Author: Bryan Walker

Ignorance in high places

BrownleeThe Minister of Energy, Gerry Brownlee, was reported on National Radio this morning as stating that the energy strategy policy of the last government is going to be altered, because it subsumed energy policy under climate change.  I was appalled by what I heard and tracked down the text of his speech, hoping it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.  It was. Here is the section in which he dealt with the subject:

The current Energy Strategy represents the high point of the total subsuming of energy policy into climate change policy.  The whole Strategy is an idealistic vision document for carbon neutrality.

You need only read the foreword of the NZES to get a sense of this. “Sustainability” and “sustainable” are mentioned thirteen times, “greenhouse gas” is mentioned four times, and “climate change” is mentioned three times. That is all very good, but security of supply rates only one mention. Affordability is not touched on at all. Nor is economic growth.

The National-led Government believes a refocusing of the Energy Strategy is required. The new strategy will focus on security of supply, affordability, and environmental responsibility, with the overriding goal of maximising economic growth.

The Energy Strategy  involved widespread public consultation.  I certainly made a submission on it.  It is an overly cautious, but still relatively hopeful document, carrying the subtitle “Towards a sustainable low emissions energy system.”

There is an air of ignorant complacency to Brownlee’s statement. Energy policy can’t be decoupled from climate change policy.  They belong together. The whole world knows this. The new Secretary for Energy in the US, Steven Chu, is in no doubt about it. He states quite clearly that his interest in energy has grown out of his concern about climate change. But much of what Brownlee has done so far reveals how threadbare his understanding of climate change is. He has lifted the ban on fossil-fuel powered electricity generation. He has reversed the decision to ban incandescent light bulbs. He has wiped the biofuel obligation only months after it was legislated. And now this statement.

Is this an example of what John Key meant when he said during the election campaign that economic growth takes precedence over environmental policy?  I wrote about that at the time.

The government needs to bring itself up to date with the science, or even with what policy makers in some significant countries (like the US) are now saying.

Under a Green Sky

Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us about Our Future

How’s this for a writer’s motivation? “I am as scared as hell, and I am not going to be silent anymore!…Thus this book, words tumbling out powered by rage and sorrow but mostly fear, not for us but for our children – and theirs.” The book is Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past and What They Can Tell Us About our Future, first published  in 2007 with a paperback version in 2008.  The scared as hell author is Peter D. Ward, a paleontologist and and professor of Biology and of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle.

The book certainly shows why the author has reason to be scared, but he lets us know gently, with a mixture of patient explanation and lively narrative.  He has worked at many interesting sites and he knows how to bring his visits back to life for the reader, whether gently chipping at cliffs on a heavily populated French beach or spending a week of 18-hour days in unceasing rain with a small group of colleagues on a remote Queen Charlotte Islands beach and running out of food the day before weather permitted the helicopter to return.

Mass extinctions in the past are his focus.  His work helped to confirm the 1980 hypotheses of the Alvarez team that the extinction which saw the end of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago was catastrophic and caused by an asteroid striking the earth.

There have been other sometimes greater extinction events in the past, especially the “Great Dying” at the end of the Permian period some 250 million years ago.  Were they too the result of asteroid impact?  If it could happen once, why not other times as well? Ward explains the investigations that lead to the conclusion that only the one extinction  was the result of impact.  The rest were different.

He takes the reader carefully through the discoveries which point to the proposal that they were greenhouse extinctions, the result of complex processes which began with releases of carbon dioxide and methane (sophisticated estimates of past carbon dioxide levels show sharp increases at the time of each extinction), caused initially by volcanic activity on a large scale. This meant a warmer world which affected the ocean circulation systems and disrupted the conveyor currents. The oceans were a key factor. Bottom waters started to have warm, low-oxygen water dumped into them, ocean winds and surface currents came to a near standstill so that there was less mixing of oxygenated surface water with the deeper waters and, gradually, ever-shallower water changed from oxygenated to anoxic.  When it moved high enough for light to penetrate, green sulphur bacteria expanded in numbers and filled the low-oxygen shallows.  Accompanying them were other bacteria which produced toxic amounts of hydrogen sulphide which rose into the atmosphere.  There it broke down the ozone layer and the subsequent increase in ultraviolet radiation killed much of the green plant phytoplankton.  As the hydrogen sulphide moved up into the sky it also killed some plant and animal life and its combination with high heat increased its toxicity.

This summary conclusion is supported by a wealth of careful detail.  Like most climate history it is based on a great variety of evidence from people working in many fields of study.  Much of the work and hypothesising is quite recent, and will no doubt be put to much examination  before it can be regarded as established.  In the meantime it’s a fascinating read, fully accessible to the non-scientist. (It helps to have a chart of the geological periods alongside though if, like me, you’re a bit hazy about them.)

But the book doesn’t finish there.  Ward is all too aware that we also are living in a time of rapidly rising carbon dioxide levels – not from volcanic sources this time but from burning fossil fuels.  The question he addresses is whether the rate of increase today is on a par with the rate during those times when greenhouse extinctions occurred. He concludes that the present rise seems to eclipse any other rate of increase in the past. Oceanic acidification is an indication of this, since the natural buffering systems need time to strip the carbon dioxide out of the water. We are “hurtling towards carbon dioxide levels not seen since the Eocene epoch of 60 million years ago, which, important enough, occurred right after a greenhouse extinction.”

Would it matter if human civilisation was transported to the Eocene world?  New Caledonia everyone?  Any apparent attractions are rapidly punctured.  He instances the harshness of tropical life, the catastrophe of sea level rise, high mortality rates, widespread infectious diseases, famine and war.

If we can sharply curtail emissions in the 21st century we have a chance of getting carbon dioxide levels down to 400 ppm, even if we overshoot it briefly, and hence have some chance of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees.  If not we are heading for an ice-free world, a change in the thermohaline conveyor belt currents and a new greenhouse extinction. “The past tells us that this is so.”

Towards the end of the book he records a memorable interview with David Battisti of the University of Washington, a notable climate scientist, one of whose lectures stimulated Ward to write this book. He asks Battisti to describe verbally the world we are headed for on our current trajectory. It’s a very different world and it’s not nice, though Battisti still hopes that under the pressures of climate change we will put into place a political structure able to implement the global regulations and incentives that might rescue us.

Ward concludes with three possible scenarios based on what he has written in his book and the “massive scientific literature” dealing with global warming and climate change.  The first is the only one I can bear to contemplate.  It’s bad enough, but the sea level will have risen by ‘only’ a metre, the conveyor belt current system will not have stopped, the ocean will stay mixed.

The political solution is out of the hands of the scientists.  But the policy makers can’t say they aren’t being warned. “This book is my scream”, Ward writes. It’s a very civilised scream, like that of many other scientists, but we must hope like hell enough politicians have ears to hear it.

The Obama Factor

This column appeared in the Waikato Times on 17 February

Suddenly there appears to be hope. Barack Obama is definite: “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all.” It’s climate change he’s talking about.

For eight dismal years the Bush administration refused even to acknowledge the threat, let alone take leadership in addressing it. Vested interests prevailed against the scientists who have come to understand what is happening to the climate. The US, alone of all the world’s nations once Australia left their side, refused to participate in even the modest Kyoto treaty and consistently tried to subvert progress towards any further binding international agreement.  This although they are responsible for more than 20% of the world’s CO2 emissions and have the highest per capita emissions of all the larger nations.

Continue reading “The Obama Factor”

The other Hot Topic

The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights on

A book of modest size but surprisingly wide scope, The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights on was co-authored last year by Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, and science writer and broadcaster Gabrielle Walker. It has now been published in a revised and updated paperback version. Straighforward clarity marks the writing, and combined with careful organisation of the material results in some readily understandable explanations of complex matters.  Both authors are trained scientists.

The book’s structure is simple. In three parts, it first explains the problem, then discusses the technological solutions and finally canvasses the political solutions.  The intention is to show that although global warming is probably the most serious problem that the human race has, collectively, ever faced, it is not unsolvable.

The problem.  The world is warming, more so and unequivocally in recent decades.  Carbon dioxide and its sister greenhouse gases are responsible, emitted by human activity. Already some of the effects of this heating are being felt in the natural world and in human suffering.  But there is more inescapably in the pipeline, currently delayed by the built-in lag of the ocean which takes a long time to warm up. Moreover there are climate wild cards which could dramatically escalate the scale of the problem, including the shut-down of parts of the oceans’ circulation, massive abrupt sea level rise following ice sheet slide into the ocean, melting permafrost triggering the release of massive amounts of carbon, or some as yet unsuspected danger hidden in the process. But our generation has the chance, the last chance, to avoid the worst of such scenarios.

The technological solutions. We may be able to keep the temperature rise to 2 degrees centigrade if we stay below 450 parts per million CO2 equivalent, lower than earlier estimates which were too optimistic. A rise of 2 degrees will be bad enough in its effects, but we should be spurred to action, not dismayed. The wedges strategy advanced by Socolow and Pacala is the best way to proceed. Efficiency savings are the low hanging fruit and can be achieved quickly.  In transport the right kind of biofuels can play a very useful part, public transport of various kinds can make a big difference to fuel use and hydrogen still remains a possibilty as a fuel.The usual technologies for clean power generation are discussed with some caution, including carbon capture and storage; the book remarks that enough sunlight falls on the earth to meet our energy needs 10,000 times over and in principle wind could generate five times the global electricity needs.  We have the technical wherewithal and ingenuity to achive the greenhouse reductions needed, and the time to start is now.

The political solutions are more difficult. Economics first. The economic debates over discount rates rather miss the point that the science says that action cannot be put off to some future date as some economists have argued – we have to act now.  In any case the costs are not beyond our ability to pay.  Fully global cap and trade schemes, if we learn from early mistakes, can work, though they will need additional regulatory action and government investment to keep us in the right direction. A “Green New Deal” could invigorate the global economy.

On to politics. Post-Kyoto agreement will need a global target, followed by the fiendishly difficult task of dividing the global reductions among the nations of the world. The book spends some time on how this might be done, surveying various possible approaches already on negotiating tables and concluding, perhaps surprisingly, that the choice of approach makes relatively little difference to the requirements for most countries. Carrot and stick financial mechanisms will be required to encourage nations to meet their targets and provide sanctions if they don’t.  The agreement finally will need a mechanism to transfer both technology and funds from the richest countries to the developing world.

There follows an interesting discussion of what will be needed from the five most rapidly developing nations – China, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and India – and then from the major industrialised countries, noting in the case of the US the new hope that President Obama has brought to the possibility of effective action.

The book concludes with a reminder of actions we can take as individuals to contribute in small ways towards the result.  I appreciated the final paragraph urging us not to despair. “The climate problem is certainly a hard one, but it’s not intractable.” This statement is backed up by a map of the world showing six small squares distributed through the various land masses which would together provide enough energy to power the entire world’s requirements once we learned to capture sunlight efficiently.

The authors describe their aim as being “to tell you everything you wanted to know about global warming but were too depressed to ask.”  Readers who know that depressed feeling may be reassured by the book, though there is nothing facile about its optimism. Indeed there is an element of doggedness in the iteration that now is the time to act, not to despair. A doggedness, I hasten to add, that I am happy to share. The political solution is the sticking point.  I found the book particularly useful in its explanations of the issues in international negotiations and how they might be tackled successfully. The authors may not be politicians, but they draw on experience of the political world  and display a good understanding of how things work there. The interested reader will find complicated matters explained with admirable lucidity.

So much to say (so little time)

NZETS.jpgGareth has suggested I might like to post on Hot Topic my submissions to the ETS Review committee.  I am doing so because the closing date for submissions has been extended by two weeks – it is now 27 February – and I would like to urge readers who haven’t done so to consider making a submission. You will see from what follows that I operate from a slighter base than Gareth, and that may encourage others in a like position. For this post I have chosen four of the terms of reference to which I responded, to keep it within reasonable length.  You can make a submission without responding to every term of reference. And you can be quite brief.  There will be some heavy artillery brought to bear on the committee – indeed it seems that the extension is to accommodate them – but think of what sniper fire can accomplish. The terms of reference are here. Extraordinarily, submissions are required to be posted (two copies) to Committee Secretariat, Emissions Trading Scheme Review, Parliament Buildings, Wellington.  There is helpful material on making a submission here. If you have queries you can ring the Secretariat at 04 817 9560 – they’re servants of the public remember.  (If you get a recorded message I suggest going to reception and asking for the assistant, who I found helpful.)  

Here are my submissions on four of the terms of reference:

Continue reading “So much to say (so little time)”