Hansen to Obama Pt III – Fast nuclear reactors are integral

Posted on 28 November 2008 by Barry Brook

Nuclear energy? Pah! Too dangerous (risk of meltdown or weapons proliferation), too expensive, too slow to come on line, insufficient uranium reserves to power more than a small fraction of the world’s energy demand, blah di blah blah blah blah. There is certainly plenty of opposition out there to nuclear energy in any way, shape or form. Nuclear is bad news, it’s a distraction, it’s a carry over from the cold war, it’s old school thinking. And so on.

Well, the above is what the majority of environmentalists and pacifists would tell you. And there is some very solid reason for scepticism about the widespread use of nuclear power, especially Generation II nuclear fission reactors (I suggest we keep the ones we’ve got, but don’t bother with any more of them). But in the brave new world of the Sustainability Emergency (climate crisis + energy crisis + water crisis + mineral crisis + biodiversity crisis, etc.), we simply haven’t got time or scope for such hard-line negativity. We need every solution we can lay our hands on — and more for good measure.

Hansen is willing to talk about nuclear energy. I am too – given chronic intermittency issues with large-scale renewables and the need for plenty of extra energy to fix huge looming problems with hanging together a sophisticated civilisation on a habitable planet, it’s got to be in the mix. Indeed, in the long run, it, in the form of fusion power, could well be the only form of energy that matters to humanity (if we manage to get through the post-industrial crunch, that is). There are plenty of tantilising prospects for safe, effective, long-term baseload power from 4th+ generation nuclear fission power. But for now, there is just nowhere near enough action ($$ and willpower) on the R&D and roll out front.

Hansen explains this in part III. He also goes into more detail on this issue in his earlier Trip Report, which I also quote below…

————————————————————–

Tell Barack Obama the Truth – The Whole Truth (Part III of IV)

Dr James E. Hansen

Nuclear Power. Some discussion about nuclear power is needed. Fourth generation nuclear power has the potential to provide safe base-load electric power with negligible CO2 emissions.

There is about a million times more energy available in the nucleus, compared with the chemical energy of molecules exploited in fossil fuel burning. In today’s nuclear (fission) reactors neutrons cause a nucleus to fission, releasing energy as well as additional neutrons that sustain the reaction. The additional neutrons are ‘born’ with a great deal of energy and are called ‘fast’ neutrons. Further reactions are more likely if these neutrons are slowed by collisions with non-absorbing materials, thus becoming ‘thermal’ or slow neutrons.

All nuclear plants in the United States today are Light Water Reactors (LWRs), using ordinary water (as opposed to ‘heavy water’) to slow the neutrons and cool the reactor. Uranium is the fuel in all of these power plants. One basic problem with this approach is that more than 99% of the uranium fuel ends up ‘unburned’ (not fissioned). In addition to ‘throwing away’ most of the potential energy, the long-lived nuclear wastes (plutonium, americium, curium, etc.) require geologic isolation in repositories such as Yucca Mountain.

(more…)

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Nuclear | 44 Comments »

Hansen to Obama Pt II – Carbon tax with 100% dividend

Posted on 27 November 2008 by Barry Brook

In Part II, Hansen looks at policy options required to drag us out of the Sustainability Emergency. It is self-explanatory, but I thought it worth adding some notes on a cap-and-trade versus a carbon tax. Which is better?

Cap-and-Trade. Pros: (i) Cap reductions ensure falling emissions – in theory; (ii) Reduces inefficiencies or overpricing; (iii) Creates both incentives and disincentives for abatement; (iv) Chance to profit from ‘doing the right thing’. Cons: (i) Enrich middle men / brokers; (ii) Requires army of bureaucrats / new system; (iii) Encourages rent seeking – pleading by special interest groups; (iv) Limited price certainty – requires projected ‘gateways’; (5) Easy to manipulate / distort to get perverse outcomes.

Carbon Tax. Pros: (i) Clear forward price projection = investment certainty, removes incentives for hedge funds, derivatives etc., and better allows for long-term business planning; (ii) Can use current tax system; (iii) Better handles emissions intensive trade exposed industries via carbon tariffs at the trade gate; (iv) Greater societal familiarity, understanding and acceptance. Cons: (i) Politicians or bureaucrats must set costs – can introduce inefficiencies, disincentives and pressure to adjust tax rate during tough economic times; (ii) No guarantee that emissions will fall; (iii) People may still be willing to pay more for old tech because it is familiar or because they have a large historical investment in capital infrastructure or related assests.

I need to do a post about the above and expand on these points (some time!), but at least the above is a taster to see where Hansen is coming from with his carbon tax + 100% dividend idea. Many economists favour a tax over cap-and-trade (Garnaut does not) – see, for instance, the recent comments of Jeffrey Sachs when speaking at ANU.

For a critique of Hansen’s proposal by Climate Progress’ Joe Romm, see here. Romm is of course somewhat right and at the same time totally wrong. He’s right that an honest appraisal of the current situation makes it apparent that it will be extraordinarily difficult to get back to 350 ppm CO2 for centuries or millennia. We need a truly transformational, system wide change across global society to achieve that, and plenty of new tech. But he’s also downright wrong, because the corollary argument he uses is that it is therefore better to advocate for the compromise goal of 450 ppm since is more resonable and feasible. Yet even if Romm’s solution were fully achieved, it would still end in failure, because successfuly meeting the 450 ppm goal would result in utterly unacceptable climate impacts and a transformed planet. This is a common theme – flaw – among environmental advocates – failing to recognise that the laws of physics and biology don’t compromise, and have no pity.

———————————————————–

Tell Barack Obama the Truth – The Whole Truth (Part II of IV)

Dr James E. Hansen

Outline of policy options. The imperative of near-term termination of coal emissions (but not necessarily coal use) requires fundamental advances in energy technologies. Such advances would be needed anyhow, as fossil fuel reserves dwindle, but the climate crisis demands that they be achieved rapidly. Fortunately, actions that solve the climate problem can be designed so as to also improve energy security and restore economic well-being. A workshop held in Washington, DC on 3 November 2008 outlined options (presentations are at http://www.mediafire.com/nov3workshop — we are writing a paper, which will be available soon). The workshop focused on electrical energy, because that is the principal use of coal. Also electricity is more and more the energy carrier of choice, because it is clean, much desired in developing countries, and a likely replacement or partial replacement for oil in transportation.

(more…)

Filed under: Impacts | 10 Comments »

Hansen to Obama Pt 1 – the Now or Never plan

Posted on 24 November 2008 by Barry Brook

It would be an understatement of epic proportions to say that President-elect Barack Obama has a big job ahead of him come January 2009. Plenty of people will be giving him ‘advice’ – some good, most not (if the history of vested interests twisting the political process over the last few decades is any guide).

Scientists have something particularly important to communicate to Obama on climate change and energy. It’s based on hard-won, peer-reviewed evidence – not spin and denial – and it’s a super urgent message. In broad terms, it’s the policy implications of the Sustainability Emergency.

One of the most respected climate change scientists, Dr James Hansen of NASA, has drafted a statement which Obama should definitely read. I think BraveNewClimate readers should study it too. It is perhaps the single best succinct summary of the problems and solutions of global warming and related issues that I’ve read.

As such, I’ve decided to republish it here on BNC in full over the next week, and invite feedback from readers. As Jim says, “This is a first draft. Criticisms would be much appreciated.” I’ll make sure he gets to see them. To access the original PDF, click here. Or wait and follow it here on BNC. I’ve enhanced the original slightly by adding some judicious hyperlinks, which will allow readers to explore these ideas further.

First up, it’s an overview of the core problem – the threats of inaction (or weak progress), the urgency of the problem and the fallacy of part-solutions, and the principle implication – coal emissions must stop ASAP.

———————————————————–

Tell Barack Obama the Truth – The Whole Truth (Part I of IV)

Dr James E. Hansen

Embers of election night elation will glow longer than any prior election. Glowing even in other nations, and for good reason. We are all tied together, more than ever, like it or not. Barack Obama’s measured words on election night, including eloquent recognition of historic progress, from the viewpoint of a 106-year-old lady, still stoke the embers. But he was already focusing on tasks ahead, without celebratory excess. Well he should.

The challenge he faces is unprecedented. I refer not to the inherited economic morass, as threatening as it is. The human toll due to past failures and excesses may prove to be great, yet economic recessions, even depressions, come and go. Now our planet itself is in peril. Not simply the Earth, but the fate of all its species, including humanity. The situation calls not for hand-wringing, but rather informed action.

(more…)

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Future | 9 Comments »

What Bob Carter and Andrew Bolt fail to grasp

Posted on 23 November 2008 by Barry Brook
Increasing ocean heat content - where most of global warming is going

Increasing ocean heat content - where most of 'global warming' is going

Perhaps the most pervasive meme in the climate crank blogosphere is that the Earth hasn’t warmed for the last 10 years (or since 1998). You’ve not doubt heard this many times, or variants thereof (e.g. that the world has cooled since 2002, etc.). Flourishes on this theme include claims that the last century of global warming was wiped out in January 2008, or that we are in dire risk of plunging into a new ice age. There has been more refutations of this silly notion than I could possibly cite, but some good ones can be found here, here, here and here. I’ve even devoted a whole lecture to it in my Climate Change Q&A series and written a brief about it for AusSMC.

Despite these many careful and logical explanations as to why this meme is fatally flawed, it persists, and indeed remains a favourite recycled talking point among the sceptical elements of the mass media (I guess because it something so simple to throw out there, and yet requires some science or stats to show why it is unscientific tosh).  But say we, being generous folks or simply for the sake of argument, decide to give people like Bob Carter and Andrew Bolt the benefit of the doubt and accept that they really do believe that the Earth’s air temperatures haven’t warmed for a decade (or so). What would this mean for global warming?

Well, not a lot, as it turns out.

The exponentially increasing activities of modern civilisation is causing a build-up in the atmosphere of long-lived greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide produced by industrial emissions from coal and oil burning, methane belched out from livestock, and nitrous oxide emitted from soils after fertiliser application. (This simple fact is disputed only by the most weird fringe of denialism). Furthermore, fundamental atmospheric physics tells us that this will cause a planetary energy imbalance, which can only be ‘corrected’ (brought back into radiative equilibrium) by a raising of the global temperature.

Now, following this expectation, air temperatures have risen by about 0.5C over the last few decades. But that is not where the real action is. You see, most of the extra solar energy trapped by the Earth’s slightly thicker blanket of greenhouse gases has not gone into raising air temperatures. It’s poured into the vast oceans (which contain about hundreds of times the volume of the atmosphere), and been ‘used up’ in causing the phase change required to turn polar and mountain ice into water. This has lead to rising sea levels from thermal expansion of the water as it gains heat, as well as contributions from melting glaciers and mountain ice caps, sea ice albedo changes, and mass loss from major ice sheets (Greenland and West Antarctica).

Indeed, it has been shown that about 90% of this additional energy has be used to heat water and about 7% to melt ice. Only about 3% is left over to warm the air. So we shouldn’t be at all surprised if air temperatures show the weakest response to the enhanced greenhouse effect – at least in the short term.

Fred Pearce explains it very nicely in a New Scientist article:

Tricky oceans
Water stores an immense amount of heat compared with air. It takes more than 1000 times as much energy to heat a cubic metre of water by 1 degree Centigrade as it does the same volume of air. Since the 1960s, over 90% of the excess heat due to higher greenhouse gas levels has gone into the oceans, and just 3% into warming the atmosphere (see figure 5.4 in the IPCC report (PDF)).

(more…)

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Sceptics | 187 Comments »

Interview with Prof Stephen Schneider

Posted on 14 November 2008 by Barry Brook

As part of a recent textbook I wrote with Prof Navjot Sodhi and Assoc Prof Corey Bradshaw (Tropical Conservation Biology, Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), we interviewed some well known scientists for a ‘Spotlight’ series. Other interviews have been published on BNC’s sister blog, ConservationBytes.

For the chapter entitled “Climate Change: Turning up the tropical heat“, we put some questions to Prof Stephen Schneider. Steve is a good friend of mine who I first met at an extinction conference in Okazaki, Japan, in 2004 – the same conference, incidentally, that motivated Tim Flannery to write The Weather Makers). Steve was later a Thinker in Residence in Adelaide and produced an important public policy document for South Australia on government actions to combat climate change. We’ve also done a tag-team interview on carbon trading.

Anyway, here is the interview, the format for which includes a small biography, a list of major scientific publications and a Q & A on the person’s particular area of expertise.

Biography

I am the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Professor of Biological Sciences, and Professor by Courtesy of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. I am Co-Director of the Center for Environmental Science and Policy in the Freeman-Spogli Institute and a Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment. I received my PhD in Mechanical Engineering and Plasma Physics from Columbia University, USA, in 1971. When considering research areas then, I became aware that anthropogenic dust can cool the climate and greenhouse gases can warm it, and thus decided to switch to studying climate science. Today, my global change interests include the ecological and economic implications of climatic change; integrated assessment of global change; climatic modeling of paleoclimates and human impacts on climate (e.g., carbon dioxide “greenhouse effect”); dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system; food/climate and other environmental science/public policy issues; and environmental consequences of nuclear war. I am also dedicated to advancing environmental literacy in all levels of education.

(more…)

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A | 7 Comments »

Response to a wine industry climate change skeptic

Posted on 11 November 2008 by Barry Brook

In a recent issue of the Australian and New Zealand Wine Industry Journal, a well known West Australian wine maker, Mr Erl Happ, published an opinion piece on climate change – expressing doubt that it is caused by industrial greenhouse gas emissions. To cite Erl’s conclusion:

Greenhouse theory does not stack up. ‘Tropo’ in ‘troposphere’ is Greek for ‘turning’. If the surface of the Earth heats up the troposphere turns faster and eliminates heat more efficiently. At an average depth of 10km, the troposphere is very thin. Moving air will not hold heat. Even in the warmest places, the nights can be cool. It is the ocean that is the real store of warmth and it is the coastal places that stay warmer overnight and in winter. Carbon dioxide is less than one-twenty-fifth of 1% of the air that we inhale. It is a much larger fraction of the air that we exhale. Are we to breathe less deeply and exercise less vigorously to reduce our carbon footprint? Carbon dioxide is what the plants need to make them grow and that is why it is scarce. While we have plants it will always be scarce. More carbon dioxide enables plants to grow faster and use less water. This will help to green the deserts. Let us not confuse environmental religion with observational science. Reliable science explains what we observe. One can not understand the climate system without an appreciation of the influence of geography, spatial relations, ocean currents and the physics that drive cloud cover over the tropics. We have managed to banish religion from politics. Now we need to do the same for science.

You can read the full opinion piece as a PDF here.

I was asked by the editor to write a short response, which was published in the latest issue. I hope if gives you a useful idea of how to respond, formally, to such pieces (the version that appeared in the journal was trimmed and edited a little compared to the submitted version I reproduce below).

——————————————————–

A general critique of Erl Happ’s ‘El Niño warming’ opinion piece

In the July/August issue of the Australian and New Zealand Wine Industry Journal, Erl Happ published an opinion piece on climate change and its relationship to ocean dynamics and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). It is not reasonable to attempt a direct, blow-by-blow critique of Mr Happ’s personal theories on climate change, because they constitute little more than a haphazard mishmash of fact, distortion, poorly contextualised data and ‘gut instinct’. I will instead use a few points to illustrate a more general interpretation of scepticism of mainstream climate science.

Mr Happ complains that climate warming is not global because it is confined to the Northern Hemisphere. This is patently not true. For instance, comparing the decade a century ago (1898-1907) to the most recent decade (1998-2007), we find that global temperatures are an average of 0.87°C hotter (based on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data cited by Mr Happ). In the Northern Hemisphere, which is more readily warmed due to a large continental land mass, the difference is 1.13°C. In the Southern Hemisphere, predominated by ocean which takes longer to change temperature (because water has a higher thermal inertia, it takes longer for energy gain to be manifested as a temperature rise), the warming over 100 years is 0.61°C. Yet , starkly, there has been no trend in ENSO intensity or its frequency of return, nor in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, nor in sunspot activity, to account for this systematic change in the global climate system.

(more…)

Filed under: Sceptics | 35 Comments »

Do most scientists really believe in global warming?

Posted on 6 November 2008 by Barry Brook

I’ve been keeping busy in China – currently in Yangling for the huge China Agricultural Fair (over 300,000 people at the opening ceremony). I’ve giving a talk on climate change to the participants tomorrow.

So not much time for BraveNewClimate until I get back to Australia. But to keep readers interested, I thought I’d share an interesting opinion piece I read a while back by George Marshall. It was actually written a few years ago, but is still highly relevant today. Jim Hansen reflected on the same problem in his paper ‘Scientific reticence and sea level rise‘. Some things, it seems, have changed little since 2006.

———————————————-

Do (most) scientists really believe in global warming?

George Marshall

This is not a facetious question or skeptic propaganda. I would never dispute that the scientific community is in full agreement that climate change is real, human induced, and significant.

However, ‘believe’ is a powerful and specific word. When we talk of the things we ‘believe’ in we give them a value and an emotional context. We know many things, but it is our beliefs that provide a frame for our decisions and direct our behaviour.

So, to come back to the question- do scientists really believe in climate change? My observation is that many do not. In the course of my work (I am a director of a climate change charity) I often attend scientific briefings and have met many professional climate scientists and have noted the following consistent traits of scientific presentations:

It’s serious, but don’t panic. Gavin Schmidt has written a long review for the excellent Real Climate site on the IPPR report I reviewed in the last posting. Schmidt argues that the IPPR authors missed a “huge missing category” of denial, the ‘it’s serious (and interesting) but don’t panic’ repertoire which, he says, ‘is the language most often heard at scientific conferences’.

Schmidt cites as an example a letter to the Independent from Dr Thomas Crowley from the Division of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Duke University, North Carolina. Dr Crowley calls on environmentalists to stop ‘castigating others and raising wild alarms’ and ’sit down at the negotiating table with industry and conservative politicians and do some good old-fashioned “horse trading”.

The role for scientists is informing the debate. Back in 2000 my friend and colleague Mark Lynas asked a simple but highly relevant question at a public meeting addressed by Professor Mike Hulme, the head of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research. “If, as you have argued, the Amazon may burn down adding a further 3 degrees to global climate, that’s curtains for all of us, isn’t it?” This is exactly the kind of question one is never supposed to ask, and Hulme responded energetically to deflate it. “I do not think it is appropriate or useful for us to bang our drum about this- we need to use this information to generate a dialogue about our future options”. He didn’t answer the question because, dialogue or no dialogue, Mark was right. It is curtains, and scientists are remarkably unwilling to ever say this even when the conclusion could be solidly supported by their own data.

(more…)

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Future | 38 Comments »

Earth as a magic pudding

Posted on 2 November 2008 by Barry Brook

Guest post by Dr Michael Lardelli

———————————–

Cornucopians – those who believe the Earth’s resources are boundless – have a clever mental trick to avoid acknowledging that the planet is finite. It is commonly called the “resource pyramid”.

The argument goes like this. When we first begin to extract a substance from a resource we exploit that resource in which the substance is most concentrated (and so easiest to purify) and/or most accessible.

An example of this would be digging large gold nuggets out of riverbanks in the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s or mining phosphate-rich guano on the Pacific island of Nauru by simply scooping it up and bagging it. However, as you probably know, the alluvial gold of Victoria and the guano on Nauru were both mined out many years ago.

You might think that this would lead to a severe shortage of these materials but this is where the resource pyramid works it magic. As these resources begin to become scarce their price rises. The higher price now makes it economically viable to extract the substance from a less accessible and/or less concentrated source. Amazingly, the total amount of the substance present in this lower-grade resource is greater than in the original, most concentrated resource. This pattern repeats. As the less concentrated resource begins to be mined out the price of the substance rises ever higher so that extracting it from an even lower grade/less accessible source becomes economically viable.

The total amount of the substance present in the lowest grade of resource is greater than previously. By this argument we can never run out of a substance because the more we use, the more becomes economically viable to extract. Our planet truly is a magic pudding! This idea can be represented as a pyramid with the small amount of most concentrated/accessible substance at the top and successively larger amounts of the substance in lower grades of ore, and so on, as we move down:

The resource pyramid idea contains a hidden assumption – that energy is cheap and abundant. In fact, it is the price of energy that ultimately determines the base of the resource pyramid. At each step down the resource pyramid the substance sought is less pure and/or accessible and so it requires more energy to extract.

(more…)

Filed under: Emissions, Future | 20 Comments »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 4,619 other followers

%d bloggers like this: