Can we stop climate change in time?

The science is clear. ‘Business as usual’ will increase global temperatures by at least four degrees – possibly much more. This will have catastrophic impacts on many parts of the world – and especially on the poorest people.

That’s why one of our leading climate scientists, Prof Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre, convened a Radical Emissions Reduction conference at the Royal Society. This was not a climate science conference, the speakers included economists, sociologists, anthropologists, NGO experts, politicians, a French philosopher and an Irish fireman! The conference brought a variety of perspectives to bear on the technical, social and political feasibility of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to avoid catastrophe. 

The conference passed no motions and made no declarations but I took away three main messages:

•  It is technically feasible, though it will be very hard, to reduce emissions fast enough. 
• To do so will require the citizens of developed countries to make significant sacrifices.
•  Neither the people nor the leaders of these countries have the will to make the changes needed. 

The political radicalism of the conference surprised me. The keynote speaker was Naomi Klein and Green MP Caroline Lucas was on the final panel. In her speech on the first day Naomi said, roughly, ‘I thought I might stir you up by calling for revolution but that’s already happened six times!’ Many speakers stressed the need for major change in politics and behaviour and emphasised the political and ideological roadblocks.

The Good News

The unexpected star of the second day was Neil McCabe, a fireman from Dublin. Six years ago he started a process of general improvement and emissions reduction at his fire station.  In six years he has done 300 actions and created 20 start-ups. He has extended his approach first to the rest of the Dublin Fire Service and then to the whole Council. Inspiring stuff!

Some speakers discussed technologies. Brenda Boardman, for instance, told us that using LED lights would significantly reduce peak electricity demand. Lighting, she said, is about 22% of peak demand (much more than I’d have guessed). Wed may already have reached ‘peak light bulb’. Other speakers discussed low energy technologies for homes and shipping.

Other speakers presented scenarios for the transition to a low-emissions energy system and Dan Staniaszek told us that stopping climate change will have many societal benefits, especially for health.

The necessary changes are technically possible, economically affordable and offer many benefits.

The Bad News

Though we’ve known about the threat of climate change for over twenty years nothing effective has been done. Global emissions continue to rise. “Global recession”, John Barrett told us “is the only thing shown to reduce global emissions – and that only briefly”. The impacts are serious and increasing precisely known. According to Tyndall Director Corrine Le Quere “Of the one meter Hurricane Sandy storm surge twenty cm was due to global warming”.

The oft-cited 80% reduction by 2050 target may not be enough. John Barrett thinks it should be 97%. Either requires annual reductions in the range 7.5 to 10% in the developed world. Yet almost everyone, and not just mainstream politicians, is in denial about both the scale and pace of the changes needed. Several speakers gave lists of reasons for the inaction and denial but here’s my list:

1. Vested interests in fossil fuel and growth oppose effective action. The worst are fuel producers, both corporate and national, energy supply companies and automobile and aerospace firms. But they also include manufacturers, retailers, media and governments who benefit from growth, ie almost all of them.
2. The dominance of neoliberal ideology. Since 1979 this has conquered the parties of the Left as well as the Right. Neoliberals believe in the magic of the market and that government intervention must make things worse. Naomi Klein criticised North American environmental organisations for using neoliberal arguments, thus strengthening their enemies. Even at this conference, several speakers proposed solutions, such as tradeable quotas, that rely on new markets, yet Clive Spash and Steffen Bohm told the conference that carbon markets had failed.
3. The near absence of convincing role models for low-carbon living requiring acts of imagination too difficult for most of us.

What is to be done?

The general shape of the needed policies is clear. We need more R&D funding for renewables, energy storage, insulation, energy efficiency and low-carbon farming. We also need much tougher standards for energy efficiency, carbon taxes and selective subsidies, eg for house insulation.

But how, politically, can we get them when government is doing the opposite? The necessary actions follow from the reasons for inaction: We need political reform to reduce corporate power, and we need, as Naomi Klein said, “to shred the neoliberal ideology”. Everyone agreed that the necessary action would not happen without strong public pressure so we need a political movement.

All this is hard but our future requires no less.

Videos of the conference sessions can be found at http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/communication/news-archive/2013/radical-emissions-reduction-conference-videos-now-online.

 

Antarctic Glacier in retreat

A new study by Gael Durand, at Grenoble Alps University, and others shows that the Pine Island Glacier, one of the largest in the Antarctic, is in “irreversible decline”.

The grounding line – the line along which the glacier lifts away from the sea bottom – has receded about six miles since 2003. But that’s just the start according to Durand; the glacier "has started a phase of self-sustained retreat and will irreversibly continue its decline." This conclusion is based on the use of three different models by the authors. The authors expect a five-fold increase in the volume of ice lost from the glacier for the period 2012 to 2031.

This is dramatic but unsurprising. The IPCC reports multiple measures of accelerating change:

·       The global mean sea level rose by an average of 1.7 mm per year from 1901-2010 but by 3.2 mm per year between 1993 and 2010.

·       Losses from Greenland's ice sheet have probably increased from 34 billion tons per year between 1992 and 2001 to 215 billion tons per year between 2001 and 2010.

·       In Antarctica, the rate of loss probably increased from 30 billion tons a year to 147 billion tons a year over the same timescale.

 
Forecasts of future warming, melting and sea level rise are highly uncertain precisely because the rates are increasing so sharply. It’s no secret that scientists are struggling to understand these changes. What’s not uncertain is that rising sea levels will threaten low-lying communities round the world, starting with the poorest. Without radical change in industry and agriculture the question is not whether they will threaten London and other cities in the developed world but when.

Imperial appoints Chevron director as president

Imperial College is one of the world's top ten universities. Amongst its many departments and academic centres we find the Grantham Institute for Climate Change (GICC), a well-regarded academic centre. The GICC studies climate change and the necessary policy responses to it.

Today, Imperial announced the appointment of a distinguished academic, Alice P Gast, as the new President of Imperial from September next. Gast is a chemical engineer with experience as academic leader. More relevant to Cassandra Gast, as president of LeHigh University, signed the University’s Climate Commitment to "create institutional policies and procedures to manage the development and implementation of a university-wide plan that affirms our commitment to protect and improve the environment through our teaching, research, faculty, student and staff service, and administrative operations."

So we should all be pleased?

Not quite. Gast is also a Board member of Chevron!  Yes, that's the Chevron, the second largest oil company in the US.

Last January Chevron CEO, John Watson, was asked about greenhouse gas emissions. He said "... the countries with the best environmental practices are the wealthiest."  Now there's some truth in that if you look at air and water standards and habitat protection but as a comment on greenhouse gases it's barking mad. It's the rich countries whose emissions have driven and are driving climate change. It's the rich countries that have failed to meet their Kyoto commitments. (Except the US, of course, which has refused to make any!)

But the real problem with Chevron is not what is says but what it's doing. And what it's doing is spending ever more on finding and extracting fossil fuels - $33 Billion in  2013 - "from wherever it hides in the Earth's crust". So Chevron's policy is to increase climate change.

What can Prof Gast be doing in that company?  And what will the good people in the Grantham Centre make of their new President?

Chevron is in the midst of an enormous cycle of investment aimed at extracting oil and gas from wherever it hides in the earth's crust.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-12-chevron-ceo-energy-crucial.html#jCp

AP: How should society go about reducing greenhouse gas emissions?
WATSON: If you look around the world, the countries with the best environmental practices are the wealthiest. There's a reason for that. If you're worried about where your next meal is going to come from or shelter over your head, your focus is on those things


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-12-chevron-ceo-energy-crucial.html#jCp

AP: How should society go about reducing greenhouse gas emissions?
WATSON: If you look around the world, the countries with the best environmental practices are the wealthiest. There's a reason for that. If you're worried about where your next meal is going to come from or shelter over your head, your focus is on those things


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-12-chevron-ceo-energy-crucial.html#jCp

AP: How should society go about reducing greenhouse gas emissions?
WATSON: If you look around the world, the countries with the best environmental practices are the wealthiest. There's a reason for that. If you're worried about where your next meal is going to come from or shelter over your head, your focus is on those things


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-12-chevron-ceo-energy-crucial.html#jCp

Does I = PAT?

The equation I = PAT was invented by Barry Commoner in 1972 and is widely used by the pressure group Population Matters in arguing for population control. It asserts that humanity's environmental impact (I) depends on population (P), affluence (A) and technology (T). The last factor is best understood as a measure of the resource inefficiency of our various industrial, agricultural and other processes.

The terms P and A are easy to understand and relatively easy to measure. GDP per head is a workable measure of A. I and T are much harder since there are many kinds of environmental impact, eg greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, mineral resource depletion and loss of biodiversity, which are not always strongly correlated. (see, eg, Cole and Neumayer, 2004).  That is, we need a set of IPAT equations, one for each kind of environmental impact. Each will need its own T value which will be defined as I/PA rather than calculated independently.

IPAT, therefore, is not so much a proposed law of nature as a suggestion for relevant factors when considering environmental change. Initially IPAT was useful but it can now be seen to be rather misleading.

The variations between groups
The equation suggests (at least when applied globally) that the affluence of the world's population can be expressed by a single number. Though technically correct it's very misleading. The reality, obviously, is of vast variations in affluence and lifestyle both between countries (contrast Somalia and Switzerland for instance) and within countries (contrast bankers and farm workers).

Single numbers are sensible where everyone is the same or where a characteristic shows a normal distribution (as for human height for instance). Affluence shows a Pareto or, colloquially, 80:20 distribution (20% of the people own 80% of the wealth) and is thus not well represented by a single number.

The interdependence of P and A
The equation suggests that population and affluence are independent variables which in general they are not. During the 19th century the UK's population and prosperity rose together as the agricultural, industrial and scientific revolutions (plus the spread of empire) produced ever more food, manufactured goods and services. In this period the true independent variable was probably 'progress'. This pattern has been repeated many times as other countries have industrialised and in most cases the main growth phase has been followed by a marked reduction in population growth.

Today growth in affluence is greatest where population growth is modest.

The parity of P and A
The equation suggests that population and affluence are of comparable importance in creating environmental impact. In fact that's not true. In recent decades our impact has risen much faster than population and is largely driven by increasing affluence. Some of this is due to the increasing wealth of the mega-rich 1% (or 0.1% globally I suppose) but much is due to the increasing numbers of Koreans, Brazillians, Indians and Chinese who can afford cars, meat and broadband Internet.

The meaningless differential
The equation suggests that its first differential would be
            dI/dP =AT.

That is, that a small (say 1%) increase in population will produce the same proportional increase in environmental impact. That, of course, is unreal. The world's population comprises many subpopulations with very different lifestyles and levels of affluence. One extra Briton will consume much more than one extra Bengali and will have correspondingly more impact.

So this first differential will be accurate only if every subpopulation increases by the same small amount. But that isn't happening. Some countries are still experiencing rapid population growth whilst growth elsewhere is static or even negative.

The first differential also requires an associated growth in the local economy to provide the extra people with goods and services. It is, at least, unclear whether local economies can respond in this way without accelerating impacts on the environment. Two examples may illustrate this:

• As people migrate to London suburbs they will need roads, houses and schools. If they find work and pay taxes they can afford them. But since there can be no more land we may expect more air pollution, less green space, higher house prices and higher population densities.
• As population increases in many East African villages the women must walk further for firewood. That gives them less time for farming and childcare whilst reducing the ground cover.

The complexity of things
The IPAT equation suggests a simplicity that simply does not exist. The complexity of things is not in doubt and its time to stop using this simplistic equation.


Refs

Cole, M. A. and Neumayer, E. "Examining the impact of demographic factors on air pollution," Population Environment 26.1 (2004): 5-21.

Commoner, Barry. 1972:  “The Environmental Cost of Economic Growth.” in Population, Resources and the Environment. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office Pp. 339-63, 1972.

Methane hydrates: Threat or promise?

Methane is a valuable fuel and a potent greenhouse gas. At low temperatures and high pressures it combines with water to make methane hydrates. There's a huge amount of the hydrates - perhaps twice as much as all other fossil fuel deposits - on the seabed - especially in the far north.

The obvious threat is that warming waters - those in the north are warming fastest - will destabilise the hydrates releasing vast amounts of methane and thus accelerating climate change. This is a particularly scary possibility for three reasons:

• It's a positive feedback loop. Once established it will probably overwhelm all the other mechanisms.
• The sea warms slowly and warming lags the relevant gas releases. 
• Hydrate deposits are poorly understood so we can't forecast how much methane will be released how soon. 

It's therefore possible that we have already released enough greenhouse gases to create catastrophic climate change. Most climate scientists think this unlikely; but the IPCC consensus has usually been over-optimistic.

Hydrates also have a promise. Methane is a very clean fuel and its extraction from hydrates will probably be an efficient process. IF we switched from coal and oil to methane and IF we could keep leakage well below 1% then we would reduce the greenhouse effect. It's no panacea but it would help a lot.

Those are big IFs. In practice new energy sources usually add to consumption. The US currently benefits from fracked methane but instead of closing coal mines it is exporting coal - much of it to Europe.

In a sane world hydrates might be an opportunity. In fact they remain a dreadful threat.

Geo-engineering is coming of age

According to New Scientist (12/10/13, p 10) the IPCC now sees geo-engineering as essential if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. That was the conclusion of the recent Oxford Conference on Negative Emmission Technologies. 

New Scientist's summary shows seven technologies any one of which could, if energetically implemented, remove at least one gigaton of carbon per year from the atmosphere. That's 10% of annual emissions.

The costs, for what are often theoretical technologies, are highly uncertain and fall in the range $10 to $2,000 per ton of CO2 captured. So the cost of removing one gigaton of carbon per year would be on the order of $400 B dollars per year. That's a lot by any ordinary standard. On the other hand it's just a quarter of the world's annual arms bill.

But money isn't the only issue. Some methods require physical resources such as gas-tight strata or land for tree planting and these are needed for other purposes too.

Has aviation seen the light?

New Scientist (12 Oct 13, p 6) reports that the airlines have agreed to participate in an emissions trading scheme. That's a useful point of principle gained but may have no real effect. It will only be worthwhile if the airlines are given significantly LESS permits than their current emissions. (Why give them any? Beats me but that's how it is.)

Experience with the EU ETS and the shipping rules are discouraging but I suppose we have to hope.