Bryan Walker

The Lesson from China

Environmentalist Lester Brown is a competitive long-distance runner even into his late seventies. There’s something of the dogged persistence of that sport in the way he keeps delivering the message that humanity must change course, and backing up what he has to say with masses of data. The latest email I received a few days ago from his Earth Policy Institute underlined that message yet again, along with stark figures. It’s a short article headed Learning From China. I was taken with its directness and simplicity and thought it worth sharing here. He reflects that for as long as he can remember his own country, the US, with 5 percent of the world’s population has consumed a third or more of the earth’s resources. But today China consumes more basic resources than the US does. China uses a quarter more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is double that of the United States. It uses three times as much coal and four times as much steel.

That’s national consumption. What if per capita consumption in China were to catch up with the US? That will happen by 2035 on the conservative assumption that China’s economy slows from the 11 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent.

If the Chinese spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then things get pretty well impossible. Continue reading “The Lesson from China”

Natural Gas is Not a Green Fuel

My heart sinks when I read enthusiastic acclamations of natural gas as a substitute for coal. It releases less CO₂ on combustion, we’re told. It is a good bridge to the time when renewable energy is sufficiently developed to take over. And latterly, with the development of fracking, that’s going to be a very long bridge. There are claims that if we can extract all the shale natural gas there’s enough to keep us supplied for 200 years. And in addition there’s the wonderful supply awaiting extraction from methane hydrates in the ocean once we find out how to do it.

The oil and gas companies even hail it as a green fuel. It’s no such thing. Natural gas is a fossil fuel. It releases CO₂ when it is burned. It may be preferable to coal, but it is no solution to the crisis we are confronted with. And there is in any case doubt being cast on its superiority to coal, especially when it is obtained by unconventional means. In a paper published in Climatic Change Letters earlier this year Howarth et al evaluate the greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas obtained by high volume hydraulic fracturing from shale formations, focusing on methane emissions. Continue reading “Natural Gas is Not a Green Fuel”

Climate Change: The Long View

Professor Tim Naish, Director of the Antarctic Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, and Principal Scientist, GNS Science, is giving a lecture tomorrow, Thursday 15 September, from 12.30-1.30 at VUW’s Pipitea Campus, Railway West Wing 501. It’s part of the NZ Climate Change Research Institute’s Seminar Series. Recommended to Wellingtonians, and worth attention from the rest of us for its sobering content indicated below.

Climate Change: The Long View

Computer models can now reliably reconstruct Earth’s climate over the last 150 years, including the rise in average global temperature of 0.7º C in the last century. When they are used to project Earth’s climate to 2100 under a range of greenhouse gas emissions scenarios they indicate average global temperature increase will likely be between 2 and 5ºC. Even at the low end, which requires an aggressive reduction in emissions, this is higher than at any time in the last million years, based on well established paleo-temperature records.

The last time Earth experienced such a climate was 3-5 million years ago. During this period known as the warm Pliocene Epoch, atmospheric carbon dioxide was near present day levels and average surface temperature was ~3°C warmer, but sea-level was up to ~20m higher, largely from ice sheet melt. In the last 50 years the polar regions have warmed at almost twice the global average, and the last decade the ice sheets have begun to melt. One of the key questions being addressed by the scientific community for the IPCC 5th Assessment Report is improving estimates of future sea level. This talk will outline progress in the use of past temperature, ice sheet reconstructions and sea level records in addressing this issue.

It isn’t the sun

The recent CERN paper in Nature on cosmic rays and cloud formation has caused considerable excitement in the denialist world. Canadian columnist Lawrence Solomon in the Financial Post declared “The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun – not human activities – as the controller of climate on Earth”. For what the paper really said readers can turn to the welcome and discussion it received on RealClimate. There’s also a useful response to Solomon’s claim on SkepticalScience.

It’s a complex picture, but today I came across this short video which sets it out straightforwardly and with a light touch. (Thanks to The Carbon Brief website.) Put together by Australian science journalist Potholer, it is both an explanation of the science and a picture of how misinterpretations travel in the denialist community.

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SOS Roadshow: Final Days

Here’s the latest update on the Jim Salinger, Rod Oram and Caroline Saunders road show. It contains more complete information on venues and two or three additions to the list we published three weeks back. By the time the tour finishes in November they will have given 35 seminars. That’s a sterling effort which hopefully will have engaged interest from the farming community. I detected, when watching a TV panel discussion recently which included the new Federated Farmers president, reason to hope that under its new leadership Federated Farmers will be more willing to understand and share the concern over climate change than has been the case heretofore. As the road show makes clear there is economic benefit for them in facing the reality. Continue reading “SOS Roadshow: Final Days”