environmentalresearchweb blog
February 8, 2010
Less snowmelt in Antarctica
Climatic change in Antarctica is complicated. The northernmost part of the continent, the Antarctic Peninsula, is warming at extreme rates, while elsewhere the pattern is mixed and in some parts there appears to be little or no warming. Up to a point, we glaciologists don’t mind whether Antarctica is warming or not. It is so cold that even an implausible temperature increase wouldn’t come close enough to the melting point to affect the mass balance.
Indeed, there is a plausible argument that warming would make the mass balance more positive. The Antarctic interior is extremely dry because the capacity of the intensely cold atmosphere to deliver water vapour, and therefore snow, is minimal. Warmer air can carry more water vapour, so snowfall should increase in a warmer Antarctica.
The evolving mass balance of Antarctica is most interesting around the edges, though. Warmer ocean water is increasing melting at the bases of ice shelves and pulling grounded ice across the grounding lines at increasingly scary rates. A modest increase in interior snowfall would not make this picture less scary.
Ice-stream dynamics is not the only interesting thing about the periphery of Antarctica. Here, in the least cold latitudes, we observe what little melting does happen. Spread over the continent, it amounts to a few mm of water-equivalent loss per year, against gains by snowfall of about 150 mm/yr. Losses by discharge across the grounding line are much greater. But melting, if negligible in the big picture, is still interesting.
In a recent paper, Tedesco and Monaghan update a standard measure of melt intensity in Antarctica, the so-called melting index. They watch the ice sheet’s emission at microwave wavelengths (8 to 16 mm) and exploit one of the most useful radiative attributes of water. At these wavelengths, the emissivity of frozen water is low, and as conventionally presented in imagery it looks bright, but when it melts its emissivity rises dramatically and it looks black. An intermittently wet snow surface flickers between bright and dark, and we can keep track of melting by noting, in twice-daily overpasses by the imaging satellites, whether the image pixels are bright (cold) or black (warm).
The melting index, summed over a glacierized region for a span of time, is measured in square-kilometre-days, an odd-sounding unit but one that captures what we want to know. For each pixel it is just the number of days on which the pixel was black times the area of the pixel. For the whole region it is the sum of these pixel counts.
The Antarctic melting index has averaged about 35 million km2 days per year (October to September, to be sure of keeping the austral summer months together) between 1980 and 2008. Here comes the intriguing feature: in 2009 it was only 17.8 million km2 days, which is not only a record low but also continues a trend towards lesser annual indices that began in 2005. The melt extent (the area experiencing at least one day of melting) was the second lowest recorded, reaching only half the average of 1.3 million km2.
Tedesco and Monaghan account for this oddity in terms of slow organized variability in how the atmosphere behaves. Two patterns of multi-annual variation in the circulation of the southern atmosphere, the Southern Oscillation and the Southern Annular Mode, together correlate rather well with the melting index. But the authors acknowledge that the correlation breaks down in some Antarctic regions, and that the common variance does not point to a clear-cut physical explanation. (Translation: we don’t understand what is happening.)
Antarctica is a happy hunting ground for climate denialists, but they need to be ignored because they are on a wild goose chase. In the first place, anomalous patterns of temperature change haven’t stopped melting rates from accelerating, and ice shelves from disintegrating, in the warmest part of the continent. Second, global warming is global. Regional non-warming, and even regional cooling, don’t invalidate the main conclusion. The fact that we don’t understand why Antarctica is anomalous doesn’t invalidate it either. Finally, when it comes to Antarctic change it’s the ocean that we need to worry about. From the glaciological standpoint, warmer water is the problem, not warmer air.
February 6, 2010
Energy for complexity: big government vs big business - it doesn’t really matter which you hate
The economic struggles since mid-2008 are bringing out factions that highlight both the uncertainty of the future together with ignorance of how the past has led us to where we are today. In the US, we have the conservative “Tea Party” movement of the right that is complaining about excessive government spending and the liberal “anti-banking” faction on the left that is fed up with the fat cats on Wall Street skimming too much off the top. Both sides are correct in coming to grips with the fact that large organizations and bureaucracies (e.g. government and banks) are having a harder time coping with the current economic and social problems of today.
What has unfortunately been quite absent from most of the political discussions about how to get the economy “back on track” is the true role of energy resources and technologies. With all of the talk in the United States about the need to “connect the dots” for the “War on Terrorism”, what we really need to do is accept the way the energy and economic dots are connected in our modern industrial society.
By taking the following factors into account and enhancing our knowledge of how we can and cannot affect these indicators, we will “connect the dots” on our future as well as possible:
- (1) Jevon’s Paradox states that increased efficiency in the use of resources (in this case energy resources) through the use of technology and structural change increases total resource consumption.
- (a) Policy point: if we target increasing efficiency, we can expect to only delay environmental problems.
- (2) The energy return on energy invested (EROI) for the combination of energy resources, renewable and fossil, together with technology that converts those resources into services dictates the level of complexity attainable by society.
- (a) Policy point: society seems to have reached a level of complexity in the last 1–3 decades such that:
- (3) The EROI of energy services has been extremely high with the use of fossil fuels, and EROI will eventually come to a value such that it is equal for fossil and renewable resources. That time of EROI equality will mark a turning point in human civilization.
- (4) The human species has now grown in size that it is capable of affecting the environment on a global scale as opposed to only very localized impacts before the industrial revolution.
The connecting of the dots goes as follows:
- (1) Humans organized into agrarian societies, and this was beneficial because it raised the EROI from farming, where the energy produced in this case was that energy embodied in food, not primary energy for operating machinery. The invention of tools and use of beasts of burden (horses, oxen, etc.) also enhanced human EROI (i.e. the amount of human energy required to grow food for human consumption).
- (2) The discovery of fossil fuels and subsequent technological change to enable further exploitation of fossil fuels led to the industrial revolution and the capabilities of production and economy in our present industrialized society.
- (3) Resource constraints via any combination of technical, physical, economic, and political factors act as a driver to increase efficiency in the use of energy resources, but there are thermodynamic limits.
- (a) For example, the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s drove up the price of oil which in turn drove the US and Europe to increase fuel efficiency of vehicles to get the same service (move passenger and cargo from point A to point B) with less fuel, or energy. Subsequently, energy efficiency increased since the 1970s but the rate of consumption of energy changed from exponential growth to linear growth, and economic growth also slowed compared to the previous post World War II rates for the US.
- (4) Today the rate of technological change in terms of increased energy efficiency and high EROI has not increased at the same rate as needed to enable economic growth equal to the pre-2000 years and subsequently the top of the economic food chain has decided to hoard recent profits at the expense of distributing those profits to the middle and lower classes. This is evidenced by the increased income gap between the top and the bottom.
- (5) The inherently lower EROI of renewable resources will not enable the same level of economic production and societal complexity as provided by higher EROI fossil fuels. This is because renewable technologies are based upon current flows of energy (e.g. sunlight, wind, waves), as compared to fossil fuels which are based upon stocks of energy stored over hundreds of millions of years.
To contemplate the final point above, consider that Earth stored the renewable energy of the Sun (in the form of biomass) on the order of 100 million years, and now we are consuming this energy on the order of hundreds of years. What humans learn and choose to practice during this century will dictate the type of societies that are even possible after peak fossil-fuel production.
Wind-turbine noise impacts
Most people are surprised how quiet modern wind turbines are when they visit a wind farm. Mechanical noise is usually minimal – even right up close. And the aerodynamic blade noise is often less than the noise of wind in any trees or bushes near by. However in some locations some problems have still been reported.
An international panel of experts convened by the American and Canadian Wind Energy Associations, recently released a report based on a review of a large body of scientific literature on sound and health effects with regard to sound produced by wind turbines. After extensive review, analysis and discussion, the panel concluded that sounds or vibrations emitted from wind turbines have no adverse effect on human health – an issue that was recently given new prominence by a US report, which claimed that physiological damage could be caused by low-frequency sound from wind turbines (see my earlier blog).
The new review states:
- There is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects.
- The ground-borne vibrations from wind turbines are too weak to be detected by, or to affect, humans.
- The sounds emitted by wind turbines are not unique. There is no reason to believe, based on the levels and frequencies of the sounds and the panel’s experience with sound exposures in occupational settings, that the sounds from wind turbines could plausibly have direct adverse health consequences.
Even so, there are still reports that aerodynamic “swishing” sounds from wind farms are an issue at some sites at night – disturbing some people’s sleep. The Telegraph quoted a nurse, Jane Davis, who says that she was forced to move from her home in Lincolnshire after eight wind turbines were built in 2006. “All I know is the amount of health problems people have suffered,” which she said included sleep deprivation, tinnitus, depression and psychological stress “seem to be excessive”. She added: “These things have devastated my life.”
The AWEA/CWEA report does say that, although “work with low frequencies has shown that an audible low frequency sound does not normally become objectionable until it is 10 to 15 dB above hearing threshold”, an exception is “when a listener has developed hostility to the noise source, so that annoyance commences at a lower level”. They note that “a major cause of concern about wind turbine sound is its fluctuating nature; some may find this sound annoying, a reaction that depends primarily on personal characteristics as opposed to the intensity of the sound level” and report that a “study of more than 2000 people suggested that personality traits play a role in the perception of annoyance to environmental issues, such as sound”.
However, they add, a bit abruptly perhaps, that though “some people may be annoyed at the presence of sound from wind turbines; annoyance is not a pathological entity”. It’s certainly true that once a noise gets annoying, however low the level (e.g. a tap dripping), it can become intolerable.
The report concludes that, though “there is no evidence that sound at the levels from wind turbines as heard in residences will cause direct physiological effects…a small number of sensitive people, however, may be stressed by the sound and suffer sleep disturbances”.
That rendition may not please sufferers! Of course, you could say that road traffic and aircraft landing and taking off can lead to much more noise annoyance for a lot more people, as can city living. But should we be adding more stress? Rural areas are, after all, usually quieter, which is one of their attractions. Or, assuming it cannot be resolved by careful wind-turbine location or modified operational patterns, is that just a cost that has to be borne by a small minority, who might in any case find a conventional power plant near them significantly less attractive?
The government’s view certainly seems unchanged. NewEnergyFocus reported that in January, energy minister David Kidney dismissed claims that the permitted night-time noise limit for onshore wind turbines is too high. He said that the 43 dB night-time limit in the ETSU-R-97 guidance was derived from the sleep disturbance criteria in Planning Policy Guidance 24, with an addition to allow for an open window. He said that ETSU-R-97 gave indicative noise levels thought to offer “a reasonable degree of protection to wind farm neighbours” and that there was no evidence that they needed to be reviewed. He added that residents’ comfort had to be balanced with the needs of wind-farm developers and so the guidelines should not place unreasonable restrictions on wind-farm development or add unduly costs and administrative burdens on wind-farm developers or local authorities. He concluded: “We have no robust new evidence to suggest that the current guidance is not achieving its aim.”
February 1, 2010
Glaciers and global warming
It seems that if you want a bunch of comments about your blog you have to say something controversial. At least, that is what happened to this blog last week. I hope that we can get back sooner rather than later to tranquil consideration of the pleasures of studying glaciers, but in response to some of the comments there is more to be said about “denialists”.
I will stick with that term, which some do not like, because it emphasizes a valuable distinction between denial and doubt. I was not talking about doubters, and in fact as an antidote to breach of trust I have lately been plugging the wisdom of Bertrand Russell as encapsulated in his first commandment: “Do not feel absolutely certain of anything”. There is a world of difference between denial on the one hand and healthy scepticism, or even just asking questions because you don’t know what to think, on the other.
There is also a world of difference between genuine ignorance and culpable ignorance. It is a capital mistake to suppose that I know a lot more than you do. I remember a long-ago field trip to look at glacial sediments during which we managed to get, er, lost. I was sitting at the front of the bus and by a fluke managed to get us unlost. One of the students said “How did you do that?!”, at which point the bus driver interjected”: “That’s why you’re a student and he’s a professor.” True, but superficial. There is an infinity of subjects about which I am genuinely ignorant.
I do know a superficially greater amount about glaciers than you (probably), which is why I am the blogger and you are the reader, but that is not important. One of the points I tried to make last time was that the denialists who commented on the news stories about the Himalayan-glacier fiasco are culpably ignorant.
I admit that “trust me, I’m a scientist” makes a lousy sales pitch, but nearly all of the denialist comments that I was deploring boil down to “trust me, even though I’m a dope”. Seen from one angle, what I have just put down is a terrible thing for a scientist and university professor to say. It is rude and probably hurtful. It breaks elementary rules about how to make conversations work. (Don’t rile your adversary. Give him a way out.) So it cannot possibly advance the discussion. Or can it? I have been worrying a good deal about this recently.
First of all, I am not selling anything. My scientific contributions about glaciers are just contributions, aimed at pushing the frontier of knowledge and understanding forward by a little bit. They are intended to be read critically and accepted or rejected according to the best judgement of the reader. Second, and more fundamentally, there is an awkward attribute of “trust me, even though I’m a dope” that I can’t shake out of my mind, namely that whether or not it is helpful or kind or sensible it is a true paraphrase of the denialist comments.
To put it as diplomatically as I can, there is a problem at the core of the debate about climatic change, and the problem is the uniformly low calibre of the arguments on one side. The arguments on the other side vary from pretty good to compelling. There are loopy environmentalists, of course, but none of them contributed to the newspaper discussions I am talking about. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but winking at it doesn’t make it go away.
One thing about glaciers that doesn’t get a lot of attention is that they are independent indicators of the state of the atmosphere. The river of reasoning has the spectral absorption bands of carbon dioxide at one of its sources, but further downstream it is braided. The information from weather stations is one of the channels, but the information from glaciers is a different channel. Even if, against all probability, the denialists were to succeed in knocking out my colleagues at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, they would still have succeeded at most in blocking one of the channels temporarily. The carbon dioxide molecules would still be absorbing and re-emitting infrared radiation. The consequent feedbacks would still be at work. The atmosphere would still be getting warmer. Most awkwardly for the denialist cause, the glaciers would still be shedding mass at an accelerating rate.
If you forget for a moment about the weather-station channel and about the carbon dioxide molecules at the headwaters of the stream, and try to explain why the glaciers are shrinking, and shrinking faster now than formerly, you come up against the considered judgement of the scientific community. Science has agreed that you can’t answer these questions satisfactorily if you forget about the carbon dioxide molecules. And even if you persist in forgetting, you still have no coherent basis for tackling the question “What should we do about this?”. The denialist answer is “nothing”, but that brings me to my last point.
I want to emphasize that my comment-eliciting remarks last time were a direct criticism of those members of the public who can be described accurately as denialist, as opposed to sceptical or doubting. I haven’t got a satisfactory answer for Clif Carl’s poser about how to have his doubts addressed or for Steve Carson’s thoughtful analysis of how best to bring travellers back from the borders of denial. I am not attacking the shadowy “vested interests” that are often blamed for climatic misinformation. Nor am I saying that the denialist citizens who comment on the newspaper articles are the dupes or stooges of these vested interests – which would be truly insulting. I am saying that we have to do something about improving the calibre of the debate, and I have no idea what. When it comes to the study of how the public makes up its mind, I am just another member of the public.
What I am saying seems to lead us to the absurdity of requiring ordinary citizens to spend their evenings and weekends boning up on glaciology, spectroscopy and a long list of other special subjects. The alternative seems to be for them to trust somebody, to which, as we have seen, there are objections. That is why I prefer to write about jam jars, baskets of eggs, fiords that turn out to be astonishing and stuff like that. Boning up on glaciers can be a lot more fun than it sounds like.
January 31, 2010
The Chinese economics of renewable-energy supply
Prices of solar energy and wind turbines are dropping world wide. This article in the New York Times highlights the role of China in this market. The bottom line is as follows: China by now is the world leading manufacturer of solar panels and wind turbines. By this is achieves economics of scale and can offer products at a relatively low world market price.
There are two immediate consequences:
- Installation of renewable energies becomes cheaper worldwide
- Manufacturing competitors in other countries have a tough stand competing against Chinese manufacturers
Why could China get into this position in first place? The NYT article delivers the following explanation:
“China’s biggest advantage may be its domestic demand for electricity, rising 15 percent a year […] In the United States, power companies frequently face a choice between buying renewable energy equipment or continuing to operate fossil-fuel-fired power plants that have already been built and paid for. In China, power companies have to buy lots of new equipment anyway, and alternative energy, particularly wind and nuclear, is increasingly priced competitively.”
In other words: in the US and Europe, renewable energies have to compete against existing energy supply, in China they don’t have to: there is enough space for both rapid expansion of coal power plants, and renewable energy. Practically unlimited demand requires expansion of energy supply across the board. Another reason the low prices, of course, is the lower labor costs in China.
An interesting exercise is to consider the consequences of this observation the other way around. If saturated economies decided to phase out conventional power plants - coal and nuclear - rapidly, there could be room for economies of scale in renewable energy supply locally, too. However, such a decision can only be made politically as those who would massively invest into renewable energy supply are the current owners of existing coal plants.
Understanding the dynamics of this game (and the relevance of the argument above) is of high relevance for OECD countries. For example, in Germany the phase-out of nuclear plants is renegotiated, with stakeholder arguing that longer running time of nuclear plants serves as a ‘bridge’ towards a renewable energy future. From a different perspective the nuclear power plants pose a barrier towards economies of scale in renewable energy supply with the two consequences of (a) losing an edge advantage in international economic competition in renewable energy technologies and (b) getting the intertemporal optimization wrong. The intertemporal optimization point is that investing now into renewable helps to get the prices down quicker, and have lower abatement costs in the future (this argument is so central that is deserves another blog).
The debate pro/con nuclear power from the climate perspective is still open. The Chinese evidence of the economies of scale, however, provides some quantitative indication in favor of phasing out conventional plans rapidly.
January 30, 2010
The wrong FIT?
In April the government is to launch a Feed In Tariff for small renewables- the ‘Clean Energy Cashback’ scheme – and details of the tariff rates should emerge next week. Under it, electricity supply companies will offer guaranteed payments for electricity generated from renewable energy devices that consumers have installed their own homes, or to small projects installed by community organisation and the like, the limit being 5MW. See my earlier blog for details: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/blog/2009/10/uk-tries-to-get-fit.html
Eligible technologies include micro wind turbines, photovoltaic modules, micro hydro plants, and biomass-fired units. In the domestic sector, PV solar seems likely to dominate – micro wind is only really viable in a limited number of places and micro biomass units for electricity generation (usually micro CHP) are still relatively novel.
The Feed-In Tariff (FiT) that has been running for several years now in Germany has certainly helped get PV established, so maybe that will also happen here. The theory is that this guaranteed subsidy helps build the market for PV, so that prices begin to fall – and the FiT support can then be reduced. The German system has a built-in annual price ‘degression’ formula to take account of that. And it seems to work – PV prices have fallen and installed capacity has grown.
However, it has to be said that this has come at a cost: the supply companies pass on the FiT charges on to all electricity consumers. PV is expensive. But since the PV element the German FiT has so far been relatively small (most of the FiT has been used to support wind, which is cheaper) the overall cost of the FiT to consumers has been relatively small – initially 3–4% or so extra on average bills. However, with demand for PV increasing due to the FiT and the reduced cost of PV, there have been concerns about loading consumers up with the higher costs. That has already led to a cap on total PV capacity supported under the FiT in place in Spain. And the German government has now decided to reduce the FiT support rate for PV by15% to reduce the cost to consumers.
Initially, the German government was clearly convinced that PV was a major option for the future – as is widely accepted to be the case. It did of course have to balance the costs to consumers, the expected reduction in prices as the FIT helped PV move down its learning curve, and how much capacity was wanted, but it obviously felt that it was right to push PV ahead rapidly. Now, however, following a shift to the political right, it’s being more cautious. That change was no doubt buttressed by claims by the German news magazine Spiegel that the additional costs for subsidizing new PV installations in 2009, based on initial industry estimates for new installations of around 700 MW, could be as high as €10bn over the course of the 20-year FiT programme. And also by the study published last year by RWI (Rheinisch-Westfaelisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung), which claimed the extra cost added to consumers bills was around 7.5% p.a., and calculated the total cost of PV to German electricity users could be more than €77 bn over a 25-year period. These estimates may be inflated: the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) put the latter cost at €50 bn. But it did seem that a continuing rapid expansion of PV was going to put more cost on consumers.
Basically the problem is that, although they are falling under the FiT, PV costs are still high at present, much higher than for other renewables, and the rapid expansion of PV meant the cost to consumers was too high. A problem really of success! By contrast, near-market options like large wind turbines are much cheaper/kW and per kWh, and so FiT support for wind cost consumers less in total. And so wind has been the main focus, with the result being that the German FiT has helped support 25 GW of wind capacity, and only about 4 GW of PV.
What does this mean for the UK? If FiT’s aren’t that good at supporting expensive options like PV without loading up consumers with high costs, arguably we’ve got it the wrong way around in our approach. FiTs should be used for the big cost-effective stuff. We are using it for the small expensive stuff.
It could be that, nevertheless, as the UK’s ‘Clean Energy Cashback’ FiT gets going, customers who are willing and able to borrow money to install the equipment will push ahead, as happened in Germany. The guaranteed FiT income does make it easier to get loans from banks. And it’s certainly better than the than the UK’s dismal ROC/Renewables Obligation system. But what smaller expensive projects like PV really need is up-front capital grants. The UK tried that earlier with the PV grants system in the Low Carbon Building programme – but the level of demand for grants was such that it overwhelmed the relatively small scheme, and there were limits to how much more taxpayers money the government felt it could provide. Hence the interest in a FIT for PV and other small renewables – then its the consumers who pay.
The FIT may work well for some people. At present, for those with money, investing in PV solar will give a better return, via the FiT, than banks offer! But what about those without money? In the pre-budget report last December, the government said that ‘although feed-in tariffs and the Renewable Heat Incentive will make payments over the life of installations, low-income households may still find it difficult to meet upfront costs’. It added that ‘building on the experience of pilot projects for Pay as You Save financing and Warm Front,’ it will consult ‘on measures to help low-income households take advantage of clean energy cash-back’. That could help. And some community schemes may also prosper.
Even so, sadly, not much is expected on the UK FiT. At best, the government sees it as delivering just 2% of electricity by 2020. The Renewables Obligation (RO) is seen as the main way ahead, helping us to get about 30% from renewables, mostly wind, by 2020. So far, using the RO, plus a few capital grants, we’ve barely made it to 6%, with only tiny amounts of PV. And the RO has loaded up consumers with much higher prices per kW and kWh than under the German FiT system- even though the latter also included support for much more PV. Ofgem, the energy regulator, has reportedly estimated that the RO cost consumers £1 bn last year and a total of £4.4 bn so far. But it has only helped support 4 GW of wind generation capacity (some of which also benefited from grants), compared to the 25 GW installed under the FIT in Germany. So in general, in terms of capacity and costs, FITs are a much better option.
Whether that will prove true of the limited UK version for small projects remains to be seen. It will be interesting to see what the government comes up with next week in terms of tariff levels. Will PV get enough to move ahead seriously? And if so, what will that cost us?
Interest in using the scheme seems high. A YouGov survey for Friends of the Earth the Renewable Energy Association and the Cooperative Group found that 71% of homeowners said they would consider installing green energy systems if they were paid enough cash – and 64% of those asked thought that the government’s plans were not ambitious enough. But what if it puts bills significantly? The poll showed that 70% of respondents said that they would be prepared to pay an extra 10p on their electricity bills each month (£1.20 annually), on top of the already proposed annual increase of £1.17, until 2013 when the scheme is due to be reviewed. So maybe there is an appetite for change.
January 25, 2010
Himalayan glaciers: there’s a mouse in the room
This blog is going to be a little bit different, because I need to let off steam about Himalayan glaciers, addressing myself mainly to readers, if any, who don’t believe in global warming.
Ben Santer is a climatologist who has done much more than most to advance our understanding of human influence on the climate. In his words from the IPCC’s Second Assessment, published in 1995, “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate.” Advances since 1995 are encapsulated in the words of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment, published in 2007: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
In a press conference call last week, Santer asserted that it would be wrong to use the mouse to cast doubt on the elephant. He was reacting to recent excitement in the media about Himalayan glaciers. Himalayan glaciers are the mouse in the room. Denialists evidently have no interest in the fact that sustained dispassionate study of the Earth and its atmosphere shows unequivocally, as summarized in the IPCC’s periodical assessments, that there is also an elephant in the room.
Santer is absolutely right about both the elephant and the mouse. I, however, want to focus on the mouse.
I am the guy who found the typo. That is, I found the sources of the mistaken claim, made in the second volume (section 10.6.2) of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment, that Himalayan glaciers are very likely to disappear by 2035 or perhaps sooner. I am also the guy who tipped off Fred Pearce, the author of the 1999 news story in New Scientist that is the de-facto source of the mistaken claim. Pearce’s story in last week’s New Scientist (16 January) is the spark that ignited the present firestorm threatening the IPCC in general and its chair, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, in particular. I am also the guy who, with three fellow glaciologists, wrote to Science describing the nature of the Himalayan errors.
Finally, I am a guy who like several thousand other scientists holds a tiny share of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace along with Dr Pachauri. That is, I contributed to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment.
Rating the news stories on clarity and factual accuracy, the widespread media coverage of the Himalayan mistake has ranged from not very good to very good indeed. On the whole, except for some misattributions and for their addiction to sound bites, I have no substantial fault to find with the journalists. But many of the online news outlets invite comments from readers. With rare exceptions, those comments make unutterably dismal reading.
No scientist can fault members of the public for not being experts. On big questions that are also complicated, they have to trust somebody. Any failure of trust must be painful. But that does not excuse illogic, ignorance and failure to check facts.
The most illogical of the comments on Himalayan-glacier stories last week are those that take the part for the whole. Those commenters who dismiss the entire Fourth Assessment should read the part of it (section 4.5 of the first volume) to which I contributed. If they find anything wrong with it (which I doubt) they should let me know and I will try to fix it. Pachauri is dead right when he says that the Himalayan mistake was a collective failure. We could have fixed section 10.6.2 of the second volume, but failed to because the right mechanisms for making 3000 pages of text all consistent with one another were not in place. We have to do better next time.
Ignorance is unpardonable, or at least very risky, if you feel inclined to shoot your mouth off. Speech is free, but if you want to be taken seriously you need to know your stuff. One point on which many of the newspaper readers are ignorant has to do with money. I don’t know how many salaried persons work for IPCC. But none of the contributing authors are paid, up at least as high as the level of Chapter Lead Author. The unknown colleague who wrote the mistaken paragraph about Himalayan glaciers was not paid to do so. I got nothing for the couple of hundred hours I put in on my contribution to the Fourth Assessment, or for tracking down the typo. I do get a salary, but it is for being a university professor. Contributing to IPCC assessments is not what they pay me for.
Failure to check facts is a tough one for an IPCC contributor to tackle, given that we are talking about a failure of IPCC to check its facts. But the difference is that we have to take the consequences and the irresponsible commentator doesn’t.
If you write that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is “widely accepted as being about 350 parts per million”, and walk away, it doesn’t do much good for me to answer that it is known with high confidence to be between 385 and 390 parts per million (in 2009, on a global annual average). If you write that the hockey-stick graph “has been discredited”, you have a good chance of getting away with it, but that doesn’t stop it being a wrong fact. Every objection to the hockey-stick graph, and there have been some plausible ones, has been unpicked, found to have no scientific basis, and explained. If you write that “Latest sea level measurements from benchmark island shows sea level is dropping”, you need to be told, if you are still there, that that is rubbish. I don’t know what “benchmark island” means, but the current best estimate of the rate of sea-level rise, averaged over the world during 2003 to 2008, is +2.5 millimetres/yr, give or take 0.4 mm. (I suspect it might be on the low side, but that is another story.)
You may have noticed that there is nothing about Himalayan glaciers in the last paragraph. That is because there is nothing about Himalayan glaciers in the readers’ comments. Although they should be, they aren’t interested in Himalayan glaciers.
Probably the least excusable of the failings of the denialist commentators, however, is muddle-headedness. Many of the opinions they express are actually about the levying and spending of tax, and are opinions to which as taxpayers they are clearly entitled. But you need a clear head to grasp that opinions about tax are not a warrant for any opinion whatsoever about Himalayan glaciers or the findings (as opposed to the funding) of the IPCC.
Few as they are, the real facts about Himalayan glaciers are disturbing enough that there is no need, or justification of course, for exaggerating them. Allowing for undersampling, measurement uncertainty and all the other things that make scientific pronouncements fuzzy, Himalayan glaciers are indeed losing mass, and it is more likely than not that they are losing mass faster now than a few decades ago.
When you make a scientific pronouncement about the future, you add new dimensions of fuzziness. Still, it is easy to show on the back of an envelope that there is no chance at all of Himalayan glaciers being gone by 2035. There is no plausible scenario, even with plausible exaggeration of human interference with the climate, that would deliver the energy required to melt the Himalayan ice in the time available. But Himalayan ice is a non-renewable resource. The more of it we pour into the ocean, the less our stock of fresh water, the less our chance of keeping life bearable for the people of the Indian subcontinent, and the less our chance of keeping sea-level rise within reasonable bounds.
Your options as a denialist are limited. You can elect legislators who have accepted the IPCC’s findings and will use tax as an instrument for encouraging people to get to work more cheaply. Or you can allow them to use the law, making it an offence to drive to work. Or you can continue to refuse to accept the presence of the elephant in the room, seizing on mice as an excuse. Sooner or later the market will make driving to work too expensive for you, although that will be among the least of your worries. Pick the least unpalatable option.
Zero-carbon heat and power
Neil Crumpton, a member of the Bath-based Claverton Energy Group of energy experts and practitioners, and also Friends of the Earth Cymru’s energy campaigner, has produced a draft zero-carbon, non-nuclear scenario to 2050 and beyond intended to initiate feedback and debate in the Claverton Energy Group. It aims to identify the low-carbon energy generating and supply infrastructure needed to build a resilient, demand-responsive UK energy system. It relies heavily on renewables, urban heat grids, possibly suburban hydrogen networks, and carbon capture and storage (CCS) during the four decades of transition.
It is very ambitious. Renewables would supply about 200TWh/y by 2020, scaling up to more than 1,100 TWh/y by 2050. Offshore windfarms, at least 10 miles from any coast occupying some 20,000 sq. km, would supply ~ 550 TWh/y, about half his estimated 2050 final energy demand. But the real innovation starts on the heat side, with much use of Combined Heat and Power plants and large heat pumps feeding industrial users and town/ city heat grids. Up to 15 GWe of industrial Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants would supply industrial clusters, while 15 GWe or more of urban Combined Heat Pump and Power (CHP&P) schemes (typically 0.5–100 MW) would distribute reject heat from fast-response ‘aero-derivative’ gas turbines, and large heat pumps.
They would feed heat grids, with up to 5 GWe of ‘initiator’ CHP&P schemes, progressively linked up to form wider district and eventually town-wide and city-wide heat grids over the next 15–20 years. Large-scale heat pump installations would deliver renewable heat from air and ground- and from solar thermal and geothermal sources.
Even more innovatively, large thermal stores (accumulators), up to traditional gasometer-scale, would optimise the system. Peaking renewable electricity, particularly from marine technologies, would primarily be stored as heat at electricity ‘regenerator’ sites comprising a mix of technologies like molten salt stores and 10 GWe or more of steam turbines, electrolysers and hydrogen fuel cells and compressed air. Chemicals and fuel synthesis could also feature and connection to the heat grids would greatly aid conversion and regeneration efficiency and heat demand response.
Crumpton says ‘such an energy storage and electricity regeneration capability would be a significant aid to delivering the UK’s large but highly variable renewable energy resources, particularly wind energy, to consumers as and when demanded’.
Initially the energy input for the heat grids would be mostly from gas, but all the gas-fired industrial CHP and urban CHP&P capacity would be progressively converted to hydrogen, piped in from coal and biomass CCS gasifiers. There could also be a direct solar heat input to local heat stores, and possibly also some from geothermal sources. Low-pressure hydrogen might also be supplied to the 9.5 million sub-urban homes via the existing (upgraded) gas network to power 10–30 GWe of mCHP boilers (possibly fuel cell) and domestic heat pumps.
All large emitters would be fitted with Carbon Capture by 2025. CCS fitted gasifiers co-fired with 15+% biomass or imported solar synthetic fuels would then provide ‘carbon-negative’ baseload to the extent climate protection policy required. The 10 GW of CCGTs already consented would operate until about 2040, then be retained for occasional duty during prolonged winter anti-cyclones.
There would also be HVDC links to Europe, including Norwegian hydro and pumped storage schemes, which would help optimise the system to high marine renewable variability, and open the option of delivering net imports of around 10% of final energy from Saharan wind and concentrated solar power schemes.
The complete system, with molten salt heat stores at regeneration sites, would comprise some 50 GW of firm electricity generation, plus peaking plant, suburban mCHP, and inter-connectors. He says the system’s firm generation and storage capacity would be designed to supply ‘smart’ demand even during a deep winter anti-cyclone lasting days. And he says that ‘Depending on the availability of sustainable bio-sources and transport sector emissions, the UK could be net zero carbon by 2040’.
It is of course all very speculative, although the use of large heat pumps is not novel- The Hague has a 2.7 MW (ammonia) seawater community heating scheme and Stockholm has a total of 420 MW (multiple 30 MW units) of heat / cold pumps feeding its district heating / cooling grid. Crumpton says ‘The large heat pumps would harness heat from sources which 11 million urban domestic heat pumps could not do, including large solar thermal arrays and geothermal’.
Using coal still might worry some environmentalists, but there would be CCS and he says it would be used in minimal amounts by 2050. Generating and piping hydrogen is also a novel idea – but there are now some pilot schemes in the UK. And piping heat is much more common – on the continent.
Installing that, and the rest of the system, would though involve a lot of new infrastructure, but he claims that ‘strategic siting the gasifiers would combine locations with good transport access for coal and biomass (dock-sides, railheads, collieries), together with hydrogen pipeline routes to CHP schemes, and CO2 pipelines to geological storage sites under the North Sea or Liverpool Bay’. And similarly ‘regeneration schemes should be sited adjacent to industrial clusters, refineries, and existing chemical sites with hydrogen, CO2 and heat grid pipeline access’. In addition, ‘coastal locations with direct HVDC connection from marine renewables would minimise need for new cross-country transmission lines’.
So disruption would be reduced. Nevertheless, building the heat grids (polypropylene pipes) would involve some short-term local disruption to pavements and roads during the pipe/conduit laying. But he says it would ‘provide low-carbon energy infrastructure for the children of today and future generations’.
The draft scenario is outlined in more detail in the current issue of Renew (183): www.natta-renew.org
January 19, 2010
On road towards sustainability? Inverse the factor 4 in financing
This was one of the questions of last week that witnessed intense and exciting exchange at the Transport Research Board, and a special conference on Transforming Transportation in Washington, D.C. From a climate perspective, sustainable translates into low-carbon transportation. However, sustainable transportation also comprises equity and accesssibility, public heat, such as air pollution and noise but also effects related to physical activity, and time and monetary cost of transportation.
Land transportation is responsible for 5-30% of greenhouse gas emissions of countries. Currently, transport’s share of GHG emissions is signficantly lower in developing countries than it is in OECD countries, notably the U.S. However, emission growth is heading north. Sustainable transport policies are not incredibly challenging to understand. They include pedestrian facilities, a network of well maintained bicycle lanes, parking facilities for bicycles, a bus or tram network for medium sized city, and an additional subway/metro network for larger cities and metropolitan regions. Crucially, non-motorized transport and public transit must have priority before car transport wherever these modes struggle for space. The spatial dimension is indeed the most interesting and challenging: what is the optimal land-use policy related to sustainable transport? When facilities, jobs and residential areas are well connected to public transit, sustainable modes of transport can guarantee accessibility. Now, sustainable transport is less expensive than building highways but it still must be financed. Let’s look at the financial flows of the development banks as of 2007 (Figure below).
adb.png
Source: ADB, 2009
· The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank commit about three fourth of their transport lending towards roads and highways (ADB, 2009). There is basically no funding for pedestrian and cycling infrastructure.
· More generally, multilateral development banks still fund dirty projects (fossile fuel related) with 4 times more money than green projects. Bilateral agencies are only little better (Hicks et al., 2008; for some further discussion and data see Creutzig and Kammen, 2009)
· According to a former Bank member, the World Bank never funded a pedestrian project. One proposed project was rejected, as the financing volume was too small.
When financing of sustainable transport projects increases sustantially, a huge number of projects could be funded as bycicle lanes, but also bus rapid transit systems are not incredibly expensive. Of same importance is the reduction of conventional projects, such as highway construction. In transport, infrastructure supply induces demand, and additional road network will increase automobile dependency, can even lock-in developing countries into car dependency as it happened before to other countries. Hence, a goal from the top-down perspective is to inverse the factor 4 in financing: 4 times more money into sustainable road projects than into road construction (certain projects probably still make sense). As banks and donors work mostly with large chunks of money, but also as sustainable transport projects work best in a system’s approach, it is in many cases best to bundle projects into city-wide packages.
As a side note: The factor 4 also finds itself in the paper of the TRB conference last week. A simple word search in TRB papers found approximately 4 times more hits for highway (1822) than sustainable (337), and cars (1822) versus pedestrians and bicycles combined (495). Science needs to switch, too.
ADB, 2009. Rethinking Transport and Climate Change. Working paper series.
Hicks, R., Parks, B. C., Roberts, J. T., & Tierney, M. J. (2008). Greening Aid? Understanding the Environmental Impact of Development Assistance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
F. Creutzig, D. M. Kammen (2009) The Post-Copenhagen Roadmap Towards Sustainability: Differentiated Geographic Approaches, Integrated Over Goals
INNOVATION, Vol 4 (4): 301-321
Ice sheets and baskets of eggs
The term “basket-of-eggs topography” in glacial geomorphology is a metaphor for the appearance of drumlin fields. Drumlin is Gaelic for a rounded but elongate hill or ridge. Where you find one drumlin you usually find a whole field. They tend to be quite tightly packed, and a basket of eggs is a rather apt analogy.
More apt than you might think. Laying an egg is a practical problem in hydrodynamics, solved long ago by our amphibian and reptilian ancestors. Forcing glacier ice over a resistant bed is an analogous problem, at least to the extent that both the bird and the glacier – usually an ice sheet – have to balance force against resistance. One of the most distinctive attributes of drumlins is that they are smooth.
This does not get us very far, though. Drumlins might look like eggs because they represent roughening of an originally smooth (flattish) glacier bed or, equally likely, smoothing of a rough bed. But why did the ice sheet and its bed find it mutually convenient to generate the particular amount of smoothness that we can see today? Why don’t we see drumlin fields everywhere? Are there drumlin fields beneath the modern Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets? And if so, can we learn about the behaviour of ice sheets, and in particular their behaviour in the worrisome near future, by working out how the ancient ice sheets drumlinized their beds?
The answer to the last question is Yes. Progress, however, has been frustratingly slow. Several intriguing papers demonstrate, either analytically or by numerical modelling, how drumlins could possibly form, but as yet there is no sign of a compelling universal explanation.
Now, Chris Clark and co-authors have fallen back on an old strategy, that of compiling a large sample of simple measurements in the hope that insight will emerge from the sheer weight of the evidence. It is easy to criticize this approach as mindless, and it is true that they have not tackled the big questions, but in my view they have indeed produced food for thought.
The first thing to note about the Clark sample is its impressive scale. They counted all of the drumlins in the British Isles – all 58,983 – and assembled aggregate statistics for half as many more from other glaciated regions. Inadequate sampling is not likely to be one of the major concerns about their results.
They measured the length and, when possible, the width of each drumlin. The average elongation (length divided by width) is 2.9, and the most common elongations are between 2.0 and 2.3, so drumlins are typically two or three times as long as they are wide.
Several non-obvious facts emerge immediately. First, drumlin lengths and widths have unimodal frequency distributions (well-defined single peaks). I buy the argument that this means that “drumlin” is a meaningful single concept and not, for example, a jumble of other concepts. Second, drumlins are no shorter than 100 m. This suggests that, whatever dynamical phenomena are represented by the word “drumlinization”, they have a physical lower limit. (To me it smells like a fraction of the ice thickness, but that is as far as my intuition takes me.) Third, the frequency distributions are skewed, meaning that increasingly small proportions of the total sample are very long (or wide, or elongate). There does not seem to be any particular upper limit to the dimensions of drumlins. Perhaps they grade into the very elongate features that geomorphologists call megaflutes.
What Clark and colleagues find most surprising about their sample is that it exhibits a clear scaling law: for any given drumlin length, the greatest observed elongation is equal to the cube root of the length. I agree that this is both clear and surprising, and that it must mean something, although I have no idea what. But for me the most striking thing about their paper is Figure 7, a map that shows that drumlins are essentially lowland landforms. (For some reason, they left the ice-sheet margin off this map, but you can find it in many textbooks. Right now I am looking at Figure 12.1 of Glaciers and Glaciation by Benn and Evans.) Drumlin-free lowlands are not uncommon in the glaciated parts of the British Isles, but all of the uplands, especially the most rugged parts, seem to be entirely free of drumlins. Were they already too rugged, so that drumlinization was unnecessary? Was the ice too thin? Too slow? Too cold? As I said, food for thought.
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