Vote now on a new era - new taxes

The critical moment, your opportunity to influence decisions on new taxes, is now.

In December, the Copenhagen conference will negotiate a new treaty, replacing the expiring the Kyoto treaty. Governments are likely to agree to mandatory limits on CO2. The method to achieve these limits will be the introduction of new taxes, taxes on either fossil fuels or on emissions. Here in Europe, the new MEPs to be elected in June will influence that conference, as well as the subsequent implementation of its decisions.

Our task as voters interested in the Copenhagen outcomes is to sort through the slogans, fine print, and technical details of the different parties positions. The beliefs of various parties and their associated groups are not clear from a cursory look at their proclaimed programs. The Green party, the German one in particular, treats "nuclear" as a dirty word. A few parties even maintain that "environment" is a fraudulent term invented by neo-communists. That is still the view of Czech president Klaus who now has his own party affiliated with the Euro-sceptic Libertas group.

Governmental subsidies for selected alternatives, e.g. solar, are favored in some quarters, while in others the wisdom of the market to select the best strategy and best technology is preferred. Some parties, notably the Greens, would like to ban nuclear power plants altogether, but others would fund a crash program to develop the next generation of nuclear fission reactors, which do not produce tons nuclear waste.

Industry promises of "clean coal" have gained support, although skeptics believe that clean coal is an oxymoron. Nearly all parties maintain, of course, that they want more "conservation" and would like to see more renewable sources, particularly solar panels and wind turbines. The real question, however, is how the transition from today's economy based on fossil fuels to an entirely new paradigm will be accomplished. Who will decide how much we will pay? How fast will we move?

For developed countries, switching to a sustainable future, a future which does emit CO2, may require changes as profound as the switch to steam and electricity was in the past two centuries. Trains are likely to resume long haul transport of goods and cars will run on electricity, or hydrogen, or bio-fuels, or a still-unknown source of energy.

We have half a century to accomplish this. As we discussed previously, if we as a global entity do not do this in a rational, peaceful, and cooperative fashion, there is always the option of an all-out war, a fight for the last drop of oil.

Before you vote, you need to know the facts.

Issue 1 : The proper role of government

Freedom car. Click to enlarge Two opposing views on this topic are represented here by the two American think-tanks, the Cato institute and CAPAF:

The Cato institute now supports the notion that CO2 emission needs to be limited. True to its philosophy of limiting governmental "meddling in the market," it favors a tax on CO2 emissions. Because all countries share the same atmosphere, this would be imposed and enforced by governments through an international treaty. In this plan, the market, private industry, would find ways to produce energy without poisoning the planet's atmosphere.

They say that every two years the US government comes up with clever ideas of how to achieve energy independence. In 1974, President Nixon launched Project Independence, declaring, "Let this be our national goal: At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy..." President Carter proclaimed his "Moral equivalent of war" in 1977. G.W. Bush spent $1.2 billion on the Freedom Car which would run on hydrogen, with little result. (see the picture of the Hydrogen pump in Washington DC). Many billions of dollars have been spent, but the goal, like the end of a rainbow, seems to be receding. Today, the US is importing 30% of its energy needs. click to enlarge

institute CAPAF argues that the problem is too large, too urgent, to be solved by any private initiative. They point to instances of how government's direct role can facilitate the solving of major scientific and technological problems. At the beginning of WWII, in 1939, it became apparent to physicists that it would be possible to develop a new weapon, a bomb of unequaled destructive power. The concern that Hitler could have this so-called "atomic" bomb first was not unjustified, as fission was discovered in Germany. Today this weapon is called by the more accurate term, a nuclear bomb, and we worry about its proliferation.

Important to note is that President Roosevelt did not wait for private industry to develop this technology and offer it to the Air Force. He invested taxpayers' money into the super secret Manhattan Project, and the US developed this weapon first. A similar effort evolved after the Soviets launched their Sputnik in 1957. Less than a year later, President Eisenhower founded a new agency, NASA, to ensure that the US would not lag behind in rocket technology.

The question is whether the threat of the climate change is of such scope and magnitude that a massive crash program run by international governments is necessary. Such a program, still in the realm of debate, has been dubbed Manhattan II. Large research projects, such as ITER, Gen-IV reactors, or solar powered satellites, can be funded this way in the future .

Local governments and cities can also be actors in this drama. The state of California is funding a network of charging stations for electric cars, while Paris has a network of pumps for hydrogen cars. Perhaps our future transportation system will use a mix of fuels, batteries for passenger cars, and hydrogen for trucks and planes, but it might be useful to have a coordination committee for at least each continent, and a study to select the infrastructure which is likely to prevail. The kinds of market wars that have dominated competing television and video formats are too costly and wasteful to be waged over a problem this large and important.

Issue 2: What to tax: carbon or carbon dioxide?

There are two ways to provide incentives for using alternatives to fossil fuels.

* Carbon tax: This is a tax at the source. Taxes are imposed on the production and on the import of fossil fuels, mostly of coal. This is easy to administer and not easy to cheat on. Coal is difficult to hide and smuggle. The tax would start low and gradually rise for a few decades until alternative sources of energy are found, developed, and be become cheaper than fossil fuels.

* Cap and trade: The other method is to tax at the point of consumption. Power plants and other main users of fossil fuels will be allocated emission permits. These are permits to emit certain amounts of carbon dioxide per year. Initially the permits will be sufficient to continue normal operation. Gradually, the amount of permitted emission will be reduced.

A key component is that companies are allowed to trade the permits, providing for a softer transition and the play of market forces. For example, one power plant may find a way to produce electricity from locally available wind or solar resources. By selling its permits, it may be able to raise the capital needed to develop those resources. This method is called "cap and trade" in the USA and ETS (European Trading Scheme) here.

Difficulties and complexities to consider

One problem with the first method, the carbon tax, is that coal can be used, and is used, in many ways other than as fuel for power plants. We should not tax all products which use coal, or carbon, only those processes which release CO2 into the environment.

The issue of "clean coal" illustrates another aspect of the dilemma. The fossil fuel industry is running ads saying that they have found a way produce energy from coal without releasing CO2. Carbon dioxide can be removed from the smoke and sequestered, that is stored underground or turned into minerals, or carbon-containing rocks.

Opponents of clean coal suggest it is unstable to have large stores of CO2 underground, where an earthquake could release them, causing a sudden catastrophe. Experts respond that natural gas was stored underground for thousands of years, until man decided to release it. The same underground reservoirs could now be used to store CO2.

Is that possible and safe, and how much it would cost? We do not know yet. The Bush administration began a large project to demonstrate the feasibility of the clean coal and to determine the costs. It was canceled, then restarted recently. We are still awaiting facts from the U.S. or elsewhere.

Selecting ETS, the second method, has its drawbacks, too. It is the government bureaucracy which must decide both what is a "fair" permit and how quickly these permits should be reduced. Lobbyists are already waging a battle about whether airlines should get permits to pollute and for how long. Not only specific industries but entire countries have a major stake in the decisions. Poland is currently producing 90% of its electricity from coal. How quickly can they retool? China is building a 1 GW coal0powered power plant per day. How much time they should be given to switch to more acceptable alternatives? click to enlarge

An argument in favor of ETS is that this method, "cap-and-trade," was already successfully used when acid rain threatened the environment in the in the US Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain and in Eastern Canada Burning of coal releases not only CO2 but other oxides, SO2, NO2 .. etc. The SO2 combines with rain to form diluted sulphuric acid, which destroys vegetation. Power plants lobbied against the introduction of caps on SO2, claiming that it would make energy too expensive. Nevertheless, caps were introduced and enforced. Patent filing for scrubbers which remove sulphur from the coal or smoke increased, and in %% years SO2 emission dropped by 45%.

In Eastern Europe, then occupied by the Soviet Union, such a program was not enacted, and one could see the devastating effect of acid rain on the woods in the Czech mountains in 1990. Now the scrubbing technologies are used there, too.

Proponents of the carbon tax argue that "cap&trade" worked on SO2 but question whether it would be successful on the much larger problem of Co2. http://www.carbontax.org/blogarchives/2009/02/21/what-worked-for-acid-rain-won%E2%80%99t-work-for-climate-change/

Issue 3. How to use the new tax money: Dividend, Manhattan II, subsidies ..

There are many technical issues involved but, ultimately, people decide political issues primarily based on their values: How much do we care about the problems we will leave our children? To what extent can we trust the government's ability to make fair decisions and the experts who assert the problems can be solved and tell us what we must do. We need to know the facts and recognize certain political biases in order to predict which of our values are supported and where. The best use of the new tax money may be a mix of these three choices:

1. Dividends: The money collected is returned to the taxpayers. All get the same refund, so that those who use more carbon will end up paying more.
2. Subsidies for certain technologies, such as solar panels, more efficient furnaces, and the insulation of homes.
3. Funding for research into new technologies, perhaps even Manhattan II types of projects.

Dr Hansen, a climatologist and activist, in an article entitled: www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2008/20080604_TaxAndDividend.pdf advocates a 100% dividend. In agreement with the Cato institute, he fears the cost of bureaucracy and the influence of lobbyists ("people in alligator shoes," as he calls them). Hansen's proposal has a certain social impact. Wealthy people using more energy will end up paying more and poorer people using less get a kind of bonus for their smaller environmental impact. This may appeal to EU voters favoring the Social Democratic parties.

The more conservative voters of the EPP may favor more merit-based use of carbon tax revenue and use it to subsidize individual projects, in which citizens install solar panels, more efficient furnaces, and thermal insulation on their homes or apartment houses. The Czech government is currently paying up to 50% of such projects, using the funds that gained by sale of the ETS permits.

On the other hand, EPP-type parties, the more right-wing, business and industry-oriented parties, are traditionally opposed to new taxes and tend to be more skeptical when evaluating the negative consequences of global warming. Do you want to give them more power in the EU Parliament?

The parties favored by deniers such as Czech President Vaclav Klaus also present problems. Their position is based on ideology rather than on thoughtful analysis of verified scientific data. That also applies to the other political extreme: the Green party would prohibit the nuclear power plants. A rational decision process requires that energy sources must be evaluated based on the actual damage to the environment.

Nuclear power plants do not emit CO2. Today's power plants use 2nd generation fission reactors, which do produce large amounts of nuclear waste. The waste, when buried, remains in the the environment for thousands of years. But experts say that it is possible to burn the nuclear fuelmore completely. The new, forth generation fission reactors, http://www.gen-4.org/ , GEN-4 reactors, can operate safely and produce only 1% of the usual low radiation waste. They can even burn the existing nuclear waste stored in the cooling ponds of today's 2nd generation reactors. Perhaps a Manhattan II-type project to accelerate their commercialization would be the right strategy. All proposed solutions, from "clean coal", to gen IV nuclear, to solar collectors in the deserts or in space, need to be evaluated and results and costs verified. Can we do it? "Yes we can!".

Conclusion

Mankind at the beginning of the 21st century is like a man with a toothache. Energy is becoming expensive. It is unpleasant but tolerable. Man may decide to go to a dentist, temporarily endure more pain than he currently has, and possibly significant costs, if the tooth has to be extracted and replaced. If he does not go to the dentist but waits, the pain and the problem are likely to get worse, and good remedies will be more expensive or eventually perhaps even impossible.

The choice is yours.

This article had provided a summary of the issues and defines some basic terms. Now that you have the basics, click on the icon of the political group to which the party you are considering belongs, then look for their position on these issues. If the program does not even mention environment and energy, that could be a bad sign. You may need to ask some questions. Then decide how to vote. Your comments here are welcome, too.

References

1. Gen-IV: Generations of the nuclear fission reactors Reactors producing 40% of emetricity in France are second generation ( gen-II). Reactors currently on the drawing boards,(particulary gen -IV) are very different.
   

   Projected Timeline
   About the project, GIF forum
   EU gen-III - recent article in the NY Times.

2. ITER http://www.iter.org/default.aspx> About the project
   

   wikipeadia article


Schematic diagram of the tokamak
3. SPS: Solární satellites space elevator simulated image of the solar satellite
4. Clean coal : More funding for controversial ‘carbon capture and storage’ research
   debate on clean coal
   skeptical view

Obama's Visit to Prague (Road to Hell?)

Click to enlarge.
We started this blog in December 2008, with the remark:
"The Czech republic will assume presidency of the EU in January 2009. The priorities they set . . 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 . .."

Now, only half way through his six month presidency, Czech ex-premier Mirek Topolanek created an uproar in the third area, the US-EU trans-Atlantic alliance. In a speech before the European Parliament a week before President Obama's G-20, NATO, EU-U.S. summit Grand Tour of Europe, he called Obama's economic stimulus package the "Way to Hell." That EU-U.S. summit will be hosted by Mr. Topolanek in Prague.

In the European and American rush to understand this dramatic rhetoric, it was noted that Mr. Topolanek had just attended an AC/DC rock concert where their hit song "Highway to Hell" lodged itself in his semi-conscious. Czechs also know that there is a subgenre in Czech fairy tale films , centering on impish devils – usually mischievous but inefficient, often charming but generally inept. (For a more extended view of Czech notion of Hell, click on the trailer of the new movie "Hell with The Princess," the source of the above picture.)

Unlike the Judgement Day as depicted in European Medieval and Renaissance art, neither the AC/DC song nor the Czech fairy tales inspire fear or even much aversion.

We also note that the socialist paradise promised by Communism turned out to be a rather unpleasant Hell, and now capitalism is dealing out harsh punishments of its own. Perhaps the old Soviet era joke about Socialist Hell vs Capitalist Hell will need to be rewritten. Meanwhile, many are skeptical of new promises of any sort.

Yet, I look with cautious optimism at Mr Obama's rescue package.

We are experiencing simultaneous multiple crises: A global recession with the gears of the global financial machine creaking to a halt. Peak oil with a spectrum of "Peak Everything" -- natural gas, uranium, water. . . Global warming, ongoing wars with the threat of further nuclear proliferation.

Why would one be cautiously optimistic in the face of these four serious sets of crises? Because all have a common denominator, and therefore a common solution. If we find an inexpensive source of clean energy, all these problems will be solvable. Admittedly, it is a big IF. However, I am optimistic enough to think about it as WHEN.

We know that the long term solution is in fusion power. What we don't know is when it will be available. What does not make sense is to endlessly repeat, "It may take another 50 years," as if its development time is given by a physical law. It actually depends only on what resources we devote to solving the problem.

Here 'we' means "we the people," or all of humanity. We can use our collective energy and ingenuity to cooperatively develop this energy source, or we can use it on the next round of the Cold War and on wars for dwindling sources of oil and other fossil fuels. This is the "crossroad" on which we humans are standing, and that is why Obama's trip to Europe and the discussions of the G-20, of NATO, and of the E.U.-U.S. summit are so important. Today's choices do matter.

Robert Frost wrote in 1915:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We can not see exactly where the roads lead, but we have had extensive experience with ever more horrific wars in the century following this poem. That may be the path to Hell. And the other? No one believes anymore that we can create paradise on earth. We simply hope to save the planet. (There is perhaps nothing scarier than a planet with its climate terminally out of control. Hmmm. Now there's a vision of true Hell.)

We have not had much experience acting globally and cooperatively. It is definitely the road less travelled.

COMMON GOAL: 20% renewable energy by 2020

Most governments have expressed support for the goal of having 20% renewable energy by 2020 and are expected to write into law recommendations of the COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009, this December.

How can that goal be achieved? Many issues will be decided by industry, by technical experts, by investors. Many will be decided by consumers and industry choosing the least expensive energy sources to meet their needs. However, without a new regulatory environment, as oil natural gas become scarcer, the least expensive sources would be the the 'dirty' fossil fuels, coal and tar sands. When burned without special and expensive processing, these produce even more CO2 than oil and natural gas. Therein lies one of our biggest problems.

We hear daily in the media about many new "green" ideas, such photovoltaic solar panels and electric cars. What citizens, voters, and consumers need to know is their true cost, their competitiveness relative to our old energy sources.

The graph above on the left shows the projected cost of electricity generation. Today, the cost of electricity is about 10 cents per kWh (a kilowatthour). Solar power is free, if we do not consider the costs of land and maintenance, and the area of Earth's deserts is large enough to produce sufficient electricity to power the whole of Europe. However, the cost of building solar plants is today about 3000$ per kW (3$ per W). It would need to come down to 1$/W to be competitive.

Similarly, electric cars can travel 100 km for 2 cents worth of electricity, which looks good when compared with 4 cents worth of gasoline. However, when we add 10 cents for the prorated cost of batteries, then today's electric cars are not competitive.

Thera are similar problems with other new green technologies. If they were competitive, we would already be using them. In the next few posts we will look in more detail on each of them. The cost of the green sources is expected to drop with continuing research. The Cap and trade or ETS - a tax on CO2 emissions or Carbon tax - a tax on use of fossil fuels, would provide incentives and funds for such research.

Issues for the Voters

At the same time, while many issues will be decided by industry and by the market, the introduction of these taxes is political and needs to be accepted by the voters. The acceptance or rejection of nuclear power is also an issue driven strong emotions, making it a political issue as well.

Technology is evolving quickly, and many of these technologies now look very different than they did twenty years ago. Many, of course, are quite complex. To avoid emotional knee jerk reactions to words such as nuclear,(clean) coal, wind, PV ...., and to provide informed guidance to politicians, we do not all need to become experts on energy technologies. We need to know enough to decide, based on real facts and numbers. We need to create shared understandings.

Below is a list of issues which the public needs to understand in order to decide wisely. On these, we will be deciding not by what we choose to buy but by how we vote and how we make our opinions known.

• How strict CO2 emission targets ETS or carbon tax
• How to allocate ETS revenue : dividend, research, incentives ..
• Nuclear energy
• Manhattan II - a massive research projects
• 'Clean' coal
• Smart grid - research - public infrastructure
• Transport : energy storage - Electric vehicles - Hydrogen economy - biofuels
• Geo-engineering - who decides and who pays?

In future posts, I will discuss each of these more technical issues with the goal of clarifying what the controversies are and what is at stake in each area.

The battle for public opinion is already heating up.
Join us on the road.

Brrr! What's Happening to the Sun?

(As always, click on the picture to enlarge it; you will see it describes the years 1988 to 2008. Or click on c4s to find the source of data and other details.)

What are the causes of this temperature drop, according to the popular press, the lunatic fringe, and climatologists?

Global warming stopped!!!

Some headlines scream: New Ice Age Coming Soon. Others, more moderate, predict at least a new " little ice age." The original Little Ice Age was the period 1645 to 1715 AD, known as the Maunder Minimum. That was the time of Galileo and Kepler. Crops across Europe failed, the river Thames froze in London, and the population of Germany dropped by a third. In the aftermath of the 30 Years War, bands of soldiers roamed the countryside and depopulated villages, searching for food. [1]. According to some websites, this may be our near future, just a year or a decade ahead.

Here are a few examples:

The popular press: "Cold future lying in wait"

Dearth Of Sunspot Activity To Herald New Ice Age?
Science blog [sic]: Widescale [sic] Global Cooling
Cool Weather... Heralding a New Maunder Minimum & Ice-Age?

"Our own observatory at Armagh ... has shown .. that over the next two decades, global temperatures may fall by about 2 degrees C .. However, temperatures have already fallen by about 0.5 degrees C over the past 12 months and, if this is only the start of it, it would be a serious concern."

Reality check: Data from Armagh Observatory are on line, but predictions of Sun activity are nowhere to be found.

Newspapers do not provide sources, but refer to "researchers" somewhere having discovered this or that. One lone voice becomes "scientists." For example:
Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera of the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Mexico states that " In about ten years the Earth will enter a 'little ice age', which will last from 60 to 80 years and may be caused by the decrease in solar activity," according to a report in the major Mexican newspaper Milenio Diario.

Lunatic fringe: Conspiracy theory of AGW

Philip V. Brennan (left) writes in a right-wing US magazine: "A global warming militant a socialist? How can that be? Well, it can be because the whole purpose of the AGW scam is nothing less than a covert movement to create a world socialist order."
.."The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. .. "
Note : If you think the word "lunatic" is too harsh, read Mr. Brennan's article Ice Age Cometh in Five Years which contains this insight:

"It would seem that God created us step by step, with each extinction, followed by the appearance of a new and vastly improved humanoid species that lasted until a new extinction before the onset of an ice age..."
Note : If you are familiar with Intelligent Design "theory," this is a new variant, Intelligent Design By Trial and Error :-).

c4s c4s . According to the ultra-conservative website FreeRepublic, Lord Monckton (left) published "a mathematical proof that there is no 'climate crisis' in a major, peer-reviewed journal; Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 46,000-strong American Physical Society..."
Reality check : Climatology is a natural science. There are no final "mathematical proofs." Hypotheses are validated or repealed by comparisions of theory with experiment. Incidentally, the article cited was neither peer-reviewed nor supported by the American Physical Society, which has this position on the issue: ... The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring ...

In his other writings about what lies ahead, after Obama was elected the good lord also wrote: U.S. economy predicted to collapse under socialism. That prediction was made without the use of equations. :-)

A list of articles on "global cooling" listed at the bottom of this article gives a peek at the vast riches/rubbish on the web. There are 9,030,000 English pages for "global cooling" on the web, and about 3,370 for global cooling on Google News, as of Feb, 20, 2009. At times, the goal of this blog, to separate the wheat from the chaff, feels more like cleaning the Augean stables. Hercules, lucky guy, was able to divert a couple of rivers to do the job. (Is there a Web equivalent?)

While not as quick and efficient as a re-routed river, reasonably thorough debunking can be found here:

20 myths of GW deniers

and here: Cooling? Myth # 2

Reference [2] provides more information on solar cycles and their effects.

Climatologists

Not all articles on global cooling are rubbish, of course. Some are simply struggling valiantly with the data. In others, climatologists are explaining that it is not possible to predict climate by extrapolating from short weather patterns.

For example, Washington state climatologist Phillip Mote says:
" That would be like saying, 'Well, the stock market had a good week last week, so the recession must be over.' ..". Climatology is not about fitting trend lines through data. It is seeking explanations based on physical laws.

The graph on the right (c4s) is a continuation of a graph from our older post. Both show variations in the solar irradiance, the 11 year solar cycle. This one extends the data to the year 2008 and shows that we are now at the minimum point in the cycle. The current trough is longer and deeper than usual.

The picture on the left illustrates how the Sun looks when at the peak of its irradiance (left half, 2002, lots of sunspots) and at the minimum (right half, 2008, no sunspots).

It would be tempting to jump to the conclusion that the cold weather we are experiencing is caused by this short term decrease in solar irradiance. However, as we noted above, a hypothesis needs to be verified by comparing the measured temperatures to actual calculations of physical effects.

Dr Hansen (left) c4s has shown that the change of irradiance is too small, and far too recent, to explain the drop in temperature. He has shown that even if irradiance remained at the current low level indefinitely, the current growth rate of CO2 would compensate in seven years for that drop in temperature. Measurable warming would then continue, of course.

Searching for a different explanation for the temperature drop this winter, he looked at weather patterns and noticed the following: The past year (2007) witnessed a transition from a weak El Nino to a strong La Nina (the latter is perhaps beginning to moderate already, as the ocean waters near Peru are beginning to warm)... Undoubtedly, the cooling trend through the year was due to the strengthening La Nina, and the unusual coolness in January was aided by a winter weather fluctuation...

Scientists do not always agree, and rarely agree on everything [3]. For example Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, is skeptical: There is no doubt that atmospheric greenhouse gases are rising rapidly and little doubt that some warming and bad ecological events are occurring. However, the main basis of the claim that man's release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models... What should we as a nation do? Decisions have to be made on incomplete information. In this case, we must act on the recommendations of Gore and the IPCC because if we do not reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and the climate models are right, the planet as we know it will in this century become unsustainable...

Most, if not all, reasonable people agree that Earth is round and orbits the Sun. Its average temperature may go up or down as a result of changes in that physical system. When the second largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century, of Mount Pinatubo, ejected vast amounts of ash into the atmosphere in 1991, it caused global dimming by 0.6 degrees C . The effect lasted two years, before the aerosol (dust in the air) settled.

If GW were a "new religion," as some right wing extremists assert, we might have several heretic sects, some believing that the Earth will freeze, some that it will boil. Science predicts neither. If the Sun's activity did not simply stay as low as it is today, but kept decreasing, we would experience global cooling after few decades and might, after a few decades, eventually enter a new ice age. How do we know this is not going to happen? Actually, we do not know, not with certainty. How we do know that Sun will rise tomorrow? We assume it will, and make our plans accordingly.

Common Sense - decisions under uncertainty

WSB's Kirk Mellish , in a thoughtful blog essay, has this to say on the topic of Global Climate Change: "Borrowing from the author of Franklin and Winston I have tried only to make some small contribution to swelling the ranks of those in what Thomas Jefferson called "reasonable society" -- those willing to approach these questions with an historical sensibility, an analytical mind, and, at the risk of wistfulness, an open heart."

". . . the only hoax I am aware of is the claim of a hoax"..... "I see man-induced global warming as clear and present, and a potential danger for the future of man. But with too much that is not certain to be a clear and present danger."

In my future posts, I will no longer debate the issue "Is Global Warming'Real'." Having examined the issue in some detail, I conclude it is "real," and deserves careful attention. The way science operates in a free society [3] makes a global conspiracy of scientists unlikely, if not impossible. We will continue to receive more measurements from satellites like this one which will measure the distribution and effects of CO2. We will (almost) certainly not enter the new Ice Age in the next few decades. However, we cannot postpone all decisions and wait to see whether Mr. Brennan (above) is wrong.

It is time to set aside philosophical or metaphysical questions of absolute truth or certainty and address the pragmatic and the political.

E.U. Action Soon

The European parliament to be elected this June will prepare legislation addressing climate change that will profoundly affect our lives. Perhaps it will just waste billions of Euros on foolhardy projects, burdening us with new taxes and delaying recovery of economy. What we hope, of course, is that they will examine the possible courses of action and select the most effective, including those which will enhance long-term economic recovery.

There are some 7 political groups of MEPs in the European parliament. Do you know where they stand on carbon issues, on the nuclear energy and other primary sources of energy? At this point, I don't, but I intend to find out. I am reading the reports [4] and I will share here what I find.

You can help: If you know, in addition to English, one of the 27 other EU languages, you may contribute translations of this blog. Do you have specific information about MEPs' beliefs and past actions on these climate change issues? If you can help, leave a comment with your email address.

References

1. The Little Ice Age and the 30 Years War.
   History and controversy
   Possible causes of the Little Ice Age
   Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War ...‎ Kepler and religious strife
   Page 275: "... Where the Thirty Years' War begins with the Second Defenestration of Prague, and where Katharina Kepler is tried and convicted of witchcraft. .."

2. More on the irradiance and models. Nasa research briefs
   Specifically: How do Solar Cycle Affect Our Climate?

3. How does science actually work these days?
   At the end of this knol is a reference to a video and to a book on "the story of a search," a "gem of a book on ancient astronomy", showing how researchers compete, make mistakes, and cooperate, correcting their blunders and gradually, step by step, increasing our understanding of the world.
4. June election 2009 and EU energy policies.
   A ‘green’ Europe by 2050
   EU Parliament backs 80% emissions cut .. A spectrum of views
   Second Strategic Energy Review drafted by Anne Laperrouze (MoDem, France)

The Earth's Atmosphere: Weather is not climate

The argument often made by deniers and repeated by naive readers is "They (scientists), cannot even predict the weather for more that three days, so how can they know what would happen in 50 or 100 years? On the face of it, this sounds like a sensible question.

The physics of planetary temperature is a very different problem, however, than weather prediction. It is actually much simpler than understanding the dynamics of air masses, which are what govern the weather. Determining planetary temperature is a more straightforward problem: calculating the "energy budget" of the planet.

Pool balls and light bulbs

c2sx As an illustration, imagine two objects, a white pool ball and a source of heat such as a 100W bulb. If you move the ball closer and closer to the source of heat, its temperature will increase. You may have to wait a bit after each move, to overcome thermal inertia, but eventually the ball heats up to a temperature at which the energy absorbed by the ball is radiated back into space. The ball has then reached dynamic equilibrium and its energy budget is balanced.

When you look at the temperatures of the planets you see a progression from cold to hot as we approach the sun. There are some small deviations from the temperature expected solely on the basis of distance. To understand those with our illustration, substitute a ball painted black. It will absorb more heat and its temperature will be higher.

This higher temperature means an increase in the radiation of the extra absorbed energy. That is the greenhouse effect. This is a simple description of a "balanced energy budget." More complexly stated, the composition of the planetary atmosphere, represented by the color of the ball in our example, changes its "albedo," the ratio of energy reflected to energy absorbed.

Obviously, the calculation of the energy budget for a real planet is a bit more complex. Our planet both rotates and orbits the sun . There are seasons. The intensity of sun's output itself is changing, as is the amount of sunlight reaching particular parts of the earth at any given time. Bodies of water, which act as heat reservoirs, are being filled and emptied, the effect of thermal inertia.

Introducing the ants

Now imagine thousands of ants, living on the surface of a ball which has gray splotches. They will run around, often in response to the local temperature, in an unpredictable, chaotic manner. Their chaotic motion will not affect the energy budget, the average temperatures, or climate of the ball. These ants represent the weather, the motion of air masses, precipitation, and the evaporation of water.

The ants also can represent the behavior of life, which has no effect on the energy budget, unless and until the ants start painting the surface of the planet a different shade of gray. That has happened in the history of our planet several times. It happened when life started, when animals appeared, and it has been happening again, since industrial revolution.

Let's abandon the pool balls and ants for a look at the Earth: c2s
The configuration of the sun, Earth, and dust clouds in space keep changing when observed on geological time scales. These changes produce semi-periodic changes of climate , ice ages and interglacial periods. Beyond that, the activity of the sun itself has several irregular cycles.
It is important to understand that climate models are not attempting to predict either weather or climate. Both are chaotic systems, in the mathematical sense, unpredictable in the long run. Models of climate are calculating the energy budget of the planet. They are describing what happens to the energy which comes from the sun. While some models of the processes within the sun and other stars do exist, they only predict the long term fate of stars. They do not predict the irregular fluctuations and cycles of their output.

From an excess of O2 to an excess of CO2

c2e
During the early years of our planet, the energy content of the Earth was increasing, the converse of our situation now. Nor were the ratios of gasses in the atmosphere stable. Rather, the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere was growing dramatically. This process had been going on since the Earth cooled enough for water vapor to condense and form oceans, followed by life appearing there in the form of microbes. The concentration of oxygen peaked at 30%. How and why did this happen?
As we all learned at school, plants use solar energy, water from the soil, and carbon dioxide in a process called photosynthesis, which releases oxygen into the atmosphere. In that splendid process, plants also reduce the energy-poor compounds (oxides such as water and CO2) into energy-rich compounds (wood, sacharides such as sugars and cellulose.) and are eventually transformed into fossil fuels.
This process flourished uninhibited until the Cambrian “explosion” a half billion years ago, when animals and multi-cellular organisms which used oxygen appeared. After many milenia and events, the rise of new species and the extinction of others, the atmosphere stabilized at ratios of 20% oxygen and 256 ppm of CO2.

It remained stable even when, some 10 million years ago, a new animal started walking on two legs and invented fire. However, about 350 years ago these bipeds invented the steam engine and started converting the accumulated fossil fuels back into oxides, to CO2 (Carbon dioxide) and H2O (water), at an ever increasing rate. c4v

Writings of that period, even as late as the early 20th century, speak exuberantly of "progress" and see the supply of such energy as inexhaustible. No one apparently could envision the rapid growth of the world's population coupled with the explosion of devices engineered to specifically to use those energy supplies stored so long ago. In fact, many of us are still reluctant to face the fact that the end of these sources is in sight.

The thin blue ribbon

c4v means "click for video". The thin blue ribbon you see at the edge in this photo is the Earth's atmosphere. In this five-minute video, American astronaut Dr.Sally Ride describes her first impression of that blue ribbon in 1983. Illustrated lavishly with photos from space taken then and in the 25 years since, we see clear changes in the Earth's surface.
The temperature, as shown in the previous post, increased by a half degree centigrade in that time. A half degree is a small change, when compared to swings of a season, the weather, or latitude, but over vast areas and time periods it leads to significant changes, as shown in the video. Do look at it and leave a comment

Dr. Ride is optimistic. Are you? In our next post, we will examine what humans can do about these problems, what was tried in the past and failed, what new solutions are being proposed.

References

Qualitative theory behind a simple model Unless you are totally allergic to even simple equations (the Stefan-Boltzman law), look at this elegant, "order of magnitude" estimate of GH effect.

What about that 800 lb gorilla?

The water cycle. c4s
In a comment to the last post ( January 20 2009, 14:36 by Ken)
Ken says:

" The vast majority of the public believes that C02 controls all of the greenhouse effect, when in reality water vapour is the dominant contributor. It is the 800 lb gorilla, not C02. Which begs the question: Why is water vapour omitted from climate modelling? Omitting water vapour is like working out the moon's orbit and omitting gravity. It's impossible, but that is what is being done with climate models. Amazing."

Indeed, water vapor is the major greenhouse gas (GHG) in the atmosphere and responsible for 60% of the natural GHG warming .

The water cycle is complex and has several opposing effects. Almost 90% of the global evaporation occurs from the oceans, reducing their temperature by evaporative cooling. Clouds, snow, and ice cover increase the albedo of the planet , reducing the amount of heat. Water vapor is also increasing absorbed heat through the GH effect.

Before we look at these effects in more detail, I will address the comment, using Ken's parable: This big and complex gorilla, the water cycle, is controlled by a small child, its cousin, called the CO2 cycle. The key term here is "residence time" (RT). For water vapor in the atmosphere the average residence time is nine days. What does this mean?

Imagine building a facility which will vaporize vast amounts of water and release it into the atmosphere. The absorption of heat will increase due to stronger GH effects. In a few days it will rain, and all the water which you added will be back in the rivers and oceans.

Our planet is unique in the known universe for having water under natural conditions in all three phases: as a gas, a liquid, and a solid. Carbon dioxide, in contrast, does not behave this way.

c4s When you add CO2 to the atmosphere, you warm the planet a little bit. The effect is amplified because warmer air holds more water vapor. So raising or lowering CO2 acts as a throttle to raise or lower the really important greenhouse gas, water or H2O.

Like water, carbon dioxide (CO2) is exchanged between the atmosphere, land, and oceans, in the carbon cycle. In contrast to water, its residence time in the atmosphere is hundreds of years. Thus the concentration of CO2 can be treated as an input variable in the models. One can set the CO2 level or its rate of increase to a given value and let the model calculate the effects. The level of water in the atmosphere can not be treated the same way because of its short residence time.

Mathematically speaking, the concentration of CO2 can be treated as independent parameter. In such a simulation run, the model is calculating "what the temperature will be" at given level of CO2 or at a given rate of increase. These different runs are the varied scenarios being considered. The concentration of water is a dependent variable; it should not be forced. The model will calculate its value as determined by the dynamical equilibrium of all cycles. That is the reason you hear more about CO2 when different scenarios are being described.

So, water is not ignored in the models. Its effect was recognised very early in history of the models of climate. In 1862 the English physicist Tyndall wrote that for Earth "water vapor 'is a blanket more necessary to the vegetable life of England than clothing is to man. Remove for a single summer-night the aqueous vapour from the air... and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost.' Tyndall needed no equations, but only simple logic, to see, what many since him overlooked: it is at night that the gases are most important in blocking heat radiation from escape, so it is night-time temperatures that the greenhouse effect raises the most."

It was Tyndall first, and then Swedish physicist Arrhenius (1859 - 1927), who created first simple climate models. They incorporated the effects both oxides, of H2O and CO2 .

Arrhenius, realized that the concentration of CO2 was rising due to the burning of fossil fuels. This was at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. He figured that if industry continued to burn fuel at then current rates, it would take thousands years for the CO2 level to rise high enouh to cause concern. As use of fossil fuels has "progressed," this estimate had to be dramatically revised.

The quotes cited above are from a fascinating book, "The Discovery of Global Warming," which reads like a detective story. Available as a 200 page paperback, on CDrom, or from the Web as pdf files for free, it is highly recommended reading.

There are other GHG gases as well as circulation models of other compounds, but those of energy, water, carbon, oxygen and carbon dioxide are the most important for models of climate. As scientists are getting more data from satellites designed to monitor GHG gases and are refining the physical basis of models, the ability to understand the changes and their causes is improving.

We should remind ourselves that climate models do not actually predict the future. The future depends on economic and political decisions. In posing "what if" questions, models can help us make those decisions.

It is important that before we spend billions of Euros on the environmental tax on carbon emission, on the ETS tax, we have a high degree of confidence in the predictions of these models.

References

1. Simple model applet
2. Here is a short summary of the first models of climate.
3. Qualitative theory behind a simple model Unless you are totally allergic to even simple equations (the Stefan-Boltzman law), look at these estimates.
4. Slightly more complex and more detailed description of the greenhouse effect.