Climate disruption: Politics and science

In a pleasant surprise, the UN Climate Change Conference in Poznań, Poland ended with a “growing consensus" about what needs to be done. The agreements should lead to commitments in Copenhagen at end of this year cutting emissions 20% by 2020. As we enter what may be a groundbreaking new year, let's look at some of the research and information behind these decisions, as well as a few of the continuing controversies. At the conference, the International Energy Agency (IEA) presented the energy outlook and possible scenarios for cutting emissions of GHG (GreenHouse Gases).
c4s This graph shows the projected reference scenario, with the world population increasing to 8 billion from today's 6.7 billion, a projected energy consumption growth of 1.6% per year, and two thirds of this energy still coming from fossil fuels. This BAU (business as usual) scenario is considered unsustainable.
NOTE: click on images to enlarge them. Also:
c4s means "click for source" and
c4x "click for additional explanation".
c4s
This graph shows the "rich" or developed countries at the top, the poor and developing countries at the bottom. The horizontal axis shows per capita energy consumption in kilowatts (kW). Canada and the U.S. lead with a consumption per capita of 11 kW. This knol has a diagram showing how that 11kW are used. Europe has half of that, and developing countries roughly 1 kW but catching up fast.
In the future, developed countries should decrease their energy use by applying conservation measures, while developing countries are expected to increase theirs. With these changes on both ends of the spectrum, the new world average would be 2kW, a goal slightly less than today's use of 2.3 kW. Such a future, charted by the Swiss ETH institute is called the "2kW" society.

Let's illustrate this more concretely with few examples what watts and kilowatts mean: If you continuously run 10 light bulbs of 100W each, you are using energy at a rate of 1kW, which means 1kwh (kilowatthour) every hour. That also happens to be the average consumption of a U.S. household. The U.S. average energy use per capita is 11 kW . Roughly 10kW of this figure is for nonresidential use, such as transportation and industry, prorated per capita.

Currently, 1kWh costs about $.10 or 8 € cents. That price will go up, even in a BAU scenario, as cheap energy sources get scarcer. With measures to limit emissions, such as the ETS cap & trade tax on emissions mentioned in our last post, the cost of energy will increase even faster. Do we really want to do this? Not everyone thinks so.

Skeptics, Alarmists and Deniers

In every area of scientific research there is controversy. Hypotheses and bold assumptions are made, argued for and against, tested, and eventually accepted or rejected. An example of such a process was triggered by an idea put forth by the Danish scientist Svensmark. He asserted that cosmic rays, rather then increasing concentration of Greenhouse gases influence the Earth's climate and cause Global Warming. That was a skeptical hypothesis. The European laboratory CERN built an experiment to test that hypothesis. That research is still underway, but preliminary results show that the effect of cosmic rays is, at most, very small. The hypothesis was welcome, and tested. That is part of the normal scientific debate.

Research concerning climate and climate change, or "global warming," has attracted far more controversy than normal scientific debates, controversy which plays out primarily in the popular press and on the Internet.

This blog has vowed to listen to both sides of any controversy. The data quoted above are from mainstream sources, meaning data collected by government-supported research centers and collated by organizations such as (IEA) or (WMO) . The question is: How should I deal with opinions which strongly contradict those data and conclusions? How much space should I give to the spectrum of opinions, arguments and convictions?

Researching web resources for this post gave me this perspective on this question: In the final section below I describe the history of the Earth's changing atmosphere. As I compiled this, I remembered that levels of oxygen were rising during the early formation of our planet, due to photosynthesis by plants, until the time when animals appeared. Wanting to verify the time when animals appeared on the planet, I entered two search queries into the Google search engine. They differed in only in one word, "origin" vs "creation," of animals. The results surprised me:

• 21,300,000 English pages for origin of animals.
• 15,800,000 English pages for creation of animals.

Amazing! There are almost as many Internet pages devoted to creationist questions, questions such as: "How did all the animals fit on Noah's Ark?" as pages devoted to mainstream science. Some of those pages look more serious, bringing in thermodynamics, entropy, and mathematical formulas. Their aim is to prove the "Young Earth 'fact'", that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, as the Bible is held to reveal. Their goal is to prove that evolution could not have happened and to disprove the "Old Earth 'hypothesis'".
c2sx The photo shows "Adam and Eve" palling around with dinosaurs, according to the Creation museum built in the Ohio. I concluded that I cannot give "equal time" to all views. I will mention websites, but not deal with "arguments" repeated over and over again in order to prove some dogma. Science does not have a goal to prove or disprove any "known truth" or hypothesis. Its one essential goal is to find the truth. It is a very concrete search filled with constant questioning and rigorous testing. Science is not divorced from a sense of awe and wonder at Creation. It just doesn't force its conclusions into a mold formed by an interpretation of the Bible.

The area of the climate research is not much different than the field of evolution. The controversy surrounding these two areas of science actually shares some of the constituency: people who suspect or reject mainstream science on ideological grounds, and who oppose government actions using the same rationale.

The relationship of scientific research to government, and of ideology to public policy, was well-illustrated in the recent drama of the U.S. presidential elections. On one side was Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin who claimed that dinosaurs and people coexisted and also supported the Bush administration's "war on science" in the areas of environment and climate. Mainstream science tended to align itself with the opposing party. This may have contributed, in small part, to Mr. Obama's victory.

The End of the Flat Earth Society?

The U.S government has now changed in ways Americans could not have imagined during the past eight years. The scientific community has hailed Obama's appointments to science-related posts, as have a good many ordinary citizens. A Nobel laureate physicist will now head the Department of Energy, for example.

"After the anti-science Bush administration, this is like going to a Mensa meeting after eight years of being trapped in the Flat Earth Society." was one liberal commentator's remark about Obama's science appointments.
Said a typical physicist: "Some good news: grownups will soon be running U.S. science policy."

On the other hand, the reaction of another physicist, known for his strong right-wing convictions, was: Harebrained theorist John Holdren will become Obama's science adviser. Dr Horden's briefing which brought about that reaction is highly recommended viewing for serious consideration. It is 61 overhead transparencies which review what he calls "climate disruption."

Stepping into Bush's shoes

With U.S. President Bush's exit, the dubious honor of having an anti-science president now passes to the European Union when Czech president Klaus assumes the rotating EU presidency in January. He was recently heard exhorting scientists to abandon the "climate change religion" and "return to reason."

Obama intends to set the U.S. on a course towards resuming a science leadership position in the world, not least in the areas of the environment and climate change. Controversy continues, of course, but in next 8 years we should be able to compare and evaluate the results of Bush's policies and policies of Obama's team.

Happy? New Year.

Certainly an exciting year is ahead, at least to those with a strong sense of irony. In the first post of this blog we pondered doom scenarios in general philosophical terms.
Now it is time to get specific: The Czech republic will assume presidency of the EU in January 2009.The priorities they set on their already running presidency website are the three E's : The Economy, Energy and the External Relations of the EU. The first two are already disaster areas. Let's see what is likely to happen in the third area as the nations of the world try to negotiate ETS caps.
As I write, representatives from 192 countries are gathered in Poznan, Poland, for a two-week UN-sponsored conference. . Main item on the agenda is ETS - Emission Trading Schemes. These are an environmental tax imposed on the companies which release a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. This meeting of more than 9000 participants from both governmental and non-governmental organizations is intended to build momentum toward the Copenhagen, Denmark meeting in December 2009. The new treaty to be adopted in Copenhagen would replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. In 2013 caps on emissions would become mandatory, which means that electricity produced from fossil fuels would become more expensive. Or, as ordinary citizens would say, "even more expensive." Whether you support or oppose such a scheme, you want to be informed.

Preliminary Promises

Major alliances, unions, and federations are contemplating the adoption of green policies, or are at least issuing bulletins about them.

• EU has agreed to a 20% emission reduction by 2020. President Barosso (on the left) created a new EU directorate, a directorate-general , adding (DG) for energy to 41 DGs of the European Commission.
• In a dramatic American change, Barry Obama promissed to reduce U.S. emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 cutting them by another 80 percent by 2050..
• Having ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2004, Russia behaved in "a typically Russian way.It announced numerous projects to promote the protocol. But these were just words. But these were just words." In practice, "Russia has not done anything at all."

All these preliminary plans, promises, and posturings are fine. One can be optimistic, but only cautiously so. The caps are not compulsory yet. Binding caps should be agreed upon at the end of 2009, with preparation for implementation over the following four years. Because we all share the same, well-mixed atmosphere, the environmental tax will only work if all countries and blocks participate. That might take a miracle to achieve. But miracles do happen. In 1963, in the middle of the Cold War, the nuclear powers signed a Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in the air. Two physicists who helped develop the H bomb, Teller and Sacharov, provided their governments with evidence that such testing was poisoning the atmosphere.

Greenhouse Gases: Why are they important?

As you have surely noticed, the role of GHG or greenhouse gases in global warming is being contested.
There are arguments for intervention and arguments against urgent action. This blog will always listen to both sides in the debate.

Many of the arguments are complex and technical, expounded in scientific papers on the causes of past changes in climate, such as the Ice Ages. Both sides agree that average temperatures are higher when the concentration of GHG is higher. They disagree about which is the cause and which is the effect.
The reconstruction of past temperatures, using tree rings and glacier cores, for example, entails complex and often contested reasoning. How much of the temperature change was caused by different outputs of the sun, or by the geometrical configuration of the sun and Earth, and how much by changes in the Earth atmosphere? Such puzzles are both fascinating and frustrating long before they become politicized.

The two graphs here bypass those complex arguments. These data were collected by satellites, which can directly record the energy output of the sun with measurements taken above the atmosphere, as well as measure the global surface temperature of the Earth. The top graph, the output of the Sun, shows the well-known 11 year cycle. Clearly, it shows no overall trend either up or down. The bottom graph shows the average temperature of the Earth at the surface. It shows a clear upward trend, demonstrating that the atmosphere now traps more of the sun's energy. That is the greenhouse effect of higher concentrations of GHGs. However, notice that the relationship is not simple. The Earth's vast oceans act as reservoirs, absorbing both heat and carbon dioxide. Complex dynamics determine how much the absorbed heat will raise temperatures. Nevertheless, more heat always means higher temperature.

For more information you can consult the sources of this data: Top graph: solar cycle data and bottom graph: surface temperature data.

In addition, interesting animated maps show changes in surface temperature derived by NASA from both satellite measurements and indirect indicators. The two animations cover the years from 1880 to 2007. They include pre-satellite and indirect data sets. These are therefore regarded as less certain than the data in the graphs above.

A Positive Note: Reprieve for the Milky Way?

In our careful reporting of both sides of arguments, we observe that it may be good environmental news that the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider, is down for repairs. This is the world's largest physics experiment to-date. Using the LHC in their search, physicists in Geneva, in the EU research center CERN (video) have been looking for Higgs boson.

Why they are looking for Higgs boson? It is not a particle which Dr. Higgs misplaced. He only predicted its existence, using the "standard model" for elementary particles, which plays a role similar to that which the Periodic Table of Elements did for chemistry. Some call this yet-to-be found little particle "God's particle," certainly an attention-getting nickname. The LHC search is expected to be restarted in Summer 2009.

Why is the shutdown possible good news to environmentalists? Well, on the list of all the possible disasters which Earth may meet, which are helpfully collected, explained, and even illustrated on the Dutch website Exit Mundi, the start up of the LHC was listed as first. One chemist is worried that the LHC will create a black hole, which would destroy the Milky way (with us in it). This concern was picked up by the news media and added to our daily dose of planetary uneasiness. The physicists, of course, are denying that this can happen. In either case, the LHC will be down until summer 2009, a definite reprieve for the Milky Way. Then, if the physicists, rather than the chemist, are right, we can proceed to the conference in Copenhagen next December.

In the meantime, Happy New Year!