Halloween News

Happy Halloween!

A really interestng article was published by the BBC this morning (and relevant to this blog of course). 

According to a new report by the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, emissions in 2012 increased at less than half the average over the past decade.

Key factors for this included the shift to shale gas for energy in the US, while China increased its use of hydropower by 23%. However the use of cheap coal continues to be an issue, with UK consumption up by almost a quarter. 

This has in absolute terms meant that emissions of carbon dioxide reached a new record in 2012 of 34.5bn tonnes. Although as stated the rate of increase in CO2 was 1.4%, despite the global economy growing by 3.5%. This 1.4% growth in emissions was half the average annual increase of 2.9% over the last decade. In general this development signals a shift towards less fossil-fuel intensive activities, more use of renewable energy and increased energy saving. 

Looking ahead, the report suggests that if the push for shale continues in the US, if China sticks to its published plans and if renewables continue to grow - particularly in Europe - global emissions might slow down permanently. However we are still currently having increases every year which are cumulative. Since CO2 lives for 100 years in the atmosphere, thus we must act decisively soon or face dangerous climate change. Thus it is important not to get carried away, as although it is great news, an increase is still increase, slowing or not.

Also in the news today a possible superior alternative to Uranium for nuclear reactors. The radioactive element is 'Thorium', billed to be safer in reactors and significantly harder to make, if not impossible, nuclear weapons from. Given these advantageous qualities it may signal the beginning of a more widespread move towards nuclear? 

Secondly, continuing on from my climate alarmism and energy prices blog, some good news for us consumers today. Energy Secretary Ed Davey has promised to cut the time it takes to switch energy supplier to improve competition and drive down prices. His "ambition" was to reduce it from the current five weeks to 24 hours, but of course added that the change would not "happen overnight". In addition Mr Davey also promised "criminal sanctions" for companies found to have manipulated the energy market i.e. if a cartel is found.  

You can find the BBC summary of the PBL report here:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24742770

And the report itself here:-

http://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/trends-in-global-co2-emissions-2013-report

Finally the other two mentioned stories (Thorium and the Energy review) are covered in much greater detail here:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24638816
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24747183

Spookiest image of a fossil fuelled smoke i could find...

Back to Basics: My Analogies

Our Earth systems usually operate between certain boundaries in a roughly cyclical relationship (although time-scales vary per cycle), i.e. think glacial-intergalcial cycles as Yannick's blog is covering http://interglacialglacial.blogspot.co.uk.

Thus I like to think of natural cycles as operating something like this:-

Note that for the ball above, friction doesn't exist so the ball won't stop rolling and the ball wouldn't always reach the edge before reversing direction.

So when considering tipping points, conditions surpassing certain boundaries and causing irreversible change I think of (i.e. leaving the normal cycle):-

Lastly, what if the the ball were to fall off the cliff onto a downslope? This would represent a positive feedback i.e. X produces more of Y which in turn produces more of X. So taking us further and further from our original cyclical relationship whilst the situation simultaneously worsens/grows in size. Like a snowball rolling down a hill....

I find little analogies like this to be really useful, especially when trying to get to grips with a new topic or subject area. It's amazing how you can come up with analogies for pretty much anything if you put your mind to it....

Remember, little things can make a big difference.

Is Climate Alarmism Pushing Up Our Energy Prices?

Just the other day I received a letter from my energy supplier telling me that they were going to be charging me yet more money for my energy ‘needs’. This can obviously be quite annoying given there are cheaper sources of energy available or possible. Coal is plentiful and provides the least expensive electricity per megawatt, whilst fracking provides another cheaper source from shale gas. Yet coal-fired power stations are being shut down because of European Union regulations, and shale gas exploration is moving at a slow pace due to numerous concerns and regulations.

It is against this background that energy companies have announced price rises. The regulations imposed by the Government underlie them, with additional green taxes exacerbating the situation.

The reason this has been done, according to Government , is because of climate change fears. But is it a reasonable or proportionate response? It is widely accepted that carbon dioxide emissions have risen, but there are also concerns over the range of possibilities that climate modeling is predicting.

Sceptics remember that computer modeling was behind the collapse of Lehman Brothers and contributed to the global financial crisis. They also reason that common sense dictates if the Meteorological Office cannot forecast the next season’s weather with any success, it is highly ambitious to predict what will happen decades ahead. However this, of course, confuses short-term variability in weather with long-term trends climate.

The U.K. is responsible for less than 2 per cent of global emissions. So even if the British freeze and our industry is made uncompetitive from high energy prices, it will not save the world. But is this a reason not to act? Britain holds a lot of ‘soft power’ to influence international opinion. It was this nation that started the industrial revolution, so why not lead the charge towards renewable energy?

It is estimated that the UK’s energy infrastructure will need at least £200 billion of investment before 2020 if it is to meet its climate change and renewable energy targets, and enable the UK to move to a low carbon economy. This investment is needed in all areas of energy infrastructure: from upgrading the electricity grid to become smarter; to making UK housing stock energy efficient; to demonstrating Carbon Capture and Storage technology; and developing renewable generation technologies, such as offshore wind. We are currently a long way short of this this. In order to encourage such investment it's important for our Government to establish a more consistent approach to energy given the long term nature of energy investments. The Tories/coalition have made a start with the announcement of a new nuclear power station (with Chinese money) and a long term pricing formula.

The unfortunate reality we are currently facing is that the Government’s carbon tax on these heavily polluting industries - to try and incentivize the market to move towards cleaner energy - isn’t working as emissions are still rising. More positive ideas such as the Green Investment Bank are failing to make any real headway. Thus taxes are being passed onto the consumer as increases in the price of energy with no real alternatives for energy being presented. Not to mention the profiteering of the energy firms, but that’s a whole other issue.

Eschatological fears are an ancient human concern. The Romans expected the world to end in 634 BC owing to a prophecy involving twelve eagles, while the early Christians anticipated the Final Judgement in their own lifetimes. Pope Sylvester II thought AD 1000 would be the last year - a view updated for the modern age by the Millennium bug.

Clearly expectations of a final disaster are part of man’s psychology and the doomsayers of the quasi religious. The Green movement certainly fits the bill. However this time we really do have a greater consensus on climate change and more science behind us. People trust science in many areas, so why not climate? Our growing energy bills may aid skepticism, but not all members of the Green movement are as extreme as the stereotype some in the media like to portray.

Many desire a return to a free market by removing regulation to create more competition in pricing and increase supply. Politicians know that their constituents will suffer this winter and some elderly may die because they cannot afford fuel. Thus you could argue that alarmism is aiding this unfortunate scenario. However, ultimately it is more of a societal problem that we have people unable to afford fuel. Resisting a move towards cleaner energy is short-sighted. Given the abundance of coal left (at least 50 years at current rates of usage), I fear that a free market would rely on coal for far too long, to the detriment of our Earth systems. We need to continue trying to further enhance investment into our future energy supply, which is a great opportunity for all, despite some short-term pains.

I know this wasn't strictly on tipping points... but hey it sure is related, and it has been a fun post to write!

A Safe Operating Space For Humanity

Hello dashing readers,

I thought after my initial introduction it would be a good idea to show you some actual proposed thresholds/boundaries. This will hopefully make everything a little less conceptual and more real. John R Rockstrom et. al. (et. al. meaning all the other authors involved) wrote a great report for the Stockholm Resilience center that was summarized in Nature (one of the main scientific journals) a few years back. The title of the article is the title of this post.

The report and article proposed that to meet the challenge of maintaining a Holocene state, a framework based on ‘planetary boundaries‘ would have to be established.. These planetary boundaries define the safe operating space for humanity with respect to the Earth system and processes (climate circulations, chemical pollution etc.).

•    
    Thus Rockstrom and his colleagues made three key points: -

1. A new approach for defining preconditions for human development.
2. Crossing certain biophysical thresholds could have disastrous consequences for humanity.
3. Three of nine interlinked planetary boundaries have already been overstepped.

 

Although Earth’s complex systems can respond smoothly to change this is likely to be an exception and one would more likely expect an abrupt, non-linear change. Particular sensitivity will be experienced approaching a threshold, as well of the possibility of irreversible change as we have previously discussed last week (a tipping point). An example would be the impact on the monsoon system. Many people heavily rely on these periods of inundation, as with out crops will likely fail. The monsoons have historically been expected over certain areas at certain points in the year, if this were to be altered too drastically then it is likely many people would suffer, even to the point of starvation.

Some of these thresholds are easier to define than others i.e. can be defined by one control variable. An example would be CO2 concentrations described in parts per million (ppm). You may remember earlier in the year when CO2 surpassed 400ppm (temporarily due to seasonality issues, it’s currently at 393ppm) and the consequential fuss about global warming that was made (rightly so). Other thresholds for land and water degradation make it harder to draw a red line at a certain point due to it being intertwined with other aspects of our landscape,.

Figure 1 below displays the 9 processes that Rockstrom et. al. felt if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change.

Figure 1: The inner green shading represents the proposed safe operating space for nine planetary systems. The red wedges represent an estimate of the current position for each variable. The boundaries in three systems (rate of biodiversity loss, climate change and human interference with the nitrogen cycle) have already been exceeded.

Table 1 below builds on figure 1, giving detailed description of the boundaries, the earth system process being impacted and the analyses behind them.

From table 1 we can see that humanity is, in addition to the three boundaries transgressed already, soon to surpass the boundaries for global freshwater use, change in land use and ocean acidification also.

The planetary boundaries are described in terms of individual quantities and separate processes, but the boundaries are tightly coupled. If one boundary is broken, then other boundaries are also under serious risk. For instance, significant land-use changes in the Amazon could influence water resources as far away as Tibet (That’s more than 11,000 miles away). Or the climate-change boundary depends on staying on the safe side of the freshwater, land, aerosol, nitrogen–phosphorus, ocean and stratospheric boundaries. Infringing on the nitrogen–phosphorus boundary can erode the resilience of some marine ecosystems, potentially reducing their capacity to absorb CO₂ and thus affecting the climate boundary. Think of poor Nemo and friends….

As you can see it can get very complex very quickly given the huge number of factors and dynamic nature of the relationships. Thus although some boundary breaks are headline grabbing, they are all a concern.

It is worth noting that the authors took a conservative approach to quantifying the boundaries. This was due to a sensible risk-averse approach and baring in mind the large uncertainties over the true position of many thresholds, as gaps in our knowledge base exist. Most interesting of these currently being the allowed overshoot time of our already transgressed boundaries before positive feedback loops take hold (X produces more of Y which in turn produces more of X), so we might not be able to return back to safe prior levels.

Large criticisms can be thrown at this paper over some of the proposed boundaries. We aren’t actively monitoring on a large/long enough scale many of the processes influencing our thresholds. Thus due to the difficulty of making global estimates the authors took their best educated guess in some areas. The links between these somewhat unknown systems further complicating the situation, as they can’t be studied in isolation. Despite all this we still widely agree that the best scenario for humanity is below the limits set (so we need to backtrack), where long-term social and economic development can occur.

Thanks for reading, if you are interested in the full reports I’ve put the links to the pdf files below. I would particularly recommend the 2^nd link, lots of great simple to understand graphs to enjoy.

‘Remember if you meet someone, tell them about global warming, it’s a real icebreaker’.

PDFs

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/pdf/461472a.pdf

http://www.uu.nl/SiteCollectionDocuments/GEO/UCAD/rockstrom2.pdf

Tipping Points - Say Whaaaaaaaaaa?

This is my first foray into the world of blogging, of course the blog itself was strongly suggested as part of my course (a requirement)…. but the topic itself originated as thought due to numerous conversations with some climate sceptic friends. I will be focusing on climatic and ecological ‘tipping points’ (where systems shift radically and potentially irreversibly into a different state). These tipping points are essentially condition thresholds that if crossed could lead to a catastrophic situation for much of the world. Quite sciencey at points but it will mean that we can examine questions like: was the Day After Tomorrow total bulls**t or was there an element of truth in there?

I genuinely don’t mean to be alarmist though (believe it or not given the picture i just inserted) and we aren’t currently at this point of no return, but, we are heading towards a potential disaster at an alarming rate. Thus this blog seems an ideal opportunity to inform those sceptics of the seriousness of the situation we face, a situation I consider the greatest challenge we must all collectively deal with this century.  Of course I hope that anyone else reading this also gains an insight, confirms his or her view or comments on just how wrong I am.

In this first post I will try and put my blog topic in context with a quick introduction to the relevant details of environmental science. Continuing on, I will look more closely at these tipping points, the potential catastrophic situations we face (or just detrimental), as well as try and explain the importance of a switch towards clean or certainly cleaner energy.

In terms of the Earth’s long history (4.54 billion years), the environment has been unusually stable for the last 10,000 years. This era of steady state conditions (or epoch) – which geologists have called the ‘Holocene’ - has allowed, or at the very least aided, civilization to rise, develop and eventually thrive.

Since the industrial revolution, a new era is commonly believed to have arisen, although this isn’t yet agreed upon on a geological timescale. It has been termed the ‘Anthropocene’, essentially meaning a shift in the state of Earth system being dominated by natural processes to being dominated by man. It was the industrial revolution that allowed us to expand our industries and control our landscapes to such an extent and scale that man has been severely impacting on the Earth’s systems around us and on which we depend. This was as I’m sure you know based largely on the burning of and current reliance on fossil fuels. Simplistically the natural cycle adds and removes CO2 to keep a balance; humans add extra CO2 without removing any, so creating a new dynamic. We use atmospheric carbon dioxide as a principal, simple indicator to track the progression of the Anthropocene. There are of course many more impacting factors, which we can talk about, but that’ll have to wait my friends (DUN DUN DUN, to be continued).

This influence on the environment could see the earth leave the stable conditions we have been accustomed to during the Holocene, with consequences, that if pushed past feared environmental thresholds, are detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world. There are many complicating factors due to issues of timescales and regional differences but in essence by 2100 we may be facing anything from inconvenience to disaster if we continue in our business as usual fashion.

To end with I would like to note, that although fascinating, we ought to be doing our utmost to avoid these dangerous situations. Thus we can view these warnings, as recently given by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (more on this later), as an opportunity to change our operating systems.

I.E. Something like this…?