Iceland Does Its Bit Against Global Warming

It is notoriously claimed that every cloud has a silver lining, and those worried about climate change may be assured that this is true of ash clouds as well. It seems that although volcanos put out a great deal of CO2 themselves, it is estimated that the flight cancellations across Europe have resulted in a reduction in CO2 per day emmissions in excess of the (very roughly) estimated CO2 emmissions by day by the volcano itself.

Of course, this ignores the primary effect of ash-heavy volcanic erruptions, which is to reflect/block more sunlight in the atmosphere, thus producing a cooling trend which can last several years. When Krakatoa blew itself up in 1883, the following years was called "the year without a summer", with global average temperatures falling by 2.2 °F and the average temperatures not returning to trend until 1888. (In an interesting side note, the climate effects of Krakatoa also represented the last time that Western Europe suffered significant food shortages as a result of climate-induced crop failure. By the turn of the century, the global grain market was so well established that only war and economic disruption could cause food shortages in the developed world.)

So people stuck in airports across Europe can, at least, reflect that The Day After Tomorrow will now instead be The Day After the Day After Tomorrow (Or Perhaps The Next Day). And perhaps there's a way forward here in the contentious global warming debate. Surely we can all agree that volcanos are pretty cool. I think it's high time that we establish a UN panel to site new volcanos around the world. Each industrial nation will be required to host its fair share of volcano offsets. Sunsets will be more beautiful, the weather will be cooler, and life will generally be more exciting. I, for one, welcome our new volcanic overlords.

What Virtue In False Promises?

One of the things that strikes me repeatedly watching the global warming debate (especially in the lead-up to and in the wake of the Copenhagen conference) is the incredible amount of excitement people have about trying to get countries to make commitments in regards to CO2 emissions which they obviously are not going to keep.

For instance, in discussing their hopes for Copenhagen, a number of environmentalists expressed hope that there would not be another "do nothing" commitment such as the Kyoto Accord -- despite the fact that even those countries which did agree to Kyoto had not managed to keep those very modest commitments. The goals that environmentalists did very much want to see committed to (generally a 80-90% global drop in CO2 emissions within somewhere between 10 and 40 years) are far more aggressive, and thus far more unrealistic.

This struck me in particular when I stumbled across this advocacy piece, in which the author expresses hope that leaders of nations will commit to decreasing CO2 emissions by 80% in ten years (by 2020) and as a first step urges people to take the radical step of decreasing their "carbon footprints" by 25%. If committed environmentalists are only finding ways to decrease their household CO2 emissions by 25%, how in the world do they expect a whole country to drop its emissions by 80%?

Environmentalists have widely branded the Copenhagen summit as a failure because it didn't produce a firm commitment to massive CO2 emission reductions within a couple decades. Even beloved left-of-center leaders such as President Obama have been branded by their own base as "irresponsible" for not making strong commitments at Copenhagen. But if there simply does not seem to be a way to achieve such reductions, if even activists willing to significantly change their lifestyles in order to reduce their personal "carbon footprints" are not able to reliably achieve such drastic reductions in the short term, I fail to understand how it was "irresponsible" of Obama, Sarkozy, etc. to refuse to commit to doing something they frankly have no idea of how to do.

Wouldn't it be irresponsible to make a commitment you have no idea how to keep?

Programmer Smack Talk and Global Warming

I've been amused to watch some of the arguments going on out in the blogsphere as discussion of the hacking of the climate change servers moves off into a discussion of the quality of the code being used by climate researchers to model global warming.

Example:

Commenter One: Much of the code in the academic world tends to be written by grad students that have taken a class in programming and get told to write it.

Commenter Two: This is totally untrue. I never took a class in programming before writing my crappy undocumented code.

There's a certain wry self recognition for me here as well: I've never taken a class in programming, and I build mostly undocumented models to predict revenue and profits at specific price points based on past data. My results are directionally correct when you look at whole categories of products, but can be wildly off when projecting specific instances. (I try to make this clear to those who use my data, but people are always looking for certainty in life, even if they have to imagine it.)

The difference is, of course, that I'm seeking to mitigate the risks people take in making decisions that they're going to make anyway. "Gee, I really feel like we need to turn this product 50% off for the holidays." "Well, past experience shows that we wouldn't sell many more units, but would lose a whole lot of money. Let's try something else."

You would think that if you were going to, say, recommend that the entire world ratchet levels of CO2 emmissions back to the levels of the 1800s (with all the impacts to living standards and, let's be honest here, human life, which that entails), you would aspire to higher levels of accuracy and transparancy.

In a sense, I would imagine that these climate researchers have much the same justification for their actions that I do: They're just giving people common sense advise. I advise people not to waste too much profit margin. They advise people not to emit too much CO2.

Waste enough profit margin and your company goes out of business. Get enough CO2 in your atmostphere, and you get to enjoy the kind of climate that Venus has. From the point of view of serious environmentalists, who often seem to assume that any change made by humans to the planet is pretty clearly a bad thing, it may not seem like one needs to bring a lot of rigor to advising people to not burn fossil fuels. From that point of view, of course doing all these "unnatural things" will have bad consequences.

However, for the rest of us, the fact that modern industrial technology allows six billion people to live on this planet -- and for many of them to do so in greater material comfort than at any previous time in history -- is pretty clearly a good thing. And standing in front of that yelling "Stop" requires some pretty rigorous evidence. This isn't something that can be left to buggy code whose results are massaged into shape manually when they're going to come out into the light.

Blame the Neolithic

A brief article in The Economist relays some evidence a palaeoclimatologist has recently put forward that anthropogenic global warming began 5000-7000 years ago, as a result of slash-and-burn agriculture spreading throughout Europe and Asia. Or to be less exciting, ice core samples show that CO2 and methane levels started rising 5000-7000 years ago, and since it's known that agriculture was spreading widely at that time, Dr. William Ruddiman of UV Charlottesville (among others) argues that early agriculture may be to blame. Although the world population 5000 years ago was obviously much smaller, the efficiency of agriculture was so much lower (Ruddiman estimates per capita land use was 10x higher than in recent recorded history.

The idea of early societies causing heavy environmental tolls is not new. There's fairly wide support for the idea that deforestation and over-mining contributed to the collapse of the Bronze Age cultures in the Mediterranian. However, the idea that "global warming" started with the late neolithic is kind of charming. Please consider adopting a more hunter-gatherer lifestyle!

More practically, this strikes me as underlining that there is not some single, sacred, stability point which industrial civilization has destroyed. We humans and our planet have always had an effect on each other, and it's virtually impossible for us to avoid that. The course of wisdom lies in trying to avoid making more impact than necessary (while not setting unrealistic goals or stiffling development) and being prepared to deal with unwanted effects that may occur.

Speaking Hot and Cold on Climate Change

The weekend WSJ included a pair of articles discussing what president-elect Barack Obama should do about global warming. I sensed, and enjoyed, a little bit of editorial commentary in the authors selected:

British novelist Ian McEwan spins an airy confection of emotion and earnestness in his plea that Obama immediately work to shut down the carbon economy -- while making the seemingly contradictory claim that this would actually make people lots of money pioneering new technology if they would only forget their attachment to past energy sources. (As with so many climate change activists, he turns a blind eye to the nuclear power which is the real source of Europe's lesser reliance on coal and oil and instead touts the advantages of solar power.)

Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Business School pens a much more prosaic piece, looking at the costs behind proposed solutions, the humanitarian dangers of ignoring pressing problems like global hunger to pursue potential future ones such as global warming, and the ineffectiveness of Kyoto-style approaches to "solving" global warming.

One hopes that Lomborg's pragmatic approach will win out over the sentimental prose of McEwan, but in a world where presidents heal planets, one never knows.

It's Called a Market, Mr. Gore

Former Vice President Al Gore went on Meet the Press on Sunday, to talk (among other things) about his challenge to the country to switch to 100% "non-carbon" energy sources for electricity generation in ten years. The latest data I found in my quick check was from February, and it shows the US getting 6.2% of its power from hydro-electric sources, and 3.1% from "other" which includes wind, solar, biomass, etc. 19.7% of our power comes from nuclear, which is "non-carbon" although Gore fails to mention it and talks of going entirely to wind, solar and hydro-electric. So taking the most reasonable (if that word can be used when referring to things that come out of Mr. Gore's mouth) interpretation of Gore's suggestion, he wants to switch out the source of 71% of our power generation in ten years -- and do so by switching to sources from which we currently only manage to get 9.3% (Realistically, most of this would have to come from from the wind and solar sources -- since there's a limit to how many more major rivers we could dam up for power generation.)

Interviewer Tom Brokaw gets points for asking the question that many on the right wing have frequently posed. If reducing power consumption is so important, why does Gore live in a notoriously electricity hungry 10,000 sq. ft. mansion?

MR. BROKAW: Let me ask you about your personal lifestyle, because it's been the subject of a lot of dialogue on the blogs, as you know. You and Tipper have bought a big home outside of Nashville, and you had it retrofitted. But for a time there was a comparison between what the president has in Texas at his home as being more environmentally correct than your home. The Building Green Council gave you its second highest award. But Stephen Smith, who is with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, is troubled by the scale of your home. He said, "We all need to evaluate what we ... need in square footage." Present company included. We all have to look at scale, don't we? Why was it necessary for you to have a 10,000 square foot home? Because that is going to be more energy intensive than a smaller home for just the two of you.

VICE PRES. GORE: Well, there--I don't claim to be perfect, and all of us who care about this issue are, are trying to do our part, but I, I will say this. We buy green energy. The issue is carbon. The issue is carbon, and we have, essentially, a carbon-free home. We buy from wind energy and solar energy. Our roof is covered with solar electric panels, a geothermal system with all these deep wells, and we cut our natural gas bill by 90 percent, and I'm, I'm--we're, we're walking the walk and not just talking the talk. There are always people who are going to try to aim at the messenger if they don't like the message, and I don't claim to be perfect, but we are walking the walk.

This is in keeping with Gore's comments elsewhere in the interview in which he asserts that there is so much power available via wind and solar power that we really don't need to worry about reducing consumption but rather switching out sources. He throws out the rather meaningless figure, "There's enough solar energy that hits this--the surface of the planet in 40 minutes to provide a full year's worth of energy for the entire world." Perhaps so, but you would have to capture every bit of that solar energy, putting the entire world into a forty minute night by building a solar cell the size of the earth. The more relevant question is: how much power can realistically be generated by a sane number of solar cells, and how long does it take a solar cell to generate the same amount of energy that was required to manufacture it.

But let's get back to Gore's claim that the power consumption of his mansion is okay because it all comes from "green" sources. If I wanted, I could actually claim the same, because our electric billing company commits to getting all its electricity from hydro-electric, wind and solar. (I picked it because it doesn't scale billing rates according to usage, which is key around here in the summer.) But when there are power trading companies such as ours which will only from the "green" generators, that simply means that those companies which don't discriminate by source will by a higher mix of coal and natural gas produced power. Because power is interchangeable, the market will move the mix around to fit the available supply.

So unless Gore's use of a "green" power company is specifically tied to that company building more renewable power production facilities (and in de-regulated states where power providers and producers are split, this is not the case) it really doesn't matter if he buys from a "green" provider or a "dirty" provider. The same amount of power is generated from the same sources. And since burning coal or natural gas is much more scaleable (at low investment) than building more dams, windmills and solar panels -- if he uses more power that will result in more combustion-based electricity being produced, even if he is personally only paying a "green" company.

If he really wants to reduce the amount of CO2 he puts out, he needs to use less electricity. (In which having a house a fifth the size of his current mansion would be a good start.) And if he wants to make sure that more electricity comes from "non-carbon" sources, he needs to put his money where his mouth is and fund alternative energy production start ups. (He has done some of this, but given the starting costs, buying a few green energy stocks is not going to be nearly enough.) How about if instead of lecturing everyone, he first moves to a much smaller house, and then uses his political pull to get together the money to launch a major "green" power production company. This would give us the chance to sit back and see if Gore actually has the ability to run anything, and it would also be a very good test case to see if its actually possible to build and run additional "alternative energy" sources in anything like a net positive fashion.

Personally, if we want to switch out power production, the only real alternatives I see are nuclear in the near term and fusion in the very long term. But it would certainly be interesting to sit back and watch if Gore wants to give real work a serious try. Maybe he'd even learn a little bit of basic economics in the process!

Czech President on CO2 Emissions

Czech President Vaclav Klaus made news last week by giving a speech in which he "questioned global warming". He may do that as well (I know next to nothing about him and his positions) but the extract from his speech which I ran across in The Australian yesterday is more on the economic difficulties of actually reducing emissions. These arguments may be familiar, but they struck me as fairly well made in this instance, and it also struck me as significant coming from the leader of a nation which is still working to rebuilt itself after communist rule.

I recently looked at the European CO2 emissions data covering the period 1990-2005, the Kyoto protocol era. You don't need huge computer models to very easily distinguish three different types of countries in Europe.

In the less developed countries, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, which during this period were trying to catch up with the economic performance of the more developed EU countries, rapid economic growth led to a 53 per cent increase in CO2 emissions. In the post-communist countries, which went through a radical economic restructuring with the heavy industry disappearing, GDP drastically declined. These countries decreased their CO2 emissions in the same period by 32 per cent. In the EU's slow-growing if not stagnating countries (excluding Germany where its difficult to eliminate the impact of the fact that the east German economy almost ceased to exist in that period) CO2 emissions increased by 4 per cent.

The huge differences in these three figures are fascinating. And yet there is a dream among European politicians to reduce CO2 emissions for the entire EU by 30 per cent in the next 13 years compared to the 1990 level.

What does it mean? Do they assume that all countries would undergo a similar economic shock as was experienced by the central and eastern European countries after the fall of communism? Do they assume that economically weaker countries will stop their catching-up process? Do they intend to organise a decrease in the number of people living in Europe? Or do they expect a technological revolution of unheard-of proportions?

It's often said that global warming will hit the poorest the hardest. That statement, however, overlooks the fact that any proposal with a realistic prospect of reducing CO2 emissions at a global level would also hit the poorest countries the hardest.

President Klaus also has what strikes me as a healthy respect for the difficulty of master planning systems:

What I see in Europe, the US and other countries is a powerful combination of irresponsibility and wishful thinking together with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project.

This brings me to politics. As a politician who personally experienced communist central planning of all kinds of human activities, I feel obliged to bring back the already almost forgotten arguments used in the famous plan-versus-market debate in the 1930s in economic theory (between Mises and Hayek on the one side and Lange and Lerner on the other), the arguments we had been using for decades until the moment of the fall of communism. The innocence with which climate alarmists and their fellow-travellers in politics and media now present and justify their ambitions to mastermind human society belongs to the same fatal conceit. To my great despair, this is not sufficiently challenged, neither in the field of social sciences, nor in the field of climatology.

The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong. They believe in their own ability to assemble all relevant data into their Central Climate Change Regulatory Office equipped with huge supercomputers, in the possibility of giving adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of individuals and institutions.

We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. We need to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.

This does not necessarily mean a refusal to do anything to be responsible about one's environmental impact, I think, but it does point out the inherent problem that comes about when very smart people decide to make the world better: They may know a great deal, but seldom as much as they think.

Awarded are the Peace Makers

Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this year.

Some might consider it odd for the award to be shared by a committee whose stated purpose is simply to assess trends and recommend solutions rather than to actually do anything. However, I think it's clear that the Nobel committee's purpose (as has been the case with several recent Nobel awards) is more to say "this is important -- listen to this person" than actually to acknowledge accomplishments. In making the award the Nobel committee said:

"He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted," said Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the Nobel committee.

In making the announcement, Mjoes said, "Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.

"Thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming." (CNN story, source)

One wonders, however, whether the Nobel committee (whose wisdom has not exactly been unquestioned recently) is picking the best course here. Certainly, it's true that Gore is probably the most well known person associated with global warming advocacy. However being the best known if not necessarily the same as being the best.

If one wants concern over global warming to be taken seriously, and I would assume that the Nobel Committee falls in this category, you would think you would want to avoid being fully identified with someone who is seldom afraid to let the scientific facts get in the way of the message when it comes to global warming.

For instance, unable to resist co-opting a disaster in the news, Gore famously announced that the destruction of Hurricane Katrina was the result of global warming, and that unless we were able to put in place stricter environmental controls, we could expect more of the same. In fact, the connection between global warming and hurricane frequency and strength is fairly tenuous, if it exists at all. The issue with Hurricane Katrina is that hurricanes don't know whether they're hitting populated areas built below sea level, or unpopulated areas. When you have a form of natural disaster which only arrives in full force (a maximum strength hurricane) every decade or two, and only hits a heavily populated area one time out of several -- it's entirely reasonable to expect this kind of event to happen on a century or greater spacing. That doesn't necessarily mean that this particular occurrence is the result of the cause celebre of the moment. It just means the occurrence is rare. (Galviston was leveled by a massive hurricane back at the turn of the last century -- an event that was fairly clearly not caused by global warming.)

Two things really bother me about the global warming movement as we see it now:

First, many modern environmentalists seem to see the Earth as a steady-state system. They imagine that the "natural" course is for the climate to remain the same, species never to go extinct, and regional ecosystems to remain stable. This often seems to lead to an attitude that sees humanity as The Problem. (Queue the Matrix' Mr. Anderson: "Humanity is a virus.") If only we didn't have six billion people mucking the planet up, everything would remain peaceful and beautiful just the way it is.

Now the fact is, to the extent that we humans are products of this world, we are products of the earth. Like every other species (and if one doubts this, one doesn't know much about how animal populations behave) we desire to be fruitful and multiply. Given the resources, we eat what we find, have children, and spread. Like other creatures, if we can change our environment to our benefit (or simply survive the changes that our spread causes) we continue to spread -- even if that results in effects that are negative to some other creatures. (If you think we're unique in this, ask a Australian cane toad.)

I don't want to suggest that we should not take into account the results of our actions. Unlike other creatures, we have the capacity to reason (when we're not watching TV or reading political forums, at any rate) and are called to be good stewards of the earth. However, this is where the fact that the earth is not static comes in. The earth has, at times, been much warmer than it is now, for completely natural reasons. It has also been colder. There have been times when ice sheets came down as far as the modern mid-west US (which is probably easy to believe in Chicago around January). As recently as a thousand years ago things were warm enough that Greenland was readily habitable, and grape vines grew wild in Newfoundland. Around ten thousand years ago, it was the increasing drying of the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East that drove populations into the river valleys, where agriculture and civilization began.

So while it's true that human activity is probably at least in part responsible for the current warming trend -- the fact also remains that we cannot assume that the earth won't go through changes all on its own that will have a highly negative impact on us humans. The planet is going to survive global warming just fine. The issue should not be "save the planet" but "save the humans".

This works around to the second thing that bothers me about the global warming movement: While on the one hand frequently exaggerating the possible dangers (threatening larger and more frequent hurricanes; claiming sea levels will rise over 2-3 decades rather than the scientifically supported 2-3 centuries) the solutions suggested by the global warming movement don't come anywhere close to dealing with the problem. If it's correct that the warming that has been observed is indeed evidence of a long term trend, and if greenhouse gas emissions caused by industrialization are the primary causes of that warming trend, then unfortunately driving a Prius and supporting solar and wind power generation aren't going to solve the problem.

It's often pointed out that the minority of the world's population that lives in the developed world is responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. This is true. However, when you look at greenhouse gas emission divided by gross national product, you find that the economies of the developed world are in fact the most efficient about avoiding greenhouse gas emissions in the world. In other words, the only reason why the undeveloped nations are currently emitting so few greenhouse gasses is that their economies are practically nonexistent. So even if the first world cut emissions by 50% (which is highly unlikely given current technology no matter how many Priuses people buy), if the third world gets anywhere close to modern first world standards, total greenhouse emissions would be up by a factor of 2-3.

So does that mean we should just throw up our hands an not do anything?

Well, no. Call me stingy, but I figure it's always one's duty not to use more resources than necessary. Conserving resources is good. However, ridiculing everyone who drives a fullsize pickup truck instead of a subcompact is not going to save the world. And unless one can somehow convince oneself that telling the third world to remain undeveloped (or coming up with some way to cut the Earth's human population in half) is anything other than wildly immoral -- we're going to have to face the likelihood that current levels of greenhouse gas emission aren't going down any time soon.

Given those things, I think the following are some of the more important things to think about:

-We'll have to wait and see how the evidence shapes up as far as whether this is a long term or short cycle warming trend that we have observed. A couple decades are next to nothing in the history of the planet, and our records on global climate cycles don't really go back accurately more than a couple hundred years. We also don't yet know how self-correct the climate is -- the Earth may well have its own ways of rebalancing the system.

-It certainly doesn't hurt us to try to be as efficient as possible and shift from fossil fuels to nuclear energy for power generation: there are a host of reasons that make that a good idea from oil politics to the mess involved in coal mining and burning. (And people who prefer solar and wind power need to recognize that these are not net positive enough in energy creation to be large scale successes.)

-We should put some serious research into CO2 reclamation possibilities. The most obvious solution to this is something many traditional environmentalists may not like: CO2 is consumed by plants. If you want to get rid of lots of CO2, you want to develop a plant that grows very, very quickly and ends up in some sort of fairly easily dealt with solid waste. (If plant material decomposes or decays, you get the CO2 back out again.) Perhaps there are other good methods of reclaiming CO2 as well. However, whatever they are, they may well involve genetically modified organisms and other things that many environmentalists don't like. They'll need to deal.

-And finally, we may simply have to deal with the fact that the earth is changing -- if it is. The history of humanity is one of migrations and changes. Goodness knows, it would be horrendously sad if 300 years from now Venice is thirty feet under water. And yet, if one thing has been constant throughout human history is has been that we have dealt with change. We've moved, we've built, we've moved again. We've found new ways to feed ourselves, new places and ways to live. It would be terribly sad if it turned out to be the case that the oceans reclaimed many old sea-side cities a couple hundred years from now: and yet the real treasures of humanity are the several billion souls that are living out their lives on this planet.