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Before and after science

“We accept the science,” says Climate Change Issues Minister Nick Smith in a Brian Fallow article in the NZ Herald. But what does it mean for a politician to accept the science? For Caroline Lucas (left), leader of the Green Party in the UK and the sole Green MP in the House of Commons, it means taking some lessons from the World War II era. She calls for this in an article in the Telegraph.

“Our health and security, our society and way of life, our natural environment, even our coastline, are all at risk from uncontrolled natural forces – disease, drought, flood and storm. In terms of the human and financial cost in the UK and internationally, the impact over the coming decades has been compared to the world wars of the twentieth century.

“Since the 1980s, successive governments and their expert advisers have accepted the seriousness of the threat, and have known what actions are needed to avert it as far as possible and to prepare for the consequences. But they have not acted either to prepare the UK or to build an international agreement on reduction. And with every passing year, the threat to our country becomes more severe.”

 

At this point she turns back to the 1930s when many politicians of all parties ignored the threat of war brewing in Europe and failed to take steps to deter aggression or prepare defence.

“At the time, the two main excuses put forward to justify inaction and appeasement were that there was not enough money to pay for proper defences, and that the British public would not support a government that took tough measures.”

Rather familiar sounding, those excuses. Lucas continues:

“Yet by the end of the 1930s, public opinion was far ahead of Chamberlain’s government in demanding tough measures, and the costs of the war itself ultimately far outweighed the costs of the measures that might have prevented it. And during the war itself, the British people were willing to make the sacrifices needed to deal with the horror of Nazism and to try and build a fairer society for the future.”

She points to some of the same patterns becoming apparent today in relation to climate change. Some members of the public, some enlightened local government bodies, some firms, and many institutions and campaigning groups are ready to urge action.

“One of the lessons of history is that putting off difficult issues has a habit of making them far more costly to deal with in the long run: climate change is certainly in that category. Our aim is to help forge the national consensus that will support this or future governments in sustained, radical action.”

Lucas is far from the first on the climate change issue to draw parallels between the challenges today and those of the 1930s, but she does so unhesitatingly because she accepts the science.

Meanwhile back in New Zealand two recent articles in the Herald provided rather disparate examples of what it might mean to our politicians to accept the science. One announced Len Brown’s plans to ‘green’ Auckland. They include a goal of cutting Auckland’s carbon emissions by 40 per cent by 2025. It’s aspiration at this point, but it’s way ahead of the government target of between 10 and 20 per cent by 2020, and it’s approaching the level that might put developed societies on track to achieve the much higher reductions that will be needed by 2050 if we are to stand any chance of avoiding dangerous warming. And it places Auckland among those enlightened local bodies which are pushing ahead of their central governments in various parts of the world.

It’s a rather different picture with Nick Smith, as portrayed in a Herald article by Brian Fallow writing about the key questions for the statutory review of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) over the coming months. Yes, Smith affirms the government accepts the science. And let me acknowledge that that is a welcome affirmation.  Accepting the science is an advance on the vacillation which was apparent in the National party in opposition not so many years ago. It means we don’t have to traverse the dreary wastes of denial which still have to be faced in parts of the US legislature and are still basic to the NZ government’s coalition partner, the ACT party.

However, accepting the science doesn’t seem to carry with it the imperative of decisive action. Fallow’s article portrays the Minister as cautious. He says the government wants to reduce emissions (though gives no indication as to how much), that they want to do it efficiently and with fairness between different sectors of the economy, and that they have an overall objective of New Zealand doing its fair share on climate change. Arriving at a fair share? Well, Smith points out, we are the 11th highest per capita emitters globally, but on the other hand we’re in the bottom third of the OECD and we have an emissions profile that is unusual for a developed country in that nearly half of it arises from the bodily functions of livestock, while the electricity sector is predominantly renewable already. No prizes for guessing that our estimation of a fair share won’t be setting any international standards for aspiration.

Indeed Smith wants to continue to signal that a National-led Government “will not be including agriculture [in the ETS] unless there are practical technologies that farmers can employ to reduce their emissions and there has been significantly greater progress than we have seen to date by our key trading partners in pricing emissions”.

Smith allows himself some optimism when it comes to electricity generation and forestry. He points to a substantial increase in the level of renewables in energy built since the passing of the ETS and also to an increase in forestry, “one of the cheapest ways of meeting current and any future international obligations”. But there is no suggestion that the government is looking to any more than the 10 to 20 per cent target for reduction in emissions by 2020 and 50 per cent by 2050 that they have so far adopted. And even those targets have a provisional air to them. What we do will depend on what others do.

We accept the science, says Smith. The science says that if emissions are not drastically reduced in the course of the next few decades the world will consequently experience sea level rise to heights horrifying to even contemplate. Droughts and floods will afflict us ever more strongly. Food supplies will be drastically threatened. And much more. Admittedly New Zealand appears likely to be one of the least affected countries, but that will be small comfort in a world so upturned.

That’s the message the government should be giving the country, and accompanying it with measures commensurate with the threat. Along the way they might show some confidence in the capacity of New Zealanders to manage a successful green economy. Accepting the science doesn’t mean the destruction of the economy, just its reshaping.

[Eno]

Fraser’s Penguins

I decided to read Fen Montaigne’s book Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica because of what I understood it would have to say about climate change. It does say very important things on that subject, but along the way it proved a fascinating account of the life of the Adélie penguins of the Antarctic Peninsula and of the scientific monitoring which has recorded the welfare of their colonies in the vicinity of Palmer Station for more than three decades. As well, the author provides memorable descriptions of the land, sea and skyscapes and the pleasure he took from them. His weaving in some of the impressions of the early Antarctic explorers added interesting historical perspective. The book is a rewarding read on many fronts.

Continue reading “Fraser’s Penguins”

Warming at the walls of the “citadel of ice”

Australian-born writer Meredith  Hooper was looking for “a route into the complex business of the Earth’s changing climate” when she spent January to March 2002 at Palmer Station on the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. She watched and chronicled the work of scientist Bill Fraser and his team who for years have studied the Adélie penguins breeding on nearby islands over the summer months.

I read the account of her time there in her book The Ferocious Summer. It was the summer when the Larsen B ice shelf on the eastern side of the Peninsula spectacularly disintegrated. Her often poignant story tells of diminished numbers of penguins arriving for breeding, weather conditions inappropriate for their nesting, poor nutrition levels and low fledgling survival rates.

The book was also an illuminating account of the working and thinking of the scientists as they gradually amass and interpret the years of data needed for a proper understanding of what is happening to wildlife populations under the inexorable processes of climate change.

Hooper wrote for any who want to understand what global warming might mean for specific places and the life which has developed in close relationship with them. She observes that “climate change isn’t a blanket thrown evenly over the surface of the Earth”. Its impacts are variable and often need to be understood locally.

In the vulnerability of the Adélie penguins she saw a small example of a potentially vast reality ahead. “In one sense, they had become surrogate humans.” Her book was yet another solemn warning from the world of science.

Now another book has appeared by a writer who also spent several months with Bill Fraser’s team. Fraser’s Penguins is written by Fen Montaigne, senior editor of the online Yale 360. I hope to be reading and reviewing it in the near future. But in the meantime I wanted to draw attention to a report he has just written for Yale 360, The Warming of Antarctica: A Citadel of Ice Begins to Melt. Its focus is much wider than the Adélie penguins, though they figure in it: amongst other things he notes that their population has declined from 30,000 breeding pairs in 1975 to 5,600 pairs today.

On the broader Antarctic picture Montaigne explains helpfully for the general reader the developing scientific understanding of the effects of warming on the ice. He begins with a prescient quote from a geologist, John H. Mercer, writing in Nature in 1978.

“If present trends in fossil fuel consumption continue, a critical level of warmth will have been passed in high southern latitudes 50 years from now, and deglaciation of West Antarctica will be imminent or in progress… One of the warning signs that a dangerous warming trend is under way in Antarctica will be the breakup of ice shelves on both coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula, starting with the northernmost and extending gradually southward.”

Montaigne observes that Mercer’s prediction has come true, a couple of decades earlier than he anticipated. Since Mercer wrote those words eight ice shelves have fully or partially collapsed along the Antarctic Peninsula, and the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula has warmed faster than virtually any place on Earth.

Montaigne continues:

“The question now, as humanity pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate, is not whether Antarctica will begin to warm in earnest, but how rapidly. The melting of Antarctica’s northernmost region – the Antarctic Peninsula – is already well underway, representing the first breach in an enormous citadel of cold that holds 90 percent of the world’s ice.

He acknowledges the vastness and coldness of the Antarctic ice dome, the heart of which is not likely to begin to melt any time soon.  But the periphery is another matter, and on that periphery the Antarctic peninsula has warmed faster than any other place. A 60-year temperature record at a research base on the northwest shows winter temperatures 11 degrees F higher and annual average temperatures 5 degrees F higher.

Ninety percent of 244 glaciers along the western Antarctic Peninsula have retreated since 1940. Sea ice covers the Southern Ocean off the western Antarctic Peninsula three fewer months a year than in 1979, according to satellite data. In addition, ice shelves have been disintegrating up and down the peninsula.

He quotes Ted Scambos, the lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

“We are already at the point where the changes we’re seeing in this part of Antarctica are unprecedented throughout the entire period of human civilization.”

Turning to the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers further south, Montaigne discusses the effect of warming water. Changing atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns have caused the water of the deep Antarctic Circumpolar Current to be funnelled up onto the continental shelf in western Antarctica. At 37 degrees F in winter, it is warmer than the surface water and much warmer than air temperatures. It’s a huge volume and is having an enormous impact. In relative terms it is described as “blisteringly hot” by Douglas Martinson, an oceanographer and Antarctic specialist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The thinking of Robert Bindschadler, a senior fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center and an expert on Antarctic ice, is that the warmer waters are melting the submerged undersides of the ice shelves attached to the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, causing them to grow thinner. The melting is effectively loosening the grip of the Pine Island Glacier on the sea floor, causing the vast river of ice behind it to accelerate into the sea. It is now moving at a rate of about two miles a year.

Montaigne reports Bindschadler as saying that if all the ice from the ice streams feeding the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers were to flow into the Southern Ocean, global sea levels could increase by five feet, inundating low-lying coastal areas from Florida to Bangladesh. “Such an event, said Bindschadler, “could happen in the next half-century.”

The warming of the Antarctic is already bad news for ice-dependent penguin species.  It will also be bad news for humanity if we mindlessly continue our assault on the citadel of ice.

Handle with care

Who is to temper the message of climate science to fit the psychology of those who receive it?

According to a report in Science Daily a forthcoming study will show that people may discount the evidence for global warming if it threatens their fundamental tendency to see the world as safe, stable and fair. On the other hand they may get past their scepticism if the findings of climate science are not presented apocalyptically and solutions to the problem are offered. Robb Willer, UC Berkeley social psychologist and doctoral student Matthew Feinberg have co-authored the study which will appear in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science.

 

I won’t report the details of their experiments, which are outlined in the Science Daily report for any who would like further information. The claim that people don’t respond to doomsday themes is common enough, though the study’s investigation of how this is related to their view of the world as just and fair may well be illuminating. What I found myself thinking as I was reading the report of the study was not so much whether it is revealing as what it is supposed to imply for those who practise climate science.

I can’t really see that it carries any implication at all for the scientists. Their work is to report what they detect is happening and will happen in the future if we continue to overload the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. There’s no way in which what they discover can be communicated as anything other than serious in its consequences.  I wrote some months ago about the unedifying spectacle of Bjorn Lomborg attempting to downplay the seriousness by talking about “balanced information” and moving away from end-of-the-world stories. He was on a climate change panel at a PEN conference and his address immediately followed James Hansen’s. Hansen had said that if we burn all of the fossil fuels we are guaranteed to pass tipping points, the most imminent major one being disintegration of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Lomborg didn’t address the science at all, but simply said that “apocalyptic information” turns people off and is part of the reason why we’ve seen a decline in public concern about global warming. The sombre warnings of the scientist were simply swept away by the economist. Easy. But not an option for the scientist who can hardly moderate the message because it might turn people off. In fact the possible public response cannot be allowed any influence on the studies climate scientists are conducting.

However there are solutions which come hand in hand with the serious findings of the science, and there’s nothing to say we can’t embrace the solutions without dwelling on the consequences of what will happen if we don’t. I notice that Arnold Schwarzenegger in his planned new role of environmental activist is likely to avoid mention of the words climate change or greenhouse gas emissions, which he thinks are a turn-off for some people. “You’ve got to make it hip. You’ve got to make it sexy to be part of this movement.” I hope he meets with success. Nevertheless he is launching on his role because he is aware of how great a threat climate change poses to the human future. It’s there as background reference for him.

I wonder how the experiments described by the psychologists would turn out if they were administered to the population of a Pacific island threatened by sea level rise. Or to Peruvian or Bolivian farmers hit by glacier retreat. Their sense of stability and safety has already been eroded and is hardly likely to interfere with their estimation of the evidence for climate change. They’re not turned off by information that the effects of climate change are potentially catastrophic. They can see that. It’s seemingly the wealthy and protected societies which require communication so delicate that it won’t arouse any sense of fear.

Any approach that will result in drastically lowered emissions and green energy is to be welcomed. But the science is implacable. There’s no way of making it unthreatening.

[Traveling Wilburys]

From Smoke to Mirrors

Kevin Cudby doesn’t rush to easy conclusions in his new book From Smoke to Mirrors: How New Zealand can replace fossil liquid fuels with locally-made renewable energy by 2040. He is clear that fossil fuels must be eliminated but seeks to be realistic about how that can be done. The focus on New Zealand is not exclusive; however, he considers that New Zealand can provide an example which many others will want to learn from and follow. There’s also an economic imperative that we be able to show those who holiday here or buy our products that they are not thereby exacerbating climate change. Cudby envisages a society continuing to have the transport opportunities we currently enjoy and depend on, but fuelled differently. He fully accepts the warnings of climate science, taking James Hansen as a guide in that respect.

The book painstakingly leads the reader through a wide variety of technologies relevant to its search.  Battery vehicles receive close and sympathetic attention but are seen as unlikely to be sufficiently developed to be widely used in NZ road transport before 2040, though they may well make sense for some transport businesses. In discussing hydraulic hybrid (rare as yet) and plug-in battery hybrid vehicles he notes that their low fuel consumption will cancel out rising fuel prices. Hydraulic hybrids should have proved by 2020 whether they can deliver what the promoters promise; he certainly sees them becoming common on machines such a ditch diggers. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles show much promise, and he sees a future for them in New Zealand, though not in significant numbers before 2040.  The discussion of these differently powered vehicles is illuminating in its detail, with very useful explanations of how they work and what problems have yet to be overcome in each case.

Liquid fuels will continue to play a major part in NZ transport by 2040, in the author’s view. They will also remain essential in non-road equipment and vehicles, which Cudby frequently reminds the reader are substantial users of fuel. It will not be enough to eliminate fossil fuels from road transport. Air and sea travel must also be fuelled from non-fossil sources. At this point in his book the Biomass Gasification and Fischer-Tropsch (BGFT) process enters the scene. It yields synthetic crude oil that can be converted into diesel, kerosene, fuel oil, and petrol. BGFT fuels directly replace conventional liquid fuels. They work best with dry biomass. They are expected to be commercialised by 2015, and although they will be more expensive than conventional fossil fuels their use should not affect transport costs because improved vehicle efficiency will offset the higher cost. Cudby estimates that to provide sufficient biomass to satisfy its entire liquid fuel requirements with BGFT synthetic fuels New Zealand would need purpose-grown energy forests covering between nine percent (low scenario) and thirteen percent (high scenario) of its total land area. Excluding from consideration native forests and conservation areas, as well as arable or high quality pastoral land, he finds that between 29 percent (low scenario) and 40 percent (high scenario) of steep low quality land would suffice for the energy forests. I was reminded of the report in 2006 of the Energy Panel of the Royal Society of New Zealand 2020: Energy Opportunities which envisaged a rapid transition to carbon-neutral transport fuel and produced an analysis which demonstrated that New Zealand can easily grow the required biomass without impinging on productive soils.

The book also considers the Hydrothermal Liquefaction (HTL) process, a likely useful complement to BGFT because it copes well with wet biomass and is a promising candidate for converting microalgae into liquid fuels as he notes NZ company Solray Energy is demonstrating. Algae biofuel receives attention but Cudby sees it as not yet ready for commercial-scale stand-alone fuel production. Biodiesel, which he differentiates from synthetic diesel such as BGFT or HTL, is not an option for running the NZ transport system but could fulfil a very useful niche role as a lubricity additive to synthetic diesel. Ethanol will have a role, but for the present its high cost and inferior environmental performance compared with synthetic hydrocarbons tells against it.

This general outline does little justice to the detailed coverage Cudby gives to all these and many related topics as he outlines the options for transport and non-road liquid fuel use. The technically inclined reader will be well engaged. As the author proceeds to his assessment of the options he acknowledges that the world’s transport systems will eventually depend on solar fuels, hydrogen, batteries, or perhaps algal biofuels. However for now none of them are competitive with conventional vehicles fuelled by synthetic biofuels. While we wait to see which technologies will ultimately succeed we should get on with the decarbonising of our supply of liquid fuels. He proposes opening renewable energy facilities at 18-month intervals beginning in 2018. The first six factories would make hydrocarbon liquid fuels. Thereafter it would depend on how world technologies are developing. The products of the first factories would certainly be needed during a 20-year investment life of the factories.  Energy forests have a twenty-five year rotation and he looks to an acceleration of the process in the first stages by using some existing forests for energy, by planting trees close together and harvesting them sooner, and by using unwanted pine trees, gorse and other scrubby weeds.

There are two distinct stages to the transition. The first is replacing the essential hydrocarbon fuels, that is, non-road petrol and diesel, aviation kerosene, and fuel oil. The second is carbon-neutralising road transport, which may involve the vehicles as well as the fuels and perhaps include a mix of different technologies.

It can be done by 2040 but in Cudby’s view it won’t happen as a result of carbon pricing schemes, whether by emissions trading or a direct tax. Energy companies will continue to pursue the enormous potential for liquid fuels made from natural gas, tar sands, heavy oil, oil shale, coal, and methane clathrates. We must therefore progressively ban imported fossil fuel as we develop our biomass synthetic fuel, and while we are about it ban indigenous fossil fuels as well.

“…the only foolproof way to eliminate fossil fuels is to outlaw them”. This is an eminently sensible thing to say, especially when the writer has set out in considerable and thoughtful detail how they can be replaced. But as I read this section of the book I tried to imagine our Minister of Energy engaging with it and failed. In fact he is doing precisely what Cudby says the energy companies will continue to do, pursuing fossil oil to its last drop, holding out a promising future for coal and expressing hope that methane clathrates can be tapped.

Full marks to Cudby and others like him for a thorough and patient exploration of the means by which we can end our reliance on fossil fuels. His vision of New Zealand showing the way, able to demonstrate renewable fuel in almost every type of vehicle even invented, is not bombast but technically grounded.  “What are we waiting for?” are his final words. To which I fear the answer is political leadership intelligent enough to understand the danger of climate change and resolute enough to take a lead in tackling it. And voters ready for such leadership. Technologically, if Cudby is right, we are ready, but politically is another matter.