engineering information technology : global warming

Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts

A Test Case For How To Lower Carbon Emissions: Texas

online engineering degree/engineering degree online/online engineering courses/engineering technology online/engineering courses online/engineering technician degree online/online engineering technology/electronic engineering online

No, I haven't gone off my nut with blind patriotism toward my native state. Yes, I know that ex-governor Rick Perry said in 2014, "Calling CO2 a pollutant is doing a disservice [to] the country, and I believe a disservice to the world." But the fact of the matter is that Texas has the most installed wind-generation capacity of any state, more even than California, and shows no signs of turning back. How we got here is a lesson in the effects of government regulation, and shows that sometimes less is more.

In an Associated Press article, reporter Michael Biesecker points out the irony that three of the leading wind-generation states—Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas—are also home to state and federal lawmakers who have been the most critical of climate-change ideas and most supportive of fossil fuel businesses such as oil and coal. He shows that in both 2014 and 2015, U. S. utilities spent more money installing renewable-energy sources such as wind and solar than they did building fossil-fueled power plants. And the fossil-fuel plants they did build mostly burn natural gas, which contributes less to the carbon-dioxide burden of the atmosphere than coal does. The fact that natural gas is so popular is largely because it's cheaper these days, and that's because the largely Texas-based oil-and-gas-extraction industry figured out how to do fracking, which has made more natural gas available now than we've had for a long time.

A few years ago we were hearing calls for carbon taxes, heavy regulation of fossil-fuel industries, and draconian mandates for Federal- and state-funded renewable energy projects imposed from Washington and other centers of governmental power. Largely because Washington has been gridlocked for the last five or six years, no significant Federal laws were passed, although the Obama administration has done what it could through executive actions in those directions.

Meanwhile, in Texas we enjoy some peculiar advantages when it comes to doing new things with electric power. Because years ago, Texas refused to interconnect in a major way with the electric grids in the rest of the country, most of the state gets power from an entity called ERCOT—the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Both physically and legally, ERCOT is independent from both the rest of the U. S. power grid and from the tangle of regulatory requirements that the rest of the country has to deal with whenever a power utility wants to do something different.

As Kyle Downey points out in an article at lawstreetmedia.com, this freedom from outside utility regulations has allowed Texas to pass innovative laws such as the Renewable Portfolio Standard in 1999, which created mandates and funded incentives for utilities to develop renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Modified over the years and threatened with repeal but never revoked, the Standard has succeeded beyond most people's expectations. From barely 1,000 MW of installed wind-generation capacity in 2002, wind power has grown to the extent that about ten percent of all power produced in the state is generated by wind farms—some 17,000 MW as of 2015. Many Texas utility customers can choose to "buy" only wind power through a trading system that gives choices of sources and pricing plans, and this has also allowed private individuals to vote for wind power with their wallets, rather than much more indirectly at the ballot box.

The other factor Downey mentions that has made Texas a wind-power leader is that we have a lot of land in the Panhandle where the wind blows steadily almost all the time, and even conveniently gets stronger at night when other renewables such as solar conk out. That everlasting wind on the prairie that early settlers often found so annoying is finally turning out to be a money-making asset. The state has also provided a fund to connect the remote wind-generation farms to the demand centers in populated areas of the eastern and central part of the state with transmission lines, an essential ingredient of the process that legislatures often overlook when planning renewable-energy futures for their constituents. Overall, the wind-power picture has never looked brighter in Texas, and there are more wind farms yet to be built. One study has shown that even without government incentives, building a wind farm is now the cheapest way to install new generating capacity—even cheaper than fossil-fuel plants.

What are the implications of this story for the current debate over carbon emissions and global climate change? For one thing, it tells me that predicting what people are going to do is hard, unless you restrict them with so many regulations that they don't have much choice. Few forecasters a decade ago would have foreseen the U. S. getting to a point where it is nearly independent of oil imports, as we are now. And even I thought that when certain wind-power subsidies came to an end, that the bottom would fall out of wind-generation growth in Texas. I was wrong, obviously, and not for the first time.

On a personal level, much of what an individual worries about does not in fact come to pass. Something like this may be the case with carbon emissions. In researching this article, I came across a chart showing that in 2013, China built more wind-generating power plant capacity than nuclear-powered plants. China is still one of the world's largest offenders when it comes to carbon emission because of its huge number of coal-fired power plants, but it is an encouraging sign that even a highly autocratic government such as China's recognizes the good sense in encouraging renewable energy sources.

All that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere isn't going to go away overnight, and we will be dealing with the consequences of burning fossil fuels, whatever they turn out to be, for many decades. But those who would like to empower a world government with the means of forcing people to quit burning fossil fuels should take a look at Texas, where climate-change deniers are happily building wind farms, making money, and thumbing their noses at regulators who are everywhere else but in Texas. It's paradoxical, but it seems to work.

Sources: The AP article by Michael Biesecker on how conservative states are leading the renewable-energy drive was carried by numerous outlets and is available on the U. S. News & World Report website at http://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2016-05-06/gop-states-benefiting-from-shift-to-wind-and-solar-energy. Kyle Downey's article "The Mystery of Wind Energy in Texas" is at http://lawstreetmedia.com/issues/energy-and-environment/mystery-wind-energy-texas/. Rick Perry's quotation is from http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/31/top-10-misguided-climate-deniers-quotes-2014and the article about wind energy in China is at https://www.statista.com/chart/1233/wind-outpaces-nuclear-in-china/.

The Ironies of Carbon Capture Technology

In a recent article in Scientific American, reporter David Biello summarizes the current state of carbon-capture technology, and it's not good. If a negative view of carbon capture appeared in some obscure climate-change-denier publication, it could be dismissed as biased reporting. But the elite-establishment Scientific American has been in the forefront of the anti-climate-change parade, and so for such an organ to publish such bad news means that we would do well to take it seriously.

The basic problem is that capturing a gas like carbon dioxide, compressing it, and injecting it deep enough underground where it won't come out again for a few thousand years is not cheap. And the worst fossil-fuel offenders—coal-fired power plants—make literally tons of the stuff every second. It would be hard enough to transport and bury tons of solid material (and coal ash is a nasty enough waste product), but we're talking about tons of a gas, not a solid. Just the energy required to compress it is huge, and the auxiliary operations (cleaning the gas, drilling wells, finding suitable geologic structures to hold it underground) add millions to billions to the cost of an average-size coal-fired plant. Worst of all, the goal for which all this effort is expended—slowing carbon-dioxide emissions—is a politically-tinged goal whose merit is doubted by many, and which is being ignored wholesale by some of the world's worst offenders in this regard, namely China and India.

However, shrinking the U. S. carbon footprint is regarded by many as a noble cause, and a few years ago Mississippi Power got on the bandwagon by designing a new lignite-burning power plant to capture its own carbon-dioxide emissions and send them into a nearby oil field, whereupon they expel oil that is, uh, eventually burned to make more carbon dioxide. Here is the first irony. Evidently, one of the few large-scale customers for large quantities of carbon dioxide are oil companies, who send it underground (good) to make more oil come to the surface (not so good).

The second irony is an economic one. It is the punishment meted out by economics to the few good corporate citizens in a situation where most citizens are not being so good.

Currently in the U. S., there is no uniform, rational, and legally enacted set of rules regarding carbon-capture requirements. So far, the citizenry as a whole has not risen up and said, "In our constitutional role as the supreme power in the U. S., we collectively decide that capturing carbon dioxide is worth X billion a year to us, and we want it done pronto." Instead, there is a patchwork of voluntary feel-good individual efforts, showcase projects here and there, and large-scale operations such as the one Mississippi Power got permission to do from the state's utility commission, as long as they didn't spend more than $2.88 billion on the whole thing.

So far, it's cost $6.3 billion, and it's still not finished. This means big problems for the utility and its customers, in the form of future rate hikes. Capturing carbon is not a profitable enterprise. The notion of carbon-trading laws would have made it that way, sort of, but for political reasons it never got off the ground in the U. S., and unless we get a world government with enforcement powers, such an idea will probably never succeed on an international level. So whatever carbon capturing is going to be done, will be done not because it is profitable, but for some other reason.

The embarrassment of Mississippi Power's struggling carbon-capture plant is only one example of the larger irony, which is that we don't know what an appropriate amount is to spend on carbon capture, because we don't know exactly, or even approximately, what it will cost if we don't, and who will pay. Probably the poorer among us will pay the most, but nobody can be sure. (There's a lot of very expensive real estate on coasts around the world, and sometimes I wonder if that influences the wealthy class to support anti-global-warming efforts as much as they do.)

The time factor is a problem in all this as well. Nearly all forecasts of global-warming tragedies are long-term things with timelines measured in many decades. That is good in the sense that we have a while to figure out what to do. But in terms of making economic decisions that balance profit against loss—which is what all private firms have to do—such long-run and widely distributed problems are chimerical and can't be captured by any reasonable accounting system. Try to put depreciation on an asset you plan to own from 2050 to 2100 on your income-tax return, and see how far you get.

So the only alternative in many places for large-scale carbon capture to happen is by government fiat. A dictatorial government such as China's could do this tomorrow if it wanted to, but as the recent Paris climate-accord meeting showed, it doesn't want to—not for a long time yet, anyway. In a nominal democracy such as the United States, the political will is strong in some quarters, but the unilateral non-democratic way the present administration has been trying to implement carbon limits has run into difficulties, to say the least.

My sympathies to residents of Mississippi who face the prospect of higher electric bills when, and if, their carbon-capturing power plant goes online. Whatever else the project has done, it has revealed the problems involved in building a hugely expensive engineering project for a payoff that few of those living today may ever see.

Sources: The article "The Carbon Capture Fallacy" by David Biello appeared on pp. 58-65 of the January 2016 edition of Scientific American.

Did Exxon Mobil Lie About Climate Change?

The energy giant Exxon Mobil is being investigated by New York State's attorney general, according to a report last week in the New York Times. The issue appears to be whether Exxon properly stated the risks of climate change to its future business in light of its own internal scientific climate research. Critics of the company say it has engaged in deception similar to what tobacco companies did in the 1960s and 1970s, when cigarette makers funded research that cast doubt on the health dangers of tobacco use even as they knew the grim truth and concealed it. For its part, Exxon's spokesman Kenneth P. Cohen said, "We unequivocally reject the allegations that Exxon Mobil has suppressed climate change research."

Under a law called the Martin Act, the New York attorney general is charged with the investigation of financial fraud, and can issue subpoenas for records and documents relating to such an investigation. Exxon got a subpoena along these lines last week, and is in the process of responding to it.

Let's step back a moment and examine the question of how this case relates to the well-known practices of tobacco companies that attacked the credibility of research that showed smoking and chewing their products was hazardous to one's health.

The history of how Big Tobacco muddied the research waters is pretty clear. After the tobacco firms fought what became a rear-guard action against the mounting evidence that smoking kills, both state and U. S. federal attorneys general sued large companies such as R. J. Reynolds beginning in the 1990s, claiming that they deceived consumers about the dangers of smoking even as the company's own internal research revealed the hazards involved. These successful suits cost the companies billions of dollars in fines and continuing payments into state-controlled public-health funds.

One of my high-school teachers loved questions that began, "Compare and contrast. . ." so let's do that here. What are the comparisons and the contrasts between what Big Tobacco did, and what Big Oil is supposedly doing?

First, the comparison for similarities. Exxon may have funded some researchers at times who opposed the general scientific consensus about climate change. This consensus has itself been somewhat of a moving target as more data, more sophisticated computer models, and a better understanding of climatology in general have contributed to knowledge of the problem. So for Exxon to be liable in the way that, say, R. J. Reynolds was liable, someone would have to show that (a) Exxon was publicly saying climate change isn't going to bother us, and (b) Exxon privately knew pretty much the opposite.

There is also the question of harm. It's pretty easy for a lawyer to argue that his late client died from smoking, which the client might have ceased and desisted from doing had he not been lied to by the maker of his cigarettes. If some of the more dire forecasts of the climate-change prophets come to pass, we will also have widespread death and destruction from it too. And to the extent that companies like Exxon were responsible for it, they could conceivably be held liable in some way.

Now for the contrasts. Apparently the worst thing that the New York attorney general thinks Exxon has done is not murder or criminal negligence, but financial fraud. Fraud generally involves the premeditated intent to trick or deceive someone to your own advantage. The idea here seems to be that if (and that is a big "if") laws are passed or other factors intervene to make it harder for Exxon to profit from fossil fuels because of climate change, and Exxon knew this was likely to happen, and Exxon told its investors otherwise, then they have tricked their investors.

Whatever you want to call this alleged action, it's a far cry from what blatant deceivers like Bernie Madoff did. Madoff, you may recall, ran a Ponzi scheme and kept one set of books for public consumption and another set for his secret fraudulent operations. While some European countries have begun to restrict fossil-fuel use in various ways—high fossil-fuel taxes, for example—their reasons for doing so often go beyond the threat of climate change. And in the U. S., to the frustration of environmentalists, very few meaningful climate-change-inspired restrictions have been placed so far on the consumption of oil, gas, and coal. This may change in the future, but it's hard to sue somebody for something that hasn't happened yet. Oil prices have recently tanked (so to speak), but the reasons have little or nothing to do with climate-change laws and a lot more to do with higher domestic production and international politics.

Another question is whether an engineering-intensive firm that operates legally to fulfill a widespread public need, as energy companies do, can be held liable for the free consumption decisions of millions of its customers. Again, we come to the question of who has been harmed. While lying is bad, if we find out that Exxon made some forecasts of future climate change that turn out to be wrong, that's not exactly the same as lying. Overall, this investigation seems to be based on speculation about future harms more than it is a realistic assessment of how investors have been harmed up to now. And such a thing will be hard to put across to a reasonable jury, assuming the case gets that far.

Of course, this may be the beginnings of what some might view as a government shakedown. Rather than face the prospect of spending years or decades in court, Exxon may choose to settle out of court by paying fines or changing its way of business to make the New York attorney general happy. Such proceedings always smack of blackmail to a greater or lesser degree, although sometimes they are the least bad alternative if a genuine wrong has occurred.

But to find out if that is the case, we'll just have to wait. Wait to see what the attorney general of New York does next; wait to see if states and countries pass much more restrictive legislation inspired by climate change; and wait to see how much hotter it gets. It may be a long wait for any or all of these things, so stay tuned.

Sources: The New York Times article "Exxon Mobil Investigated for Possible Climate Change Lies by New York Attorney General" appeared on Nov. 6, 2015 at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/science/exxon-mobil-under-investigation-in-new-york-over-climate-statements.html. I also referred to the Wikipedia article "Tobacco politics." I blogged on a related matter pertaining to climate change and university-funded research in "A Chunk of (Climate) Change", posted on Mar. 2, 2015.

A Chunk of (Climate) Change

An old saying in investigative journalism is "follow the money." According to a recent article in the New York Times, that's just what the environmental organization Greenpeace did when it began to look into the funding of publications written by one Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon. Soon is a researcher associated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and has attracted a lot of publicity for his outspoken comments on global warming, which he appears to doubt is due to man-made causes. He has made the rounds of conservative talk shows to express his doubts, and that is probably why Greenpeace decided to investigate him. While Soon has made no secret of the fact that some of his funding came from energy industries and interests, documents obtained by means of the Freedom of Information Act showed that Soon was producing papers to order for specific funders, referring to the papers as "deliverables." He received over $400,000 from a prominent electric utility and $230,000 from the Koch Charitable Foundation. The New York Times reports that the Smithsonian Institution is mounting its own investigation into Soon's dealings, and its acting director admits that the Institute may need to clean up its ethical act with regard to disclosure of funding sources.

As Newton taught us, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, at least in physics. The opposite reaction inspired by the Soon affair has come from the U. S. Congress, which has now showered universities and energy companies with letters demanding information about funding sources for scientists who have criticized the establishment view of climate change. This has prompted Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, to criticize what he calls "fishing expeditions" by Congress, because of the chilling effect it has on academic freedom.

I heard Prof. Dessler speak about a year ago at Texas A&M on the topic of the history of climate-change science. In general, he is in sympathy with the Greenpeace view that corporate interests are trying to sow discord in the climate-change area, in much the same way that tobacco interests sowed doubt about the link between smoking and cancer in the 1960s. But he is objective enough to realize that when Congress sends your university a letter asking for documents concerning your own research funding, it doesn't help you sleep better at night, and it doesn't make it any easier to follow the data wherever it leads.

If everybody would recognize the wisdom of a couple of well-established principles, things like the Soon investigation and the congressional reaction to it might be avoided.

The first principle is, always acknowledge your funding sources in sufficient detail. I haven't read any of Dr. Soon's papers and I don't know how or whether he acknowledged the specific ties between dollars and articles, assuming these ties existed (and while the investigation is still ongoing, it looks like they did). As far as I'm concerned, the only time an academic should take money for publishing a specific piece of writing with a specific point of view, is when the funding source itself publishes the piece, as in book publishing. (Full disclosure: I am currently waiting for Wiley to publish a textbook I've written, and while I don't expect to get rich from it, I will get royalties if they sell any copies.) Any time someone comes to you and offers you money to "place" specific publications in other venues not controlled by the funder, especially if readers of the publications will think that what you write is objective and not influenced by outside agencies, you should see bright flashing red conflict-of-interest lights and think about it a long, long time.

Now, I myself have taken money from agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) with the expectation that I would do work and publish papers as a result. What's the difference? Sometimes it's not easy to tell. Everybody expects that scientists and engineers who take research money from NSF will publish papers about their research. And nobody I know looks at the acknowledgment section and says, "Ah-hah! The NSF paid for this. No wonder it's X, Y, or Z." This is because the NSF has, overall, done a reasonably good job of letting scientists themselves judge what is good research and what isn't, and whether it should be funded or published.

The problem that comes up with climate-change research is that it has become a political hot-button issue. Billions of dollars of corporate revenue are at stake if unfriendly climate-change-related legislation comes to pass, and so corporations that feel threatened are eager to see ostensibly objective research published that favors the views which allow them to keep making more money. This is rational behavior on the part of the corporations, but the danger to objective science research is clear.

And that brings me to my second point: the fiction of truly 100% "objective" science. Guess what: there ain't no such animal. Every scientist has biases, prejudices, and hunches that prevent him or her from being the perfect, suspended-in-the-air, dispassionate, Mr.-Spock-like viewer of objective truth. In the choice of research topics, in the selection of funding agencies, and in the way research is performed and presented, scientists betray their biases—and yes, even their political convictions—all the time, often while fooling themselves into thinking they are being perfectly objective.

When the subject of study is not of widespread public interest and influence—say, nematodes—it's fairly easy for the small group of folks who just can't know enough about nematodes to get together and pursue the truth about nematodes, and sometimes come pretty close to ideal objectivity. But when the subject has vast and time-extended implications for every resident of the planet, as climate change does, everybody wants to get in their two cents, or two hundred thousand dollars, as the case may be. And while I won't go so far as to say that everyone has their price, if a researcher's salary depends 100% on raising external funding, it's hard to resist the blandishments of a corporation or political group that wants a quid pro quo in the form of research with a predetermined outcome.

While the jury is still out, that's apparently what happened to Dr. Song. His case can serve as a warning to every funded researcher not only to disclose one's funding in enough detail, but to ask whether one has betrayed the ideal of objectivity for cash. Congress can think about restraining itself from scaring academics and making it even harder to do objective science in the academy. And everybody can realize that scientists are human beings for whom the ideal of absolute objectivity is just that—an ideal that is rarely, if ever, realized in practice.

Sources: I referred to the New York Times articles "Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Researcher," appeared at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html

on Feb. 21, 2015, and "Lawmakers Seek Information on Funding for Climate Change Critics" on Feb. 25 at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/science/lawmakers-seek-information-on-funding-for-climate-change-critics.html. After this blog was written, I was saddened to read of the passing of the original Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame, Leonard Nimoy, at the age of 83.

Two degrees of warming closer than you may think

by David Spratt

It has taken a hundred years of human-caused greenhouse emissions to push the global temperature up almost one degree Celsius (1C°), so another degree is still some time away. Right? And there seems to have been a "pause" in warming over the last two decades, so getting to 2C° is going to take a good while, and we may have more time that we thought. Yes?

Wrong on both counts.

The world could be 2C° warmer in as little as two decades, according to the leading US climate scientist and "hockey stick" author, Dr Michael E. Mann. Writing in Scientific American in March 2014 (with the maths explained here), Mann says that new calculations "indicate that if the world continues to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, global warming will rise to 2C° by 2036" and to avoid that threshold "nations will have to keep carbon dioxide levels below 405 parts per million", a level we have just about reached already. Mann says the notion of a warming "pause" is false.

Global temperature over the last 1000 years: the "hockey stick"

Here's why 2C° could be just 20 years away.

Record heat

2014 was the hottest year in the instrumental record. The US government agencies NASA and NOAA announced the 2014 record on 16 January, noting that "the 10 warmest years in the instrumental record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000".

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) says that since 1880, "Earth’s average surface temperature has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8C°), a trend that is largely driven by the increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) and other human emissions into the planet’s atmosphere. The majority of that warming has occurred in the past three decades."

GISS Director Gavin Schmidt says that this is “the latest in a series of warm years, in a series of warm decades. While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases".

2014 was also Australia’s third-hottest year on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology: "Overall, 2014 was Australia's third-warmest year on record: the annual national mean temperature was +0.91 °C above average… All States, except the Northern Territory, ranked in the four warmest years on record."

The 2014 record was achieved in neutral ENSO conditions

Fluctuations in the ENSO cycle affect global temperature, with El Niño conditions (a mobile blister of Pacific Ocean heat that affects wind patterns and currents and reduces rainfall in eastern Australia) correlating with warmer global temperatures. Former NASA climate science chief Dr James Hansen and colleagues note that the record global temperature in 2014 "was achieved with little assistance from the tropical ENSO cycle, confirms continuing global warming... and with the help of even a mild El Niño 2015 may be significantly warmer than 2014."

And El Niño conditions are likely to became more frequent with more warming. Last year, Wenju Cai, a climate researcher for Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), warned that the frequency of extreme El Niño events could double with climate change, in a paper that presented "evidence for a doubling in the occurrences in the future in response to greenhouse warming".

There is no "pause" in warming

In releasing the data on 2014's record warmth, NASA charted warming since 1970 and demonstrated that there has been no "pause" or slowing in warming, contrary to the million-times-repeated claims of the climate warming denial industry.

Joe Romm of Climate Progress says this chart (below) shows that: "The human-caused rise in surface air temperatures never paused, never even slowed significantly. And that means we are likely headed toward a period of rapid surface temperature warming. "

A year ago, Prof Matthew England of University of NSW suggested that temperatures were likely to rise quickly:

Scientists have long suspected that extra ocean heat uptake has slowed the rise of global average temperatures, but the mechanism behind the hiatus remained unclear…. But the heat uptake is by no means permanent: when the trade wind strength returns to normal –- as it inevitably will –- our research suggests heat will quickly accumulate in the atmosphere. So global [surface] temperatures look set to rise rapidly….

The oceans are warming very rapidly

Of all the additional heat trapped by higher levels of greenhouse gases, more than 90 per cent goes to warming the oceans, and thus ocean heat content (OHC) is by far the most significant and reliable indicator of global warming. By contrast only two per cent goes to warming the atmosphere, so small heat exchanges between oceans and the atmosphere (caused by changing sea surface, ocean circulation and wind conditions) can have a significant impact on atmospheric temperature, but not on ocean temperature.

The NOAA's State of the Climate for 2014 reports:

During 2014, the globally-averaged sea surface temperature was 1.03°F (0.57°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest among all years in the 1880-2014 record, surpassing the previous records of 1998 and 2003 by 0.09°F (0.05°C).

The rate of OHC incease appears to be accelerating, with Romm noting that:

... ocean warming has sped up, and sea level rise has accelerated more than we thought, and Arctic sea ice has melted much faster than the models expected, as have the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

And as Matthew England has told us, when the trade wind strength returns to normal, some ocean heat will quickly accumulate in the atmosphere.

You can check all the NOAA ocean heat content charts here.

Human greenhouse gas emissions are not slowing

Data from the Global Carbon Project shows annual carbon dioxide emissions are continuing to increase, and that the rate of increase since 2000 is at least double that of the 1990-99 decade. Emissions are projected to continue on the current growth path till 2020.

Fossil fuel emissions 1990-2014 and projected to 2019

To summarise the story so far: 2014 was a record hot year (without El Nino conditions); there has been no pause in warming; ocean heat content is rising at an increasing rate; global annual carbon dioxide emissions are continuing to grow; and more frequent El Nino conditions and a return to more normal trade wind strength will release some ocean heat to the atmosphere; so we are likely headed for a period of rapid surface temperature warming.

But there is more to the story.

A reservoir of heat already in the system

Increased levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases create an energy imbalance between incoming and outgoing radiation, which is resolved by elements of the earth system (land and oceans) absorbing the additional heat until the system reaches a new balance (equilibrium) at a higher temperature. But that process takes time, due to thermal inertia (as with an electric oven: once energy is applied, it takes time for all the structure to heat up and is not instantaneous). As a rule of thumb, about one-third of the heating potential of an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will be felt straight away, another third take around 30 years, and the last third is not fully realised for a century.

Thus there is more warming to come for the carbon dioxide already emitted, amounting to about another 0.6°C of warming. And because the rate of emissions is increasing, that figure is also increasing.

From this we can conclude that around 1.5°C of warming is locked into the system for current CO2 levels, though very large-scale carbon drawdown could reduce levels slowly over decadal time frames.

As well as long-lived CO2, there are other greenhouse gases with shorter lifetimes, particularly methane (lifetime approx. 10 years) and nitrous oxide (lifetime approx. 100 years). Because emissions of these gases are also continuing unabated, they also contribute to warming temperatures on decadal time frames.

In fact, the current level of greenhouse gases if maintained is already more than enough to produce 2°C of warming over time: in 2008 two scientists, Ramanathan and Feng, in On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead found that if greenhouse gases were maintained at their 2005 levels, the inferred warming is 2.4˚C (range 1.4˚C to 4.3˚C).

The current level of greenhouse gases is around 400 parts per million (ppm) CO2, and 470 ppm CO2 equivalent (CO2e) when other greenhouse gases are included. The last time CO2 levels were as high as they are today, humans didn't exist, and over the last 20 million years such levels are associated with major climate transitions. Tripati, Roberts et al. found that, big changes in significant climate system elements such as ice sheets, sea levels and carbon stores are likely to occur for the current level of CO2:

During mid-Miocene climatic optimum [16-14 million years ago] CO2 levels were similar to today, but temperatures were ~3–6°C warmer and sea levels 25 to 40 metres higher than at present… When CO2 levels were last similar to modern values (greater than 350 ppmv to 400 pmv), there was little glacial ice on land, or sea ice in the Arctic, and a marine-based ice mass on Antarctica was not viable…

But the question remains as to how quickly this warming will occur, and for that we need to look at two further factors: climate sensitivity and the role of aerosols.

Climate sensitivity

The measure of how much warming occurs for an increase in greenhouse gases is known as climate sensitivity, and is expressed as the temperature rise resulting from a doubling of greenhouse gas levels.

As Michael E. Mann explains:

Although the earth has experienced exceptional warming over the past century, to estimate how much more will occur we need to know how temperature will respond to the ongoing human-caused rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide. Scientists call this responsiveness “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS). ECS is a common measure of the heating effect of greenhouse gases. It represents the warming at the earth's surface that is expected after the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere doubles and the climate subsequently stabilizes (reaches equilibrium)… The more sensitive the atmosphere is to a rise in CO2, the higher the ECS, and the faster the temperature will rise. ECS is shorthand for the amount of warming expected, given a particular fossil-fuel emissions scenario.

As discussed previously here, some elements of the climate system respond quickly to temperature change, including the amount of water vapour in the air and hence level of cloud cover, sea-level changes due to ocean temperature change, and the extent of sea-ice that floats on the ocean in the polar regions. These changes amplify (increase) the temperature change and are known as short-term or “fast” feedbacks, and it is on this basis that (short-term) ECS is well established as being around 3°C for a doubling of greenhouse gas levels (see, for example, Climate sensitivity, sea level, and atmospheric carbon dioxide).

But there are also longer-term or “slow” feedbacks, which generally take much longer (centuries to thousands of years) to occur. These include changes in large, polar, land-based ice sheets, changes in the carbon cycle (changed efficiency of carbon sinks such as permafrost and methane clathrate stores, as well as biosphere stores such as peat lands and forests), and changes in vegetation coverage and reflectivity (albedo). When these are taken into account, the sensitivity is significantly higher at 4.5°C or more, dependent on the state of the poles and carbon stores. Importantly, the rate of change at present is so fast that some of these long-term feedbacks are being triggered now on short-term timeframes (see Carbon budgets, climate sensitivity and the myth of "burnable carbon").

Mann says uncertainty about ECS can arise from questions of the role of clouds and water vapour, with the most recent IPCC report simply giving a range of 1.5–4.5°C but no "best-fit" figure. Factors such as changing rates of heat flux between oceans and atmosphere (including the El Nino/La Nina cycle), and volcanic eruptions, can cloud the short-term picture, as has the focus on the non-existent "pause".

What would happen if ECS is a bit lower that the "best-fit" value of 3°C of warming for doubling of greenhouse gas levels? Mann explains:

I recently calculated hypothetical future temperatures by plugging different ECS values into a so-called energy balance model, which scientists use to investigate possible climate scenarios. The computer model determines how the average surface temperature responds to changing natural factors, such as volcanoes and the sun, and human factors—greenhouse gases, aerosol pollutants, and so on. (Although climate models have critics, they reflect our best ability to describe how the climate system works, based on physics, chemistry and biology. And they have a proved track record: for example, the actual warming in recent years was accurately predicted by the models decades ago.)

I then instructed the model to project forward under the assumption of business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions. I ran the model again and again, for ECS values ranging from the IPCC's lower bound (1.5°C) to its upper bound (4.5°C). The curves for an ECS of 2.5 degrees and 3°C fit the instrument readings most closely. The curves for a substantially lower ECS did not fit the recent instrumental record at all, reinforcing the notion that they are not realistic.

To my wonder, I found that for an ECS of 3°C, our planet would cross the dangerous warming threshold of 2°C in 2036, only 22 years from now. When I considered the lower ECS value of 2.5°C, the world would cross the threshold in 2046, just 10 years later.

This is charted as:

Michael E. Mann's graph of future temperature for different climate sensitivities. Click to enlarge.

Mann concludes that "even if we accept a lower ECS value, it hardly signals the end of global warming or even a pause. Instead it simply buys us a little bit of time—potentially valuable time—to prevent our planet from crossing the threshold."

As I have explained repeatedly, including in Dangerous climate warming: Myth and reality, 2°C is far from a safe level of warming. In fact, a strong case is made that climate change is already dangerous at less than 1°C of warming and, in James Hansen's analysis, “goals of limiting human made warming to 2°C and CO2 to 450 ppm are prescriptions for disaster” because significant tipping points – where significant elements of the climate system move from one discrete state to another – will be crossed.

Aerosol's Faustian bargain

Mann also indicated what level of CO2 would be consistent with 2°C of warming:

These findings have implications for what we all must do to prevent disaster. An ECS of 3°C means that if we are to limit global warming to below 2°C forever, we need to keep CO2 concentrations far below twice pre-industrial levels, closer to 450 ppm. Ironically, if the world burns significantly less coal, that would lessen CO2 emissions but also reduce aerosols in the atmosphere that block the sun (such as sulfate particulates), so we would have to limit CO2 to below roughly 405 ppm.

The aerosol question is central but often not well understood. Human activities also influence the greenhouse effect by releasing non-gaseous substances such as aerosols (small particles) into the atmosphere. Aerosols include black-carbon soot, organic carbon, sulphates, nitrates, as well as dust from smoke, manufacturing, windstorms, and other sources.

Aerosols have a net cooling effect because they reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground, and they increase cloud cover. This effect is popularly referred to as ‘global dimming’, because the overall aerosol impact is to reduce, or dim, the sun’s radiation, thus masking some of the effect of the increased greenhouse gas levels. This is of little comfort, however, because aerosols last only about ten days before being washed out of the atmosphere by rain; so we have to keep putting more and more into the air to maintain the temporary cooling effect.

Unfortunately, the principal source of aerosols is the burning of fossil fuels, which causes a rise in CO2 levels and global warming that lasts for many centuries. The dilemma is that if you cut the aerosols, the globe will experience a pulse of warming as their dimming effect is lost; but if you keep pouring aerosols together with CO2 into the air, you cook the planet even more in the long run. A Faustian bargain.

There has been an effort to reduce emissions from some aerosols because they cause acid rain and other forms of pollution. However, in the short term, this is warming the air as well as making it cleaner. As Mann notes above, likely reductions in coal burning in coming decades will reduce aerosol levels and boost warming

Some recent research suggest aerosol cooling is in the range of 0.5–1.2°C over the long run:

Leon Rotstayn in The Conversation explains that "results from CSIRO climate modelling suggest that the extra warming effect from a decline in aerosols could be about 1°C by the end of the century".
Present-day aerosol cooling effect will be strongly reduced by 2030 as more stringent air pollution controls are implemented in Europe and worldwide, and as advanced environmental technologies come on stream. These actions are projected to increase the global temperature by 1°C and temperatures over Europe by up to 2–4°C, depending on the severity of the action. This is one of the main research outcomes of the European Integrated project on Aerosol Cloud Climate and Air Quality Interaction project.
In 2011, NASA climate science chief James Hansen and co-authors warned that the cooling impact of aerosols appears to have been underestimated in many climate models and inferred that: "Aerosol climate forcing today is inferred to be −1.6±0.3Wm−2," which is equivalent to a cooling of about 1.2°C. In that case, they wrote, "humanity has made itself a Faustian bargain more dangerous than commonly supposed".

Conclusion

Michael E. Mann's analysis is sobering, especially when aerosols are accounted for.

The world is already hitting 400 ppm CO2 (the daily average at the measuring station at Mauna Loa first exceeded 400 ppm on 10 May 2013 and currently rising at a rate of approximately 2 ppm/year and accelerating), so the message is very clear that today we have circumstances that can drive us to 2°C of warming, and that emissions from now on are adding to warming above 2°C and towards 3°C or more. This reinforces my conclusion last year that there is no carbon budget left for 2°C of warming, and claims to the contrary are a dangerous illusion.

Mann concludes in not dis-similar terms:

The conclusion that limiting CO2 below 450 ppm will prevent warming beyond 2°C is based on a conservative definition of climate sensitivity that considers only the so-called fast feedbacks in the climate system, such as changes in clouds, water vapor and melting sea ice. Some climate scientists, including James E. Hansen… say we must also consider slower feedbacks such as changes in the continental ice sheets. When these are taken into account, Hansen and others maintain, we need to get back down to the lower level of CO2 that existed during the mid-20th century — about 350 ppm. That would require widespread deployment of expensive “air capture” technology that actively removes CO2 from the atmosphere.

Furthermore, the notion that 2°C of warming is a “safe” limit is subjective. It is based on when most of the globe will be exposed to potentially irreversible climate changes. Yet destructive change has already arrived in some regions. In the Arctic, loss of sea ice and thawing permafrost are wreaking havoc on indigenous peoples and ecosystems. In low-lying island nations, land and freshwater are disappearing because of rising sea levels and erosion. For these regions, current warming, and the further warming (at least 0.5°C) guaranteed by CO2 already emitted, constitutes damaging climate change today.

[Originally posted at Climate Code Red]

Imagining Geoengineering

Okay, suppose some of the most extreme voices warning of global warming are right. Suppose we really do face the inundation of much of the world's coastlines in a generation or two. Even if, starting tomorrow, nobody ever burned a drop or a gram of fossil fuel ever again, the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere might take hundreds of years to fall to pre-industrial levels. So simply implementing restrictions on fossil fuels to reduce carbon-dioxide levels may not do the job fast enough. What do we do in the meantime? To use an automotive analogy, if you're going too fast and you see that the road ahead of you ends in a cliff, it might not be sufficient simply to take your foot off the gas. You might actually have to apply the brakes. David Keith says we ought to at least talk about applying the global-warming brakes. But the question I have is, how could it ever get beyond talk?

Keith is a professor with appointments at both the Harvard Kennedy School, where he teaches public policy, and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. An environmental engineer by training, Keith thinks that "geoengineering" ought to be considered along with reductions in fossil-fuel consumption as a way to reduce the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Geoengineering refers to intentional efforts to manipulate the climate. So far, the only moderately successful geoengineering projects have been cloud-seeding efforts that arguably increased rainfall in some areas. But Keith is talking about a worldwide effort to do something that will counteract global warming by artificially cooling the planet somehow.

Interviewed last March by the CBC (Keith is Canadian), he admitted that ideas such as spreading small sulfur particles in the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation as a way of countering global warming are a "brutally ugly technical fix." But he thinks such geoengineering solutions should be on the table, rather than brushed aside scornfully, as they are by many environmental activists.

Let's try to imagine how such a geoengineering fix would work, not just technically, but politically. Many of the geoengineering solutions that have been posed are not terribly expensive, globally speaking. We are talking about industrial quantities of sulfur or other chemicals dispersed in the upper atmosphere, but the cost in terms of the global economy is miniscule. There is no question that such a project could be mounted by even one well-prepared industrial nation. The question I'd like to examine is: could the nations of the world ever reach a consensus on what geoengineering solution to adopt?

If we examine the track record of united global action on the main cause of the carbon-dioxide increase, namely the use of fossil fuels, history is not encouraging. The most significant effort in this direction is the Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997. It is technically an extension of a 1995 UN agreement that parties signing it will reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases in accordance with certain goals spelled out in the document. While 192 countries signed the accord, some of the most significant producers of greenhouse gases either did not participate at all (e. g. the U. S. A., China, India) or have not met their targets (e. g. New Zealand).

The only global environmental agreement I can recall that actually worked was the way we kept chlorinated fluorocarbons (CFCs) from destroying the ozone layer. CFCs were once used widely as refrigerant fluids (e. g. under the trademark "Freon"), but in the 1970s, scientists figured out that (a) these compounds lasted for a long time in the atmosphere and (b) they catalyzed the destruction of the important ozone layer in the stratosphere, which protects us from harmful UV radiation from the sun. The Montreal Protocol, which went into effect in 1989, set its signatories on a path to eliminating the production of new CFCs and phasing out their use by finding alternatives. By and large, the Montreal Protocol is a success story in international technical agreements, because most of the industrialized world signed on and actually did what they agreed to do.

Why can't we get such cooperation with the global-warming issue? The simple answer is, it would cost more. Telling the world economy to give up CFCs was like telling a dieter to give up the tutti-frutti milkshake he has every Shrove Tuesday. CFCs were a minor part of the global economy compared to fossil fuels. If we accept the most radical recommendations of those alarmed about global warming and implement restrictions as fast as they want us to, well, the point is, the world won't do it without something approaching a global police state. Developing nations such as China and India will not willingly forego the advantages of wider use of fossil fuels to grow their economies. It would take a world war and dictatorial economic domination by a single global-warming-prevention entity to make the world go on a fossil-fuel diet. And that doesn't sound like a good tradeoff.

The thing that geoengineering proponents like David Keith have going for them is that many geoengineering proposals would cost a lot less than replacing fossil fuels with a sustainable alternative. Whether geoengineering would work is another question, unfortunately even more complicated than the still-controversial question of exactly how bad climate change is going to get, and what adverse effects it will have in the future.

Besides the technical issue of whether geoengineering would work, I think there is an esthetic or philosophical factor involved. Many of those who advocate harsh restrictions on fossil-fuel use to avert further climate change seem to have bought into the "deep-green" assumption that humanity is really a net liability for Planet Earth. Burning fossil fuels represents meddlesome tinkering with what Mother Nature was up to naturally, and geoengineering would be another step down that evil road of manipulating the environment. Better we just fold our tents, globally and economically speaking, and go back to living off nuts and berries. The trouble with that notion is that there would not be enough nuts and berries to go around unless we keep burning fossil fuels, or find an energy-equivalent alternative that won't bankrupt us. Such an alternative is not yet at hand.

I admire engineers like David Keith for thinking through important problems such as climate change to arrive at possible solutions that might actually work, at least technically. Given the dismal track record of the Kyoto Protocol, the chances of arriving at a truly global accord to implement significant fossil-fuel reductions are vanishingly small. If some of the more dire climate-change predictions come to pass, it might be easier to get international agreement on a geoengineering strategy than it would on fossil-fuel reductions, especially if the price is right.

Sources: An article on David Keith's ideas about geoengineering appeared on March 29, 2014 on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/give-geoengineering-a-chance-to-fix-climate-change-david-keith-1.2586882. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on solar radiation management, the Kyoto Protocol, and chlorofluorocarbons.

Dealing with Climate Change: Getting There from Here

Engineers are people of action, not just words. But even if we believe what we are often told about climate change, it's not at all clear what we should do about it.

Last week, I attended a meeting at which a highly credentialed professional meteorologist outlined the history of the science of climate change from the nineteenth century to the present. Prof. Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M's Department of Atmospheric Sciences described how as long ago as the 1890s, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius calculated that the small concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (then around 300 parts per million) had a disproportionate effect on the earth's temperature. Regular monitoring of this concentration began in the 1950s, and by then it was clearly understood that more carbon dioxide means higher temperatures. Dr. Dessler said that for at least fifty years, there has been a consensus that the present human-caused increase in carbon dioxide in the air will eventually lead to a rise in global average temperatures of "a few degrees C."

So far I was with him. Other things being equal (which they never are), more greenhouse gases in the air (of which carbon dioxide is one) means the planet gets warmer. But then he started talking about cigarette smoking, and how the tobacco industry mounted a cynical disinformation campaign in the 1960s against the overwhelming evidence that smoking caused lung cancer and heart disease. Because it took about forty years for the scientific truth to change public policies (you began to see smoke-free campuses and workplaces only about ten years ago), Dr. Dessler thinks it may take that long for the U. S. to get serious about global warming. Personally, I think it will take longer than that, because the two cases are more different than they are similar.

As someone else in the audience pointed out, smoking has highly specific individual consequences. As long ago as 1964, anyone who read a newspaper knew that by smoking, you made it a lot more likely that you would die early and fast, the way my father died of lung cancer at 57 only a year after he was diagnosed. If driving a Humvee increased your personal chances of having your own house wrecked by a tornado by the same degree as smoking increases your chances of causing lung cancer, what would happen? Well, for one thing, Humvee owners would have a lot of trouble getting home insurance. And sales of Humvees would fall.

But in contrast to the smoking-cancer tie-in, the actions that contribute to climate change, and the possible (I emphasize "possible") consequences, are about as far removed as you can get and still stay on the same planet. From what little I know about the matter, it appears that the most widespread and likely consequence of letting the earth's average temperature rise a few degrees Celsius is that a lot of ice will melt, water will expand, and the ocean's average levels will rise. Let's leave aside all the other stuff—species extinction, storms, and other changes in weather patterns—and concentrate on just that one thing.

About 44% of the world's population in 2010 lived within 150 km (94 miles) of the sea. And many of the world's most populous cities are coastal ones, or so close to the coast that a significant rise in ocean level would cause them major problems. Now if all the ice in Antarctica melted, the ocean's level would rise some 61 meters (200 feet). So in that case, good-bye Hong Kong, New York, and Florida. But to my knowledge, no serious scientist has proposed that the entire ice sheet covering Antarctica is going to melt because of human-induced climate change. So the fact is that you have a range of estimates of how much the oceans will rise, but all of them are much less than 61 meters. They may be well-educated estimates, but that's all they are—estimates.

So instead of a single increased chance that you, individually, will suffer about the most serious consequence you can encounter—death—as a result of your individual actions, your individual motivation to do something about climate change is that somebody, somewhere, possibly but not certainly near a coastline, might eventually have to move or suffer an increased chance of getting flooded out in a storm. And that person might be you, but not for another few decades, anyway. And even if you become a hyper-climate-conscious zero-carbon-footprint fanatic, your solitary actions will be fruitless unless billions of people all across the world do likewise, or at least move in that direction.

Personal versus impersonal, individual versus transnational, death versus some fuzzy probabilistic consequence for many people you will never meet—at the point of political action, the analogy between smoking and burning fossil fuels collapses. There is also the little matter of the difference in economic importance of the two industries in question. If the entire tobacco industry vanished tomorrow, life could go on more or less normally for most of us, but if the entire fossil-fuel industry vanished tomorrow, a large number of us would die in a matter of weeks for lack of basic necessities. That is a big downside cost to the proposal to something about climate change fast.

Prof. Dessler sees a global carbon tax as the way forward. He thinks if the U. S. slapped a big carbon tax on imports, that the rest of the world would fall in line and come along quietly. A global tax high enough to put significant brakes on fossil fuel consumption now would likely do something similar to what the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 did. Most economists believe that those extremely high U. S. tariffs contributed significantly to the worldwide depression of the 1930s, and punitive carbon taxes imposed on countries that don't get in line with reduction in fossil-fuel use would probably trigger a global depression that would make the 1930s one look like a mild headache in comparison.

From an engineering point of view, achieving the goal of transitioning from a global economy based on fossil fuels to one in which fossil-fuel use is cut to a small fraction of its present rate is logically possible. But achieving it in a way that is just and fair, and imposes hardships less than those otherwise suffered from whatever climate change would result, is an immensely challenging technical and political task, and would require a degree of coordination and cooperation that is unprecedented in world history.

Maybe it will happen. But if history is any guide, something really awful, and unequivocally attributable to climate change, will first have to happen worldwide, in order to create the political will to act.

Sources: Prof. Andrew Dessler spoke at the Lone Star Historians of Science meeting at Texas A&M University on Apr. 11, 2014. I referred to Charles Krauthammer's column on climate change carried by the Washington Post on Feb. 20, 2014 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-the-myth-of-settled-science/2014/02/20/c1f8d994-9a75-11e3-b931-0204122c514b_story.html, and Daniel Yergin's history of climate change at http://danielyergin.com/history-of-climate-change/.

The statistic about ocean levels and Antarctica is from http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question473.htm. And for how a qualified opponent of the conventional view of climate change, Prof. William Happer, was received at another professional meeting, see my blog "When Scientists Aren't Scientists" on Oct. 7, 2013.

engineering information technology

Source of knowledge Engineering and information technology.

Pages