Climate Debate Daily

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Review of Lomborg’s new book

In the Financial Times, Clive Crook reviews Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,

One man who was not rooting for Al Gore to win the Nobel Prize was Bjorn Lomborg. The smiling Dane is the anti-Gore. Unimpressed with An Inconvenient Truth , his new book challenges many of that film’s alarming statements about global warming. Mr Gore and his admirers are paying no attention, needless to say, and that is a pity.

Lomborg’s capacity to anger his opponents is limitless. Of course, he disagrees with them, an outrageous affront in itself. He says that the state of the environment is not dire. He also argues that cutting greenhouse gas emissions should not be the world’s top priority, another scandalous provocation. He makes it worse by being pleasant and reasonable (not to mention Danish), turning up in T-shirt and jeans all the time, supporting his arguments with too many footnotes and acting in other ways designed to offend.

Freeman Dyson on global warming

Freeman Dyson is usually worth reading. Here he is on global warning and other matters.

Prices, prices, prices

From BBC’s website,

The focus on reducing carbon emissions has blinded us to the real problem - unsustainable lifestyles, says Eamon O’Hara.[...]

We urgently need to think about the more fundamental concept of sustainability and how our lifestyles are threatening not only the environment, but developing countries and global peace and stability[...].

How many people are tired and weary of modern living? The endless cycle of earning and consumption can be exhausting and does not necessarily bring happiness and fulfillment. Can we do things differently, and better?

I don’t think an appeal to our better selves to change our lifestyles is going to work. And I certainly don’t want the government to tell me in detail what I can or can’t do.

What we need to do is to get the prices right. The enormous environmental problems in China and India show what happens if you don’t get prices for water, power, and pollution right. This is not at all simple and easy to do; rich OECD countries are also struggling to get to grips with it. But it is absolutely fundamental.

Will Live Earth save the planet?

Nature magazine writes about the Live Earth concerts, “Concerts aim to save the Earth“.

Comedian Chris Rock says about Live Earth, “I think this will do for global warming what Live 8 did for ending world hunger.”

(Here is a classic Chris Rock video clip)

Terraforming Terra

What should scare us most, climate change or hubristic schemes to mitigate climate change?

The unintended negative consequences of e.g. biofuel production from food crops are large, and include tortilla riots in Mexico because of rising food prices, destruction of rainforests in Indonesia to make way for palm oil plantations, and a general expansion of land under cultivation.

Here is a harbinger of things to come. A company plans to dump iron particles into the ocean in a 100 by 100 kilometer area near the Galapagos Islands in order to stimulate the growth of plankton.

In this case it is not the action of some mad scientist, it is business. The company is peddling “carbon offsets”.

What will be next? Why not seed the stratosphere with sulphur particles and claim carbon credits for that?

The biofuel fiasco and other well-meaning attempts to improve nature - think of the introduction of rabbits in Australia - should make us vary of climate change interventions.

How should we experiment with our poorly understood, nonlinear planetary systems? Very, very carefully.

Climate change is not as scary as climate change mitigation schemes that are driven by the combination of a powerful rent-seeking lobby, investors’ feeding frenzy, opportunistic politicians, and political correctness. Biofuel from food crops is one such scheme. There will no doubt be other even more ambitious schemes in the future. The danger is that they will do more harm than good, and that they will be almost impossible to stop because of the groups that benefit from them.

Update: BBC: Galapagos experiment sparks alarm.

Let me add that I don’t think that dumping 100 tons of iron filings in a 10,000 square kilometer area in the ocean is a cause for alarm. It is not going to trigger a new ice age, destroy the Galapagos ecosystem, or end intelligent life on Planet Earth. The main effect will be to relieve some rather naive people of some of their cash when they pay for carbon offsets.

Tie carbon taxes to actual levels of warming?

Ross McKitrick has a proposal for harmonized carbon taxes tied to temperature. Note that if temperatures fell, this would turn into a carbon emissions subsidy. Somehow I don’t think that global-warming activists would buy into this. Why not?

The Clean Development Mechanism under fire

The Clean Development Mechanism isn’t working. From The Guardian,

Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved

Abuse and incompetence in fight against global warming

If a significant number of the 1,900m CDM credits [Clean Development Mechanism; it is supposed to offset greenhouse gases emitted in the developed world by selling carbon credits from elsewhere] waiting in the pipeline also prove to be bogus, the whole Kyoto project would start to backfire.

The Kyoto project is not credible. And as Charles de Gaulle said about treaties,

Treaties are like girls and roses. They last while they last.

The $40 billion handout

This week’s survey in The Economist of business and climate change explains why the US is likely to get a cap-and-trade system (as in the EU), rather than a carbon tax.

If the American governments adopts a cap-and-trade system [...], it will hand out permits to pollute. They are, in effect, cash. According to Paul Bledsoe of the National Commission on Energy Policy, those allowances are likely to be worth in the region of $40 billion. Companies therefore want to be involved in designing those regulations. As Mr Rogers explains: “There is a saying in Washington: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” [...]

A tax would be a better option. Unlike a cap-and-trade system, which stipulated the amount of CO2 that may be emitted and allows the price to vary, a tax sets a price and lets it determine the quantity emitted. [...] But the prospects for a tax are not good. Business - particularly in America - is allergic to the very word; and the allowances which companies tend to be handed in the early stages of a cap-and-trade system have an obvious appeal to companies concerned about rising costs.

There is an academic discussion (e.g. here and here) about which is better, a carbon tax or cap-and-trade. But the discussion will remain academic. The $40 billion cap-and-trade allowance giveaway offers so many opportunities for patronage, lobbying, and campaign contributions from firms that stand to benefit that it is hard to see how a carbon tax could stand a chance. And on top of that, it is called a “tax”.

Quote of the day

From this week’s survey of business and climate change in The Economist,

Climate change is fashionable, and although fashion has the virtue of being able to transform the dull and worthy into the hip and happening, it is, by definition, transitory. Hollywood stars will probably get bored of their Priuses, and executives may become weary of mouthing green platitudes and move on to whatever branch of corporate social responsibility next catches the popular imagination.

Sustainable consumption

Below the fold, the second part of the report on sustainable consumption from Stratfor. The first part is here.

Carbon trading and subsidies

In the excellent series the Financial Times has been running on carbon trading, Fiona Harvey writes that

Power generators will make tens of billions of euros in profit from the second phase of the European Union’s emissions trading scheme, according to predictions in an analysis of the market released on Friday.

Companies don’t have to pay for most of the carbon they may emit, they are issued with allowances.

Across the EU, governments plan to auction only 1.5 per cent of the available allowances. Electricity generators are expected to profit by passing on the cost of buying allow­ances to customers in lib­­eralized electricity markets.

The EU Emissions Trading Scheme is a scheme that provides huge subsidies for power generators, most of which are coal powered.

Biofuels and greenhouse gasses

The demand for biofuels is driving the destruction of forests and the emission of greenhouse gasses.

Origin of greenhouse gasses:

• Deforestation 25%
• Transport and industry 14%
• Aviation 3%

From The Independent (via EcoWorld),

Most people think of forests only in terms of the CO2 they absorb. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia are thought of as the lungs of the planet. But the destruction of those forests will in the next four years alone, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern, pump more CO2 into the atmosphere than every flight in the history of aviation to at least 2025.

Indonesia became the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world last week. Following close behind is Brazil. Neither nation has heavy industry on a comparable scale with the EU, India or Russia and yet they comfortably outstrip all other countries, except the United States and China.

What both countries do have in common is tropical forest that is being cut and burned with staggering swiftness. Smoke stacks visible from space climb into the sky above both countries, while satellite images capture similar destruction from the Congo basin, across the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo.

If CO2 offsets make sense in aviation (a rather large “if”), then people who use biofuels in their cars should buy offsets to make up for the CO2 emission caused by the deforestation taking place when biofuel plantations are established. But this is absurd.

A sensible first step would be to get rid of all subsidies for biofuels. Why should EU taxpayers, for example, subsidize palm oil plantations, rainforest destruction, and greenhouse gas emissions in Indonesia and Malaysia?

Homage to Reid Bryson

Interview with Reid Bryson, “the father of the science of modern climatology.”

Via CCNet.

Carbon credit smokescreen

Financial Times reports under the headline Carbon trading schemes often not so green that there are

• Instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.

• Industrial companies profiting from doing very little - or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.

• Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.

• A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the credits’ true value.

• Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

Read the story here, also this story by Fiona Harvey Beware the carbon offsetting cowboys.

Ethanol and respiratory-related deaths

From ScienceDaily,

Using ethanol-based fuel instead of gasoline would likely increase the ozone-related death rate in Los Angeles by 9 percent in 2020, according to a new study by atmospheric scientist Mark Jacobson. (Credit: Mark Z. Jacobson)

The deleterious health effects of E85 [a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline] will be the same, whether the ethanol is made from corn, switchgrass or other plant products, Jacobson noted. “Today, there is a lot of investment in ethanol,” he said. “But we found that using E85 will cause at least as much health damage as gasoline, which already causes about 10,000 U.S. premature deaths annually from ozone and particulate matter. The question is, if we’re not getting any health benefits, then why continue to promote ethanol and other biofuels?

Top 10 plants for clean indoor air

Indoor air quality is often worse that outdoor air quality. What can you do about it? Grow these plants.

	Common name	Scientific name	Score
1	Areca palm	Chrysalidocarpus lutescens	8.5
2	Lady palm	Rhapis excelsa	8.5
3	Bamboo palm	Chamaedorea seifrizii	8.4
4	Rubber plant	Ficus robusta	8.0
5	Dracaena “Janet Craig”	Dracaena deremensis “Janet Craig”	7.8
6	English ivy	Hedera helix	7.8
7	Dwarf date palm	Phoenix roebelinii	7.8
8	Ficus Alii	Ficus macleilandii “Alii”	7.7
9	Boston fern	Nephrolepis exalta “Bostoniensis”	7.5
10	Peace lily	Spathiphyllum sp.	7.5

These are plants selected for their ability to remove indoor air pollution, based on research carried out for NASA’s Clean Air Study.

The score is based on four factors,

1. Removal of chemical vapours
2. Ease of growth and maintenance
3. Resistance to insect infestation
4. Transpiration rate

The information is from B.C. Wolverhampton. Eco-friendly House Plants: 50 indoor plants the purify the air in homes and offices. London: Seven Dials, 2000. For information about how to take care of the plants etc., see the book. These plants are very easy to take care of.

The Quartenary Conundrum

The Quartenary Conundrum is this: While current empirical and theoretical ecological forecasts suggest that many species could be at risk from global warming, during the recent ice ages surprisingly few species became extinct.

In a recent paper in BioScience, Forecasting the Effects of Global Warming on Biodiversity (pdf), Daniel Botkin et al. state that

Fossil evidence and recent ecological and genetic research, along with specific problems with present forecasting methods, lead us to believe that current projections of extinction rates are overestimates. Previous work has failed to adequately take into account mechanisms of persistence. [...]

Until recently, it was thought that past temperature changes were no more rapid than 1 degree Celsius (°C) per millennium, but recent information from both Greenland and Antarctica, which goes back approximately 400,000 years, indicates that there have been many intervals of very rapid temperature change, as judged by shifts in oxygen isotope ratios. Some of the most dramatic changes (e.g., 7°C to 12°C within approximately 50 years; Macdougall 2006) are actually of greater amplitude than anything projected for the immediate future. [...]

What, then, is the answer to the Quaternary conundrum? The answer appears to lie in part with the ability of species to survive in local “cryptic” refugia, that is, to exist in a patchy, disturbed environment whose complexity allows faster migration than forecast for a continuous landscape, within which species move only at a single rate. The answer also lies in part with greater genetic heterogeneity within species, including local adaptations,which allows rapid evolution. For example, populations close to latitudinal borders are likely to be better adapted to some environmental changes than the average genotype. However, the conundrum is not completely solved, and some important genetic research suggests that species are more vulnerable than the fossil record indicates. A fuller solution to the conundrum will be important for improving forecasts of climate change effects on biodiversity.

HT Carl Zimmer.

Note that this is not a call for complacency, it is a call for better models of climate change effects on extinctions.

Ben-Ami on Sachs

Daniel Ben-Ami reviews Jeffrey Sachs’ first Reith Lecture on Spiked.

Sachs has played a key role in transforming the contemporary mood of pessimism into a coherent intellectual system.

Global warming mitigation and adaptation

As several people have observed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report favors mitigation over adaptation. Read for example here,

“…the IPCC continuously tries to deemphasize the importance of adaptation as development, for instance writing that,

there are formidable environmental, economic, informational, social, attitudinal and behavioural barriers to implementation of adaptation.

Of course the exact same thing could be said about mitigation (but is not said), and by contrast the IPCC always frames mitigation in a positive light:

Many impacts can be avoided, reduced or delayed by mitigation.”

Mitigation favors global solutions such as the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. It favors states, international organizations, and international bureaucracies. Mitigation is based on a belief that a central elite can set the rules and manage away our problems, it is managerialism.

In contrast, adaptation is local. The power to act must therefore be with local people, not with international organizations. The best way of empowering local people so that they can adapt is to make them prosperous. That means economic opportunities. An emphasis on adaptation therefore leads to radically different policies. These policies would not necessarily lead to an increase in power and funding for international organizations.

Of course we also need mitigation, but the present bias against adaptation only makes sense if we assume that it is in the nature of bureaucracies to want to accumulate money and power.