Category: Uncategorized

Another Perspective (pdf), by Shuo Zhang.

Inequality, development, and obesity: just a few reasons why the global public-health message is so
important for the change to a low carbon future.

Back to basics (pdf), by Stephen Stretton and Daniel O’Neil.

In the clamour of contention and controversy surrounding the climate change debate, sometimes it makes sense to return to first principles. I was reminded of this sharply during a conversation with a professor of solar energy technology, when he stated bluntly that speculation on solutions is worthless unless we have come up with a concise definition of the problem we are trying to solve. I hope in this initial column to humbly attempt to lay out the problem we face with the hope of looking at possible solutions, and the debates surrounding them, in later columns.

I have recently been in touch with some of the Cambridge parliamentary candidates to ask their views on biofuels. The Green Party policy on biofuels is very clear and robust and amongst other things “calls for an immediate moratorium on agrofuels from largescale monocultures” (point C6 at policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/mcc.html). The Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative parties do not have a written policy on biofuels and it seems important that this pressing issue is brought to their attention and their views are made available to voters. I have written to the candidates from these parties and the Green party to ask their views.

A recent post to this site gives a thorough analysis of the problems with biofuels.

I became concerned about the views on biofuels of Tony Juniper, the Cambridge Green party candidate, when I heard him speak in a radio interview at http://climateradio.org/37-forests-in-the-copenhagen-deal/ in which, when challenged on the EU biofuel targets, was rather ambivalent and said that he thinks
that “biofuels is a part of the equation”. This prompted me to write to him to ask for confirmation that he is in full agreement with the views stated in the Green Party policy, and was disappointed to discover that this is not the case. He gave the following response:

“I am very familar with these issues, not least through my many years working as the Vice Chair of Friends of the Earth International. With this in mind the Green Party policy on this subject accords very closely with my own views. I might have one or two questions, however, for example in relation to sugar cane, that I believe can actually be quite good in achieving a useful carbon reduction, if done right. Of course this needs to include in relation to land use and food growing and also labour issues. Finally, I think we should say more about what fuel sources might work in the future in meeting the massive human need for energy that is not going to go away. A look at so called second and third generation biofuels would be illuminating in setting out what technologies we think might be acceptable, as well as those that we are sceptical about.”

Sugar cane plantations have had a devastating effect on Brazil’s Cerrado and it seems to me that Tony Juniper’s belief that sugar cane can be a good option does not actually “accord very closely” with the Green Party Policy which specifically includes sugar cane as part of the problem. (point CC252 policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/mcc.html) I have asked him for the information on which he bases his view that sugar cane “can be quite good”.

The second area in which his view differs with Green Party policy is to do with second and third generation biofuels (CC254). The following articles give a convincing presentation of the problems with these: www.globaljusticeecology.org/publications.php?ID=296 www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/reports.php#secondgen

The view supported by several of the NGOs mentioned below is that there is no such thing as ‘sustainable’ industrial biofuels. All will destroy natural habitats either directly or indirectly by displacing farmers from agricultural land. All involve the use of agrochemicals with toxic by products, heavy water use and soil erosion. In the light of this, I would like to hear exactly what kind of large-scale biofuel could possibly be “quite good”; the caveat used (“in relation to land use and food growing and also labour issues”) clearly needs to be fully explained.

It is worrying that biofuel proponents have been so successful that there are now government policy incentives in place whereby burning biofuel in power stations attracts twice the subsidies compared to on-land wind power generation. George Monbiot makes this point here.

With over a billion people in the world going hungry, it seems to me morally indefensible to use land to grow crops to power our vehicles rather than to feed hungry people.

When contacting the other parties, since they do not have a policy on biofuels, I quoted the Green Party Policy and asked whether they are in agreement with this. I have received the following response from Julian Huppert the Liberal Democrat candidate.

“I think there are real concerns about trying to develop wide-scale biofuels for exactly the reasons described. We would firstly ensure that the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) only permits sustainable biofuels as required by the EU 2009 Directive on the Promotion of Renewable Energy Sources and includes a calculation taking into account the effects of indirect land use change, and secondly aim to ensure that energy is supplied by more renewable and less damaging alternatives.”

I have raised the following points with him (based on information from the NGOs mentioned below).

1. The RTFO, and soon the European Directive (RED) are licensing all biofuels with false sustainability standards, and this applies to all large scale biofuels, even those made from Brazilian sugar cane. This is exactly what the problem is about and the Green Party policy gives examples of biofuels (including even rapeseed oil from Europe) which have a knock on impact on deforestation elsewhere in the world. www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/docs/RenewableEnergyDirective.pdf, www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/docs/rtforesponse.pdf

2. The calculation to compensate for indirect land use change (ILUC) is completely inadequate. It allows just a few percent compensation as part of a “risk adder” when ILUC causes additional emissions of thousands of percent. www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/docs/lca_assessments.pdf

3. Both the RTFO and the RED make no inclusions for their wider ecological footprint including biodiversity losses and the attendant acceleration of climate feedbacks as ecosystems are systematically wiped out.

4. Both directives allow biofuels from countries where human rights abuses and land grabs are commonplace…i.e. even the safeguard against human rights abuses in both directorates is absent or entirely inadequate.

5. Currently it is illegal for the UK to have different “sustainability standards” from the EU: we need a new Government who has the courage to challenge this.

6. Also under EU rules, it is illegal to “discriminate” against particular biofuels for example because people have been evicted or even killed to produce them; (there are no adequate safeguards – even minimal additional safeguards are illegal)

7. Under EU rules, it is also illegal to “discriminate” against biofuels which can be shown to cause people to go hungry. www.actionaid.org.uk/102313/food_vs_fuel.html

8. Although a final decision is still pending, the European Commission has proposed to class oil palm plantations as forests! So if natural forests are cut down for oil palm plantations, this is not classed as deforestation! Hence palm oil can still be classed as “sustainable”!!

9. Ironically there is actually no requirement on the UK to keep the RTFO in place and no renewable energy target for transport applies BEFORE 2020. This means that the UK or any other EU member government who is concerned about the problems outlined above can simply withdraw. By 2020 the EU legislation may well have been changed in view of new and ongoing evidence about biofuel impacts as well as fast increasing public opposition so not meeting the 2020 10% targets would not be an issue.

10. There is also currently no requirement to support biofuels in the heat and power sector. The Renewable Heat Incentive associated with this will go through Parliament later in the year.

11. You may be interested to know that a number of Lib Dem councillors and Green Party members in Bristol and Portland are fighting hard against the biofuel power stations proposed by W4B, using some of the arguments cited here.

I should mention that I’m not an expert in this field and have gained this information from discussions and reports from the following organisations: Biofuelwatch www.biofuelwatch.org.uk, Action Aid www.actionaid.org.uk, Friends of the Earth www.foe.co.uk, Global Forest Coalition www.globalforestcoalition.org, and World Rainforest Movement www.wrm.org.uy.

I am calling on concerned individuals to contribute their views to this discussion. I will post here all further responses that I receive from the candidates.

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What do we need to do to solve the simultaneous energy and climate crises?

What do we mean by the energy crisis?

There are various energy crises (high prices, unstable suppliers, resource depletion(?)). One possibly serious energy crisis is the potential shortage of electricity generation capacity.

For example, by 2015, the UK might have only 80% of the generating capacity that it needs.

What are the reasons behind this ’energy gap’?

Firstly there is a closing of existing capacity: both of old nuclear power stations coming to the end of their lives and of dirty coal power stations being closed down due to EU regulations: see this report p11-13.

Secondly, there is large uncertainty in the market.

Uncertainty leads to:

a) returns need to be higher or else investment won’t take place [1]

b) investment may be delayed, especially if a delay will lead to the resolution of uncertainty [2]

The problem now is that there is severe uncertainty over the future of the energy in this country. The government has assuaged some of the regulatory uncertainty by making strategic statements about the future of nuclear, renewable and fossil fuel energy. But there remains great financial uncertainty.

Each power source has uncertainties:

a) Gas: the fuel is now expensive, making this source uneconomic if such prices were to be maintained

b) Nuclear: nobody has built a nuclear power station in the UK since Sizewell: there are considerable price escalation and legal risks. A power station can be built in 7 years but with all the regulatory and public opinion hurdles new power is unlikely to come on stream before 2020. The government was 5 years too late in its decision.

c) Renewables: the Renewables Obligation, unlike the German system of ‘feed-in tarrifs’ provides a highly uncertain return

d) Carbon Capture and Storage (coal or gas): again we don’t know the exact cost until the plant has been built. Any plants built by 2015 would be ‘demonstration’ plants.

e) Coal. The dirtiest energy source of them all. The price of energy in the form of coal is a lot lower than the price of energy in the form of natural gas or oil. However, is the European Emissions Trading Scheme carbon price sufficient to control the price?

In this sitution, gas is ruled out as too expensive. renewables may happen if they can get through planning, nuclear is too late for 2015 but could make a significant impact from 2020 onwards. We are stuck between the rock of our climate change ambitions and a hard place of the investment response of low-carbon electricity to current ambitions. What we need is strong incentives for investment and in particular strong incentives for low carbon electricity. My next post will explain how this can be done.

References

[1] uncertain cashflows will lead investors to require a higher return in order to compensate for the risk. in otherwords people will invest but only if the price is right.

In otherwords, uncertainty may lead to less investment and the prices of that investment may rise to compensate investors for the extra risk incurred.

The relevant theory of this is known as certainty equivalent. Under certain conditions, an investor’s aversion to risk can be represented by a higher or ’risky’ discount rate. For a full account of the relation between the various ways of representing risk in investment decision see Rothwell and Gomez (2003) “Electricity Economics”, IEEE press, NJ, USA pages 53-74

If governments make investing more risky than it needs to be, then electricity consumers (industry and the public) are likely to have to pick up the bill in higher bills or blackouts.

[2] If investment is irreversible there is a further effect. Real options theory shows that a combination of irreversibility and uncertainty can lead to investments being delayed. See for example Dixit and Pyndyck ’Investment Under Uncertainty, Princeton.

Why ‘Fast Feedbacks’ are quite slow and ‘Slow Feedbacks’ might be rather fast.

This paper by Hansen et al. has lots of interesting material on climate sensitivity: http://www.planetwork.net/climate/Hansen2007.pdf

The climate sensitivity is the temperature response of the whole climate to a forcing of greenhouse gases. We know that there are two basic sorts of feedback processes going on in the climate. Firstly we know that as the temperature rises, relative humidity will stay roughly constant and thus absolute humidity will increase. This leads to more water vapour in the air; and water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas. Higher temperatures also has an ambigous (to this author) effect on clouds. The sum of all these atmospheric effects yields the ‘Charney’ definition of the climate sensitivity which is the equilibrium temperature rise from a doubling in CO2 concentrations; assuming that the land albedo and carbon (CO2/Methane) sinks stay constant. (of course they don’t stay constant; we will come to this). This has been argued to be close to 3Celsius (3C) for a doubling of CO2 or 0.75C/(W/m2)*. [*A doubling of CO2 gives an increase in radiative forcing of about 4W/m2, so multiply the C/(W/m2) by 4 to get the temperature change for doubling CO2]

Hansen et al. (1993) calculated the ice age forcing due to surface albedo change

to be 3.5 C/(W/m2). The total surface and atmospheric forcings led Hansen et al. (1993) to infer an equilibrium global climate sensitivity of 3C for doubled CO2 forcing, equivalent to 3/4 +/- 1/4 C/(W/m2). This empirical climate sensitivity corresponds to the Charney (1979) definition of climate sensitivity, in which ‘fast feedback’ processes are allowed to operate, but long-lived atmospheric gases, ice sheet area, land area and vegetation cover are fixed forcings. Fast feedbacks include changes of water vapour, clouds, climate-driven aerosols1, sea ice and snow cover. This empirical result for the ‘Charney’ climate sensitivity agrees well with that obtained by climate models (IPCC 2001). However, the empirical ‘error bar’ is smaller and, unlike the model result, the empirical climate sensitivity certainly incorporates all processes operating in the real world.

This ‘fast feedback’ is not all that fast however… The fast feedbacks being slow: 50% of the climate response happens in 30 years and the rest takes 1000 years. So we see in immediate terms (net of the cooling effect of aerosols) about 50% of the climate change that we are likely to see.

Now to the `slow’ feedbacks, namely the ice-albedo changes from melting ice and carbon dioxide and methane releases. How fast are they? And how serious?

In answer to the ‘how fast’, the simple answer is we don’t know. Traditionally, ice-melting has been seen as a slow process. But the old models may not be correct; as was shown by record melt rates in the early 21st century. Paleotological evidence points to times between the ice ages where sea levels have risen metres in a single decade. Hansen suggests that the relative stability of our epoch may have been to do with the fact that there was a zone of comfort between the melting of the great Eurasian and North American icesheets and the melting of Greenland and West Antarctica.

The second question is ‘how much’. One approach is bottom up: you add carbon cycle causation to the greenhouse effect.

If the effect of temperature on radiative forcing is given by s and the effect of radiative forcing on temperature by g, the feedback relation is simply:

DT(with feedback)/DT(without feedback)= 1/(1-g*s). This amounts to 15-78% more warming (Cox and Scheffer 2007):

the feedback of global temperature on atmospheric CO2 will

promote warming by an extra 15–78% on a century-scale.

This estimate may be conservative as we did not account for

synergistic effects of likely temperature moderated increase

in other greenhouse gases.

But as the authors point out, this does not include the effect of everything working together.

What evidence do we have of everything working together?

A cursory inspection of this graph of greenhouse gas forcing shows:

a) A very high correlation (suggesting a strong link between greenhouse gas concentrations and warming)

b) Episodes of very rapid temperature change and ice melt (over the time scale of decades – e.g. the ‘Younger Dryas’ event.

c) a correlation between the two variables of about 3C/(W/m2)

Now the temperature shifts at the poles by about twice the global temperature change, we can imply a correlation of about 1.5C/(W/m2).

This is about double the ‘fast feedback’ 0.75C/(W/m2) predicted byclimate models and would imply a temperature change of six celsius for a doubling in CO2, twice what we have already found. But this is not the same quantity. It’s not clear that the figure found by dividing the standard deviation of the Temperature graph by that of the Forcing graph is the quantity that Hansen asserts it is and that we want. What is going on?

So, following Scheffer and Cox, here is some basic theory of feedback loops…

Let’s assume that Forcing (in W/m2) leads to temperature increases in Celsius (C). Let’s assume both processes are linear:

g

Forcing –> Temp

\ /

< --

s

If we denote the initial change in forcing by f (before feedbacks)

and the final change in temperature by T (after feedbacks)

This gives T/f=g+g(sg)+g(sg)*(sg)…= g/(1-s*g)

What about the other direction?

s

Temp –> Forcing

\ /

< --

g

Here we observe only the final F and the final T
We see Forcing = (s+gs+gs*gs+…)t

F = t * s / (1-gs)

And T = t(1+gs+gs*gs+…)=t/(1-gs)
So F = s * T
T/F = 1/s

So if we observe T/F = 1.5 this implies that s = 2/3.

So the overall effect all depends on the overall strength of the feedback 1/(1-gs).

So ice core evidence provides us with information about the *strength of the Temperature-CO2 feedback* not on the overall greenhouse effect, including feedbacks.

The information about the gain of the whole system will therefore be gleaned from the size of the equivalent radiative forcing change that started the whole process off. If the huge temperature change and big CO2 increase was the result of a huge temperature forcing, this would imply that the feedback from temperature to CO2 was huge, but that the greenhouse effect was small.

Hansen’s paper provides some very interesting evidence of the magnitude of the forcings from precession, but does not go so far as to come to an estimate of the ‘equivalent’ forcing implied by the Milankovich cycles. It is clear that the forcing on a global sense is small, but as Hansen points out, the effect at the ice age boundary is larger.

My conclusion supports the methodology of Cox and Sheffer over that of Hansen. However, it suggests that it should be easy to extend Cox and Scheffer to include
other greenhouse gases and ice-albedo effects (by using the data that Hansen himself uses).

What is needed is to have a rough estimate of the magnitude of the original ‘equivalent temperature’ forcing (already including *local* ice-albedo feedbacks – since an insolation increase at the polar rim where ice is melting is clearly very effect; but *excluding* global feedbacks) that started the whole process off.

Hansen’s paper hints at it but does not profer an estimate. His guess is probably a bit better than mine. Perhaps he should guess. An approximate answer to the exactly relevant question may be as much use as the exact answer to an approximately relevant question.

Science Issues

Why do we think that the observed increased concentrations of CO2 and Methane will warm the earth?
1) Basic physics
2) Water vapour feedbacks from recent measurement of radiative outflow from satellites & Models integrating these observations
3) Observations of the climate warming up already (see below for detailed refs)
4) Observations CO2 of the ice ages (showing evidence for positive feedback as well as a very close link between temperature and CO2 and Methane)

Concentrations of CO2
Concentrations of CO2 went between 180 (ice age) and 280ppm (warm period between ice age). They are now at 388ppm: higher than the last few million years; the sun is also getting stronger over the very long term.

Science of Greenhouse Effect