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- Energy and Global Warming News for October 13: California heats up incentives for solar power; China, Japan, S. Korea vow to make climate talks success
- Lester Brown on his must-read new book "Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization"
- Meet Lindsey Graham, the conservative gamechanger who just made a climate bill likely
- Error-riddled 'Superfreakonomics': New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and "patent nonsense" — and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says "it is an inaccurate portrayal of me" and "misleading" in "many" places.
- Not just for Treehuggers: France to Spend $2.2 Billion on Electric Car Charging Stations; Does Peeing Before Boarding an Airplane Really Save Carbon Emissions?
| Posted: 13 Oct 2009 10:02 AM PDT
California heats up incentives for solar power
China, Japan, SKorea vow to make climate talks success
India's Floods Reveal Climate Change Specter
Carbon capture coal tech must be ready by 2019: U.S.
Africa wants polluters to pay for climate change
Solar power outshining Colorado's gas industry
Transforming Clean-Energy Industry Into a Local One
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| Lester Brown on his must-read new book "Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization" Posted: 13 Oct 2009 08:47 AM PDT
He also lays out one of the most comprehensive set of solutions you can find in one place, including important subjects and strategies that don't get enough attention, with a full chapter on "Eradicating Poverty and Stabilizing Population," another one on "Restoring the Earth," which focuses on regenerating forests, soils, and fisheries, and, of course, "Feeding Eight [!] Billion People Well" — the exclamation point is mine. I had lunch with him recently, an eye-opener even for someone who follows these issues closely. I asked him to submit some blog posts. What follows is his first, about his new book, which was just released September 29. In early 2008, Saudi Arabia announced that, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the non-replenishable aquifer it had been pumping for irrigation was largely depleted. In response, officials said they would reduce their wheat harvest by one eighth each year until production would cease entirely in 2016. The Saudis would then import virtually all the grain consumed by their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people. The Saudis are unique in being so wholly dependent on irrigation. But other, far larger, grain producers such as India and China are facing irrigation water losses and could face grain production declines. Water Shortages Undermining Food Security Fifteen percent of India's grain harvest is produced by overpumping its groundwater. In human terms, 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced from wells that will be going dry. The comparable number for China is 130 million. Among the many other countries facing harvest reductions from groundwater depletion are Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen. The tripling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices between mid-2006 and mid-2008 signaled our growing vulnerability to food shortages. It took the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression to lower grain prices. Past decades have witnessed world grain price surges, but they were event-drive-a drought in the former Soviet Union, a monsoon failure in India, or a crop-withering heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt. This most recent price surge was trend-driven, the result of our failure to reverse the environmental trends that are undermining world food production. These trends include-in addition to falling water tables-eroding soils and rising temperatures from increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Rising temperatures bring crop-shrinking heat waves, melting ice sheets, rising sea level, and shrinking mountain glaciers. With both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting at an accelerating pace, sea level could rise by up to six feet during this century. Such a rise would inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half of the rice in Viet Nam, the world's second-ranking rice exporter. Even a three-foot rise in sea level would cover half the riceland in Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people. And these are only two of Asia's many rice-growing river deltas. The world's mountain glaciers have shrunk for 18 consecutive years. Many smaller glaciers have disappeared. Nowhere is the melting more alarming than in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau where the ice melt from glaciers sustains not only the dry-season flow of the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers but also the irrigation systems that depend on them. Without these glaciers, many Asian rivers would cease to flow during the dry season. The wheat and rice harvests of China and India would be directly affected. China is the world's leading wheat producer. India is second. (The United States is third.) With rice, China and India totally dominate the world harvest. The projected melting of these glaciers poses the most massive threat to food security the world has ever faced. An Early Sign of Decline? We know from studying earlier civilizations such as the Sumerians, Mayans, and many others, that more often than not it was food shortages that led to their demise. It now appears that food may be the weak link in our early twenty-first century civilization as well. Will we follow in the footsteps of the Sumerians and the Mayans or can we change course–and do it before time runs out? Can we move onto an economic path that is environmentally sustainable? We think we can. That is what Plan B 4.0 is about. Mobilizing to Save Civilization Cutting carbon emissions will require both a worldwide revolution in energy efficiency and a shift from oil, coal, and gas to wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The shift to renewable sources of energy is moving at a pace and on a scale we could not imagine even two years ago. Consider the state of Texas. The enormous number of wind projects under development, on top of the 9,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity in operation and under construction, will bring Texas to over 50,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity (think 50 coal-fired power plants) when all these wind farms are completed. This will more than satisfy the needs of the state's 24 million residents. Nationwide, new wind generating capacity in 2008 totaled 8,400 megawatts while new coal plants totaled only 1,400 megawatts. The annual growth in solar generating capacity will also soon overtake that of coal. The energy transition is under way. The United States has led the world in each of the last four years in new wind generating capacity, having overtaken Germany in 2005. But this lead will be short-lived. China is working on six wind farm mega-complexes with generating capacities that range from 10,000 to 30,000 megawatts, for a total of 105,000 megawatts. This is in addition to the hundreds of smaller wind farms built or planned. Wind is not the only option. In July 2009, a consortium of European corporations led by Munich Re, and including Deutsche Bank, Siemens, and ABB plus an Algerian firm, announced a proposal to tap the massive solar thermal generating capacity in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Solar thermal power plants in North Africa could economically supply half of Europe's electricity. The Algerians note that they have enough harnessable solar energy in their desert to power the world economy. (No, this is not an error.) The soaring investment in wind, solar, and geothermal energy is being driven by the exciting realization that these renewables can last as long as the earth itself. In contrast to investing in new oil fields where well yields begin to decline in a matter of decades, or in coal mines where the seams run out, these new energy sources can last forever. At a Tipping Point Yes. But it will take something close to a wartime mobilization, one similar to that of the United States in 1942 as it restructured its industrial economy in a matter of months. We used to talk about saving the planet, but it is civilization itself that is now at risk. Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us must push for rapid change. And we must be armed with a plan outlining the changes needed. – Lester Brown | |||||||
| Meet Lindsey Graham, the conservative gamechanger who just made a climate bill likely Posted: 13 Oct 2009 06:03 AM PDT
Their bipartisan partnership now makes a comprehensive climate and energy bill likely. What's fascinating politically is that while some might try to label him a maverick, like his friend John McCain (R-AZ), Graham has a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 89.79. Graham is an ACU "Senate Standout," among the 20 most conservative U.S. Senators in 2008! So how did a hardcore conservative like Graham come to his game-changing climate and energy views? E&E News (subs. req'd) has a good profile, which I excerpt below:
If you want to thank Lindsey Graham for reaching across the aisle to address the climate problem, start here. |
On Sunday, I discussed the | CLIMATE BILL TOOLBOX |
| Senate Debate: The 60-Vote Climb |
| E&E's exclusive analysis of the positions of all senators on climate legislation. |
| S. 1733: "Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act" |
| Senate climate bill introduced Sept. 30 by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). |
| H.R. 2454: The "American Clean Energy And Security Act" |
| House climate bill from Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) Passed June 26, 2009. |
Download AnalysisIn 2006, Graham cosponsored a bill with Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) that would have set mandatory limits on several traditional air pollutants and carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. And before the 2008 presidential primaries, Graham said South Carolina voters were concerned about global warming because of its effect on hunting and recreational opportunities.
"I can't imagine a nominee for either major party arguing to the public that climate change is not real and man is not contributing to it," he said in February 2007. "If they take that position, the public is going to really question their judgment."
Graham credits his entry into the climate debate in large part to McCain, whose one-time energy aide, Matt Rimkunas, has worked for Graham since 2005. The two lawmakers have made trips together to see first hand the effects of climate change at the North Pole, in Norway and Alaska.
"I've been to every cold place that's not as cold as it used to be," Graham said. "Common sense tells me, just as acid rain became a problem because of pollutants going up into the atmosphere, this much carbon for this long a period of time has to have some effect. And I've just come to the conclusion that it has."
There are other factors for Graham's interest in the issue. His home state has four existing nuclear power reactors, with another four in the planning stages and possibly online by 2015. Graham often cites the pro-environment views of many religious and faith-based groups in his home state. And he regularly repeats that South Carolinians under age 30 are the firmest believers in the science linking man-made emissions to climate change.
Like Kerry, Graham also enjoys making the connection between energy and climate change to his military credentials, which include a rank of colonel in the Air Force Reserve and several short active duty stints in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I really do believe that our energy dependence, that as much as we rely on foreign oil as a national security nightmare, I believe that climate change is real and it's going to affect the food supply over time, and it's going to make the world even a much more dangerous place.
"It's not just me saying it," Graham added. "A bunch of generals are saying it. So I think there's a lot of national security reasons that you'd want to control greenhouse gases. A lot of national security reasons you'd want to get more independent when it comes to finding your own energy."
As for McCain, the 2008 presidential nominee said he did not mind ceding the spotlight to his friend. "He's like a son to me," McCain said.
Debating DeMint
Graham has also made a habit out of upsetting conservatives.
His work on immigration in 2007 with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) prompted a longtime state GOP official to challenge him in the 2008 primary. Graham was among the first Republicans to publicly commit to vote for the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. And he lit up the conservative blogs earlier this month by brushing off FOX News commentator Glenn Beck's criticism about President Obama.
"You can listen to him if you like," Graham said of Beck. "I choose not to because, quite frankly, I don't want to go down the road of thinking our best days are behind us."
So longtime observers of Graham's career are not surprised by his recent emergence as a possible Democratic ally on global warming.
"I don't think he's ever met a Democrat he didn't like," said David Woodard, a Clemson University political science professor who ran Graham's successful House campaigns in 1994 and 1996.
And they also see Graham distancing himself from fellow South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, who earlier this summer sounded a far different note when it came to health care and the president's agenda.
"If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo, it will break him," DeMint said.
On climate change, the two senators may represent the same state. But they are not on the same page.
"The science is certainly inconclusive that CO2 raises temperature," DeMint said last week. "If you look at global temperature over the last 10 years, you cannot make a case. That does not mean we do not need to continue all efforts to clean up the environment and lower emissions. But the legislation doesn't lower emissions. Even the people who designed it agree with that. It's more of a federal power grab. So what we need to do is continue to work on alternatives."
"I respect that, but I completely disagree," Graham countered. "See, from Jim's point of view, if you didn't think this was a problem, you wouldn't do this. I respect that. And there are people in South Carolina with that point of view. And I'm not one of them."
Graham also is in a different place when it comes to working with the Obama administration. Last week, he said he would urge the president to set up working groups on various issues still needing to be resolved on the energy and climate front. And he insisted that he would vote for a bill even if led to a major victory for the president.
"I'd like to solve a problem, and if it's on President Obama's watch, it doesn't bother me one bit if it makes the country better off," Graham said.
Mike Couick, president of the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, said he welcomed the differences between his two senators.
"You need to have a certain amount of pressure from folks like DeMint in order to make folks like Graham effective," Couick said. "It's all part of the mix. There's a continuum. Somehow, the truth has to fall out somewhere between the two."
In the clear for five years?
Politically, Graham may be in the perfect spot to be working with Democrats on a climate bill. After all, the 54-year-old senator is not up for re-election to a third term until 2014.
"From a distance of five years away, he's in a very safe position," said Robert Oldendick, director of the Institute for Public Service and Policy Research at the University of South Carolina. Oldendick added that Graham has compensated for losses on his right in past elections by winning over centrist Democrats. It has also helped that he hasn't faced a formidable opponent.
But Clemson University's Woodard warns that Graham may be asking for trouble the next time he's in cycle should he continue to stray from the Republican conservative base. "He's pretty much been a cat of nine lives in the way he's done this frequently," he said.
For now, some top South Carolina business officials say they welcome Graham's role in the climate debate, especially given the inevitable prospect of U.S. EPA regulations once the agency follows through with the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA.
"Trying to find a legislative compromise is in the best interest of business, more so than just fighting it all the way down the line if it is going to happen," said Otis Rawl, executive director of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce. "And it appears to me it's going to happen."
Rawl said he is uneasy about cap-and-trade legislation, but the inclusion of nuclear power and energy exploration provisions help.
As for the political consequences, "the right will criticize him for being too left and not being what he's supposed to," Rawl said. "But if you don't work both sides of the aisle, you get nothing out of it."
Environmental groups in South Carolina say they too are pulling for Graham, though they are also taking a wait-and-see stance on what comes out of the negotiations with Democrats over nuclear power.
"We're sort of seeing where it's going to go," said Steve Moore, director of climate and energy programs at the South Carolina Wildlife Federation. "We all realize [nuclear] is going to be part of the mix. We're trying to let him know we're not totally opposed to that. As a committee, we've not gelled on that, as we haven't nationally."
"Graham is really looked to with a lot of respect as someone who seeks common ground on both sides of the aisle," added John Ramsburgh, the climate and energy director for the Conservation Voters of South Carolina. "We are generally very pleased to have him as our senior senator."
Political observers in South Carolina say there is some additional positives for Graham taking center stage on climate change. Many welcome his status representing the state to the country given the recent adultery scandal that made national news involving Gov. Mark Sanford (R).
"The positive symbolism those kinds of things represent work to his advantage," Oldendick said.
Going forward, Oldendick expects Graham to play down the Obama angle as he works on the climate bill. Politically, he said it would be better for Graham to tout his home state's interests to expand nuclear power and help low-income residents cope with the higher energy costs associated with the bill.
"There's enough of that in the way the legislation will play out that he can position himself so that dealing with the problem becomes the story, instead of helping Obama," Oldendick said.
Graham last week said he is working to contain any potential political fallout that comes from him working with Democrats on an energy and climate bill.
"I need the nuclear people to say that the title that Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman have come up with is a good one," the senator said. "I need business people to say we can comply with these emission standards given the things Congress has set aside from us. And I need the energy independence, national security operatives to say this is a breakthrough in energy independence. And I need the environmentalists to say this emission control standard is reasonable."
"We're trying," Graham added, "to get them lined up."
Posted: 12 Oct 2009 04:28 PM PDT
Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception.
That staggeringly anti-scientific statement (page 170) is just one of many, many pieces of outright nonsense from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. In fact, human-caused global warming is well-established science, far better established than any aspect of economics.
In other words: it's illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions.
Hard to believe such a staggeringly illogical statement (page 203) comes from Levitt and Dubner, the same folks who wrote the runaway bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
For the record, it's perfectly logical to believe that — indeed, I daresay most of the world's leading climate scientists believe that if you could curtail all new carbon emissions (including from deforestation) starting now (or even starting soon), you would indeed avoid apocaplyse. None, however, would use the loaded word "simply" I'm sure and most, like Hansen, would like to go from curtailing emissions to being carbon negative as soon as possible. The Superfreaks, however, are simultaneously skeptical of global warming science, critical of all mitigation measures, but certain that geo-engineering using sulfate aerosols is the answer.
"Rogue" is a good word for Levitt, but I think "contrarian" is more apt. Sadly, for Levitt's readers and reputation, he decided to adopt the contrarian view of global warming, which takes him far outside of his expertise. As is common among smart people who know virtually nothing about climate science or solutions and get it so very wrong, he relies on other smart contrarians who know virtually nothing about climate science or solutions. In particular, he leans heavily on Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft, who has a reputation for brilliance, which he and the Superfreaks utterly shred in this book:
"A lot of the things that people say would be good things probably aren't," Myrhvold says. As an example he points to solar power. "The problem with solar cells is that they're black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12% gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat — which contributed to global warming."
Impressive — three and a half major howlers in one tiny paragraph (p 187). California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld called this "patent nonsense," when I read it to him. And Myhrvold is the guy, according to the Superfreaks, of which Bill Gates once said, "I don't know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan." This should be the definitive proof that smarts in one area do not necessarily translate at all.
In olden days, we called such folks Artistes of Bullshit, but now I'm gonna call them F.A.K.E.R.s — Famous "Authorities" whose Knowledge (of climate) is Extremely Rudimentary [Error-riddled? I'm still working on this acronym].
The most famous FAKER was Michael Crichton. I thought Freeman Dyson was the leading FAKER today, but Myhrvold makes Dyson sound like James Hansen. I will devote an entire blog post to the BS peddled here by Myhrvold (who now runs Intellectual Ventures) because I'm sure he's got the ear of alot of well-meaning, influential, but easily duped, people like Levitt and Dubner.
Here are the howlers in that paragraph for the record:
"The problem with solar cells is that they're black." Try googling "solar cells" — [Nathan, you can Bing "solar cells"] — and most of the panels you'll see are in fact blue. I'll call this half a howler. Lots of the cells are black. As we'll see, however, it is NOT a problem. This is a bogus issue.- These days, lots of solar cells get much higher efficiency than 12%. Scientific American writes about "Suntech's Pluto line of multicrystalline cells, which boasts 17.2 percent efficiency converting one sun's light into electricity, or Suniva's ARTisun single silicon crystal cells that can convert 18.5 percent of the sunshine into electricity." This book is supposedly about solutions available in the near future and billions of dollars are being poured into technologies that could more than double those efficiencies. Indeed, "New solar energy material captures every color of the rainbow." But, of course, only IV's unproven and dubious aerosol geo-engineering solution gets the benefit of assumed scientific advances, not real, actual hardware that could start solving the problem now.
The biggest howler from the perspective of a would-be FAKER (and those who are duped by them) is the logical error of failing to ask one simple question: What was the absorbtivity or emissivity of the material that the panel covered up? If you look on Google images, you'll see that PV panels are often — if not usually — put on roofs or over ground that is quite dark, often black. In a large fraction of cases, the panels contribute less heat reradiation than what they are covering would. This is a complete red herring, a "trivial issue" in the jargon Levitt would normally use.- The way Leavitt and Dubner write the paragraph — "A lot of the things that people say would be good things probably aren't," Myrhvold says. As an example he points to solar power. — they have Myrhvold saying all forms of solar power "probably aren't" a good thing. That is a laughable notion, and I seriously doubt he believes that. But, as we'll see, this is the Superfreaks style, to overstate or misstate what the people they talk to actually believe.
UPDATE: John O'Donnell, VP Business Development, GlassPoint Solar and a former lead engineer at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (old bio here, Business Week profile here) just emailed me to be sure I don't miss the forest for the trees here in debunking this nonsense:
Yes Nathan is howlingly off base. Not because solar panels are (whatever cover with whatever relative emissivity), but because solar panels, like wind turbines and solar thermal power plants, eliminate the emission of CO2 which would otherwise occur from electricity production.
As Ken Caldeira so grippingly points out (and I tried to make graphically clear in my Stanford talk last year) , each molecule of CO2 released thermal energy when it was formed — that's why we formed it. In the case of electricity generation, about 1/3 of its thermal energy went out a wire as electric power, the rest was released promptly as waste heat. But each molecule of CO2, during its subsequent lifetime in the atmosphere, traps 100,000 times more heat than was released during its formation.
A hundred thousand is a big number. It means that running a handheld electric hairdryer on US grid electricity delivers a planet-warming punch comparable to [the heat directly emitted by] two Boeing 747s operating at full takeoff power for the same time period. The warming is delivered over time, not promptly, but that don't matter; the planetary heating is accrued, the accountants would say, the moment you hit the switch.
The thermal energy balance for a solar panel runs vastly in the other direction. If our solar panel is pure black, and 14% efficient, then for each kWh of electric power that comes out, there are 7 kWh of heat that were absorbed and radiated. But each kWh it generates it eliminates the release of 1.4 pounds of CO2, which during its lifetime in the atmosphere will absorb 210,000 kWh of heat. So the energy balance for the solar panel (when it's connected to the US grid) is about NEGATIVE 209,993 kWh(heat) per kWh(electric) — since some fossil power plant somewhere is being turned down based on its generation. And hey, if it's blue instead of black, that might increase to negative 209,995 kWh.
So, yes, Myhrvold is an uber-FAKER, raising issues that are uber-trivial.
As an aside, O'Donnell is a CSP guy, like me, the solar energy that I believe is most promising for large-scale, low-cost, low-carbon power delivery (see "Concentrated solar thermal power Solar Baseload — a core climate solution"). Naturally, the Superfreaks never mention this in their amateurish take-down of solar.
The reason I'm calling Leavitt and Dubner Superfreaks for short is that Chapter Five, the "Global Cooling" chapter — aka "What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?" — has precious little economics, and what it does have is simply wrong. So the book could easily have been titled Superfreaks. [Note: Most of the book is searchable online, but I've also uploaded Chapter 5 here (huge PDF).]
The answer is that Gore and Pinatubo's eruption both suggest a way to cool the planet, albeit with methods whose cost-effectiveness are a universe apart.
Yes, the Superfreaks frame this chapter mostly as their (misguided) view of the science versus the views of that famous non-scientist Al Gore (as opposed to the views of all of the scientists who disagree with the crap they are peddling). That straw man approach gives them the "high" ground.
But by embracing aeresols and rejecting mitigation, they have adopted the identical view of that rogue, thoroughly debunked, non-economist Bjorn Lomborg. Unlike the Superfreaks, CP readers know that Ken Caldeira calls the vision of Lomborg's Climate Consensus "a dystopic world out of a science fiction story."
And yet Caldeira is the primary practicing climate scientist the Superfreaks rely on in the chapter! He has responded to many e-mail queries of mine over the weekend so I could characterize his views accurately. He simply doesn't believe what the Superfreaks make it seem like he believes. He writes me:
If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do.
One sentence about Caldeira in particular is the exact opposite of what he believes (page 184):
Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight.
Levitt and Dubner didn't run this quote by Caldeira, and when he saw a version from Myrhvold, he objected to it. But Levitt and Dubner apparently wanted to keep it very badly — it even makes their Table of Contents in the Chapter Five summary "Is carbon dioxide the wrong villain?" It fits their contrarian sensibility, but it makes no actual sense.
Here is what Caldeira really believes:
I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero. I believe that it is essentially immoral for us to be making devices (automobiles, coal power plants, etc) that use the atmosphere as a sewer for our waste products. I am in favor of outlawing production of such devices as soon as possible….
Every carbon dioxide emission adds to climate damage and increasing risk of catastrophic consequences. There is no safe level of emission.
I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies … It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.
I am in favor of fire insurance but I am also against playing with matches while sitting on a keg of gunpowder. I am in favor of research into geoengineering options but I am also against carbon dioxide emissions.
Carbon dioxide emissions represent a real threat to humans and natural systems, and I fear we may have already dawdled too long. That is why I want to see research into geoengineering — because the threat posed by CO2 is real and large, not because the threat is imaginary and small.
Ouch!
Needless to say, you'd never get that impression from reading Superfreakonomics. Again the authors had a contrarian argument they wanted to push, and they shoe-horned the one true expert they talked to into it.
I'll address the other myriad errors and analytical flaws in the chapter in future posts. Their core argument is the same as Lomborg's, that aerosol-based geo-engineering can substitute for aggressive mitigation, which they repeatedly diss as uneconomic, contrary to virtually all actual independent economic analysis (see "Introduction to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar"). They leave the impression Caldeira shares that view. This is what he really believes:
If we keep emitting greenhouse gases with the intent of offsetting the global warming with ever increasing loadings of particles in the stratosphere, we will be heading to a planet with extremely high greenhouse gases and a thick stratospheric haze that we would need to main more-or-less indefinitely. This seems to be a dystopic world out of a science fiction story. First, we can assume the oceans have been heavily acidified with shellfish and corals largely a thing of the past. We can assume that ecosystems will be greatly affected by the high CO2 / low sunlight conditions — similar to what Earth experienced hundreds of millions years ago. The sunlight would likely be very diffuse — maybe good for portrait photography, but with unknown consequences for ecosystems.
We know also that CO2 and sunlight affect Earth's climate system in different ways. For the same amount of change in rainfall, CO2 affects temperature more than sunlight, so if we are to try to correct for changes in precipitation patterns, we will be left with some residual warming that would grow with time.
And what will this increasing loading of particles in the stratosphere do to the ozone layer and the other parts of Earth's climate system that we depend on?
On top of all of these environmental considerations, there are socio-political considerations: We we have a cooperative world government deciding exactly how much geoengineering to deploy where? What if China were to go into decades of drought? Would they sit idly by as the Climate Intervention Bureau apparently ignores their plight? And what if political instability where to mean that for a few years, the intervention system were not maintained … all of that accumulated pent-up climate change would be unleashed upon the Earth … and perhaps make "The Day After" movie look less silly than it does.
Long-term risk reduction depends on greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Nevertheless, there is a chance that some of these options might be able to diminish short-term risk in the event of a climate crisis.
I would add the grave risk that that after injecting massive amounts of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere for a decade or more, we might discover some unexpected bad side effect that just gets worse and worse. After all, the top climate scientists underestimated the speed and scale of greenhouse gas impacts (and the magnitude of synergistic ones, like bark beetle infestations and forest fires).
We would be in incompletely unexplored territory — what I call an experimental chemotherapy and radiation therapy combined. There is no possible way of predicting the long-term effect of the thick stratospheric haze (which, unlike GHGs, has no recent or paleoclimate analog). If it turned out to have unexpected catastrophic impacts of its own (other than drought), we'd be totally screwed.
No surprise, then, that science advisor John Holdren told me in April that he stands by his critique:
"The 'geo-engineering' approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects."
Even geoengineering advocate Tom Wigley is only defending "a complementary combined mitigation/geoengineering scenario, an overshoot concentration pathway where atmospheric carbon dioxide reaches 530 ppm before falling back to 450 ppm, coupled with low-intensity geoengineering," with the goal of stabilizing global temperature rise at 2°C, in case we can't stabilize at 450 ppm. You can see a good discussion of that at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' expert roundtable response to Alan Robocks' excellent piece, "20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea."
Well, stabilizing at 530 ppm requires doing a massive amount of mitigation starting now — only 2 or 3 fewer wedges than what is needed for 450 (see "How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution").
Levitt and Dubner and Myhrvold are FAKERs. They simply don't know what they are talking about.
Related Post:
New solar energy material captures every color of the rainbow
Posted: 12 Oct 2009 12:16 PM PDT
The most widely read 'green' site on the Web has a firehose worth of material, in part because they themselves fill their hydrant with almost everything green that is published online. I'm going to try clip some of the highlights regularly for CP readers:
Yet another reason EVs trump FCVs (see "Climate and hydrogen car advocate gets almost everything wrong about plug-in cars") — — people are actually spending big bucks to building the EV infrastructure
France to Spend $2.2 Billion on Electric Car Charging Stations
Build It And They Will Come
Electric cars and charging stations go together, but there's a kind of chicken & egg problem; who's going to build charging stations along highways and public roads if there are no electric cars, and who's going to buy a electric car if there are no charging stations? The French government seems to have decided that the way to crack this dilemma is to build a network of charging stations using taxpayer money as part of a broader initiative to encourage the development of clean vehicle technology and battery manufacturing in the country.Charging Sockets to Become Obligatory in Office Parking Lots
€1.5 billion (about $2.2 billion) will be spent by France on the network of EV charging stations, but also "the government will make the installation of charging sockets obligatory in office parking lots by 2015, and new apartment blocks with parking lots will have to include charging stations starting in 2012."
Coal-Fired Power Generator To Supplement Boiler Feed With Switchgrass And Sorghum
Remember all the excitement over growing switch grass as feedstock for ethanol fuel? Forget that sissy fermentation stuff. Real powerhouses burn it outright. NRG Energy Inc, a company with combined generation capacity of 24,000 megawatts, plans trial burns of switchgrass and sorghum (as pictured) to supplement the coal normally fed to boilers at the company's Big Cajun II power plant, in Louisiana.
Sorghum has been around for centuries as a food grain, a molasses substitute, and a pasturing plant. Chopped up, it is also used for sileage. Because power plant emission limits are measured on a per-ton of fossil fuel consumed basis, and because coal fired plants may be carbon "capped" in proportion to fossil-fuel derived emissions only, a power plant might be able to add some biofuel, up it's capacity, stay within permit limits, and avoid purchasing carbon credits. Sounds like a strategy. Via Washington Examiner
More Than 100 iPhone Apps For Green Shopping, Eating, Travel and Fun
About a year ago, we put together a list of 20 iPhone apps that would help you live a greener life. The number of apps we've seen come across the radar since then has exploded to the point where we wonder how on earth anyone can keep track of them.
As Ron Williams, President of 3rdWhale, a green app developer, states, "The iTunes App Store is a big part of the reason [there are so few great green apps] — it does not do a good job of encouraging their millions of visitors to look beyond the small number of apps featured on their homepage…" He suggests even adding just a "sustainability" tag would be a big help. Well, until we get that, we figured we should start pulling them together for you. So here are our old favorites, new additions we think are cool, and some interesting oddball apps that we're curious about.
Carbon Footprint
Home Power Monitoring and Automation
Public Transit, Walking and Biking
Driving and Car Care
Travel and Wildlife
Tips, News and Just Plain Fun
Shopping, Eating and Drinking
More Lists of Green Apps
World's Airlines Pledge to Cut Emissions 50% by 2050
Aviation accounts for only 3% of carbon emissions from the global transport sector, but it's a number that's growing. Not to mention that those emissions often have a higher warming potential than ones emitted elsewhere. Radiative forcing anyone? Well, to address these concerns the International Air Transport Association committed Saturday to new emission reductions targets and fuel efficiency improvements:
At the International Civil Aviations Organization High Level Meeting in Montreal, the IATA set the following targets: 1.5% annual fuel efficiency improvements through 2020; 50% reduction in carbon emissions (from 2005 levels…) by 2050; and, stabilizing aviation emissions from 2020, with carbon-neutral growth thereafter.
Government Support for Sustainable Biofuels Requested
To help with this, IATA threw the ball into government's court. IATA Director General Giovanni Bisignani said, "We can fly the plane efficiently, but governments must deliver improvements in air traffic management," and added, "Governments must also accelerate the development of the legal and fiscal framework to support the use of sustainable biofuels."Here's the declaration itself: Elements of an ICAO Position for COP15
Does Peeing Before Boarding an Airplane Really Save Carbon Emissions?
Image Source: Specialkrb
Dear Pablo: Can Airlines really save fuel by asking their passengers to empty their bladders before boarding?Although their website makes no mention of it, Japan's All Nippon Airways (ANA) has been widely reported to be trying an experiment for the month of October: they are asking their passengers to "lighten the load" by visiting the restroom before boarding.
An article by the UK's Daily Mail estimates that the average weight saved per flight is just over 60 kg (or as one reader commented: Assuming a take-off weight of 140,000 lbs and 160 passengers (a Boeing 737), the weight saved would amount to .11% of the takeoff weight). During the one month-long trial period, and over 42 flights, the weight savings will add up to over 2600 kg and will save an estimated five metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (maybe more if the take into account the Radiative Forcing Index).
Silly Stunt or Legitimate Emission Reduction Effort?
Is this just a silly stunt to get attention in the media, including from this writer, or is it a legitimate attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Well, with the urgency of addressing climate change, every little emission reduction counts. But is there more effective "low-hanging fruit" to be tackled by the airline industry first? One commenter to the Daily Mail article pointed out that, just by reducing the amount of fuel carried by 50 gallons, it would save the airline more weight, and greenhouse gas emissions than asking everyone to go pee first. The problem with this is that pilots are already being forced to fly with seriously low fuel levels, dramatically increasing the number of low-fuel emergency landings. So maybe that isn't the best idea.
How Else Can Airlines Cut Emissions?
But there are some opportunities to cut weight and fuel use that are being explored. Switching to LED lighting and other, more energy efficient technologies aboard the airplane can reduce fuel use. It has also been shown that flushing the lavatory toilet requires 1 liter of fuel, so why not install lavatory-sized waterless urinals? Also, Lufthansa has for years shifted its in-flight snack services on regional flights to the airport waiting area. This allows the airlines to carry only what passengers actually intend to consume…..
The Greatest Irony About It All
What is ironic is that the airline that is saving 5 tons of greenhouse gas emissions in October by asking its passengers to pee before boarding is creating many more greenhouse gas emissions through their newly announced helicopter airport transfer for First Class passengers. Helicopters, of course, are one of the least efficient means of transportation from an environmental perspective.
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