prescription for humanity seems to resemble a cheesy grocery store magazine diet: avoid carbon-intensive fuels, manage resource use and waste flows, and feel free to use all the renewable energy and carbon- and resource-neutral technological advancement as you can manage.

The Global Climate Coalition and climate change denial

Some interesting evidence has emerged about the artificial ‘debate’ that has been created about the reality of human-induced climate change. Documents filed in a federal lawsuit reveal that the scientists working for the Global Climate Coalition – a fossil fuel industry front group that sought to prevent action on climate change – were themselves convinced of the reality of the problem. Back in 1995, they advised in an internal paper that: “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”

This contrasts sharply with what the group said in public, and what they probably said to politicians while lobbying. It helps to demonstrate that the tactic here isn’t appropriate scientific skepticism, but simply a rearguard action to delay climate change mitigation policies. They have certainly succeeded in confusing some politicians with an ideological bent that predisposes them to rejecting climate policies. For instance, Republican Representative for Minesota Michele Bachmann has publicly expressed an absurd position on the science of climate change, while also calling for those who are opposed to climate legislation to be “armed and dangerous” and ready to “fight back hard” against legislation like the Waxman-Markey bill.

Who would control geoengineering?

Over at Slate there is an interesting article about the geopolitics of geoengineering: specifically, the ramifications of the fact that any major nation could choose to deliberately modify the planet’s climate. As the author identifies, this is in some sense the reverse of the ordinary climate change problem. So far, the issue has been how to produce a global action when states disagree on what should be done, how quickly it should occur, and who should pay. By contrast, the problems with the politics of geoengineering are making sure that any states that undertake it do so with the interests of all states (and future generations) in mind.

This is especially problematic because the side-effects of geoengineering might fall disproportionately on certain states, probably the ones who would not be in control of the policy. For instance, consider the so-called ‘Pinatubo option’ of particulate injection into the upper atmosphere. It might help cool the planet overall, but could severely disrupt patterns of precipitation and wind. It would also do nothing about the problem of ocean acidification. Who would decide if the possible advantages outweighed the risks? Who would pay for the side effects? Who could decide to shut the system down, if the effects in some places prove too painful?

Another issue with the ‘Pinatubo option’ is that it would need to be constantly maintained to keep working. This could be an advantage, since we could ‘turn it off’ if it proved too problematic. It could also be a disadvantage, since disabling the system would bring about abrupt and dangerous warming.

All this may be moot, if no forms of geoengineering actually work, or if the danger of unintended consequences is sufficient to deter states from trying. That being said, I see geoengineering (regrettably) as a real possibility. If we don’t reduce emissions fast enough and start to really feel the full brunt of climate change, it will become harder and harder to argue against. As such, it is good that we are starting to consider both the physical and political elements of geoengineering now.