Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

Kessler Syndrome

When an atom of uranium undergoes fission in the right circumstances, it produces multiple neutrons which in turn induce fission in other uranium atoms, creating a chain reaction. Today, due to a lack of caution on the part of governments, there is a risk of something similar happening to satellites in orbit around the Earth. When they collide or get blown up, satellites produce large quantities of fast-moving debris. This can cause additional satellites to disintegrate, in turn.

The nightmare scenario is one resembling a nuclear chain reaction, in which a small number of initial collisions produce debris, additional collisions, and debris in an escalating cycle, until certain orbits are no longer safe and usable. This scenario is called Kessler Syndrome, a possibility first identified in 1978 by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler.

The risk of this outcome can be reduced by improving procedures in the future. For instance, satellites can be designed so that they fall out of orbit when they cease to be useful. There could also be financial incentives put in place to encourage the operators of satellites to behave responsibly at the end of their lives – for instance, a bond that is paid when the satellite is launched and which is refunded when it burns up in the atmosphere. If a satellite is simply left to die in orbit, the bond money can be put into an insurance fund, to compensate the owners of any satellite that it collides with.

It may also be possible to deal with some of the existing junk in space, using a variety of methods such as lasers, the after-the-fact attachment of small disposal rockets to existing satellites, or possibly the use of some kind of membrane to catch small pieces of debris.

California’s Proposition 23

In California, there is a risk of further rollback of climate change mitigation policies:

IN 2006, the California assembly passed AB32, known in the vernacular as the Global Warming Act of 2006. The measure requires that the state reduce its carbon emissions below 1990 levels by 2020. In this election cycle, that has proven too tempting a political target to ignore, and in November California will vote on Proposition 23, which would suspend AB32 until the state’s employment rate falls below 5.5% for four straight quarters (a condition which has been met just three times since 1976, and which seems rather distant with the state’s unemployment rate currently running at 12%). Proposition 23 has been largely funded by multi-million-dollar donations from two Texas oil companies, Valero Services and Tesoro Companies.

The campaign is largely being funded via multi-million dollar donations from two Texas oil companies: Valero Services and Tesoro Companies.

The situation reveals some of the special dangers associated with climate change policy: big polluters will do whatever they can to block and water down effective policies. Voters are always tempted to delay the necessary transition to carbon neutrality, due to concern about jobs or growth today. Finally, the structure of the political system often effectively prevents the consideration of the welfare of future generations.

Bedbugs proliferating

I have had one nasty personal experience with these fast-spreading bloodsuckers, and hope to never have another. Alas, that may be an unrealistic hope, given how they are spreading all over the world. According to the BBC, the last big outbreak happened before World War II: “[i]n the 1930s there were large swaths of London where every house was infested.” Eradication with DDT after 1946 pushed that outbreak back, but such pesticides are restricted now because of their health and environmental effects.

Apparently, bedbugs have also grown resistant to DDT, so bringing it back probably wouldn’t help address the current problem. The pesticides currently used for bedbugs may be losing effectiveness, as the creatures become resistant. Increased domestic and international travel may also contribute.

Personally, I have taken to adopting a few precautions:

  • When staying in hostels and hotels, I check for the fecal spots, moults, and blood smears they leave behind, especially when there is a severe infestation (as there is at the Sous Bois Hostel in Montreal).
  • Keeping luggage off the floor and away from upholstered furniture is also a good idea.
  • When I found that I had stayed somewhere with bedbugs, I put everything I had with me through either a high temperature wash or three weeks of sub-zero temperatures.
  • I will no longer purchase or accept used furniture.

Thankfully, these horrible creatures don’t seem to spread disease. They are revolting, however, and extremely expensive and difficult to eradicate. As such, it pays to be cautious.

Dangerous offshore drilling

One manifestation of how we are now chasing the dregs of the world’s oil is the increasingly dangerous and expensive places and ways we are going after the stuff. The latest explosion on a Gulf Coast oil rig is a demonstration of some of the dangers.

Meanwhile, we should be expecting more leaks and spills, including in places where help is a long way off. For improved understanding of part of what that involves, there is a series from Deep Sea News that may be worth a look:

  1. How effective are dispersants on real oil spills?
  2. How toxic are dispersants?
  3. Do dispersants really promote degradation of oil?

Oil dependence is all about transportation – the fuels used for electricity and industry are largely oil and gas. As such, the medium- to long-term solution to all the problems associated with offshore drilling is to reduce the global demand for oil with some combination of investments in alternative forms of transport, pricing to reduce consumption, and complementary policies.

Bad times ahead

In the wake of the failure of the current U.S. administration to pass climate legislation, Grist’s David Roberts asks ‘How bad are the next few years going to suck?‘

He predicts that “Democrats are going to get shellacked in the midterms” but that they will probably retain control of the senate. The economy will quite probably remain weak, which significantly worsens Obama’s prospects for a second term. Finally, he says “[b]y 2016 my son will be a teenager and atmospheric CO2 will be flirting with 400 ppm” and calls for people to take local action, while central leadership is lacking.

That’s more useful than saying ‘throw up your hands in despair, we are dooming the world’ but it doesn’t strike me (or Roberts) as an adequate response to the problem. Humanity’s level of collective intelligence still looks pretty low.

Reforming the IPCC

Alternative title: What to do when everybody ignores you?

In the wake of University of East Anglia email scandal, there has been yet another review of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This one was chaired by Harold Shapiro, a Princeton University professor, and concluded that “[t]he U.N. climate panel should only make predictions when it has solid evidence and should avoid policy advocacy.”

The IPCC has certainly made some mistakes: issuing some untrue statements, and evaluating some evidence imperfectly. That being said, the details they got wrong were largely of a nitpicky character. The core claims of the IPCC reports – that climate change is real, caused by humans, and dangerous – remain supremely justified. The trouble is, governments aren’t willing to take action on anything like the appropriate scale.

The situation is akin to a doctor giving a patient a diagnosis of cancer, after which the patient decides that he will try to cut down on his consumption of sugary drinks. That might improve the patient’s health a bit, but it is not an adequate response to the problem described. At that point, it would be sensible for the doctor to engage in a bit of ‘policy advocacy’ and stress how the proposed solution is dangerously inadequate.

It can be argued that the IPCC works best when it presents the bare facts and leaves others to make policy decisions. The trouble is, people don’t take the considered opinions of this huge group of scientists sufficiently seriously. They are happy to let crackpots tell them that there is no problem or that no action needs to be taken. While scientists should not be saying: “Here is what your government’s climate change policy should be” they should definitely be saying: “Here are the plausible consequences of the policy you are pursuing now, and they don’t match with the outcomes you say you want to achieve (like avoiding over 2°C of temperature increase)”. They could also very legitimately say: “If you want to avoid handing a transformed world over to future generations, here is the minimum that must be done”. James Hansen accomplishes this task rather well:

Today we are faced with the need to achieve rapid reductions in global fossil fuel emissions and to nearly phase out fossil fuel emissions by the middle of the century. Most governments are saying that they recognize these imperatives. And they say that they will meet these objectives with a Kyoto-like approach. Ladies and gentleman, your governments are lying through their teeth. You may wish to use softer language, but the truth is that they know that their planned approach will not come anywhere near achieving the intended global objectives. Moreover, they are now taking actions that, if we do not stop them, will lock in guaranteed failure to achieve the targets that they have nominally accepted.

Scientists don’t lose their integrity when they present scientific information in a way that policy-makers and citizens can understand. Indeed, it can be argued that they show a lack of integrity when they hide behind technical language that keeps people from grasping the implications of science.

Greenland offshore oil

In a development that seems to reinforce a number of ongoing trends, it seems there may be oil to exploit off the coast of Greenland. As with other places in the Arctic, the combination of new technologies, higher oil prices, and retreating ice is making it plausible to access fossil fuels that would once have been out of reach. At least as reported by The Economist, residents seem moderately intrigued by the prospects for increased wealth, but largely disinterested in the ongoing climate change that could profoundly transform the massive island:

Most of Greenland’s 56,000 inhabitants seem persuaded [that the risk from oil spills is acceptable]. Despite the vulnerability of the country’s ice sheet to global warming, a recent Greenpeace meeting in Nuuk drew a paltry 45 people. Even this minimal interest in the environmentalists’ message could fall further as the implications of this week’s news start to sink in.

Cairn Energy, a British oil and gas firm, already has an area designated for exploration which is thought to include 4 billion barrels of oil. United States Geological Survey data suggests that a total of 17 billion barrels may lie in the waters between Canada and Greenland.

As with so many issues related to climate change, there is an important disjuncture here between different relevant timescales. Whereas it is plausible that the next few decades could see the deployment of offshore oil and gas platforms in the Arctic – and at least the beginning of significant revenues from them – the warming of the climate will largely occur over a more extended span of time. Nevertheless, we have good reasons to believe that the emissions trajectory humanity is investing in right now is incompatible with the continued existence of the Greenland icesheet, though the disappearance will probably take centuries. Of course, that change will profoundly alter life in the region. At the same time, the seven metres of sea level rise embedded in that ice would surely prove problematic for many of the cities and nations that may find themselves benefitting from the use of Greenland’s oil and gas in the interim.

Climate and the timing of emissions

Climatologist James Hansen emphatically argues that cumulative emissions are what really matter – how much warming the planet experiences depends on what proportion of the world’s fossil fuels get burned.

One reason for this is the long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere, with much of it remaining after thousands of years. That being said, the model simulation I have seen shows concentrations dropping sharply, and then tapering off with time:

It seems like it would be helpful to put together that chart with this one, showing historical and expected CO2 concentration increases:

Atmospheric concentration of CO2

A combined chart on the same scale would illustrate what would happen to CO2 concentrations if we stopped emitting at some point soon, specifically what the next few decades would look like.

It seems at least logically possible that timing of emissions could matter. Imagine, for instance, that having emissions cross a certain concentration threshold would really matter. If so, spreading out human emissions so that absorption of CO2 by the oceans would keep the concentration below that cap could be quite beneficial.

It seems an important question to sort out, given how the whole BuryCoal project is focused on limiting total human emissions, rather than trying to space them out.

CO2 is plant food

One of the many things that falls into the category of ‘things that climate change deniers say that are true, but deeply misleading’ is the claim that carbon dioxide (C02) is ‘plant food’ and thus beneficial to the planet.

This video does a nice job of smashing that argument.

Ironically, in the very long term, life on Earth actually is imperiled by the possibility of insufficient CO2, though not on a timescale that human beings need to worry about now. A billion years from now, it could be a problem.