Energy and climate books I read in 2009

Posted on 31 December 2009 by Barry Brook

Here is an incomplete list of the sustainable energy and climate change books I read in 2009 (actually, a few also scraped in from late 2008). I’ve provided a 2 — 3 sentence summary of each book (from my perspective) and a Rating out of 5. Some books have been reviewed in more detail on BNC already — enter from the title of the book in this website’s search box to find the review.

Climate science

James Lovelock. The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. Basic Books, 2009, 288 p. — Lovelock is a wise old man who’s seen it all, and he pulls no punches here. His ruthless pragmatism on nuclear energy and climate adaptation was what I most enjoyed about this book. Chapter 4, “Energy and Food Sources” is a wonderful summary of the energy problem and the rest of the book explores the many uncertainties in climate science, and why they’re generally pretty bad news. We’re not in for a smooth ride this century. Rating: 4

James Hansen. Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance To Save Humanity. Bloomsbury, 2009, 320 p. — For a scientist, Hansen has an exceptional knack at writing for a general audience. In exploring the climate’s sensitivity to human forces, he draws on three principle lines of evidence — Earth history, modern observational data, and models/physics (the latter as integrators and predictors, the first line of evidence he considers to be the most compelling). In Hansen’s exploration of solutions, he (rightly) derides cap-and-trade shell games and points towards a technological solution with a clear timetable for closing out coal by 2030. Rating: 4.5

David Archer. The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate. Princeton UP, 2009, 180 p. — Excellent summary of the study of palaeoclimates and why this field of science points to long residence times of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with the implication that we are truly committing to change that will last ‘forever’ (hundreds of millennia). The right way to write popular science. Rating: 4

A. Barrie Pittock. Climate Change: The Science, Impacts and Solutions. CSIRO Publishing, 2009, 350 p. — Thorough, up-to-date review of climate science from a well-know Australian scientist. It examines whether things are worse now than we anticipated 5 to 10 years ago (answer = yes), and considers adaptation and mitigation solutions, with a focus on Australia. Barrie doesn’t think much about nuclear power; his dream is solar. Hmmm. Rating: 3.5

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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Future, Impacts, Nuclear, Renewables | 28 Comments »

Open Thread 2

Posted on 28 December 2009 by Barry Brook

It’s the Christmas and New Year season, and that means general festivities, good food and drinks, and lots of time in the pool with the kids (remember, it’s the height of summer in Australia). I also make it a rule at this time of year to try to stay away from anything serious on the computer, at least for a week or so. (For those who care about my other life, I’ve been catching up on season 4 Doctor Who and old Poirot episodes, as well as leveling up to 70 in CoD:MW2 multiplayer).

But, as a hat tip to my mentally evolutionary year (in terms of my thinking on climate solutions), I’ve got one last post lined up to close out the Noughties. It’s a brief review of the sustainable energy and climate change books that I read in 2009 (…stacking them up on my table, there is a disturbingly large number). Expect that post to be up on 31 December.

Meanwhile, I’ll be in-and-out of BNC, keeping up with the comments. I really love the active community that’s built up here — it’s got a real life of its own. In that spirit, I thought it was probably time to post up another Open Thread.

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Filed under: Open Thread | 167 Comments »

Unnatural gas

Posted on 24 December 2009 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Tom Blees. Tom is author of Prescription for the Planet – The Painless Remedy for Our Energy & Environmental Crises. Tom is also the president of the Science Council for Global Initiatives.

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Last month Bobby Kennedy Jr., a tireless advocate for the environment, gave a talk in New York City to a packed house. He spoke about the devastation wrought by coal mining and argued that we must get away from fossil fuels if we’re to deal with climate change. He also, to my chagrin (since I know he’s got my book), threw in some tired clichés about how bad nuclear power is. He then waxed enthusiastic about wind and solar power, asserting that if we build a smart grid and pour enough resources into building a lot of wind and solar production, we can have “free energy forever.” The crowd ate it up. Bobby’s a very good speaker, he’s definitely got the Kennedy knack for that.

Later, as he expanded on the renewable energy topic, he pointed out that we have abundant natural gas in the USA that we can use to fill in when the wind and solar production is insufficient. Bobby is certainly not alone in having a huge blind spot in this regard. Virtually every prominent advocate for a renewables-only future includes natural gas as a big part of the mix. Though it’s usually de-emphasized by wind and solar promoters, this embrace of natural gas generation is a tacit admission of the logistical and economic impossibility of providing all the energy humanity needs from renewables alone.

The willing acceptance of increased natural gas use by so many who consider themselves environmentalists is stunningly inconsistent with the science of anthropogenic climate change. The nearly religious fervor of the windies and sunnies virtually ignores this devil in the details. The most classic example of such willful blindness is the elevation of T. Boone Pickens to the status of environmental hero because of his plans (since scrapped, ironically) to build a huge wind farm in Texas. Back in 2004, T. Boone was infamous among these same people as the nefarious money man behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the abominable smear campaign that helped keep George W. Bush in power for a second disastrous term. T. Boone’s transformation into a darling of environmentalists is reminiscent of the “rehabilitation” of political pariahs in Maoist China. How quickly we forget.

A cynic (or realist) might well observe that T. Boone Pickens is a gas guy. That’s his stock in trade, it’s what made him the billions that freed him to support arch-conservative interests until his recent foray into the world of lefties. His political chameleon act, though, is much easier to understand if one keeps in mind the fact that the more massive the deployment of wind turbines and solar farms the more dependent we will become upon natural gas. It’s telling that T. Boone eventually abandoned plans for his mega-wind farm, attesting to his recognition that the economics simply couldn’t justify it. Ironically, he’s still pals with the big shots on the left. Ah, sweet redemption!

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Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Renewables | 82 Comments »

Temperature of science – never give up

Posted on 21 December 2009 by Barry Brook

As the end of 2009 approaches, I have many BraveNewClimate blog posts that are developing behind the scenes — more from the IFR FaD and TCASE series, a guest post by Tom Blees on the natural gas ‘game’, a guest post by a new BNC writer on wind farm planning problems, a report about my upcoming popular book on nuclear power (co-authored by Ian Lowe), and so on.

One of the most interesting things on the immediate horizon is a simple analysis to compare six options for reducing CO2 emissions from Australia’s electricity generation over the period 2010 and 2050, by Peter Lang. Peter has written a number of important posts on likely wind and solar energy costs and carbon abatement potential, as these technologies are taken to a large scale (search for ‘Peter Lang” on this page for a listing).

For now though, I want to take a bit of space to reflect on the global temperature record. With 2009 ranking among the hottest years on record [final data pending] and 2010 looking likely to be the hottest ever, it’s worth understanding where these data come from and why climate scientists consider them to be so robust. (Incidentally, on my research front, Corey Bradshaw and I are currently working on a new systematic analysis of the Australian temperature station data, to better contextualise extreme heat wave events).

So, below, I reproduce “The Temperature of Science” by Jim Hansen (arguably the world’s most famous climate scientist and a fellow SCGI member). Jim has perhaps the best understanding of this topic of anyone I know. This is a post everyone who wishes to make a comment in this area ought to read. I’ll be interested in the opinions of regular BNC readers.

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The Temperature of Science

James Hansen

Background

My experience with global temperature data over 30 years provides insight about how the science and its public perception have changed. In the late 1970s I became curious about well known analyses of global temperature change published by climatologist J. Murray Mitchell: why were his estimates for large-scale temperature change restricted to northern latitudes? As a planetary scientist, it seemed to me there were enough data points in the Southern Hemisphere to allow useful estimates both for that hemisphere and for the global average. So I requested a tape of meteorological station data from Roy Jenne of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who obtained the data from records of the World Meteorological Organization, and I made my own analysis.

Fast forward to December 2009, when I gave a talk at the Progressive Forum in Houston Texas. The organizers there felt it necessary that I have a police escort between my hotel and the forum where I spoke. Days earlier bloggers reported that I was probably the hacker who broke into East Anglia computers and stole e-mails. Their rationale: I was not implicated in any of the pirated e-mails, so I must have eliminated incriminating messages before releasing the hacked emails. The next day another popular blog concluded that I deserved capital punishment. Web chatter on this topic, including indignation that I was coming to Texas, led to a police escort.

How did we devolve to this state? Any useful lessons? Is there still interesting science in analyses of surface temperature change? Why spend time on it, if other groups are also doing it?

First I describe the current monthly updates of global surface temperature at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Then I show graphs illustrating scientific inferences and issues. Finally I respond to questions in the above paragraph.

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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Hot News, Sceptics | 39 Comments »

A LFTR deployment plan for Australia

Posted on 17 December 2009 by Barry Brook

Below is a guest post by Alex Goodwin, which canvasses the idea of a large-scale deployment of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) to clean up Australia’s power generation sector. On the Energy from Thorium forums, he’s known as fnord.

Alex refers to himself as “the finance grad they keep in a deep dark hole”, reflecting the master of business in applied finance he earned at QUT in 2007. Thus, although he’s often been mistaken for a nuclear engineer or other nuclear industry professional, in reality he’s merely an interested amateur and communicator [we need more people like this]. He joined Toastmasters (a public speaking club) in October 2008, completed a Competent Communicator course in November 2009, and most of his speeches promote the LFTR concept in one way or another.

In this post, Alex is being pragmatic. For instance, one may argue over whether his subplan to upgrade lignite using LFTR process heat and so add value to our exports is a good idea, from a climate change perspective, but ultimately we’ve got to have some transition plan, and at least the one he proposes is probably more realistic than the Government’s dreams of a world powered by coal with carbon capture and storage. In the end though, we, and other coal-rich nations, will just have to face the fact that most of the coal must be left in the ground.

You can download an 8-page printable PDF of Alex’s article here.

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Clean electricity, cheap electricity, safe electricity – pick any three

By Alex Goodwin

The federal government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme signals its desire for Australian carbon emissions (currently 28.3 tonnes per capita, yearly) to drop to 60% of 2000 levels by 2050, after allowing for population growth.

If it’s business as usual, I can see some difficulty meeting that goal.

However, we don’t have time for business as usual – climate change slowly parboils us all.  For those of you skeptical of global warming, there are still plenty of reasons to go full throttle nuclear – economic development, saving Australian lives from reduced air pollution, and energy/water security, to name three.  Energy and water security vastly reduces the need for Australia to undertake foreign policy adventures to secure oil and clean water supplies, saving yet more lives.

It makes sense to go after the biggest source of carbon emissions first – which, in Australia’s case, is the power generation industry.  Power generation emits nearly 14 tonnes per head, and it’s fairly concentrated, unlike agriculture (4.2 tonnes) and transport (3.8 tonnes).

Clean power generation up, and we can meet, and beat, the CPRS goal.  We can’t cut our own economic throats cleaning up our act, so we need reliable, emission-free power to avoid disrupting the Australian economy.

This can be done, for roughly the cost of Mr Rudd’s stimulus package, inside ten years, benefiting Australian national security, the power generation industry, the coal industry, and the Australian consumer.

Enter the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR).  As the name suggests, it is:

A liquid-fuelled nuclear reactor;

Running on thorium;

Toothpaste and table-salt safe;

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Filed under: Nuclear | 74 Comments »

IFR FaD 2 – fuel use

Posted on 13 December 2009 by Barry Brook

With the Chinese announcing a projected 10-fold increase in their country’s uranium demand by 2030, some observers are worrying that we face a uranium supply crisis. In the short term, there may indeed be bottlenecks, if mining expansion fails to keep pace with escalating demand. (Frankly, I find this unlikely — price will dictate resource investment decisions over this 20 year time frame.) But what about the broader, long-term question that arises from this supply problem? How much uranium is out there, and accessible, and if the world was run entirely on IFRs (or thorium-based LFTRs), how long would we be able to do this before the ‘energy metal’ fuel supply ran out?

This is an interesting and important issue, but it’s also a little complex. So I’m going to need to devote a couple of posts to answer it properly. (Keeping in mind that I want each IFR FaD post to be concise and have a single main message). In this post, I consider how much fuel an IFR would use.

Coal, natural gas and oil, which are the feedstock used to run fossil-fuel-powered thermal generators, embody a convenient and concentrated store of ancient sunlight. But as was discovered in the 1940s, we can also unleash the vast energy contained within the atom. Indeed, splitting (‘fissioning’) the nucleus of a heavy atom like uranium, releases over a million times more energy than chemically adding oxygen atoms to carbon (which is what combustion really does). So, compared to fossil fuels, all forms of nuclear power are incredibly efficient in terms of power density.

It takes 160 — 220 tonnes of natural uranium to fuel a modern 1 gigawatt (GW) nuclear power plant for an entire year (the total energy produced is called a gigawatt year, or GWyr). One GWe of power (recall that the ‘e’ stands for electrical power rather than ‘t’ for thermal power, or heat) is a huge amount. It’s enough to run 65 million desk lamps (assuming they used 15 W compact fluorescent globes), or more practically, to satisfy today’s electricity demand of a typical Australian or US city of about half a million people. For comparison, to deliver a GWyr of energy using a coal-fired power station, about 3 — 7 million tonnes of coal must be burned (the amount can vary depending on the grade of coal).
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Filed under: IFR FaD, Nuclear | 39 Comments »

Mind the gap – distant climates and immediate budgets

Posted on 10 December 2009 by Barry Brook

Time for some updates from the world of climate science.

First up, the December issue of Nature Reports Climate Change is definitely worth checking out. (This spin-off internet magazine, produced by the Nature Publishing House, is always worth reading, and you can download a full-colour PDF if you prefer this format — good for printing).

Three articles, in particular, grabbed my attention this issue. The first revisited the premise of carbon budgets proposed by Allen et al. 2009 — a concept I covered in a BNC post back in May 2009. The conclusion was that to have a half-decent (50%) chance of keeping global temperature rise to <2°C below pre-industrial levels, given a climate sensitivity in the range of 2 — 4.5°C, humanity’s cumulative carbon budget between now and ‘forever’ (the next 100,000 years or so), is 1 trillion tonnes of carbon. We’ve burned 500 billion tonnes of fossil carbon and forests already, and on our current trajectory, we’ll break the global carbon bank within the next two to three decades.

In this latest paper, the authors suggest that in order  to better focus our attention to the immediate rather than perpetual task, we need a supplementary short-term budget for the period 2010 — 2030. They calculate that to avoid a rate of change of +0.2 per decade, the carbon ‘expense’ for the next 20 years must stay within 190 billion tonnes, or about 9.5 billion tonnes per year (for context, in 2008 global emissions were 9.8 billion tonnes). If we met this goal, we would then have a further 300 billion tonnes to spend for the period 2030 — 100,2030 AD (or thereabouts). Given the seeming inevitability of emissions growth for at least the next 5 — 10 years, we’ll have to have a serious turn around and decline in emissions in the period 2020 — 2030. Sobering thought. Massive deployment of nuclear and renewable power, anyone?

The second article worth reading is called “Mind the Gap”. Here, the question of novel and disappearing climates is considered (this problem has previously been addressed in the technical literature, here). Take a look at this grim figure: (more…)

Filed under: Emissions, Future, Hot News | 21 Comments »

TCASE 7: Scaling up Andasol 1 to baseload

Posted on 6 December 2009 by Barry Brook

Andasol 1 is Europe’s first parabolic trough solar thermal power station, which went online in Nov 2008. It is located on a high desert site in Granada, Spain, which enjoys a high level of direct insolation – an average of 2,136 kWh / m2 / year. The mirror field — turbine infrastructure can yield a peak electricity generation capacity of 49.9 MWe (20 MWe average, see below). It also has a thermal storage system using molten salt.

The purpose of this post is to consider how one might scale up an Andasol 1 type plant in order to meet a rated power demand for 8,000 hours per year — thereby giving it a capacity factor of ~90%, similar to a baseload coal or nuclear power stations. This is a first attempt to improve the comparisons first given in TCASE 4.

But first, let’s look at the technology and current numbers. Here’s a good summary of its main features:

The Andasol 1 storage system absorbs part of the heat produced in the solar field during the day. A turbine produces electricity using this heat during the night, or when the sky is overcast. This process almost doubles the number of operational hours at the solar thermal power plant per year, the company said.

The heat generated in the solar field will be stored in a molten mixture of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate. Both substances are used in food production as preservatives and are also used as fertilizer. The storage tank consists of two, 14-meter high tanks with a diameter of 36 meters and a capacity of 28,500 tons of molten salt. During the pumping process from the cold to the hot tank, the molten salt absorbs additional heat at an outlet temperature of approximately 280°C, reaching a temperature of 380°C.

A fully loaded storage system can keep the turbine in operation for 7.5 hours, which means almost 24-hour operation of the power plant in during high sunshine periods.

More technical details, including some useful illustrations of the storage system, can be found here and here. In summary, the solar collectors for the existing plant add up to a total of 510,120 square metres (0.51 km2), consisting of 209,664 mirrors along 312 rows with a total length of 24 km, with 90 kilometres of absorption pipes. The total physical area occupied by the plant (after appropriate collector spacing, and allowing for the storage and turbine housing, etc.) is 1.95 km2.  The estimated energy yield is 178 GWh / year (I haven’t seen reports of actual performance data), at a capacity factor of 40.7%, and an average power yield of 10.4 W/m2. It will use 560 million litres/year of fresh water, mostly for cooling the steam circuit, drawn from local ground water (a plant using air cooling would have a lower efficiency and would have to be larger to compensate).  The lifespan of the plant is estimated to be 30 — 40 years.

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Filed under: Renewables, TCASE | 120 Comments »

Clean future in nuclear power

Posted on 4 December 2009 by Barry Brook

Here is an editorial written by Martin Nicholson and me, which is published in today’s edition of The Australian newspaper. This is all pretty familiar fare for regular BNC readers, but I publish here for completeness, as I like to have my media articles collected together and archived in this central web repository.

I should point out that it’s deliberately pitched in a way to get the general public thinking more carefully about nuclear power and the alternatives. Although it’s not made abundantly clear in the article, I’m actually increasingly of the view that Gen III+ reactors will have a major role to play in large-scale nuclear deployment over the next two to three decades, to support the ramp up of the Gen IV fleet (more on this in later IFR FaD posts). But making this point credibly in a short Op Ed like this would have left room for nothing else, and also would have risked been seen as ‘same old, same old’ by the nuclear power fence sitters (or those who are ‘weak antis’). Hence an emphasis on Gen IV, to try to hook the fresh fish.

I’d be interested to hear whether you think we’ve struck the right balance here.

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WE may not be getting an emissions trading scheme any time soon but the climate and energy crises still need fixing with real urgency.

For climate, the issue is excess greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. For energy, the crisis is dwindling supplies of those fuels and air pollution from coal combustion.

Replacement energy sources need to be reliable, plentiful and economic to deploy. They need to be low-carbon to minimise global warming. Business-as-usual or half measures risks saddling future generations with a climatically hostile planet and energy scarcity.

Nuclear power is one obvious replacement source, but typically raises five objections.

First, readily available uranium supplies are limited. If the world was wholly powered by present-style nuclear reactors there would be at most a few decades of energy before cheap uranium was exhausted.

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Filed under: Nuclear | 47 Comments »

Copenhagen reality check – what’s really coming

Posted on 1 December 2009 by Barry Brook

Here in Australia, there’s currently a political storm over a proposed cap-and-trade system for putting a price on carbon pollution. In brief, the federal Labor (left wing) government has passed the legislation for an emissions trading scheme in the house of representatives (where they have a clear parliamentary majority), but have had it blocked in the senate, where they lack a majority.

It has now become clear that the Liberal/National coalition (conservatives) will not pass the bill the second time around, for various reasons (a large number of members are sceptical of a human role in climate change, and others claim it will be an economic disaster). The Greens party, with five senators, have also refused to vote with Labor to pass the bill in the senate for inverse reasons — they claim it is a flawed system because of the way it rewards big polluters and due to its grossly inadequate emissions reduction targets.

A similar vexed position exists as the US debates the Waxman-Markey bill, as outlined here. In Europe, which has had an emissions trading scheme for a few years now, the system is failing to make any noticeable difference. Indeed, it’s fair to conclude that there is nowhere in the world where an effective cap-and-trade system is working as intended.

So, what does this mean for the upcoming Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference (7 — 18 December)? Is there any prospect for a global deal to reduce emissions in developed and developing countries? If there is, will the targets be meaningful? Will there be agreement on the preferred system for putting a price on carbon (cap-and-trade, carbon tax, fee and dividend, etc.). I’d like to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

Jim Hansen has made his views pretty darned clear. Here’s what he said recently asked if there any real chance of averting the climate crisis:

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Filed under: Emissions, Future, Nuclear | 68 Comments »

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