Category: Science

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

Obama visiting Canada

President Barack Obama will be visiting Canada on February 19th. Presumably, that will include some sort of large public gathering, hopefully with an appearance from the man himself. In preparation, it seems fitting to contemplate what sort of message it would be most valuable to convey to the new president.

With that aim in mind, I propose that people submit their best ideas for a message that could be put on a placard for the media (and maybe even the President) to catch a glimpse of. Text versions and images would both be welcome. The former can be posted as simple comments. In the latter case, people can email images to me for possible posting. My immediate idea would be something along the lines of:

The oil sands are a trap!
Choose zero-carbon energy!

These days, it seems that the best hope for an aggressive shift towards decarbonizing the global economy comes from the possibility of new US leadership and the destruction of the reckless approach to energy the world is using at present. The challenge of expressing that general necessity in a compact statement is a considerable one.

Ice and solar power

Indirectly, Ottawa winters provide a good demonstration of just how immense a quantity of solar energy there really is on this planet. Consider the fact that the Earth’s axial tilt produces thirty degree weather here in the summer and negative thirty degree weather here in the winter. Walk out onto the frozen surface of Dow’s Lake and think about how the only reason the lake is ever liquid is because of the massive amount of solar energy striking it in the spring and summer. Then, recall that all the lakes and seas everywhere on Earth would freeze solid without the constant solar influx. This is well illustrated by the frozen moons in the outer portion of our solar system.

Burning all the world’s fossil fuels wouldn’t let us keep oceans liquid, in the absence of solar assistance. Moving to an energy system that relies directly (solar photovoltaic and concentrating solar) or indirectly (wind, hydroelectricity, biomass) on the sun is an overwhelmingly important part of creating a sustainable society. The amount of energy available to harness vastly exceeds the amount we can drill or dig up out of the ground.

Climate change and the perception of threat

Winter pigeons and bricks

This David Roberts post, over at Gristmill, discusses the relationships between public awareness of climatic science and the need to take action on climate change. In short, it concludes that the general public will not understand climatic science in the foreseeable future. The critical task is not to make them do so. Rather, what is critical is altering the answers they reach when they ask themselves the two questions through which they evaluate potential problems:

  1. “Is this a problem that threatens me/my family/my tribe? Is there an imminent threat? Is it an emergency?”
  2. “Do the proposed solutions to the problem threaten me/my family/my tribe? Am I going to get screwed?”

It goes on to argue that scientific reports and data will not change how people answer these questions. Rather, to get action on climate change, the following must be done:

  1. “Greens, politicians, and other communicators need to get serious about calling climate change the impending catastrophe it is, with serious, dire consequences for people now living, certainly for their children. That means risking being called “hysterics” by conservatives and their dupes in the media.”
  2. “The same folks need to get better at showing the public the opportunities and benefits of action. It’s about expanding the winner’s circle and making damn sure everybody in it, or potentially in it, knows about it.” (emphasis in original)

This is a strategy quite different from climate change mitigation by stealth, but it does seek to respond to the same fundamental problems of selfishness and misunderstanding.

The critical flaw in thinking we can achieve a technocratic solution to climate change is a failure to appreciate the influence of those who will be harmed by effective climate change mitigation efforts (such as coal and oil sands producers), as well as their willingness to manipulate the public into demanding inaction. In order to counter the influence of such status quo powers, there does need to be a political constituency for effective climate change action. I think Roberts is basically correct in asserting that it will be through changing the public perception of risk and opportunity that such a constituency might best be constructed.

The usefulness of being methodical

'Justice' stonework

Whenever I need to wake up early in order to catch a bus or train, I make sure to lay everything out in a clear and sequential manner. That is the most effective way of not forgetting critical items, while also not wasting too much time checking and re-checking things. While, in my case, it is early-morning brain woolliness that makes such clear sequencing valuable, there is evidence that simple lists and straightforward procedures can also serve a useful purpose in situations where complex and demanding tasks are undertaken, sometimes making it too easy to forget a seemingly small but crucial step. Flying airplanes and performing surgery are examples. Indeed, it seems that the pilots might be able to teach some useful techniques to the men and women with the scalpels.

Some recently published research has shown that a simple World Health Organization (WHO) checklist (PDF) is highly valuable for preventing surgical mishaps. The British National Patient Safety Agency found that the use of the checklist (which includes simple items like having the surgical staff confirm the patient, site, and procedure to be performed) can cut deaths by over 40% and complications by over a third. The finding is especially impressive due to the sample size examined: 7,688 patients, 3,733 before the checklist was implemented, and 3,955 afterwards. The patients were located in a diverse collection of countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Jordan, India, the Philippines, and Tanzania. Clearly, surgeons worldwide tend to overlook the same things.

It’s a curious quirk of human nature that someone can be both capable of performing advanced cardiac surgery and capable of forgetting a sponge inside the patient’s body while sewing them up. Hopefully, simple tools like the WHO checklist will help the former to occur more successfully without the danger of the latter. In a less specific context, it is worth remembering the value of simple tools that produce welfare improvements quite disproportional to their cost or difficulty of use.

Fishing, weather, and uncontrolled experiments

New Scientist recently published an interesting article discussing the importance of weather for fisheries. Specifically, it examines some of the ways in which weather and climatic phenomena affect the stocks of individual species and the balance of species within an ecosystem. Important mechanisms through which effects are transmitted include changed ocean temperatures and the aggravated mixing of nutrient-rich deep waters and sunlight-rich surface waters. Where they are persistent, such upwellings produce some of the world’s most fertile marine habitats, such as those off the west coast of Africa.

When it comes to the ocean in general, humanity is in the midst of an overlapping series of massive experiments: bumping the temperature and acidity by emitting CO2, altering salinity by melting ice, aggressively fishing for creatures of all kinds, dumping plastics into the oceans, and so forth. Given the scale of these actions, the unknown linkages between them, and our poor level of overall knowledge about the chemistry and biology of the oceans, it would be surprising if all this did not produce major unexpected changes in the biological makeup of the seas within the next half-century or so.

Fossil fuels and industrialization

Emily Horn in duotone

Given our present energy and climate predicament, it is interesting to contemplate how human history would have progressed in the absence of large supplies of coal, oil, and gas. Before efficient steam engines existed, heavy industry depended on mechanical water power to grind flour, saw wood, and so forth. Steam engines and coal helped kick off the path of development that leads to the present world, in which fossil fuels play critical roles as energy sources, inputs for agriculture, and feedstocks for chemical manufacture.

On a planet without fossil fuels, industrialization would probably have made use of mechanical water and wind energy for far longer. It is an open question whether such a society could ever have reached the point of being able to build current-generation renewables, such as electric wind and hydro turbines, solar photovoltaic panels, or concentrating solar arrays. It is possible, then, that only planets with ample and accessible supplies of fossil fuel are compatible with the development of things like spaceflight or computer networks. That could even be one explanation for the Fermi paradox: the question of why the vast observable universe hasn’t yet provided any signs of life outside our solar system.

The challenge now is to move beyond fossil fuel dependency, without losing the beneficial new capabilities that have largely arisen due to the use of those energy sources. Eventually, we need to reach a point where the whole lifecycle of energy production – including construction and dismantling of generation equipment – is accomplished in a zero carbon and sustainable way. We will also need to re-make global agriculture in a way that isn’t dependent on fossil fuels or fertilizers derived from them, as well as find ways to use biomass feedstocks in chemical manufacture. The fossil fuel era must be a one-off transition period in human history; at least, it must prove to be so if human history is to extend much longer.

The fossil fuel industry has no long-term future

Ice on a window

Oil, gas, and coal are all – at best – transitional sources of energy, moving us from muscle power to truly renewable non-muscle sources. To see why, there are two basic facts that must be appreciated:

  1. Only finite quantities of fossil fuels exist on Earth.
  2. Burning all the world’s coal, oil, and gas would cause catastrophic climate change.

It is as though there are two hard barriers to fossil fuel use out there. What we don’t know is how far away they are. The first fact is self-evident, though it is more nuanced to say that there is a finite quantity of fossil fuel that can be extracted for any particular level of price or effort. If oil cost $10,000 a barrel, we would be able to find some pretty unusual geological sources for it. The second fact arises from the basics of climatic science. We have already increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses from about 290 parts per million (ppm) to 385 ppm. Continuing to run our economy as we have been (bigger every year, and largely powered by coal, oil, and gas), that figure will be approaching 1000 ppm by the end of the century. Based on the climatic sensitivity estimates of the IPCC and Met Office, that would likely produce 5.5 to 7.1 ° C of warming by 2100, with more to follow afterwards. That would be utterly catastrophic for humanity, quite possibly threatening our ability to endure as a species. We will either stop using fossil fuels, or we will die in the process of trying to burn them all. Due to lags in the climate system, we just might be able to burn them all and leave it to another generation to suffer the fatal consequences.

A useful analogy is that of a factory worker taking methamphetamines to stay awake. This is essentially what all of society is doing with fossil fuels: giving ourselves an unsustainable jolt that gets things moving faster. Of course, extended and heavy use of amphetamines will eventually kill you. If that lethal toxic effect is likely to be achieved before you run out of pills, you are presented with a barrier just as impassable and just as real as the difficulty of their eventual and total depletion.

As such, those who invest in fossil fuel infrastructure and equipment and processes that depend on fossil fuels need to appreciate that this is an industry that will need to peak and then be wound down, even though oil, gas, and coal remain in the ground to be extracted. Greater efficiency of use and technologies like carbon capture and storage can somewhat extend the timeline across which that will need to occur. All the same, a world with a stable climate will be a world that does not use fossil fuels for energy. If we want that stable climate to be one compatible with human welfare, civilization, and prosperity, we must hope that it is established sooner rather than later.

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

What it means to stabilize climate

Mica Prazak with a beer

This speech, given to the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, contains a basic error about the nature of climate stabilization. In part, it reads:

Never losing sight of the ultimate long-term objective of the exercise – stabilizing the level of man-made greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere at non-dangerous levels not in 2020, or even 2030, but 4 decades hence in 2050. Recognizing that we are running a marathon, not a sprint; and acting accordingly. (emphasis in original)

As stated, this is a very ambitious goal. Stabilizing the global concentration of greenhouse gasses by 2050 would mean reaching the point of zero net human emissions in that year. That would require either the total elimination of fossil fuel use and deforestation, or the deployment of technologies that capture greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere and sequester them.

Right now, greenhouse gas concentrations are about 385 parts per million (ppm), and rising at 2 ppm per year. Even if they kept up that rate between now and 2050, concentrations would ‘only’ rise to 469 ppm – a figure not enormously higher than the commonly cited target of 450 ppm. Of course, it is unlikely that emissions per year would stay completely flat until 2050, then drop instantly to zero.

Given the other contents of the speech (such as affirming that 80% of North American electricity will come from oil and gas in 2020), I don’t think the literal meaning of the passage quoted is the one intended. I fear, instead, that rather than talking about stabilizing concentrations of greenhouse gasses, the speaker may have been talking about stabilizing emissions. If so, this is a disastrous suggestion. If we are to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, global emissions almost certainly need to peak between 2015 and 2020, declining sharply after that.

A simple analogy to personal debt easily explains the difference between concentration and emission stabilization. If you are going into debt because you are spending more each year than you earn, stabilizing your level of spending is not going to get you out of debt. It will just leave you in the position where your level of debt increases by the same amount every year. Stabilizing your debt requires that your expenditures match your income every year. While your level of wealth is lower than it was when you started, it is still stable. So too it will be when humanity reaches the point of zero net greenhouse gas emissions: what we already put in the atmosphere will stay there for hundreds of thousands of years, but at least we will no longer be adding to it.

Armchair iceberg tracking

In July 2008, a 27 square kilometer iceberg calved from the Petermann Glacier: between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Scientists from the CCGS Amundsen placed radio beacons on the iceberg, which has subsequently shifted position and lost some volume. You can actually track the beacon online. The larger piece remains 22 square kilometers in area, and thus may pose a risk to the offshore oil industry in spring of 2009.

Apparently, with an iceberg of this size normal ‘iceberg management’ techniques cannot be employed. You just have to hope it doesn’t run into something.