I’ve just uploaded beta version 0.0.1 of “Lou’s Energy and Environmental Clock”. It’s now a fully self-contained HTML + CSS + JavaScript page, which means it should (he typed nervously) run on Windows, Linux, Macs, or any other system that has browser released in this century.

Get it here.

This version is a complete re-write of the energy clock Windows program I released some time back that I know was popular with quite a few people.

Please note that this is a beta version, and beta comes from the Latin for “guaranteed to be so riddled with bugs and stupid design errors that you’ll wonder why the doofus programmer ever let it see light of day”. Consider yourself warned.

I plan to do a series of these clocks focused on different energy and environmental metrics, as time permits and I receive “interesting” suggestions from all you people who live on the other side of my screen.

While all feedback is welcome, right now I most want to hear about problems–it won’t work right on a particular mobile device (and I have none of those, so I’m relying on others to do that part of the testing) or browser or whatever oddity you run into. If you report a problem please make sure to tell me exactly which OS and browser you’re running, and anything else about your system that could be relevant.

So that’s it. Give it a spin and let me know what you think, either in a comment below or in a direct e-mail.

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NYISO (New York Independent System Operator has released Alternate Route: Electrifying the Transportation Sector: Potential Impacts of Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles on New York State’s Electricity System [17 page, 277KB PDF]. From the executive summary:

Plug-in Electric Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs) represent a new stage in the evolution of hybrid electric vehicles in which the electric “plug” for charging batteries has the potential to supplement the “pump.” Several automobile manufacturers have announced plans to introduce PHEVs. President Barack Obama has called for new programs to support PHEV development and deployment. In New York State, Governor David Paterson has announced the creation of the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY BEST). The Consortium, one of the first of its kind in the nation, will focus on the development and manufacturing of advanced and affordable battery technologies for the purpose of advancing the PHEV industry here in New York. General Electric also announced a new initiative for the development of advanced batteries, with manufacturing facilities expected to be built in New York State.

The timing and magnitude of potential electric load from PHEVs will be determined by several key factors. These include consumer acceptance of PHEVs, the advancement of battery storage technologies, and the availability/location of PHEV-charging infrastructure. Two studies, one by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and another conducted jointly by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) concluded that incremental load for PHEVs in New York would be in the range of 7,000-8,000 gigawatt-hours per year (GWH/yr)by 2030.

PHEV load can also migrate and occur intermittently, as PHEV-charging opportunities (as an electric load) expand beyond the owner’s home and depend on travel schedules. If charging patterns are managed properly, PHEVs with loads in the range predicted by these studies could be served by the existing New York bulk power system. The migratory nature of this load, however, does require further analysis to fully assess the impact of PHEV load on local electric distribution systems.

If the charging pattern of PHEVs is not managed effectively, loads of this size could require significant additional generation capacity. Rate design to encourage off-peak charging, coupled with time-of-use rates, and Smart Grid/Advanced Metering Initiatives, would facilitate favorable charging behavior. Advanced communication protocols between the recharging location and an evolving Smart Grid could also facilitate effective management of charging patterns.

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Laurel Graefe, a senior economic researcher working for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has written an excellent overview of peak oil, “The Peak Oil Debate” [16page, 1.6MB PDF].

I consider this a must-read piece, as much for armchair oil experts as beginners, and as much for who published this as what it contains. This should be very high on your list of “brother-in-law” documents, the ones you can safely recommend to co-workers, neighbors, or, well, your brother in law.

While Graefe has taken a decidedly middle of the road approach, which will be enough all by itself to infuriate the Apocalypticons, she also touches on several points that I would have expected a publication from any part of the Fed to ignore.

I should also mention that if you’re one of those economist-haters who have seizures when I or one of my fellow dismal scientists does the “on the other hand…” thing, then you should probably read this only under the influence of a suitably calming libation. I thought Graefe used this technique properly, in that she highlighted some of the rampant uncertainties involving oil, but at no point did I think she was hiding behind a false question to escape taking a position.

The notable details, in no particular order:

• The paper talks about peak oil, by that name, without condescending to prefacing it with “so called” or anything similar. I know this sounds like a triviality, but I think it’s critical to de-demonize the term so that politicians and voters can talk about it without all the baggage that the term has grown over the years.
• Graefe tells us on page 1 that “The term ‘peak oil’ is not about running out of oil; oil; we will likely have oil to pump for generations to come. Peak oil refers instead to the inevitable point at which the world’s energy output can no longer increase, and production begins to level off or decline.”
• She gives the reader an excellent overview of the kinds of oil we use–conventional vs. unconventional, proved vs. probable vs. possible reserves, deep sea reserves, etc.–and never strays far from two critical details, the cost and the role of technological advancement in extracting various kinds of oil.
• She mentions on page 7 what I consider the key detail in our run-up to peak oil: “Still, despite their drawbacks, nonconventional resources will likely play an increasingly important marginal supply role in the future as reserves that are easier and cheaper to produce become depleted.” This is the mechanism that (1) will impact human beings and (2) give us the needed incentives to transition away from oil, both via increased prices. The view, sometimes implied quite subtly in online conversations, is that we’re going to hit a wall at full speed when we reach the peak. That characterization is as wrong as it is cartoonish.
• Graefe also talks candidly about Matt Simmons’ number one issue (and references his work in a footnote), the lack of transparency in oil reserve numbers.
• In talking about oil prices in 2008, she says:
  

  However, the price spike also had an upside: Consumers began to drive less and conserve more, while businesses and producers set out ambitious plans to invest in energy-saving technology and upgrade outdated equipment. Alternative (both nonconventional and renewable) sources of energy, which historically had been price prohibitive, emerged as attractive substitutes to $145 per barrel oil and gasoline above $4 a gallon. World oil demand plummeted as record prices and a worldwide economic slowdown forced consumers to cut back on their energy use. But just as talk of a new green era was entering the mainstream, crude prices retreated as quickly as they had come.

  I found this notable simply because of the explicit comment that driving less and conserving more were positive developments. This is a mindset that can only help us in the coming years.

• The last three grafs of the paper deserves quotation in full (emphasis added):
  

  The supply of energy as we have known it is in the process of transition. Today’s “easy” conventional oil that the world relies upon as a primary energy source is being depleted, and, regardless of the exact timing of peak oil production—be it this year or fifty years down the road— the world faces the challenge of adapting to a new model of energy supply. Although the peak oil literature tends to concentrate heavily on the scenarios of peaking world oil production, the true underlying issue is a fear that the transition from conventional oil to substitutes will be expensive and chaotic, leaving insufficient time for supply substitution and adaptation.

  This adaptation process—which involves using more renewable resources and conservation and developing new technology and processes to better access hydrocarbon deposits and more efficiently extract and refine nonconventional sources—has already begun. But the road to the future energy balance—one with dwindling amounts of conventional oil—is far from mapped out.

  It is possible that the world’s vast endowments of hydrocarbon resources will be heavily relied upon to answer this growing call for substitutes for the conventional oil supply. However, there is also potential for an energy future largely diversified away from hydrocarbon use. Most likely, future energy sources will be a combination of the two. Perhaps the peak oil literature would better serve society by being more solution-oriented, focusing on discovering the best way to transition to a world with less conventional oil rather than locking horns about discrepancies in terminology.

  Do I have to say how delighted I am to see this emphasis on the timing of the transition and her rebuke of the more obsessed members of the peak oil community? I didn’t think so.

To be sure, I think there are some problems, or at a minimum, things I would have preferred to see done differently in this paper.

No mention of Chris Skrebowski’s bottom-up analysis of world oil supply? Given his methodology and background, not to mention his 2011 prediction, I think this stands out as a conspicuous omission.

It’s “Fatih Birol”, not “Faith Birol” (page 12). Death to spellcheckers!

My biggest concern is that the overall paper is so controlled in tone that a newcomer to the field who hasn’t read Simmons, Skrebowski, Aleklett, or any of the other rational people writing about peak oil could jump to the conclusion that, “Nobody knows what’s going to happen, so I’m not going to change anything or worry about it. Things will work themselves out.” That’s precisely the mindset that will be most damaging, since there is still quite a lot people can do individually and through their influence over concentrations of power (via their vote and spending patterns) before they’re forced to take action by much higher oil prices in just a few years.

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MIT has made the copious material from its symposium in March regarding CCS (carbon capture and storage) available: Retro-Fitting of Coal-Fired Power Plants for CO2 Emissions Reductions.

That page has 31 PDFs (according to DownloadThemAll), enough that I won’t even pretend that I’ve had a chance to read them all–yet.

Note that the MIT link above is a generic link to the reports page for the MIT Energy Initiative, so in time this material will likely move to a different web address.

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Just in case you thought all that chatter about permafrost wasn’t scary enough, we now have an indication that (everyone repeat after me) it’s worse than we thought. In this case I’m happy to say that it’s not a new sign that what’s up there is melting any faster than we thought, but that there’s twice as much carbon up there. While the news isn’t as bad as it could have been, it’s plenty sobering, all the same.

Super-size deposits of frozen carbon threat to climate change(emphasis added):

The vast amount of carbon stored in the arctic and boreal regions of the world is more than double that previously estimated, according to a study published this week.

The amount of carbon in frozen soils, sediments and river deltas (permafrost) raises new concerns over the role of the northern regions as future sources of greenhouse gases.

“We now estimate the deposits contain over 1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere”, said Dr. Charles Tarnocai, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa, and lead author.

Dr. Pep Canadell, Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project at CSIRO, Australia, and co-author of the study says that the existence of these super-sized deposits of frozen carbon means that any thawing of permafrost due to global warming may lead to significant emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.

Carbon deposits frozen thousands of years ago can easily break down when permafrost thaws releasing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, according to another recent study by some of the same authors.

“Radioactive carbon dating shows that most of the carbon dioxide currently emitted by thawing soils in Alaska was formed and frozen thousands of years ago. The carbon dating demonstrates how easily carbon decomposes when soils thaw under warmer conditions,” said Professor Ted Schuur, University of Florida and co-author of the paper.

The authors point out the large uncertainties surrounding the extent to which permafrost carbon thawing could further accelerate climate change.

“Permafrost carbon is a bit of a wildcard in the efforts to predict future climate change,” said Dr Canadell. “All evidence to date shows that carbon in permafrost is likely to play a significant role in the 21st century climate given the large carbon deposits, the readiness of its organic matter to release greenhouse gases when thawed, and the fact that high latitudes will experience the largest increase in air temperature of all regions.”

Carbon in permafrost is found largely in northern regions including Canada, Greenland, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, Scandinavia and USA.

The carbon assessment is published this week in the journal of “Global Biogeochemical Cycles” of the American Geophysical Union, and the radiocarbon study was recently published in the journal of Nature.

The papers are:

• Soil organic carbon pools in the northern circumpolar permafrost region [11 page 644KB PDF]
• Vulnerability of Permafrost Carbon to Climate Change: Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle

The second paper can be read at the link above, but the PDF download link wouldn’t work for me. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

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One of the “magic numbers” in energy and environmental issues is 2C, as in we can only allow 2C degrees of warming over pre-industrial levels before we trigger truly nasty consequences.

I’m sure that like me, most people reading this site have seen this number quoted endlessly. But where did it come from, I wondered, and how valid is it?

I’ll save you the click-by-click replay of my online sleuthing, but I think I managed to track it down, using official or trustworthy sources.

The Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2009 says (page 18):

Deciding what level of climate change is dangerous and what might be safe is not a purely scientific question. It involves normative and political judgments about acceptable risks. Science has, however, a fundamental role to play in providing information and analysis relevant to this question and has contributed to policy and political debates on acceptable levels of climate change since the 1980s.

By the late 1980s the scientific community had begun to recognize that a warming of much more than 1–2 degrees Celsius over the preindustrial level could lead to rapid and adverse changes to many human and natural systems. In 1986 the U.N. Environment Programme set up an Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases, which in 1990 reported that a 2-degree warming could be “an upper limit beyond which the risks of grave damage to ecosystems, and of non-linear responses, are expected to increase rapidly.” Also in the late 1980s the Enquete Komission, a joint committee of German parliamentarians and scientists, sought to define acceptable limits. Warming more than 0.1 degree Celsius per decade was seen as especially risky to forest ecosystems, with an overall acceptable maximum warming estimated to be 1–2 degrees Celsius. In 1995 the German government’s Global Change Advisory Council found that 2 degrees Celsius should be the upper limit of “tolerable” warming.

Efforts to define acceptable limits to warming at a political level started in the European Union and among its member states. Based on the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report at the end of 1995, the European Union’s Council of Environment Ministers in 1996 called for warming to be limited to 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level. Nearly a decade later this position was confirmed by European Union Heads of Government after consideration and debate over the findings of the IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment Report, as well as more recent scientific developments. Since 2005 other countries have joined in calling for global mean warming to be limited to 2 degrees: Chile, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, the Least Developed Countries, and Small Island Developing States. The latter two groups of countries have argued that 2 degrees may in fact be too much warming if their safety and survival are to be guaranteed.

I also stumbled upon this presentation by Bill Hare, “The EU, the IPCC and 2C” [26 page, 6.3MB PDF] from 2008, which gives the history of the magic 2C number, picking up the trail with a 1989 UNEP report.

If you want to do some of your own detective work, one good place to start is with a Google search for “1939th European Council Meeting Luxembourg 25 June 1996″.

I think it’s reasonable to conclude from these and other sources:

• The 2C threshold is not a recent and untested finding. It’s been around for roughly 20 years.
• It’s been reexamined several times over that time span and found to be a reasonable metric.
• Despite all the science involved, as the State of the World 2009 quote above correctly points out, there’s more to it than science. We have to make some of those endlessly nasty value judgments, even before we add politics to the mix. How much should we expect China or the US to reduce their CO2 emissions if the other one is perceived as not doing “enough”? How much will or should the US or China or the EU do in response to climate impacts far from their (perceived) immediate interests? You can add your own thorny problems to the list.

But… that doesn’t feel to me like the whole story, for a fairly obvious reason: We’ve seen a steady drumbeat of “it’s worse than we thought” scientific findings over the last few years. Just the quicker melting of long-lived ice in Greenland and many glacier fields around the world, Arctic ice and permafrost should be enough to get our undivided attention, given the implications for positive feedbacks (albedo flip in the Arctic, permafrost bomb) as well as direct impacts (loss of fresh water supplies from glaciers).

So, what happened? Did the original, 20-year old assessment that 2C was the knee in the curve just happen to be right, even before two more decades of observation and study? And if so, then what did we know then that we somehow forgot in order to be surprised by these recent revelations? Or has the science community simply held onto 2C of temperature rise and 2100 as a planning horizon out of inertia?[1]

Could a lack of faith in this 2C metric be one reason why World will not meet 2C warming target, climate change experts agree:

Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed, a Guardian poll reveals today. An average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century is more likely, they say, given soaring carbon emissions and political constraints.

Such a change would disrupt food and water supplies, exterminate thousands of species of plants and animals and trigger massive sea level rises that would swamp the homes of hundreds of millions of people.

The poll of those who follow global warming most closely exposes a widening gulf between political rhetoric and scientific opinions on climate change. While policymakers and campaigners focus on the 2C target, 86% of the experts told the survey they did not think it would be achieved. A continued focus on an unrealistic 2C rise, which the EU defines as dangerous, could even undermine essential efforts to adapt to inevitable higher temperature rises in the coming decades, they warned.

…

The poll asked the experts whether the 2C target could still be achieved, and whether they thought that it would be met: 60% of respondents argued that, in theory, it was still technically and economically possible to meet the target, which represents an average global warming of 2C since the industrial revolution. The world has already warmed by about 0.8C since then, and another 0.5C or so is inevitable over coming decades given past greenhouse gas emissions. But 39% said the 2C target was impossible.

I realize the scientists were not asked about the accuracy of the 2C guideline, but whether we could stay under that threshold. As asked, this is largely a question about the responsiveness of the world’s citizens and governments, not one of science. But I’d guess that many of those scientists also considered feedback mechanisms, one of the key areas where things are “worse than expected”. They complicate the situation significantly because they change the conversion rate, if you will, for translating a given amount of warming into real world human impacts. We have a pretty good handle on mapping a level of CO2 emissions to an initial amount of warming (despite what some of the deniers will tell you until your ears bleed), at least before the feedbacks get into the act. Once we take that second step and try to map warming to impacts, we’re dealing with more dynamic mechanisms, things get much more complicated. One prime example is glacial melt water draining through cracks and lubricating the underlying rocks, allowing the glaciers to move quicker and break up sooner.

Another issue here is this cognitive gap between what scientists really think and what they’re willing to stake their reputations on by saying publicly. Answering a newspaper reporter’s poll is one thing, stating something as a scientific conclusion in a journal article is something else entirely. But as I pointed out recently (see Climate chaos, indeed), we’re now seeing some on-the-record assessments from the scientific community that we have almost zero chance of staying within 2C of warming, and should instead be focused on something closer to 4C.

The bottom line is I’m still not sure what to think about 2C. Even though the official consensus of the scientific community still seems to say that it’s the critical demarcation between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” human impacts (with all the fuzziness those judgments imply), it’s feeling more and more like the next magic number that will be adjusted in a direction we won’t like, just as our assessment of the critical level of atmospheric CO2 went from 550ppm to 450ppm, with James Hansen, among others, making the case that it should be 350 [PDF].

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[1] Just to be painfully clear on this point: I’m not beating up the climate scientists by suggesting they’ve fallen into orbit around a point of conventional wisdom. We all do this, and while I’m sure scientists are much less susceptible to making this particular mistake than is the average layperson, I’m equally sure they’re not immune to it.

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Graph(s) of the week: Carbon emissions, measured in absolute yearly amounts and per capita levels, from the web site of CDIAC (Carbon dioxide Information Analysis Center), perhaps the most interesting and important US government site that not enough energy and environmental geeks know about. One of these graphs is terrifying, and I’m willing to bet that it’s not the one most of you would have picked after a quick glance (at least without this spoiler).

Please note that the values graphed below are carbon, not CO2. I normally try to stick to talking about CO2, but the critical detail is the shape of the curves. Mentally scale the lines in these graphs upwards by a factor of 3.67, if you’re so inclined.

First up is annual global carbon emissions:

(Click on the graph to see a slightly larger version in a new window.)

Notice that this is not a plot of cumulative emissions, but yearly emissions. In other words, the steep slope of the curve is not an indication of how quickly the running total of carbon that humanity has poured into the atmosphere is rising. It’s a measure of how quickly our annual emissions have risen since roughly the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Next on our graphical hit parade is per capita carbon emissions:

(Click on the graph to see a slightly larger version in a new window.)

Worldwide per capita carbon emissions have remained relatively flat since the mid-1970’s. So surely the “terrifying” graph is the total, right? Well, no. I would argue that the per capita graph is the scary one, for a couple of very basic reasons[1]:

First, the world population is still rising, a lot. We’re currently in the neighborhood of 6.8 billion people[2], and the most common prediction I’ve seen is that world population will top out at around 9 billion in 2050. Call it an increase of one third over today’s level. If nothing else changes, meaning the mix of people in different economic groups and following various consumption patterns, the carbon intensity of the things those people do, etc., then we’re looking at a staggering increase in carbon emissions, from today’s 8 billion metric tons/year to about 10.6 billion metric tons/year, in a span of 41 years, less than the lifetime of a coal or nuclear power plant, and well within the lifetime of most people reading this site.

In other words, the per capita graph will have to decline noticeably from its current plateau.

How do we avoid that level of increase in carbon emissions? Some combination of fewer people and less carbon per person. That’s the easy, quick, and almost useless answer, given how difficult it will be to get the yearly emissions down enough to keep the atmospheric level low enough to avoid catastrophic consequences.

Second, the one key assumption I made above–”if nothing else changes”, a.k.a. ceteris paribus isn’t true. The worldwide CO2 emissions per person will rise unless we take heroic actions to prevent them. The issue is those oft-mentioned “developing countries”, most conspicuously China and India, two countries developing and growing their middle classes at an astonishing rate. And those middle classes are showing a marked tendency in their consumption patterns–more meat on their plates, more electrons in their homes, more motor vehicles–that sound very much like European and, dare I say it, American consumers.

Look closer at that per capita line. Not only is it not declining, it started to turn up around 2000. And that’s the value we multiply by the (rising) world population to arrive at the total yearly emissions. In other words, humanity faces the dual chores of de-carbonizing the “developed” nations as well as keeping a lot of the future growth in “developing” countries from carbonzing in the first place (and de-carbonizing some that’s already happened).

Terrified yet?

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[1] Careful readers will no doubt remember that I’ve argued against being too enamored of per capita or per GDP dollar numbers, because Earth’s climate doesn’t know or care about such derived statistics. It responds to aggregates–how much warming is triggered by the total level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, how much cooling is triggered by aerosols, etc. This is one time where I think the per capita number yields an unusually large amount of information, in the proper context.

[2] See the US Census Bureau’s population clock for a value of around 6.77 billion, and this one for a value of around 6.92 billion. For more information about the world population that you probably need or want to know, see Wikipedia’s entry.

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Yes, it’s true, my fellow geeks: The US Dept. of Energy has just released the Annual Energy Review 2008, the Bible of US energy statistics.

It’s 446 pages of graphs and tables, with very little space squandered on artwork and, you know, words.

The home page of the report is here, where you can download the entire document as one monolithic PDF or individual sections in PDF, Excel, or HTML format.

You can also grab the entire report directly here [446 page, 5.94MB PDF].

One reminder: Don’t plan on spending all day with our new toy. We’re all heading out to a Chinese restaurant for dinner.

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One of the enduring themes of this site is that we risk making very costly errors if we over-compartmenalize our perceptions. This is why I so often argue against the idea that we can pick one of the Twin Terrors (climate chaos and peak oil) and say, “This is the one that really matters–the other one will take care of itself.” Those among my fellow greenies who think that “peak oil is a good thing because it will prevent us from emitting so much CO2″ are merely indulging in an ever so slightly more nuanced version of the basic “this matters a lot and I can ignore that” mindset.

Of course, we can’t literally consider all things at once; we have to, and naturally do, compartmentalize many issues. Which size memory card to buy for my camera has no connection with whether I choose to cut the grass today or let it go and risk being delayed by further rain (to cite two recent, real-world examples from my own life). Many decisions are much less clear, and sometimes we get surprises, when the universe tells us that, golly gee, the rate of CO2 uptake of the Southern Ocean is affected by the state of the ozone layer:

New Scientist: Ozone hole has unforeseen effect on ocean carbon sink:

The Southern Ocean has lost its appetite for carbon dioxide, and now it appears that the ozone hole could be to blame.

In theory, oceans should absorb more CO2 as levels of the gas in the atmosphere rise. Measurements show that this is happening in most ocean regions, but strangely not in the Southern Ocean, where carbon absorption has flattened off. Climate models fail to reproduce this puzzling pattern.

The Southern Ocean is a major carbon sink, guzzling around 15 per cent of CO2 emissions. However, between 1987 and 2004, carbon uptake in the region was reduced by nearly 2.5 billion tonnes – equivalent to the amount of carbon that all the world’s oceans absorb in one year.

…

The effect could be down to the way decreasing stratospheric ozone and rising greenhouse gases are altering the radiation balance of the Earth’s atmosphere. This has been predicted to alter and strengthen the westerly winds that blow over the Southern Ocean.

“We expected this transition to a windier regime, but it has occurred much earlier than we thought, seemingly because of the ozone hole,” says Lenton.

Stronger surface winds enhance circulation of ocean waters, encouraging carbon-rich waters to rise from the deep, limiting the capability of surface water to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Furthermore, the higher carbon levels in surface waters make them more acidic – bad news for many forms of ocean life, such as coral and squid.

“This result illustrates how complex the chain of cause and effect can be in the Earth system. No one would ever have predicted from first principles that increasing CFCs would have the effect of decreasing uptake of ocean carbon dioxide,” says Andrew Watson, from the University of East Anglia, UK.

The good news is that we did something serious about CFC emissions years ago, and their level in the atmosphere is indeed coming down, albeit slowly. (See the graph on this page on the US NOAA’s web site for CFC trends since 1978.) In the mean time, we’re likely to see significantly more CO2 staying in the air than would happen otherwise.

What’s “significantly”? Using the figures from the article (2.5 billion tons of carbon, not CO2) over 17 years, that’s about 538 million additional tons/year of CO2, roughly 10% of the US’s current annual CO2 emissions. In this time when every greenie’s favorite parlor game is trying to figure out how we get to an 80% CO2 emissions reduction by 2050, imagine that we suddenly discover that the US’s emissions had leaped by 10% in a single year, and we would be stuck with that yearly increment of CO2 for decades.

The secondary lesson here is another of my favorite themes (read: obsessions): the importance of timing. The world took serious steps to reduce CFC emissions because of what a greatly expanded ozone hole would mean to human beings. At the time we had no idea that in 2009 the climate chaos situation would be as bad as it is, and we certainly didn’t know about this ozone/CO2 uptake connection. In other words, we got lucky, and while the timing of our actions could have been better, it certainly could have been much worse.

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We all know that Americans waste a lot of gasoline because of congestion. Well, this is one of those times when what we all know is actually true:

The Texas Transportation Institute studies congestion in 85 urban areas throughout the United States each year. According to their latest study, the amount of fuel wasted due to congestion grew to 74 gallons per traveler in 2002, a total of 5.7 billion gallons of fuel.

That’s 5.7 billion gallons of gasoline that we could have simply poured on the ground and burned, for all the benefit we got from it. And the cost, aside from dollars, was huge: About 51 million metric tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere, from just the one year (2002) in question, CO2 we’ll be dealing with for many decades. If anything, I would expect that the congestion problem has become worse in the US since 2002, even if it’s dropped a bit since entering the current recession.

See the data for the above graph here.

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We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

– John W. Gardner

The quote above came to mind when I read ‘Worst Case’ Scenario: New Report Says World Is Warming Faster than Thought:

Two degrees — that value has long been the guideline for international climate policy. Were the increase in average global temperatures held below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), then drastic climate change and long-term irreversible damage — like the melting of Greenland’s glaciers — could still be avoided. Or so it was thought.

…

In 2007, the IPCC assumed that the earth’s average temperature could increase anywhere from 1.8 to 4.0 degrees Celsius by the end of this century — depending on which strategy the international community adopts and by how much greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.

According to the current findings, the world is currently on track for the worst-case scenario — the dynamics of climate change are already larger than feared.

To be on the safe side, people should adjust for a three, four or even five degrees of warming, PIK head Schellnhuber recommended in March at the Copenhagen congress. Should he be right, extreme weather resulting from rising global temperatures could be even more dramatic than assumed up until now.

In the past, the IPCC prepared an entire spectrum of possible emissions scenarios for this century. According to the new report, “some climate indicators are changing near the upper end of the range indicated by the projections or, as in the case of sea level rise, at even greater rates than indicated by IPCC projections.” The report continues, “current estimates indicate that ocean warming is about 50 percent greater than had been previously reported by the IPCC.”

Konrad Steffen, professor for Environmental Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder, explains what that means. “The forecast for the year 2100 probably needs to be revised at least by a meter or more,” he says.

Schellnhuber, who is also a climate consultant for the German government, says he is worried “that we still aren’t seeing a large portion of the unavoidable global warming.” Dirt particles in the atmosphere, especially sulphate aerosols, have created a certain cooling effect and has prevented a stronger temperature increase at the moment. “If we were to ever install sulphur filters all over the world, then we would already be at 2.5 degree warming,” the physicist said.

If this report sounds hauntingly familiar, it is. I mentioned it briefly just five days ago (Document alert: New synthesis report), and provided a direct link to the 39 page, 5.7MB report in PDF format.

What I didn’t do, however, was give this report the attention it deserved. Hopefully this post will help close that gap in my performance.

While I strongly urge you to read the whole document, let me quote at length the portion (page 18) that directly addresses the main issue brought up in the above article:

The goal of constraining warming to an average global temperature increase of no more than 2°C above preindustrial levels plays a central role in current discussions about appropriate climate policies. As described in the previous section, a 2°C warming would, in itself, introduce considerable risk to human society and natural ecosystems. Nevertheless, the facts that global average temperature has already risen by about 0.7°C and that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are still increasing (Box 2) render the achievement of a more ambitious goal very difficult. Due to inertia in the climate system alone, the 2007 IPCC Report argues that a global temperature increase of about 1.4°C above preindustrial levels is inevitable. There is also inertia in human systems but this is harder to quantify and it is not known how quickly or dramatically society can or will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What level of emission reductions is needed to retain climate change on the right side of the 2°C guardrail? The IPCC estimated the level of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at which the global average temperature rise would be contained within various ranges (Table 1). The concentrations are given both as CO2 and CO2-equivalents. CO2-equivalents include the combined warming effects of CO2 and the non-CO2 greenhouse gases (excluding water vapour) as well as the net cooling effect of aerosols in the atmosphere. CO2-equivalents are expressed as the equivalent amount of CO2 required to give the same net warming as that created by these other gases and aerosols. Aerosols are small particles suspended in the atmosphere that reflect the sun’s incoming radiation and thus have a cooling effect. As air pollution regulations become more stringent and the amount of particles emitted to the atmosphere from human activities decreases, the cooling effect of aerosols in the atmosphere will also be reduced.

According to the IPCC analysis, atmospheric CO2 concentration should not exceed 400 ppm CO2 if the global temperature rise is to be kept within 2.0 – 2.4°C. Today, the CO2 concentration is around 385 ppm, and is rising by 2 ppm per year. The 2007 concentration of all greenhouse gases, both CO2 and non-CO2 gases, was about 463 ppm CO2-equivalents. Adjusting this concentration for the cooling effects of aerosols yields a CO2-equivalent concentration of 396 ppm. A recent study estimates that a concentration of 450 ppm CO2-equivalents (including the cooling effect of aerosols) would give a 50-50 chance of limiting the temperature rise to 2°C or less.

Thus, atmospheric CO2 concentrations are already at levels predicted to lead to global warming of between 2.0 and 2.4°C (Table 1). If society wants to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations at this level, then global emissions should, theoretically, be reduced by 60-80% immediately, the actual amount being dependent upon the amount that will be taken up by oceans and land. Given that such a drastic immediate reduction is impossible, greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to rise over the next few decades. An overshoot of the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations needed to constrain global warming to 2°C is thus inevitable. To limit the extent of the overshoot, emissions should peak in the near future. Recent studies suggest that if peak greenhouse gas emissions are not reached until after 2020, the emission reduction rates required thereafter to retain a reasonable chance of remaining within the 2°C guardrail will have to exceed 5% per annum. This is a daunting challenge when compared to a long-term average annual increase of 2% in emissions (Box 2). The conclusion from both the IPCC and later analyses is simple – immediate and dramatic emission reductions of all greenhouse gases are needed if the 2°C guardrail is to be respected.

Short-term financial concerns, political and institutional constraints and lack of public awareness and concern are the greatest barriers to immediately initiating ambitious emission reduction. There is still disagreement in the economics community as to whether climate change is simply an externality like any other or is fundamentally different from anything humanity has ever faced. There is also disagreement about how to appraise the costs of mitigation as compared to the future costs of inaction, and how to evaluate the risks of climate change. Nevertheless, a growing number of analyses indicate that the costs of both adapting to and mitigating climate change will increase if action is postponed (sessions 32 & 52), (Box eight). Generally, economic analysts agree that the uncertainty about the extent of future climate change is not a rational reason for delaying programs to curb emissions. Existing economic structures and interests, however, can often prevent effective climate policy action.

I have resisted the argument that surely everyone who reads this site has heard, namely that we have to put at least as much resource into adaptation as we do mitigation (i.e. reduction of CO2 emissions). This line of thinking usually falls into one of two categories: Cost efficiency or inevitability.

Cost efficiency, which sounds cold blooded, essentially says that while moving people away from coastlines, building desalination plants and sea barriers, etc. are certainly not cheap, they still deliver more human impact avoidance per dollar than simply reducing CO2. In other words, it’s economics in its purest form: Finding the optimal allocation of scarce resources to achieve the most good. As much fun as it is to bash economists in some corners of the Internet, it’s undeniably true that when you have a choice of preventing X or X + Y human suffering for the same cost, and you’re spending all that you can afford, then only a fool or a sadist would take the first option. Deciding which of many possible combinations of actions to take is a classic exercise in multivariate optimization.

The inevitability argument is much simpler: No matter what we do to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, climate chaos is going to be bad. As in really bad, so it makes no sense to ignore adaptation efforts and focus almost exclusively on mitigation, since that won’t be enough. (These arguments are really the same, as they’re merely claiming that the best way to respond to this quickly evolving situation is not a monolithic approach; they’re often presented as unique views, so I’m preserving that dichotomy.)

Suddenly, I’m no longer sure it makes sense to reject these arguments. If the best, leading edge and peer reviewed research, like the report above, says we’ve already created a world where more than the magic two degrees of warming is locked in, then at the very least we have to start considering some very nasty choices that a lot of people still think are plot elements from a bad science fiction movie and not reality. To pick just two examples: What do we do about all the large population centers on coastlines around the world? And how do we address the looming fresh water crisis that will very likely affect well over a billion human beings in the next few decades?

As for the emissions involved, remember that 1 ppmv of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 7.79 billion metric tons (see Life in the Metricene), so increasing from 385 ppmv now to the 400 ppmv limit mentioned above requires “only” an additional 116.85 billion metric tons. And the world emits about 30 billion metric tons of CO2/year, a good portion of which would effectively be absorbed by the oceans and plant life. That’s assuming we don’t get a sizable boost in CO2 (and/or methane) from the permafrost bomb starting to go off (see Life in the Metricene, CO2 checkpoint, and Methane checkpoint).

Again: Please read the report, and let’s all hope that John Gardner was right and this terrifying situation turns out to be one heck of a great opportunity.

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See It’s all about energy for a pretty decent, concise summary of alternatives:

The global energy scene is currently dominated by two overriding concerns that strongly affect decisions on energy development priorities: security of supply and climate change.

Worldwide, renewable energy is still dominated by the ”old” renewables: hydropower and traditional biomass. They supply respectively six and nine percent of global primary energy demand.

Only about two percent of the world’s primary energy is currently provided by ”new” renewable sources such as wind, photovoltaics (solar cells) and mini- and micro-hydro.

If greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced substantially, renewable energy technologies arguably have to obtain a greater share of the global energy supply. But even if renewables get a larger market share, this only takes care of the climate problem. To become commonplace, they also need to satisfy the demand for security of supply.

”One of the main challenges is that all of the sophisticated sustainable energy technologies – be it wind, solar, wave or something else – produce energy when it suits them. But Mrs. Jensen does her laundry when it suits her,” says Hans Larsen, Head of Division at Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy, Denmark, and a review editor of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

The problem is storing the energy for later use and also transporting it over greater distances with a minimum of loss.

”If someone were to come up with a major storage breakthrough, the world’s entire need for energy could be covered by renewable energy,” says Hans Larsen.

In addition to storing and transporting energy, two other factors are a key to optimizing energy use and obtaining a higher degree of sustainability: intelligence and energy systems.

”The intelligent energy system is an area you don’t think so much about, but where there is a whole lot to be gained. It is key to making all current and future energy technologies meet and work together,” says Hans Larsen.

Below are listed 12 energy technologies. The overview shows the current technological status and growth of each technology, as well as the major challenges and barriers for further exploitation. The current and projected global market shares are noted, and so are the possible adverse effects of the technology. The overview is based on Risø Energy Report 7 – Future low carbon energy systems.

The technologies covered in the list following the above quote is:

• Wind
• Solar cells
• Solar thermal
• Biomass-based fuels for transport
• Biomass – combustion, gasification and pyrolysis
• Fossil fuels – combustion and gasification
• Nuclear energy
• Fusion energy
• Geothermal energy
• Hydro, ocean, wave and tidal
• Fuel cells
• Hydrogen

I could quibble with a few details, but overall it looks like a solid treatment.

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Frequent readers of this site know the speech by heart: A warming climate means dramatic shifts in where and when fresh water is available for any purpose, most notably direct human use, agriculture, and electricity generation. One of the greatest potential impacts of this shift, worldwide, is triggered by the disappearance of glaciers that provide fresh water during summers. The glaciers act as natural dams, in effect, storing large amounts of water as snow and ice during the winter and then releasing it months later. Most estimates I’ve seen say that roughly one billion people around the world are highly dependent on such water flows from glaciers. One billion people.

This is why I keep saying that water supply is the primary way in which climate chaos will impact human beings. There will be impacts from rising sea levels and increased total destructive power of storms[1], but shifts in the availability of fresh water, whether from changes in rainfall patterns (as we’ve seen in parts of the US and Australia in recent years) or the disappearing glacier effect.

All of which is prelude to some new information about the state of glaciers in South America, as explained in Chilean Glaciers Melting at Unprecedented Rates:

The latest research expedition to the Southern Patagonia Ice Field revealed that alpine glaciers in the Chilean and Argentine Andes are disappearing at much faster rates than previously anticipated by the scientific community.

A preliminary analysis by a team of scientists from NASA and Chile’s Valdivia-based Center of Scientific Studies (CECS), which commenced an expedition to the Ice Field in October 2008, sheds light on the alarming speed at which the glaciers are depleting.

The scientists discovered that the masses of ice in the Patagonia are melting in larger proportions and in much higher alpine zones than in any other part of the world, including Alaska and the Himalayas. Glacier ice accounts for around 75 percent of the world’s fresh water.

“The loss of ice mass in the higher zones is the really new phenomenon,” said Gino Casassa, a CECS glaciologist. “At least this is what we are seeing with the preliminary results which we have just received.”

Until recently, it was believed that glacial loss occurred from lower areas, and that snowfall on the higher sections of glaciers would compensate for loss of ice at lower altitudes.

“One hypothesis we put forward was that there could be a positive balance of ice in the high zones because of higher rates of snowfall in these areas,” said Casassa.

But with ice thinning high up and down low, too, loss in glacial mass in Patagonia is likely to be much greater than what has previously been calculated by scientists.

…

The higher temperatures associated with glacier meltdowns and climate change are largely caused by CO2 or “greenhouse gas” emissions. Chile’s failure to develop a sensible renewable energy policy has resulted in a green light to highly-polluting coal and diesel fuel energy production.

State authorities confirm that the nation’s CO2 emissions will quadruple in the next 20 year if no mitigating actions are taken.

Feel free to add your own 100 decibel commentary about the last two paragraphs I quoted above. You’ve heard my rants on such things far too many times already.

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[1] By “total destructive power of storms” I’m referring to the measure Kerry Emanuel pioneered, hurricane power dissipation, which is essentially the sum, over a season, of the power of each hurricane, which is, in turn, a function of it’s maximum wind speed, size, and longevity. See Chris Mooney’s description of Emanuel’s work beginning on page 139 of his excellent book Storm World. In general, I think Emanuel’s metric for gauging a season makes far more sense than simply counting the number of storms that fall into each category on the familiar one-to-five Saffir-Simpson scale.

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I’ve been struggling for the last few days to make sense of the recent NOAA news regarding atmospheric levels of CO2 and methane, plus a handful of other items, including where I now think we might or might not be headed headed in terms of climate chaos.

The impetus for this effort to piece things together is, of course, the uptick in atmospheric levels of CO2 and methane, which I wrote about on May 19th (Methane checkpoint) and, coincidentally enough, on June 19th (CO2 checkpoint), and what, if anything, we should read into those observations.

First, let me do something I should have in the CO2 post, namely use a little math to try to contextualize the results. That post pointed out that the latest NOAA data shows a pronounced jump in the observed global level of atmospheric CO2. The level increased from 387.71 ppmv (parts per million by volume) in March to 388.47 ppmv in April of this year. That 0.76 ppmv growth is the largest for any March-to-April period going back to 1980, the first year of the publicly available data that I could find on the NOAA site.[1] It’s also 0.35 ppmv above the average March-to-April transition for all years other than 2009.

Just how much CO2 is that? An atmospheric level of 385 ppmv equates to 3,000 billion metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. That means every ppmv represents 7.79 billion metric tons of CO2, and 0.35 ppmv is 2.73 billion metric tons. According to the US Dept. of Energy’s Annual Energy Review, the US emits 5.934 billion metric tons of CO2/year.[2] In other words, the amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere in March, above the historical average gain for that month, was 46% of the CO2 the US emitted in all of 2006.[3] Using the oft-quoted world number for CO2 of 30 billion metric tons/year, that increment over the normal rise, for just that one month, was equal to about 9% of humanity’s worldwide, yearly CO2 emissions. (The total increase of 0.71 ppmv is 5.53 billion tons, 93% of the US’s 2006 emissions, or 18.4% of world emissions for a year.) That’s a huge additional pulse of CO2 to show up in the atmosphere in a single month, so it’s no wonder that the trend line in the NOAA graph shown in CO2 checkpoint and reproduced below lurches upward so noticeably.

Given CO2’s long lifetime in the atmosphere, that would be bad enough news, but it comes on the heels of a marked increase in methane atmospheric levels (Methane checkpoint). For many of us, the number one climate fear is that we’ll cross the most critical single tipping point and trigger a massive release of both CO2 and methane from the Arctic region. Most of this would come from defrosting permafrost, with some additional methane coming from methane hydrates, a.k.a. the clathrate gun. If (and that’s an enormous “if”) these additions to the atmosphere’s levels of those two greenhouse gases are the early stage of the permafrost bomb going off, it’s almost unimaginably bad news.

The obvious next question then becomes: When will we know? And indeed, someone did ask it. In the comments for my CO2 post, Sasparilla said (emphasis added):

I wonder how long we’ll have to wait to know for sure? What do you think? 2-3 years?

I remember hearing an author (who wasn’t associated with the geo-engineering field) stating that he thought we’d be forced as a society to seriously entertain geo-engineering strategies (just to keep the temperature brakes on while we get emissions down) in 5-10 years. I thought that sounded far fetched at the time (last year), but here we are a year later and if these trends continue and accelerate as the north continues to warm - we may just end up where he thought we’d be, frightening.

To which I replied:

My gut feeling, based on statistical experience with non-climate time series data (mostly from economics) and my E&E reading, is that we could have a pretty good idea much sooner than 2-3 years. Since 1980, the yearly peak in CO2 level has come in April or May every year. If we peaked this year in June, or saw a statistically significant deviation from the established pattern over the summer, then I think the odds of it being the permafrost bomb would go up considerably. I don’t know if that would mean a 10% or 50% or 90% chance of it being The Bomb, but it would certainly set off alarm bells. If the pattern more or less returns to form, but we start seeing a deviation every year, and it gets larger, then it could take several years to be convincing.

I think the odds that we’ll be able to drop emissions quickly enough to avoid betting the farm (and the city and …) on geoengineering are declining. Right now, my gut feeling is that it’s only about a 60 to 70% chance, but that’s making some (very?) optimistic assumptions about international agreements and compliance.

Upon further thought, I think I wasn’t as clear in my response as I could have been, so I’m going to elaborate a bit.

I see three possibilities in the coming months and years:

• The sharp upticks in both CO2 and methane turn out to be one-time events, and the phenomenon doesn’t reappear in 2010. Whether climate scientists reach consensus on the cause now or a year or decades from now is another matter entirely.
• The upticks subside and the rest of 2009 plays out as one might expect based on historical data, but it happens again in 2010, 2011, and later, establishing a new pattern of Spring greenhouse gas pulses. One could argue whether this constitutes the permafrost bomb going off, even if in stages. With a warming climate I think it would be reasonable, even if too flippant, to refer to these yearly events as permafrost firecrackers going off one at a time, a year apart. The nasty detail, of course, is that each one adds to climate change and brings us slightly closer to the bomb actually going off.
• The upticks don’t subside right away. May’s numbers are even higher, and then so are June’s, making it the first time that the yearly high doesn’t land in either April or May.[4] This would be alarming, and it would result in a huge amount of attention focused on the July numbers. If those came in higher yet, I wouldn’t want to think about the implications or what kind of response it would elicit from various countries and political factions. (I’m ignoring the possibility that we could see a sustained, huge increase in Arctic emissions for just this one year.)

In other words, in the best case scenario (the first one above) it would likely take us a year to gather some hard data (the lack of these pulses in 2010) before we would even consider classifying them as a singular event. But even then, we might be premature in saying they’re a one-time anomaly, as they could show up in perhaps one year out of ever two or three at first and then increase in frequency.

The middle case would also take at least one more year to unfold, as we would have to wait for 2010’s data, at the least, before passing judgment, albeit with the same caveat as above about leaping to a wrong conclusion about the new pattern or lack thereof on such scant evidence.[5]

The last and worst case is the one in which we’d get essentially instant feedback from the climate system. This is what I meant when I said in my reply to Sasparilla that we “could” find out in as little as two or three months. Frankly, I was so focused on this horrific scenario that I didn’t lay out the possibilities, as I see them.

So, Sasparilla might well be right, and it could take 2-3 years to tease the pattern and an explanation out of the raw data. All things considered, this is one of the very few times I hope we don’t solve a scientific mystery right away.

The possibility that the data is showing us the beginning of the permafrost bomb going off is so terrifying that I think it needs to be examined in a broader context.

If you assume, as I do, that James Hansen and Bill McKibben are right, and the “safe” level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 350 ppmv, about 38 ppmv (or 296 billion metric tons, roughly ten years of worldwide CO2 emissions) less than April’s reading, then, like me, you feel on a visceral level how unsettling these CO2 and methane observations are.

In one sense, we’ve almost certainly crossed a critical boundary. As Bill McKibben pointed out in The Most Important Number on Earth:

DIY [do-it-yourself] conservation makes great practical sense, but we won’t save the planet that way. One by one, trying to do the right thing, we add up to… not nearly enough. You cannot make the math work that way—there are too many sockets and too many tailpipes and most of all too much inertia for voluntary action to do the trick. It didn’t work when President Bush made voluntary reduction by corporations his global warming “policy,” and it won’t work fast enough with individuals either.

Please go read the whole article. It’s worth your time.

(The phenomenon McKibben points out is why I’ve long advocated that we need both individual action to change our consumption patterns and engagement at the voting booth and through whatever other legal means we can find to tell large concentrations of power–corporations, universities, NGOs, governments at all levels, etc.–that we demand they do their share to bring down our collective greenhouse gas emissions. And if they refuse, then we should withhold the things they absolutely require and give them to their competition: Votes and financial support in the case of politicians, sales from corporations, etc. Nothing will change the behavior of large entities faster than a credible threat to reduce or cut off their oxygen supply and feed it to their competition.)

Once again, timing is everything. We’re just beginning to deal with the fact that humanity poured a lot of long-lived CO2 into the atmosphere before we generally realized the consequences. Now we have no choice but to take much more extreme steps to avoid a climate catastrophe than would have been required had we started 50 years ago. This is why I’ve indicated numerous times, including in my response to Sasparilla, that I’m not optimistic that we’ll be able to avoid resorting to one or more geoengineering schemes. (In fact, I’m less optimistic than I said in that reply. I’m not sure where that 60 to 70% range came from.) If we see strong evidence in the data that the permafrost bomb is indeed going off, then the public support for launching orbital mirrors or seeding oceans with iron or who knows what will rise dramatically.

As uncomfortable as that sounds, I think it signals a more profound change than the one McKibben points out. We’re entering a period when we’re so close to (or have already passed) tipping points that dictate we have no choice but to actively manage the planet’s climate. We’re now in (or will be very soon) what I propose we call the Metricene, a time when virtually everything related to climate, including our own actions, is measured and, by implication, explicitly managed. This is the concept I’ve alluded to in the past by saying we’re all living a “measured life on a managed planet”, and what James Lovelock was no doubt talking about when he said:

This could happen if, at some intolerable population density, man had encroached upon Gaia’s functional power to such an extent that he disabled her. He would wake up one day to find that he had the permanent, lifelong job of planetary maintenance engineer. Gaia would have retreated into the muds, and the ceaseless intricate task of keeping all of the global cycles in balance would be ours. Then at last we should be riding that strange contraption, the “spaceship Earth,” and whatever tamed and domesticated biosphere remained would indeed be our “life-support system.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the growing sentiment for terming our current era as the Anthropocene, the time when human activities have had an effect on the world’s climate. Wikipedia’s entry gives a good overview, and points out that there’s some disagreement about when it should start–in the late 1700’s with the beginning of our love affair with mass use of fossil fuels, or 8,000 years ago when the spread of agriculture increased greenhouse gas emissions. While I think William Ruddiman makes a compelling case for the much earlier date (see his book, Ploughs, Plagues & Petroleum), I think the evidence is quickly growing that even that concept has been surpassed by reality and our perception of it. The shift from a period of unintentional climate influence to one of required and intentional control is an even more compelling reason to coin a new term and view our evolving situation much differently.

I certainly don’t like the prospects of being forced down that path, even if you assume we won’t wind up in the kind of centralized Carbon Dictatorship that Tim Flannery describes in chapter 33 of his must-read book, The Weather Makers. But as is so often the case in life, we’re forced into terrible situations through random chance or our own actions born of simple ignorance.

Right now, as we wait for the next few months or years of data on CO2 and methane levels to trickle in, humanity is playing the role of a medical patient anxiously awaiting test results. We’ve had some disturbing symptoms, and we’re now in the gray zone of ignorance that lies between perceiving ourselves as healthy and either getting good news from the doctor or finding out we have a particularly nasty form of cancer that will require extremely unpleasant treatment in an effort to save our lives. Had we known about this nexus point in our lives years or decades ago, we surely would have changed our lifestyle in almost any way possible to reduce our risk factors–or so we tell ourselves. But for now, all we can do is hope we’re not about to pay an awful price for our past actions.

And maybe all will be well. Maybe the climate scientists will give us the equivalent of a chat in which our doctor says, “Good news–your tests were negative. But you really need to get serious about taking better care of yourself. Stop smoking, cut back on the alcohol, get more exercise, and lose 40 pounds. Next time, you might not dodge the bullet.” And sometimes that scare is enough to force us out of our complacency. We make sweeping changes, give up or greatly restrict some things we’d prefer to indulge in, and in time realize the multiple benefits of our new lifestyle which go far beyond what the actuarial tables suggest.

Those CO2 and methane numbers could very well turn out to be nothing more than humanity’s cancer scare, and one that ultimately is beneficial by providing enough uncertainty and genuine fear to overcome our complacency and willful ignorance. Or they could lead to the discovery of an awful underlying truth about the state of the climate, with terrible, sweeping implications we would do anything to escape. We shouldn’t wait for our global test results. Even without a permafrost bomb in the picture, our situation should be more than sufficiently dire to motivate us. We can and should get to work making those changes throughout society, which will benefit us no matter what the data tells us in months or years. What have we got to lose by acting in our own best interest?

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[1] We have CO2 data for Mauna Loa that goes back much further than that, obviously, but I don’t know if there’s global data that predates 1980. I will continue to look for it and contact NOAA.

[2] As I type this on Sunday night, we’re just a couple of days away from the US DOE releasing the latest Annual Energy Review (on Tuesday), which will presumably have emissions data for 2007.

[3] I’m ignoring the fact that some of the CO2 emitted in that month was absorbed by the ocean or plants. I’m assuming that over such a short time frame any such removal of new CO2 would be negligible, although including it would push up the calculated emissions value (2.73 billion metric tons) just slightly.

[4] In the 29 years prior to 2009, the yearly high arrived 16 times in April and 13 times in May. The average change (not absolute value) between those two months was only 0.14 ppmv.

[5] If this sounds like I’m being extremely cautious, I am. The implications of what’s happening to the atmosphere and how we perceive and react to it are impossible to overestimate.

I’m reminded of the story of three scientists walking near their laboratory. One points to a sheep in a nearby field and says, “Gee, didn’t know there were black sheep around here.” The second says, “Don’t jump to conclusions–you’ve only seen one black sheep.” The third says, “Neither of you should jump to conclusions–you’ve only seen one side of one sheep, which happens to be black.”

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This time around, Graph of the Week focuses on one of those things “everyone” knows that ain’t necessarily so–the fact that Americans drive hideously long distances to their jobs.

The graph, courtesy of US Dept. of Energy and the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program, shows that 58% of the trips to work are 10 miles or less:

The page for the above graph, along with a table of the data, is here.

A few points I feel compelled to make:

• The data is from 2001. I suspect there’s more recent data on this floating around out there, somewhere, but I haven’t tried to track it down. I doubt things have changed much in the intervening eight years; even in a mobile society like the US, I wouldn’t expect such a broad measure to shift radically when it depends on broad patterns of employment and living arrangements.
• The graph measure miles per “trip”, which I think is one-way, but I wouldn’t make any bar bets on this data without verifying that detail.
• The reason so many people have this notion of Americans driving 100 miles a day just to get to and from their place of work is attributable to our friends in the media. Every time the price of gasoline gets “high” they do the inevitable filler pieces showing people gassing up their vehicle and grumbling about the price, which often enough turns to the issue of just how far the person drives just to get to work–and whaddaya know, it’s really far! Honestly, I wish they would interview someone with a Prius (or a Scion xA driving, home working hypermiler, like me). But I guess that wouldn’t make nearly as “interesting” a narrative.

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Yet another study on the cost of a specific way to move electrons has been released, this time the technology of interest is nuclear fission. The author is Mark Cooper, Senior Fellow for Economic Analysis
Institute for Energy and the Environment, Vermont Law School.

From the press release announcing the study [PDF]:

The likely cost of electricity for a new generation of nuclear reactors would be 12-20 cents per kilowatt hour (KWh), considerably more expensive than the average cost of increased use of energy efficiency and renewable energies at 6 cents per kilowatt hour, according to a major new study by economist Dr. Mark Cooper, a senior fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School. The report finds that it would cost $1.9 trillion to $4.1 trillion more over the life of 100 new nuclear reactors than it would to generate the same electricity from a combination of more energy efficiency and renewables.

Titled “The Economics of Nuclear Reactors,” Cooper’s analysis of over three dozen cost estimates for proposed new nuclear reactors shows that the projected price tags for the plants have quadrupled since the start of the industry’s so-called “nuclear renaissance” at the beginning of this decade – a striking parallel to the eventually seven-fold increase in reactor costs estimates that doomed the “Great Bandwagon Market” of the 1960s and 1970s, when half of planned reactors had to be abandoned or cancelled due to massive cost overruns.

The study notes that the required massive subsidies from taxpayers and ratepayers would not change the real cost of nuclear reactors, they would just shift the risks to the public. Even with huge subsidies, nuclear reactors would remain more costly than the alternatives, such as efficiency, biomass, wind and cogeneration.

Dr. Mark Cooper said: “We are literally seeing nuclear reactor history repeat itself. The ‘Great Bandwagon Market’ that ended so badly for consumers in the 1970s and 1980s was driven by advocates who confused hope and hype with reality. It is telling that in the few short years since the so-called ‘Nuclear Renaissance’ began there has been a four-fold increase in projected costs. In both time periods, the original low-ball estimates were promotional, not practical; they were based on hope and hype intended to promote the industry.”

Commenting on the study, former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Peter Bradford said: “This study makes clear that new nuclear reactors can only be built if taxpayers or customers assume the very large risks that investors would normally bear in the U.S. economy. Such subsidy to a mature industry – already heavily subsidized — is contrary to the fundamental free enterprise principles that protect customers and allocate resources efficiently. The risks of cost overruns, reactor cancellation, poor operation and the development of less costly competitors are real. All have happened to nuclear power in the U.S. before. If the enormous financial burden of assuming these risks falls on the taxpayers (in the form of loan guarantees), it will increase our national deficit and crowd out other borrowers needing federal credit support. If it falls on customers (in the form of ratemaking guarantees), it will create additional economic hardship and job loss … Setting a quota of 100 new nuclear reactors by a certain date presumes – against decades of evidence to the contrary - that politicians can pick technological winners. Such a policy combines distraction, deception, debt and disappointment in a mixture reminiscent of other failed federal policies in recent years.”

The presentation slides for the study are here [32 page, 326KB PDF].

The study itself is here [78 page, 630KB PDF].

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I recently posted about what methane was up to (Methane checkpoint), prompted by the noticeable upturn in the atmospheric level of that particular greenhouse gas. See that post for sexy graphs and instructions on making your own (graphs, not methane). My conclusion is that there’s definitely something going on with the methane level, but it’s way too soon to know for sure if it’s just another surge, as we’ve seen in the past, or the first sign that the methane time bomb is going off.

Now it’s time to take a look at atmospheric CO2, since there’s now data that something odd is going on there, as well.

The Trends in Carbon Dioxide page on the US NOAA’s Earth System Monitoring Lab’s web site provides the following graph:

Look at that last observation–the rightmost dot on the red line–and the black trend line, which take the data up to April of this year. What’s up with that jump, one might well ask (or write about on one’s blog)? And how does this connect with the unnerving but inconclusive methane blip?[1]

An article in Scientific American, The Arctic Thaw Could Make Global Warming Worse, points out:

Methane is emitted anywhere organic matter ferments—be that a cow’s belly or frozen soil that starts to thaw. Permafrost, which averages 80 feet thick, is chock-full of dead plant and animal matter that has been locked in cold storage for thousands of years. Conventional wisdom long held that permafrost should take thousands of years to melt away, so researchers expected it to play a negligible role in climate change. But recent findings—Walter’s lake discovery in particular—have wrecked that prediction.

Walter’s work revealed that the relatively warm lake bed was indeed thawing the frozen earth directly below it, down several dozen feet. Thawing a block of permafrost is like taking a package of frozen hamburger out of the freezer and leaving it on the kitchen counter. As the meat warms, ravenous microbes consume it, giving off a gas as a by-product. On dry land, microbes convert the dead animal and plant matter primarily into CO2. But in the wet, oxygen-starved depths of a lake, they instead release methane. Walter’s best guess is that researchers have been underestimating methane emissions from Arctic wetlands by as much as 63 percent.

(The article above is a fascinating, and more than slightly disturbing, look at the changes climate chaos is triggering at the top of the world, and the potential for a massive feedback from CO2 and methane releases. It also gives a glimpse into the dedication of the scientists who are on the leading edge of this work.)

Suddenly there are unexpected, or unexpectedly large, increases in the atmospheric levels of CO2 and methane, the two signature pieces of empirical evidence we would expect to see in the early stages of the permafrost time bomb going off. But they’re no more definitive than any other unusual short-term data: They’re highly suggestive and they beg to be scrutinized even more closely to determine the underlying causes, but in and of themselves they don’t prove anything.

Given the potential consequences if these numbers do reflect a massive release of these two greenhouse gases due to a permafrost melt, these are trends I really wish we didn’t have to try to explain. But we certainly can’t afford to ignore them and hope they somehow go away; the universe has never been that accommodating.

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[1] The data in the graph isn’t much of a sample size. Luckily, the NOAA provides a text file with the monthly global mean readings, linked from the above page, starting in January, 1980. You can grab it directly here. I loaded the “average” column of data from that file into Excel and found that the March-to-April change in 2009 (0.76) is the largest for any March-to-April period in the data. The average increase for the March-to-April transition across all years (except 2009) is 0.41. One can get carried away slicing and dicing data, so we shouldn’t read too much into the 2009 value being so much larger than the average, but at a gross level it does show that something unusual happened.

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The EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) has released an interim version of their “Report to NIST on the Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Roadmap”. From the cover letter on the document:

Under the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has “primary responsibility to coordinate development of a framework that includes protocols and model standards for information management to achieve interoperability of smart grid devices and systems…” [EISA Title XIII, Section 1305]

In early 2009, responding to President Obama’s energy-related national priorities, NIST acted to accelerate progress and promote stakeholder consensus on Smart Grid interoperability standards. On April 13, NIST announced a three-phase plan to expedite development of key standards.

This document is input into the first phase: engaging utilities, equipment suppliers, consumers, standards developers and other stakeholders in a participatory public process to identify applicable Smart Grid interoperability standards, gaps in currently available standards and priorities for new standardization activities.

…

NIST is now reviewing EPRI’s synthesis of stakeholder inputs received through the end of May 2009, as presented in this document. In addition, NIST is inviting public comment on the EPRI deliverable. A request for comments will be issued in the Federal Register. Comments can be submitted electronically to smartgridcomments@nist.gov or by mail to: George Arnold, 100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8100, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8100.

Along with this EPRI deliverable, NIST will review the comments received. By early fall, NIST intends to issue its Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Roadmap, which will set priorities for interoperability and cybersecurity requirements, identify an initial set of standards to support early implementation, and list plans to meet remaining standards needs.

For more information, go to: http://www.nist.gov/smartgrid/

The document is here [291 page, 5.8MB PDF].

On this one, only the hardest of the hardcore energy geeks need apply.

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Report: Global climate disaster is moving closer - COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009:

With unabated greenhouse gas emissions the world faces a growing risk of “abrupt and irreversible climatic shifts”. This is one of the conclusions in a scientific synthesis report released Thursday.

Based on more than 1,400 studies presented at a congress in March in Copenhagen that attracted some 2,000 scientists from more than 70 countries, the report presents the newest scientific evidence that has emerged since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report came out in 2007.

“The report gives an important overview of what science can tell us today about global warming, and perhaps most importantly what we can do about it,” Professor Katherine Richardson, Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee of the congress and the writing team, said in a press release.

“I hope the busy negotiators will have time to study the report carefully before they meet in Copenhagen, because a lot of new data have emerged,” the Science Faculty Vice Dean at the University of Copenhagen added.

According to the report, rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid “dangerous climate change”.

“Weaker targets for 2020 increase the risk of serious impacts, including the crossing of tipping points, and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult and costly,” the report warns.

“The new report is four years wiser and not filtered by political considerations. It tells the uncomfortable truth that climate change is real,” John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the report, told the Danish engineering journal Ingeniøren.

The synthesis report is intended as an inspiration for decision makers ahead of the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen (COP15) in December this year.

“Once again we have been presented with clear and unequivocal evidence that temperatures are rising – and faster than we even dared think,” Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen said, after having had the report handed over in Brussels, where EU leaders were trying to agree on how to finance poor countries’ adaptation to climate change.

“A precondition for a greenhouse gas emissions cap is that world leaders cooperate on and provide money for projects that are comparable to the lunar landing,” Loekke Rasmussen said, making it clear that each country must commit to binding CO2 targets if global carbon emissions are to stabilize by 2020.

The report is here [39 page, 5.7MB PDF].

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The US government has released a report that’s sure to be a “must read” item for anyone who cares about the mushrooming issue of climate chaos.

The report is “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States”, and is a product of the US Global Change Research Program. (See the end of this post for links to the report’s web page, which has numerous downloadables.)

I’ve had just a few minutes to give the document a quick skim, but it seems to be exactly the report I would have requested, had I been in such a position, in terms of its focus on regions and sectors. Note that “sectors” is not the typical breakout we see in energy discussions of residential, commercial, industrial, transportation, and electricity. Here, it means Water Resources, Transportation, Ecosystems, Agriculture, Society, Human Health, and Energy Supply and Use.

From the Key Findings (page 12):

1. Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced.
Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. (p. 13)

2. Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow.
Climate-related changes are already observed in the United States and its coastal waters. These include increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows. These changes are projected to grow. (p. 27)

3. Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase.
Climate changes are already affecting water, energy, transportation, agriculture, ecosystems, and health. These impacts are different from region to region and will grow under projected climate change. (p. 41-106, 107-152)

4. Climate change will stress water resources.
Water is an issue in every region, but the nature of the potential impacts varies. Drought, related to reduced precipitation, increased evaporation, and increased water loss from plants, is an important issue in many regions, especially in the West. Floods and water quality problems are likely to be amplified by climate change in most regions. Declines in mountain snowpack are important in the West and Alaska where snowpack provides vital natural water storage. (p. 41, 129, 135, 139)

5. Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged.
Many crops show positive responses to elevated carbon dioxide and low levels of warming, but higher levels of warming often negatively affect growth and yields. Increased pests, water stress, diseases, and weather extremes will pose adaptation challenges for crop and livestock production. (p. 71)

6. Coastal areas are at increasing risk from sea-level rise and storm surge.
Sea-level rise and storm surge place many U.S. coastal areas at increasing risk of erosion and flooding, especially along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, Pacific Islands, and parts of Alaska. Energy and transportation infrastructure and other property in coastal areas are very likely to be adversely affected. (p. 111, 139, 145, 149)

7. Risks to human health will increase.
Harmful health impacts of climate change are related to increasing heat stress, waterborne diseases, poor air quality, extreme weather events, and diseases transmitted by insects and rodents. Reduced cold stress provides some benefits. Robust public health infrastructure can reduce the potential for negative impacts. (p. 89)

8. Climate change will interact with many social and environmental stresses.
Climate change will combine with pollution, population growth, overuse of resources, urbanization, and other social, economic, and environmental stresses to create larger impacts than from any of these factors alone. (p. 99)

9. Thresholds will be crossed, leading to large changes in climate and ecosystems.
There are a variety of thresholds in the climate system and ecosystems. These thresholds determine, for example, the presence of sea ice and permafrost, and the survival of species, from fish to insect pests, with implications for society. With further climate change, the crossing of additional thresholds is expected. (p. 76, 82, 115, 137, 142)

10. Future climate change and its impacts depend on choices made today.
The amount and rate of future climate change depend primarily on current and future human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases and airborne particles. Responses involve reducing emissions to limit future warming, and adapting to the changes that are unavoidable. (p. 25, 29)

I expect to have more to say about this, post reading.

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Links:

• The report’s web page
• the download page on the site<.a>, which has links to the full report, an executive summary, and regional and sector-level breakouts
• the report, in one 196 page, 13MB PDF
• You can follow the goings on today (and possibly in the coming days) about this report on Twitter and facebook.
• an online summary slide show

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