Climate Climate & Energy

Between Iraq and a hard place

I wonder how many people realize that the chances of nuclear war did not fall significantly with the end of the Cold War. A deliberate nuclear war, while a real risk, was always the outside chance. The worst danger -- an accidental nuclear launch -- is probably more likely today than it was prior to the fall of the Soviet empire.

Neither the U.S. nor Russia have taken their missiles off hair trigger alert, and Russia's command and control system is deteriorating. When the old war criminal McNamara, leftist Noam Chomsky, pacifist and anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott, and the right-wing libertarian Cato Institute all worry about the same problem, maybe we should also.

Aggravating this, the U.S. is engaged in talks with Poland and the Czech Republic to put a "missile defense" system in their territories. "Missile defense" systems are useless, of course, as defense against missiles. Even in rigged tests they fail as much as they succeed. They can be fooled by tricks as simple as Mylar balloons.

But they are a quite useful as first-strike weapons. Russia won't be at all nervous at such first-strike weapons on their border, right? The U.S. is well known for a calm and measured approach to foreign policy. So we're not increasing the chance of an accidental launch by them even a little bit. After all, we would have no objection if Russia placed a similar system in Cuba.

One down …

It’s a start.

Sigh

The 1872 Mining Law is evil. It gives mining companies cheap and privileged access to public land, and makes it virtually impossible for anyone, including the gov’t, to stop them from grabbing it (yet another cost of mining that gets offloaded onto the public). Attempts to get rid of or update the absurdly archaic and […]

Observed warming since 1990 is greater than the models predicted

An article in the May 4 issue of Science shows that observed warming in the 16 years since 1990 is greater than predicted by models.

Perhaps models are underestimating future climate change. That would be bad news.

"Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections"

We present recent observed climate trends for carbon dioxide concentration, global mean air temperature, and global sea level, and we compare these trends to previous model projections as summarized in the 2001 assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC scenarios and projections start in the year 1990, which is also the base year of the Kyoto protocol, in which almost all industrialized nations accepted a binding commitment to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The data available for the period since 1990 raise concerns that the climate system, in particular sea level, may be responding more quickly to climate change than our current generation of models indicates.

Those who argue that great uncertainty exists in our knowledge of climate need to recognize that uncertainty cuts both ways -- things could be worse than we think just as easily as they could be better.

Population is not the short-term problem

Now and again some commentator will claim that we lack to resources to support our population sustainably -- either today or in the near future. But the fact is, even with current technology we have plenty of sustainable resources for our ~7 billion population and for the ~10 billion we expect in the future. What prevents this is not scarcity but folly and cruelty.

What are the constraints usually cited? There is soil and sustainable food production. But as I recently documented, we can feed ten billion sustainably if we choose to. There is freshwater, but as I documented, we have sustainable ways to deal with that as well.

What about energy? Right now we use about 14 terrawatts total primary energy world wide. The most conservative estimates of potential efficiency increases say we can double efficiency. And the most conservative estimates overlook stuff we are doing in some places at this very moment, including the potential for changes in material intensity and savings in thermal losses by producing electricity from mostly non-combustion sources.

But of course we are also going to have increased population and a lot of poor people who want to get richer. So it is not unreasonable to assume that a ten-billion-population world that consumes energy thriftily but lives a decent lifestyle with indoor plumbing, hot water, refrigerators, basic electronics, enough to eat, enough work, enough leisure, and plenty to do with that leisure will consume around 25 average terawatts worldwide.

Summarizin’ summaries, summarily

Here is the second half of my summary of the IPCC summary (PDF):

Energy Efficiency:

It is often more cost-effective to invest in end-use energy efficiency improvement than in increasing energy supply to satisfy demand for energy services. Efficiency improvement has a positive effect on energy security, local and regional air pollution abatement, and employment.

(In buildings):

Energy efficiency options for new and existing buildings could considerably reduce CO2 emissions with net economic benefit. Many barriers exist against tapping this potential, but there are also large co-benefits (high agreement, much evidence).

By 2030, about 30 percent of the projected GHG emissions in the building sector can be avoided with net economic benefit.

No, but we still know enough to start taking action

A few weeks ago, I was perusing Grist when I ran across an ad for A Convenient Fiction, a slideshow rebuttal of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The author was none other than Steve Hayward, who you might remember from the AEI-$10,000-payola scandal.

I had actually seen this slideshow discussed in the New York Times, and was interested to see it. In my previous communications with Hayward, he was at great pains to describe himself as someone who believed the science as described by the IPCC. I wanted to see if the slideshow bore that out.

Measure Twice, Cut One of These Days

Coalition of 31 states creates greenhouse-gas emissions registry Flipping the feds the collective bird, 31 U.S. states have created a registry to track industrial greenhouse-gas emissions. The states — joined by British Columbia, Manitoba, and a Native American nation in California — represent some 70 percent of the U.S. population and all (er, both?) sides […]

Trends on an ever-shrinking planet

I was at Coop Power's excellent annual renewable energy summit in western Massachusetts recently. Richard Heinberg was there as a presenter. He discussed his well-regarded peak oil projections, and he then put that curve next to his peak uranium and peak coal projections. That visual drew gasps from the crowd -- especially the peak coal bit.

Sure we've got lots of coal, but its quality ain't what it used to be, and won't go as far. Check his data. This got me thinking of all the indexes we might put forward to track important trends on this ever-shrinking planet.

The next one I'd promote, given our perilous reliance on the mobile hives that are driven from farm to farm to pollinate our crops, plus this winter's mysterious honeybee population crash, would have to be peak bees. And how about peak freshwater. What would you propose?

A story from Tanzania

Interesting story on a Michigan State University project to help test and improve locally made solar cookers in Tanzania: