Environmentalism and Question I Don't Have Answers To

It seems that most environmental policy involves regulation by a governing body, and most environmentalism on a personal level involves self-sacrifice.  If we are going to get serious, really serious, about the issue of climate change, is it inevitable that we adopt heavy-handed government mandates to get our emissions under control?

As environmentalists, do we just have to accept that human nature is to fail to grasp environmental consequences until bad problems result, and so helpful actions must be externally enforced to have a hope of being implemented effectively?

I'm not sure that I know enough about economics or sociology to intelligently answer this question--but it is an important one, because it cuts to the heart of some of the political difficulties with environmentalism.  Because on the other side of the argument is the Rand-ian elevation of individual rights and the critical importance of personal liberty in allowing creativity and innovation. In this view government regulation only stifles our potential, and individuals doing things for the greater good or against inclination is not just silly, it's immoral, in part because who has the right to define "greater good?"

There is plenty of evidence that lack of oversight is detrimental:  Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons is a great place to start. But does that oversight have to come from the government?  And is regulation from the government in the name of curtailing our own tendencies toward destruction really such a bad thing?

I find it extremely hard to believe that X Large Manufacturing Company That Happens to Have a Polluting Process, absent any environmental regulation, is going to add any environmental safeguards just cause hey that's the right thing to do.  The employees might have the same desire for clean air and water that we do, but if all the competitors of X aren't doing it, X would go out of business if it chose to raise it's overhead cost in a way no other competitor was bothering to do, and the employees of X would also like to have jobs.  But if the playing field has been made level to the point that all of X's competitors must treat their sludge and scrub their smoke stacks, that becomes the cost of doing business.  Sure, I the consumer pay a higher price.  But you know what, the price I would otherwise pay is chloride rivers and asthma, and honestly a higher price for a good is a bargain in comparison.  It's not just that clean air and clean water are pretty and endemically valuable in themselves, although they are that, it's that the doctor's bill for asthma costs a lot of money, it's that chloride rivers might contaminate my drinking supply without somebody ensuring it doesn't, it's that if I ever wanted to start my own business using that river that wouldn't work if it were chloride, well that's just too bad.

In other words, clean air and water regulations have to be the cost of doing business, because otherwise, dirty air and dirty water are going to be the costs of having an economy--but only an economy which allows for dirty air and dirty water activities.  Personally I'd rather have a diverse economy and clean air and water too.  I've seen economists argue that these things are still luxuries when compared to the basic necessity of employment in order to gain sustenance, and sure, when our grand economy developed, we didn't have those things.  And we realized how bad an idea that was, and consequently we are not Haiti.   As for clean air and clean water verses money to eat--one will kill you sooner yet too much of the other may well kill you later, but either way, life's better if you can have both.

That leads me to climate change, because we've sort of mostly figured out how to create a decent balance of clean air, clean water, and economy, but we're still at a loss about how and even if to do something about carbon emissions while maintaining an economy and standard of living that depend deeply upon emitting carbon. There is no other way to describe this unique situation in history except to say that it royally sucks. And it looks like most of the feeble solutions we've come up with are full of imperfection on many fronts, heavy-handed government intervention and the necessity of mass personal sacrifice being high among them.

Two ideas, both of which are politically dead as dead can be, match two common economic strategies for dealing with "externalities," which in economic terms are bad consequences caused by an entity which don't directly penalize that entity, resulting in little incentive within the market structure to do much about it.  One could call climate change the largest externality our global economy has ever created.  One proposed solution is a tax on carbon, getting everybody who uses it, which is most of us, to pay per unit of use.  When the price of something goes up, demand goes down, so that would force reductions somewhere along the way.  Since people use carbon as a matter of necessity for things likes getting to jobs that give sustenance and getting the sustenance to stores too, that is going to have bad consequences for those who can't afford the higher price, the counter argument being that none of us can afford climate change and this way we are, at least, fairly paying according to our contribution thereof.

Another dead solution is a carbon cap and trade scheme, which mimics what we've already done with decent success to get other air pollutants under control.  This seemingly puts the cost on large-scale polluters but will really put it on us too, because anybody providing a service whose costs go up must of necessity raise their prices all the same as if we'd all been taxed.  The advantage, in my mind, in this kind of approach, is that it allows companies already doing better at reducing their emissions to be rewarded, and in general leaves more room for innovating in order to comply with the rules.

Both of those involve heavy government intervention--but they are still market solutions, far from "this must be this way" laws.  Yet both of those were politically killed dead by most Republicans and not a small number of Democrats, see once again "wow this situation sucks" and the fact that no matter what we choose, some people are going to be burdened. 

Other solutions:  "investment in the green economy."  I don't think this will work without further clarification of intent, because what is the "green economy" really? "Green jobs" seems to mean jobs for people who go out and install solar panels and put insulation in your attic--but somebody's got to be buying those solar panels and that insulation first--does the average homeowner have money for that? I sure as heck don't, and my observation is that despite everyone clamoring about how great that economy will be, these "green jobs" are largely a myth at the moment.  Maybe Science! will give us new renewable energy and nuclear technology that will be awesome, but we need workable solutions now already, and have quite a few at least workable technologies already, with only economics and rapidly only politics standing in their way.

Ron Paul, as one example of the opposition to governmental intervention in all things environment, when he's not calling climate change a hoax, insists that removing oil subsidies and letting the price be what it is will go a long way to fix the problem naturally--again, not without pain. George W. Bush shared this sentiment, and sometimes attempted to structure policies this way while he was in office.  It seems to me that doing this would at the very least solve a few birds with one stone:  cut deficits though perhaps not substantially, have the same effect as carbon tax without having to actually tax people and deal with the associated bureaucracy, and would likely work to reduce carbon emissions as well as any other idea.  And it may well severely staunch our recovery by damaging the oil and gas industry which even now employs millions of Americans.

None of these fixes are what I would call socialism, and have been shot down for economic reasons, rather than philosophical ones.  Yet a rising timbre in American political discourse pre- 2012 election calls for reduced business regulation and also a symbolic return of rugged individualism to the tune of Ayn Rand, and this does not seem to bode well for fixing an externality associated with a large swath of our individual behaviors.  And so with all proposed solutions so far struck down and a new sentiment a'brewing, this raises the philosophical question:  are there any solution to climate change that don't involve unprecedented self-sacrifice where it's willing and social engineering where it's not?  Do all practical environmental solutions equate to accepting some incremental new level of socialism, and is that always such a terrible thing?

Updated Fission Cost-Benefit Analysis

About six months ago, I posted my thoughts on the costs and benefits of nuclear power.  Nuclear power is a hot-point among we environmentalists:  some of us are staunchly, utterly opposed, some insist that it can be made reasonably safe and is an important piece of getting us out of this climate change mess.

In the context of the earthquake, tsumai, and corresponding crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan, it is certainly time to think about this once agian.

In my last post, I posed the question:  "In a cost-benefit analysis between a climate that is definitely warming up and changing even if we still don't know how much, and a remotely possible local but who knows maybe worldwide radiation induced horror, which would I choose?"

And I said I'd choose a warmer climate.

On further investigation I do not think I would choose a warmer climate, because the economic and human cost of billions of climate refugees, more frequent and stronger natural disasters, increased incidence of tropical disease, is clearly going to be more than the human cost of a nuclear disaster.  The human and economic cost of losing all of the land we're predicted to lose to rising seas enough would probably outweigh the cost of a nuclear disaster.   There is no such thing as a perfectly safe situation, the unthinkable happens, and not all contingencies can be planned or engineered for.  But we can learn from the mistakes of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the not-a-mistake-at-all situation in Fukushima.  Large scale disaster is unlikely, while climate disruption of some degree is almost a certainty.

However, I do not think nuclear is good for humanity; we have found that it and fossil fuels alike have consequences that, in a perfect world, are unacceptable for humanity.  Risks to health, environment, and well-being we should not settle for.  One day, we'll have to reckon with the consequences of those risks.

Right now, nobody has a good answer to what to do about nuclear waste.  No matter how safe nuclear power plants are--and there's good reason to think we can get really good at making those safe-- there is still the issue of the extremely hazardous waste they produce, that will be around for thousands of years.   Nobody wants it stored their community, threatening the integrity of their groundwater or their property values--and I don't blame them at all--but the concern is more than just a short-term one.

It seems incredibly naive to think we can isolate and keep that stuff out of the environment or the hands of terrorists for thousands of years.  Looking thousands of years into the future, it's not even a sure bet that the safeguards of a constant and well-governed state will be around to provide the stability that helps mitigate the risk.  We have been running reactors for forty years and we plan to make more and more waste, but we still do not have a solid plan for what to do with it even while a solid plan itself is laughable on the scale of thousands of years.

The upside to this is that we are likely to be able to to keep waste out of the environment for a few hundred years--although I'm not as optimistic about keeping it away from terrorists for that long--and the problems it will cause are left to far future generations, and are of unknown scope and who knows maybe they'll develop the technology to render it all harmless.

Since we've already left future generations a planet with an altered climate, morally I just can't feel good about that.  But we've got to fix this climate problem, morally you could say we owe it to the people alive right who expect to be alive throughout the next century to rapidly counteract greenhouse gas emissions.  Long-term, nuclear is not our answer--but we've already, however unknowingly, crossed the threshold into doing things that have steep and painful consequences with fossil fuels, and we have to deal and we have to act.

The technology for a truly sustainable energy exists and that isn't even counting future innovations, is getting cheaper and is expanding all the time, and ultimately needs to play the largest a role we can get it to play to have a society that can keep going without creating unacceptable risks. There is absolutely no reason to stop short of that goal.  That being said, nuclear provides an impressive amount of energy without producing greenhouse gases, and seems necessary to make a transition out of fossil fuels happen quickly and less painfully in light of the threat of climate change.

But then we need to transition out of that too, and really figure out how to solve the question of waste.

(Clarity note: I am not talking about Bomb-making potential when I refer to terrorists, being aware that most of the waste from the first few generation light water reactors doesn't make weapons-grade materials and that's one of their upsides in the eyes of the government.  However, it has always struck me that concentrated sources of a material that is dangerous to human life if entered into the atmosphere or groundwater would be a desirable sabotage target for the truly evil, and being suicidal wouldn't hurt.)

Politics Through the Lens of a Scientist

Me the scientist has always felt downright alienated by the way politicians have ultimately framed the climate change issue.  Lately it's too much of a political landmine and/or political old news to even get a mention at all, but that doesn't surprise me considering the pressing, deep-running and stubborn economic problems of the 2008-? recession.

Leading up to our forgetfullness of the whole issue, and even now, when it still get mention, there is a push from the political right to frame climate change as an "is it real or is it not" debate--which was true one to two decades ago when there was ample room for many legitimate skepticisms, yet the ongoing succession of refuting evidence has been ignored at best and deliberately redirected into pointless irrelevant realms of non-logic at worse. 

This is a game that is nothing new to politics but that doesn't make it not shameful.  And scientists, used to following a process that requires--however imperfectly--an honest adherence to truth only as far as one can reach it with carefully designed hard work, can so easily find it deeply wrong that truth in the political word is mutable or else possibly flimsily correct but full of glaring omissions.  The world-views are almost completely incompatible.

That plenty of policy-makers would deliberately obscure what science tells us doesn't really surprise me, because the reality of climate change sucks and who wants to do something hard when they could do something easy instead?  But it disappoints me so, from a "human civilization can address and solve problems" standpoint, and the thing that really does get my science blood boiling is when arguments that display an utter failure to grasp the science are held us as legitimate counterpoints, with the same level of credibility as thoughtful scientific inquiry.

The most crass example of this is of the "well trees need carbon dioxide so it's good for the environment and so it can't cause climate change QED" variety, but slightly more sophisticated yet equally scientifically wrong assertions exist, and at least in popular media stand among some of our politicians as if on the same scientific footing with verified fact.

This is not to say that scientists can never be wrong either.  In fact scientists set out to prove themselves and each other wrong all the time, and there is a wide, gaping, expansive difference between realizing that your understanding needs refinement after putting in the research and brainpower, and saying "well it's snowing so global warming can't be real" and not probing any further than that.

We can, and we should, have a debate on whether or not climate change is worth the high economic cost of dealing with now that the economy sucks or even if it didn't--and I would fundamentally argue and you may disagree that even amid a recession, this is the most pressing issue of our time and that reasons both economic, moral, and Preserving Of Our Own Asses abound to address this--but we aren't having that argument, and that's not because nobody on the right is scientifically literate and they all really thinks that carbon dioxide is good for trees and so what's the problem.

Perhaps the root of the political breakdown is that addressing it climate change is hard and involves things that conservatives don't like much. The kinds of proposals that have thus far been brought forth to address climate change stink of socialism and social engineering, which the right runs from at all costs and most Americans in general are highly wary of.

That doesn't have to be, though!  The only reason the past few climate bills are so liberalnomics oriented is because the liberals are the ones who made the show of sticking the green plank in their platform, and they're proposing to fix the issue according to how they look at society and absent input from the right about how to do it differently.  If you fundamentally disagree with the methods, as most fiscal conservatives no doubt do, that's a separate debate from whether or not there is a problem.  The Bigger Man approach, the Right Thing, is to still address the problem, to have the debate for what it is, and as a scientist, it is very, very difficult to have patience with anything less, even being fully aware that the ways of reasoned inquiry are not the ways of politics.

Are Electric Cars "Greener"?

Potentially, maybe...but generally not so much.

Electricity as it is right now is not very green--though it is somewhat greening, and there is potential to make it more so.  At least, the biggest opponent of more widespread deployment of renewable and nuclear energy is political, not technical.  I have posited before that we are much better at overcoming technical limitations than we are at overcoming political ones, so one can assume that electricity is not greening at such a rate that the average electric car is powered by anything other than batteries charged with coal.

Cars emit a host of pollutants, most notably carbon dioxide and nitrous oxides of various forms, commonly referred to as NOx (pronounced "nocks.)"  NOx 1)contribute to acid rain, 2) react with sunlight to make ozone, which is great for blocking ultraviolet light in the stratosphere, but when produced at ground level not so good for people who like breathing easily on hot summer days, especially people with risk factors like small children, the elderly, and asthmatics.  Ozone levels in the southeast (I don't have firsthand experience with other regions) get so elevated on some summer days that prolonged outdoor exertion is considered unhealthy for most people.

Ground-level ozone is a concern for multiple reasons: high concentrations damage crop and forest tissue, and it's also a much more potent greenhouse gas that carbon dioxide.   

Here in the southeast most electricity comes from coal.  Coal-fired power plants emit carbon dioxide, sulfur oxides SOx ("socks"), and trace other things like mercury and lead.  SOx 1) contribute even more strongly to acid rain, 2) forms a layer of very fine particles suspended in the atmosphere, that are also irritating to breath in for those who are sensitive, and contribute to smog.

The good news is that SOx emissions in particular are declining thanks to a cap and trade program that's been in place since the 1990s.  Emitters buy credits, ones who have made technology improvements such as scrubbers that make their SOx emissions go below required amounts sell the extra ones, and the total number of overall credits available declines each year.  If you felt like speeding that along, you could go buy a SOx credit. (My econ teacher did that, and framed it.) Both NOx and SOx from large emitters are capped-and-traded, but obviously nobody is cap and trading the NOx that come from private vehicles.

So the trade-off between a gasoline or non-bio-diesel powered engine and a car charged with coal-fired electricity is really between more NOx or more SOx.  Carbon dioxide is gonna happen either way.  Certainly there may be a difference in the carbon dioxide released per unit of petroleum verses coal that makes one less absolutely contributory to climate change--but since coal and fuel combustion technologies alike vary strongly in their age and efficiency, and about three different varieties of coal with very different properties are regularly used by the same plants, that is a difficult and largely apples to oranges comparison.  While we're at it I suppose one should also look at life-cycle costs when considering claims of relative greenness:  the energy and environmental costs of finding, drilling for, securing, shipping, refining, shipping gasoline verses the energy and environmental costs of finding, mining, and shipping coal. I'm curious enough that maybe I'll look into that for another post, but still, apples to oranges.

Hybrid cars by contrast actually are greener, because they are tapping into an otherwise unused energy source and charging batteries with something one does while driving anyway--putting on the breaks.  That idea, tapping into otherwise unused sources, is certainly thinking along the right track toward sustainability.  I will note that my fully gasoline-powered Saturn, a product of GM, for goodness sake, regularly equals or exceeds the gas mileage of the first-generation hybrids, although they've outstripped me in recent model-years.

The advantage I do see of fully electric cars is that it takes two huge pollution problems, coal and gasoline, and turns them into one, just coal, which is theoretically much more capable of being supplemented by more environmentally sustainable production methods.  Sometimes simplifying your problems is progress--turning your oranges into apples.  The only apples to apples "green" alternative to gas combustion is biofuel, which is great when produced from used vegetable oil, but actually very un-green if made from palm-oil planted on illegally logged rain-forest.  From a climate change mitigation standpoint, we cannot afford more deforestation, and could really use some re-forestation instead.

Maybe a hybrid biofuel engine is the future.  Or crazy superconducting mag-levs, assuming room-temperature super-conduction is possible, something we have not yet observed but haven't found evidence yet either that it is impossible.

There's also the issue of American driving patterns--which is a lot of downtown, where electric or hybrid cars are doing something, anyway--but also a lot of inter-city.  People generally want cars for both capabilities, getting to work each day, visiting your sister on weekends.  Hybrids can take you inter-city no problem but don't perform much better than regular vehicles when doing so.  Electric cars don't generally have enough juice to go more than one or two hundred miles--although this could be changing.

Light passenger rail would be sweet, but way too expensive right now, and not practical at rural to suburban density levels, most common here.

By the way, your gas is pretty much exclusively 10% ethanol in North Carolina.

Fuel cells?  Still have to work out that hydrogen exploding thing.  Super efficient though, and non-emitting in the carbon dioxide department, although the method of obtaining the hydrogen is probably going to be quite carboniferous.

350 thoughts

When I went into college as an environmentalist I found out pretty quick that "activism" is sooo not my thing.  I am too timid and furthermore too attached to my rationality to chain myselt to anything, ever, and even asking people to volunteer or sign a petition, much less holding up signs and chanting things, are so not things I relish doing or found myself willing to do again after trying them once. I don't even much like calling my elected officials, but that at least I'll do.  Something about being introverted, I suppose, about not wanting to bother people who aren't asking to be bothered, about self doubt as it relates to having a worthwhile opinion on something, about insisting on a true conversation as opposed to absolutely anything else--even though the supposed point of activism is that nobody will engage your conversation so you've got to find creative ways to bring it into wider attention. 

There have been instances in this country and world where activism has been necessary to bring about change.  I can recognize that, but still, I don't want to be the one to do it.

"Activism" incorporates all kinds of things--it could be trying to have that conversation.  It could be having a bake sale to raise funds.  It could be organizing food drives or river cleanups or fun runs.  Writing letters to the editor.  That kind I suppose I can handle--have handled; have read the names of endangered species to a crowded campus, have written a letter to the editor on an accused friend's behalf, have organized river cleanups and campus energy reduction initiatives.  But even though I care, I don't have much energy for endeavors like this.  I can't let go of my reservations about the whole notion of trying to rally people around something I think is imporant.  I do have strong convictions on right and wrong--and I can't extend those to anyone beyond myself.   To me doing is doing, not trying to get other people to do.

Yet with something like climate change, all I can do is not enough to make a difference.  Yesterday was supposedly a big day for climate action.  I attended a speech by Bill McKibben on Friday night, the founder of 350.org, an organization dedicated to generating activism around climate change, and that was pretty much his thesis. We've tried scientific appeal to reason, we've tried having the conversation, and that hasn't worked, we are still emitting beyond a safe threshold and the climate is still warming.  So maybe people who care, people like me, have to stop just doing things ourselves and start trying to get other people to start doing things too.  If political limitation is the problem--and it is, not technology, not capabilities; that can be found as long as there is will to deploy such solutions, which there is NOT--activism is one way, maybe the only way, around that. 

Some of the things that have been done around the world in the name of "350", which is one scientific interpretation of the number of carbon dioxide molecules per million molecules of air that we need to keep our climate relatively like the one we knew, are pretty inspiring.  Especially considered that one of the ethical issues with climate change is who is projected to feel the effects of a disrupted climate, compared to who is producing the carbon emisisons which change it.  I like reading about this sort of thing, and I want to help.  I want nothing more than to find a solution for this, what I believe to be the greatest challenge that humans have ever faced--but I'm, still not very willing to organize events or do anything remotely like telling other people what to do.

Fission Cost-Benefit

Nuclear energy is "cleaner" in the carbon emissions sense, is heckof energy dense, is damn expensive, is here now and growing, is a viable and practical solution to climate change.

There are many ways to do it better:  it is theoretically possible to separate the really nasty million-year-half-life stuff and recycle it into a few hundred-year-nasty stuff, getting more energy out in the process.  You can better safeguard and better safeguard, and I bet we have the ability to get our safeguards pretty darn goon.

But I am reminded, over and over again, of the phrase "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."  And nuclear, just being what it is, can go pretty darn wrong.  Yes, there are safeguards upon safeguards.  Yes, waste can be managed--although we are not doing a particularly great job at the moment, due purely to political limitations.  We're a heck of a lot better at overcoming technical limitations than we are at overcoming political limitations.

But you know, that Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer was not supposed to be able to fail, either.  Something going terrible wrong is always within the realm of physical possibility, and in the case of nuclear the consequences for life on earth are really serious business.

Right now, this burning of fossil fuels thing is potentially going wrong for us, and we're gonna run out eventually anyway.   So in a cost-benefit analysis between a climate that is definitely warming up and changing even if we still don't know how much, and a remotely possible local but who knows maybe worldwide radiation induced horror, which would I choose?

Honestly, I'd choose a warmer climate.

(But Science! is still good at what it does, so let's keep doing it re: nuclear fission processes that are safe.  Keep the physicists employed!)

How It Is, Not How You Want It To Be

I'd like to try to spend an entire day entertaining the, idea? can I go as far as conviction? that the planet isn't actually warming and/or planet warming isn't something to be alarmed about because it's not related to anthropogenic greenhouse gases.  What if it all really is a hoax, really just incorrect?

(I'm working this week at Climate Science Camp, so expect a slue of Climate themed posts)

It is profound to contemplate this.  Because that would be...better.  We could focus our attention on other things, happily optimistically solvable things.

We'd still have to deal with peak oil (what are we gonna do when we run out?) and dependence on foreign oil and air pollution, which have some of the same solutions.  But maybe we could afford take our time about it.

It's nice to contemplate, but I am pretty darn sure of my climate science, and the moral imperative of "well, the possibility of climate change is very plausible, the physics of climate change is pretty indisputable" is pretty serious.  So for me it is only a happy thought experiment.

I have learned a great deal in my past six month stint as a research scientist on a project where the results we expected were just not what we got, and perhaps because I'm just a newcomer to the field of radio astronomy everything was just so hard to interpret.

You stare at graphs, at plots of independent variable vs dependent variable, and you try to understand what it means.  You know what you want it to mean because that would mean it's easy or that's what your hypothesis says or that is what would make some frikkin' sense.

But you cannot, cannot, cannot allow what you want it to mean to influence what you can honestly defend with carefully considered application of verifiable knowledge.   And even when you do your best you can't always explain everything, so you do your best to lay out plausible reasons for discrepancies while making very clear that you are only laying out the possibilities that you can rationally acknowledge in all of their limitations.

What happened for us is that we did not find evidence of quantum fine-structure electron energy transitions in ionized hydrogen, even though darn-it we should have, we got our resolution five times greater than necessary to see them, and we didn't for four different radio sources.  We came up with explanation after explanation:  dust which allows the conditions for the transitions isn't as dense as we thought, the hydrogen ions themselves are more dense than we thought, electric fields (which make electrons superimpose between levels) create a superposition which destroys the effect...yet we can get bounds on all of these things based on evidence and theory, and those bound still don't explain it.  Sure, maybe the evidence or theory that gave us those bounds is wrong, but finding that isn't within the scope of what we're doing, so we just communicate the theories we proposed and why they don't explain it and leave it at that.

Even though we want to see the lines.  But they don't really matter that much to us, and they don't matter at all (that we know of...) to the fate of planet Earth.

I'm sure some climate scientists interpret the graphs as C02 driven global warming because they want it to say that:  career and funding depend on it, they like being alarmists (though I really can't understand why someone would like admitting a very unhappy possibility and having to convince happy people to be unhappy about it to), whatever.  Certainly nobody likes being wrong, especially not so publicly and especially not after crying out in alarm.

Just like many climate skeptics don't accept climate change because, you know, that would just suck if it were true, and/or they've spent a good amount of work trying to say that it's not true and they don't want to be wrong either. 

I am very glad I am in the position, somewhat, of not having to be just told things.  The skeptics are lying to you because they want to spread doubt because they have stakes in the status quo and don't want to give up burning fossil fuels.  (you know what, I don't much want to give up burning fossil fuels, all externalities removed).  The global warming fraternity is little more than a religion, lying to you because of the established political interest and money in climate science and fear mongering for the sake of controlling others.

It's all noise.  The facts are the charts.  CO2, and temperature, some physics of molecules, some physics of the sun, some physics of weather.  And how you interpret it.  And buddy, you can interpret a chart all kinds of ways, yet one way is right in the sense that there is only one physical reality (or is there?) and it is certainly very nuanced and multi-faceted--and all the others are wrong.

So I could, be wrong.  Climate change may not be man-made.  It may not be catastrophic.  The world for my children may not be a whole lot hotter than it is today, and my god, the world may really have a lot about it that is totally, happily, awesomely fine.

Nothing the skeptics have said have convinced me, however, that their interpretation is more correct than the interpretation the majority of scientists have come to, the interpretation that I have come to, is wrong.  All the things they give me saying that the man-made warming interpretation is incorrect can be satisfactorily refuted.

But in the interest of full disclosure I'm a phyiscal scientist trained and trying to get a green job in renewable energy, I was raised a liberal-leaning (but very much center-reverting, at times) environmentalist, and I'm agnostic.  (Because some kid this week asked when deciding how much to trust our statements.)  So before you diss my opinion based on those data points, howabout you disclose yours.

Carbon Emissions: The Big Speculative Hoop-la

Got this link from Jeff a while ago:  Walking to the shops 'damages planet more than going by car.'

The idea is that, assuming one re-consumes the calories one burns while disdaining a car in order to walk to a destination, the carbon emissions coming from the raising, slaughtering, and transporting your caloric food source actually outstrip the carbon emissions from burning the small amount of gasoline you would have burned to drive instead.  The big greenwashed news: everything you thought about being a "green" citizen was a lie! Just drive baby, drive!

This article is extremely silly, either because the author didn't sum the book (How to Live a Low-Carbon Life) it draws from correctly, the author of the book (Chris Goodall) didn't have his thinking together, or both.  The title is  rigged and oversimplified merely to create sensationalism.  Although meat consumption is extremely heavy on the greenhouse gases; what with the landspace required in raising the animals and the food for 'em, the CO2 in slaughtering packing and transporting, and the methane, 20 times more potent a GG than CO2, that cows...err, emit with regularity--there are still several, hummer-sized holes in the argument.

First is the simplicity of the one data point which drives the whole statement:

“If you walked [3 km] instead [of driving], it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving."

When people need between 1500 and 3500 calories per day, 180 is hardly noteworthy, whether you eat beef or anything else.  With obesity and/or weight-obsession being what it is, many people could stand to or would love to just not replace those 180.

Certainly it's not entirely helpful for me to say that calories burned by being more active should not be replaced, but this argument is negated by its oversimplification in another way as well.  Pardon me for being one of those pushy holier-than-thou vegetarians, but is 100g of beef really the only way to replace 180 calories?  The article was written for a British audience, a country for which a majority of most foods both animal and vegetable are shipped long distances--but beef was specifically chosen as the data point that arrived at the four-times-as-much touchpoint.  I know some people do see meat-as-whole-meal, but they may often not be the people who are walking 3km instead of driving to begin with.  The reality of the matter is that people do eat too much meat to curb our carbon emissions, but the one-to-one beef-for-calories argument is way too oversimplified.  I want to see the carbon comparison for something besides carnivory. 

Granted, on the isolated and rainy Great Island Monarch, many food choices make carbon emissions.  The article is saying that life-cycle consideration are important.  So important, in fact, that the failure of the author to include life-cycle costs in the thing he is comparing--the life-cycle cost of drilling for, refining, and shipping that gasoline, or the materials for your automobile, for that matter--is as glaring error in logic.

I haven't researched them, so I don't know what those life-cycle costs are  directly, thus I can't say how they compare to the CO2 and methane of 100g of beef.  Perhaps the author of the book, if not the article, has looked into them.  However, they are not mentioned, and some critical thinking suggests that such an omission is hardly trivial.  Drilling uses fossil fuels, and certainly removes any trees and greenery--natural carbon sinks--from the land in question.  Refining the stuff is going to use some energy, to say the least.  And fossil fuel isn't exactly Britain's great natural resource, either, so just as you're boating and flying and trucking in the meat and out-of-season fruits and vegetables, so are you flying and boating and trucking in the oil.   Car parts are also mined, forged, assembled, and shipped all over the world.

Perhaps the carbon emissions from beef are still worse.  But you can't make conclusive statements until you consider all of the evidence, especially when the whole premise of your argument is based on considering hidden factors.

So the article may have some food for thought in it (pardon the pun), but it's not actually saying anything particularly profound.  In fact, considering what it has left out, it may not be saying anything new at all.   If you want to save the environment, you're better off reducing your meat consumption AND walking 3 kilometers.

Yard Waste

A few years ago I went to Australia.  Sister descendant of the British motherland that it is, although the eastern half (and probably the western half too) had been experiencing one of the most severe droughts in the country's history, still the Australians clung to that stately British idea of well-manicured grasses as ground covering for human-occupied spaces.

Seeing as the drought had caused the government to implement severe water restrictions (how socialist of them), that dream was clearly clung to with considerable delusion:  most everybody's short (and not because they mow it) lawn was yellow-brown.

Quite a few of my Australian friends apologized to me for all the dead grass, some even profusely. As if I, hailing from one of North America's temperate rain forests, would find it some ghastly breach of etiquette, some indication of Australian society's inferiority due to lack of ability to control nature.

On the scale of things, I find lawns a somewhat absurd idea.   They keep the wildness of Real Nature (which is considerable, in a temperate rain forest) from encroaching on your house, and they look nice--when you're living on a continent to which the species used are remotely adapted.  But with things in mind like global food and water shortages, not to mention that Climate Change thing that gets you labeled as a no-good-hippie-alarmist if you mention it, dedicating sections of land to short green grass really does seem, well, extravagant and wasteful.  Millions barely get by with subsistence farming on marginal soils, and here some folks dump nitrogen and all-valuable drinkable water into already-pretty-decent soil with no intention of using that space for food production.   We go on and on about needing to cut our carbon emissions for the sake of our future, yet we fail to see the hilarity in using gas-powered engines once a week or so just to forestall the undaunted efforts of a plant to get a little taller.

According to 2000 census projections, in 2008 there were 112 million occupied American households.   63.2% of those were detached, which for simplicity will be my only area of focus--even though apartment building, mobile homes, government areas and businesses often have lawn areas as well--so we can estimate that there were 71million American lawns of some size or other.  According to the American Housing Survey data tables, the median lot size of occupied housing in 2008 was 0.36 acres, and the median house size was 1800 square feet.  Subtract house square footage from 0.36 acres * 43,560 square feet per acre, and you get a rough estimate of 0.32 acres of yard per household.   Multiply that by 71 million occupied households, and you get 23 million acres of private lawn.

Lawn mower efficiency is a pretty difficult concept to pin down, because it varies based on size, type, and age, and isn't generally advertised or noticed.  Because they are smaller, lighter, and have a less complicated cycle than car engines, one could argue that they are much more fuel efficient than cars; however, they burn a heck of a lot dirtier, not being as as regulated as car engines.  For the sake of forging ahead, and at risk of making this whole thing even more arbitrary than it already is, I'm going to throw out a guess of one cup of gasoline per acre, based on minimal experience mowing a 1.5 acre yard with a tiny 1980s push mower.  So that's 23 million cups of gasoline, burned once a week throughout warm months, we'll say half the year.  598 million cups of gasoline.  According to the EPA, 1 gallon of gasoline yields 19.4 pounds of CO2--that varies too based on the efficiency of combustion, which for lawn mowers probably is not particularly great.  But lacking a better number, we'll take that one, so that 598 million cups of gasoline * 16 cups to a gallon * 19.4 pounds of CO2 to a gallon gives you a grand and arbitrary total of...186 billion pounds of CO2 in a year.  84 million metric tons, if you like.

All based on not-well-pinned-down numbers, but we can't deny that is is a darn lot of CO2, thrown up there in the name of neatness and conformity.   Considering the supposed scope and potential of human ingenuity, it is pretty darn silly.

Particle Physics, Climate Change, and Dinner With Vera Rubin, Part I: Interview with A Climate Scientist

Finally, my APS April Meeting article is done!

Read article full text on the SPS website.  

By far the biggest event in the avenue of energy and environment was the plenary talk by Naval Research Observatory scientist Dr. Judith Lean, entitled "Surface Temperature Responses to Natural and Anthropogenic Influences: Past, Present, and Future." In light of such recent events as the email hacking at the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia, and the APS's ongoing discussion on its official climate position, Dr. Lean's talk was destined to be a hot topic, and was well attended. In the talk, Dr. Lean presented climate data from the past 30 years, revealing the contributions of both natural and anthropogenic factors to global temperature changes.

"Surface temperature is the equilibrium of incoming and outgoing radiation, modulated by several processes," explained Dr. Lean. Although human additions to concentrations of so-called greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons, have received much attention of late, many other natural processes have observable effects on global temperature. The presence or absence of an El Niño Southern Oscillation can create warming in equatorial oceans, aerosols from volcanic eruptions can block incoming sunlight and create periods of cooling, and the sun itself goes through cycles of increasing and decreasing irradiance. When these decoupled effects are looked at together, they explain some of the temperature patterns of the last 30 years, yet anthropogenic greenhouse gases are so far the only explanation for the background rise of global temperatures in the past two decades.

In other words, it does not take a steady increase in temperatures across the globe to indicate that humans have altered global temperatures. Rather, what we see is an upward trend that is modulated by natural processes. According to Dr. Lean, we can expect that upward trend to dominate in the long run.

A common critique of anthropogenic warming asserts that the global temperature changes can instead be accredited to the changing brightness of the sun. Dr. Lean admits that solar irradiance has been something of a wild card: direct measurement of irradiance only goes back to 1978, and even the IPCC models do not deal with variances in irradiance, because of the difficulty in modeling the changes in oceanic and meteorological processes that can be caused by a change in solar irradiance. Yet Dr. Lean's work for the NRO includes modeling the changing magnetic forces within the sun, in hopes of yielding a more long-term picture of the patterns of solar irradiance, so she is well qualified to speak to the variation in solar irradiance itself. For solar variation to account for the nearly 0.9 Kelvin change that has been observed over the past 150 years, says Dr. Lean, “you'd have to say that the sun has varied five times more than we think it has varied, and you'd have to say the earth is really sensitive to sun's variations but at the same time is insensitive to increasing greenhouse gasses." To that she adds that taking the anthropogenic and natural processes together gives a consistent picture of both the last 30 years and the last 150 years, something solar variation does not do.

Immediately after her presentation she was swamped with enthusiastic crowd members, eager to ask questions or obtain a copy of her slides. Those slides contained simple and informative graphs of the past three decades of climate data, information that Dr. Lean admitted to me that she and her colleague almost didn't bother publishing. "We really focused on the forecasting at first, because we didn't think there was enough science in just explaining the past 30 years," she told me. "We thought, 'everyone knows that', you know, here's an ENSO [El Niño], here's a volcano. But it turns out that nobody knows that!" When working to determine how much models can or cannot tell us about the future, we sometimes forget that there is much that direct observation from the past can say.

Dr. Lean and I discussed the importance of communicating climate science effectively. I asked her, as a climate scientist, what she wanted the public to know about climate change, and she reiterated the main points she'd made in her presentation. "The climate varies for lots of reasons, on different timescales, by different amounts, and due to different things," she reminds. "There's this expectation that if anthropogenic gasses are causing climate change, then as proof of that we'll see global temperatures going monotonically up and up. But just because you see ups and downs, doesn't mean that anthropogenic gasses aren't affecting the climate."

She adds that, "The sun actually does appear to have a role, but it's not a very dominant role."

I asked Dr. Lean how she would improve the current climate science study, if she had more resources. She laughed, and said she would put in place the best observing system that money could buy.


Stay tuned for excerpts from Part II and III over the next few days!

Interviewing Skills

So I'm going over the interview I had with climate scientists Judith Lean, who spoke at the APS 2010 Meeting on surface temperature responses to anthropogenic gases AND other factors.  Her point was that a) natural processees affect climate too, even variations in solar irradiance, yet b) anthropogenic gases are still the only explanation for the background rise in temperatures.  She didn't use models, so much as data from the past 30 years (quoth Shakespeare: Using Past as Prologue) where the signal from say, an El Nino can be teased out, cooling from volcanoes can be teased out, even solar variations can be teased out, and the upward trend remains.

It was my first attempt at a journalistic interview, and I think it went amazingly well.  I had a very personable, intelligent, and passionate subject, who loved talking to me and talking about her work, and it helped that we had ties to Australia in common.   There's a heck of a lot of great science and science-for-the-public material to glean.  I would post the clip if I could, though it's more than half an hour long.

I did make a few interviewer mistakes.  Like saying "yeah" a lot as she went on, instead of just letting her talk.  Rather than asking questions that were leading, which I really tried not to do, I think I might have left some of them too open-ended, and then thrown my own thoughts in with hers as a matter of having a conversation, rather than conducting an interview.  I spoke too fast, though I must admit when I listen to myself I realize that I do speak rather intelligently. 

I have a southern accent, and I stumble over myself sometimes.

But still, pretty good.  It was a few days before I could work myself up to listen to myself again, which is something a journalist needs to get over very quickly.

So I'll be trying to finish that APS article up soon. 

Communicating Climate Change Science

Yesterday I went to a talk on communicating climate change science, put on by one of Asheville's own National Climactic Data Center personnel (and Nobel laureate!)

The talk covered much of the expected information vis a vis communicating science: keep your audience in mind, don't overuse jargon or acronyms, or at the very least, explain them, sum it up in clear points that the audience can relate to according to their concerns.

And he made the point that this is easy to say, but very hard to do.

First, people want absolutes, and the nature of many disciplines but especially climate science, is not to deal in absolutes. You have knowledge of a mechanism, and you might know the mechanism very well, and you have models, and the models most likely work well for some things, but cannot work well for all things. Put them together and you can only think, "okay, the likelihood of this is enough to concern me, not the certainty." Yet people want to know if hurricane Katrina can be attributed to climate change, they want to know what was the warmest year on record, and if you try to speak in possibilities instead of certainties, many will think that can only mean you just don't know anything.

Second, everyone is only human, and human reaction are going to cloud the debate. People will panic. People will scoff. People will jump to erroneous conclusions, will take conclusions out of context. Even the climate scientists will write nasty things in their emails,and those trying to prove them wrong will hack those emails. According to our speaker, the evolution of the blogsphere has accelerated this kind of thing, yet climategate shows that even those claiming to follow strict "scientific discipline" are just as human as anyone else, prone to bouts of emotion and opinion. That shouldn't come as a surprise.

So how is climate science generally communicated? Has it been communicated successfully?

Our speaker argued that no, it has not been communicated successfully to the public.

First, you have the scientific literature, and this is what scientists trust, what they revert to. It would be great, from a scientist's perspective, if everyone would just go to the journals for information. This, he says, is how the NCDC, a government agency, has responded to accusations of fraud. General response as to methodology, and a point to the journals.

Yet journals are not written to an audience of the whole world, no matter how scientists might like them to be, and the whole world is exactly who is involved in this instance. And so you will have a whole world of speculation, a whole world of reactions, but not too many people who have the time, knowledge, or fortitude to wade through the journals, especially not when blogs will do. So in the case of the NCDC accusations, sure, it should be up to accusers to make a compelling, researched and ethical case, and if they had read the journals, it probably would have helped. But on some level is also up to the accused to be engaged, not removed and above, and scientific journals are just not an effective way to do this.

The next level is the assessment reports, like the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports, like some domestic ones, where groups of scientists do the reading of the journals for you, and do their best to sum it up and distill it to it's finer points for an audience with some general science background, for an audience with no science background. These, he says, are better, more accessible, though still not mainstream, and certainly not error-free in and of themselves.

Sometimes, scientists have the opportunity to directly speak to political leaders. Congressmen and senators can have their staff write up a list of questions and send them to folks at government agencies like NCDC, and dedicated and busy government scientists will do their best to answer. This is certainly a directly useful method of communicating the issue to the people that matter, although undoubtedly is not without political land-minds that some scientists might be ill-prepared to avoid.

Though he didn't go into it, it is clear that the next step, the most engaging yet difficult step, is interviews and sound bites, popular science books and perhaps even the symbol that is Al Gore. Al Gore does not define climate science, he does not own the concept of climate change, and he is certainly not a climate scientist, though he is educated. He has done great things to get the information out to people who might not have found it accessible otherwise, and he has done great things to make sure that has critics will never believe a word anybody else says about the whole thing. The private jets, all the money he supposedly made off of the movie, and all that.

The point is that every tool we have is fraught with flaws, and to some those flaws have been basis enough to outright reject the whole thing. Yet no system is without flaws, so for the good of the discussion, forging ahead is a must. Refining and employing a combination of these communication methods is the right thing, whether or not it is the easy thing for scientists or the public. We are an enlightened society, and must be able, however imperfectly, to communicate and contend ideas of weight productively. Climate change is the issue that it is, because it is by its nature an intersection of science with philosophy, politics, economics, and morality.

Perhaps the best thing would be to have more sessions like this, in which a dedicated scientist and human being stands up in front of an audience and shares the issues is a humble yet knowledgeable, wholly human-like manner. Who disclaims the absurd notion that climate change is an international left-wing conspiracy for climatologist job security and the power one somehow gains by instilling panic by throwing in things like "you know, it would be great if this turned out not to be true, because I like driving my car as much as anybody else."