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UKWED
Welcome to the UK Wind Energy Database – UKWED – the most definitive database on wind energy projects in the UK, both onshore and offshore, tracking project progress from submission through to operation. UKWED offers a range of statistical information, tables and maps, which is automatically updated as and when new data is entered, divided into four categories for those projects in planning, consented, under construction and operational. BWEA hopes that you find this free facility useful, and should you have any comments, please email ukwed@bwea.com
Links to .klm file for uk wind sites
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Posted via web from RTS
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Hepatitis C: Blood
Hep C is transmitted through blood. Visit the NHS site for more info.
www.nhs.uk/hepatitisC
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There’s a fascinating paper by Corinne Le Quéré and many other hands out in Nature Geoscience on what’s up with sources and sinks of carbon dioxide. The authors claim that the sinks are getting weaker, and that a greater proportion of the carbon dioxide emitted is staying in the atmosphere, which is a pretty big thing. They are not absolutely sure of this, and when they spoke to the press earlier this week they recognised that another recent analysis by Wolfganag Knorr suggested the sinks were sucking up just as great a proportion as they ever did. The datasets are not great, which is one reason for the uncertainty; another, as I understand it (haven’t dug into the matter) turns on how you filter out variability when looking for the trend. This matters not least because variability may be driving some of the trend: El Ninos, for example, decrease the tropical land sink because they dry places out, and if El Nino frequency is part of the long-term climate signal then removing them from the data means removing some of the trend too. Anyway, the paper doesn’t say for sure that the sinks are beginning to slow down, but the authors do find it likely-in-the-ipcc-sense, which means they assess the probability as 2 to 1 odds on or better. (Update: John Timmer at Ars Technica has more on the differences between the papers.)
SMAP also looks pretty cool
Now there’s some fascinating stuff in this, which I may come back to, but there’s also cause for deep frustration. A real sense of what the sinks are doing would be hugely helped by having better measurements of carbon dioxide, both from global monitoring networks and from satellites. But that just doesn’t seem to be a priority. Global ground based monitoring of carbon dioxide capable of showing regional effects is still underfunded — this summer in Boulder Pieter Tans was telling me that there was a lot more that could be done for relatively little money. And satellite measurements took a terrible blow when the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, OCO, didn’t make it to orbit in February. OCO could have been rebuilt and relaunched quickly: the team was all still there,the designs were good, it was as shovel-ready a piece of spending as you could wish for. But it wasn’t funded as such, and doesn’t seem to have any new money associated with it. So as I understand it the money to refly OCO will have to be gouged out of NASA’s existing earth science budget (8% of its total budget, because it’s not like the earth is a sexy supernova or galaxy or anything like that). I have to assume that that means it will fly later than it could have (and cost more); that probably means delays for SMAP, the soil moisture mission currently due to launch in 2013. SMAP would provide unparalleled data on one of the key parts of the planet — the part just beneath our feet that contains the root zones of plants and the water that those roots require.
Not to be treating such missions as a global priority strikes me as simply crazy. Now I know that there is an argument that the need for new climate science is overstated — that we know the outlook is bad, and that there is no science that is going to change the degree of action or inaction that that badness is held to merit. I understand that stressing a need for more data and science might be seen as offering reasons for delay. But the OCO and SMAP data really matter. They matter to understanding the processes going on — where the carbon is coming from and going to, how ecosystems are being effected, and so on. In SMAP’s case they even have operational implications — better soil moisture data means better forecasting. But despite the fact that great things turn on these issues, they don’t get the money. And their ground-based correlates, which offer even more bang for the buck, get penny pinched too.
Scientific monitoring isn’t going to save the world — but it will tell us what is going on as we try to adapt and to prioritise mitigations. Which means we should be taking it seriously.
Refs:
“Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide” Corinne Le Quéré, Michael R. Raupach, Josep G. Canadell, Gregg Marland et al. Nature Geoscience (2009) | doi:10.1038/ngeo689
“Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?” Wolfgang Knorr Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L21710, (2009) | doi:10.1029/2009GL040613
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The FT is doing a lot of climate stuff at the moment, not all of which I have caught up with, and much of which I am sure is excellent, but this para in yesterday’s broadly fine leader on following the science is flat wrong:
Fortunately the science becomes much clearer when we move from predicting the climate itself to assessing how best to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Forget about esoteric “geo-engineering” proposals to cool the earth. Technology that already exists (or is in development) can do the job perfectly well by increasing the efficiency with which we use carbon-based energy.
The point here is not that I disagree with the notion of ignoring geoengineering — reasonable people can and do differ on that, as noted last week. But the idea that the earth can be cooled by using carbon-based energy more efficiently is just not true. Efficiency can slow the rate of warming — but any meaningful cooling will need zero-emissions energy and probably a fair bit of direct air carbon capture too.
Unsuprisingly, the letters in today’s issue do not point out this error, because they are from people objecting instead to following the scientific consensus — including one from a chap who claims that there was once a scientific consensus that the world was flat. Can we get a better class of sceptic please?
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Not by me, not my leg...
This thought from Bruno Latour seems spectacularly apposite to my work:
The dream of going to another world is just that: a dream, and probably also a deep sin.
But to seize, or seize again, this world, this same, one-and-only world — to grasp it otherwise: that’s not a dream, that’s a necessity.
Image from flickr user Enro, used under a creative commons licence
Steven Levitt, at the end of a long post on his freakonomics blog about Superfreakonomics and geoengineering:
For all the blogosphere shouting against our chapter, I have to be honest and say that I just don’t get it. I can’t understand why any environmentalist who really cares about the Earth’s future could say with a straight face that geoengineering doesn’t deserve a seat at the table as the global-warming debate heats up.
This mischaracterises the debate/furore/ritual clubbing/whatever (see previous posts). Quite a lot of the people attacking superfreakonomics — eg Brad Delong — *do* want geoengineering to have a seat at the table. It’s just that they don’t like the superfreaks’ treatment of the subject — and may, as I do, think such treatment is going to make it harder to get that seat, not easier. They, and I, are criticising the chapter not because geoengineering shouldn’t be taken seriously, but because Levitt and Dubner don’t seem to be trying to take it seriously: their handling of the issue is partial and unsatisfactory. It mixes a poorly tempered enthusiasm for geoengineering with some tired tropes of global warming denialism (which serve no clear purpose in the argument), and it frames the idea specifically as an alternative to emissions reductions (“Mt Pinatubo versus Al Gore”, “solve the whole global warming problem”) rather than as an additional strategy should there be a need for prompt cooling.
From the evidence of his post Levitt sort-of-gets some of this: that is why he says that the chapter in question is really about “how could we most efficiently cool the earth fast”, rather than other questions such as “how can we most equitably manage the risk of climate change”. But: a) while it may well be that a close reading provides textual support for the idea that the superfreaks acknowledge the narrow focus of their question, the chapter sure gives the impression that it is about climate change in general; b) asking “how can we most efficiently cool the earth fast” without asking broader questions about climate change is intellectually shallow; c) even in the narrow frame, surely “how could we most efficiently cool the earth fast and keep it cool” is a better question, with a more complex answer.
Generosity dictates, though, that we should also look more generally at the real phenomenon that Levitt points to: people who don’t want geoengineering discussed at all, or only under the strictest of limits. I disagree with these people. But I don’t find it very hard to understand where they are coming from. Here are five components to their arguments, as I see them.
- Geongineering adds to the climate risks unconscionably. Volcanoes, and by implication other stratospheric-veil schemes, screw with hydrology; cloud brightening can change ocean currents; ocean fertilization radically rearranges ecosystems: we don’t know how to do any of these things well, and if we sanction the general idea that geoengineering is plausible we are prohibitively unlikely to retire all these risks before going ahead with a scheme. As applied to geoengineering research this is partly an epistemological argument (the impossibility of getting knowledge of a high enough quality) and partly a slippery slope argument. I think in general slippery slope arguments are overblown, but I can see where this line of reasoning is coming from. (There is also a linked concern about crowding out research money for other aspects of climate, but I think that’s a sceond tier argument)
- It is reasonable to distrust a priori the motives of anyone who tries to argue for any approach to global warming other than emissions reduction. People feel this because they know, from experience and analysis, that that there are extremely powerful lobbies which want to slow or derail emissions reduction, and assume that pretty much anyone saying anything along those lines is doing so as either a dupe or a tool of those lobbies. There is an element of cognitive miserliness in this; but where one person says cognitive miser another might say cognitively prudent, and ask why he or she should bother wasting cognition on a subject when past experience has given them a pretty damn good inductive basis for thinking such an investment of thought will be wasted.
- I think its clearly true that many environmentalists have a pre-existing desire for people to live low-impact, low-consumption lives, often because they sincerely believe that this will make everyone happier. To some extent, and with various levels of awareness that they are behaving in this way, some of these people see concern about global warming as an instrumental way to bring a low-consumption low-impact work of some sort about. This is not to say they are insincere in their concern about global warming: merely that it is overdetermined. I personally would rather people separated out these two strands of their thought, but I can see as a matter of fact that they frequently don’t, and I’m sure if Steve Levitt was really trying to “get” things he could see that to.
- The first moral argument. At an everything-I-need-to-know-I-learned-in-kindergarten level people think that when you make a mess you should clean it up, not paint over it, even if painting over it is much easier. This is not a particularly good argument, and will have little if any traction with people who see the world in terms of costs and benefits — but it is an argument that people can feel easily and clearly, and feelings about the morality of pollution run deep.
- The second moral argument: the purpose of environmental action is to restore nature. This means getting back to a preindustrial sort of a climate, with lower greenhouse gases and no permanent high-altitude smogs. For me, this is a flawed argument, a planet-wide application of the naturalistic fallacy; I think correct environmental action is much more complex, and that increasing the possibilities for human happiness matters more than an idealised concern for nature. But I understand that other people don’t feel this way.
There is doubtless more to geoengineering opposition than this, but these five points seem to me to cover a great deal of it. The important thing is to grasp that geoengineering is at some level just another form of climate change, that there are a great many of ways in which people disagree about climate change, and that it helps to understand them. If Steven Levitt wants to understand all this better, then he ought to buy a copy of Mike Hulme’s “Why we disagree about global warming” (Amazon US|UK), as discussed in the Copenhagen reading list post.
PS: Recent useful contributions to the superfreakonomics debate: an interview with Ken Caldeira by Jeff Goodell, whose book on all this is going to be way better than Superfreakonomics, and Daniel Davies on what contrarians should expect.
Filed under: Geoengineering
A swimming pool pump, geoengineering potential unknown
It’s clear that there are real problems with Levitt and Dubner’s take on geoengineering in their book Superfreakonomics (see past two posts Update: or more concisely, see Eric Pooley’s piece on Bloomberg, reposted here with added Joe Romm). I thought it might be interesting to see if those problems necessarily reflect mistakes made by Nathan Myhrvold, who is one of their sources (more on Nathan and some of his geoengineering ideas in this post).
Here are the things that Nathan says or is reported to believe in the relevant chapter — not necessarily a comprehensive list, but I think I got most of them:
That people who suggest global warming will lead to the extinction of humanity are probably wrong; that an Inconvenient Truth was meant to scare people; that Al Gore doesn’t lie in An Inconvenient Truth, but some aspects of the film are misleading, in that they lead people to believe significant problems such as the flooding of Florida are near at hand when they are not; that it will take decades for computer software/hardware to be good enough to implement models that do a really good job on climate; that while global warming is a real phenomenon most of the warming of the past decades may be due to a reduction in aerosol pollution (“global dimming”); that most commercial greenhouses run under high CO2 coniditions in order to benefit from CO2 fertilization; that current attempts to replace fossil fuels are insufficient to the task; that transportation is not a big sector; that doing without coal is economic suicide (though that phrase is not in quotation marks); that cap and trade will not deliver large enough carbon cuts in time; that “a lot of things people say would be a good thing probably aren’t”; as an example of that, that the reradiated heat from solar panels, which is a lot more than the electricity they generate, will warm the planet; that the building of a planet’s worth of solar panels would itself require a lot of energy which would mostly not be generated by solar panels; that Mt St Helens kicked up a lot of dust; that his dorm room at college was messy; that “big-ass” volcanoes have climatic effects; that the ideas for implementing a stratospheric aerosol that would cool the world included in the chapter on geoengineering of the NAS 1992 report on policy implications of climate change were not very practical; that putting sulphates into the stratosphere as opposed to the troposphere gets you an extra level of cooling in a way that can be seen as leverage; that the pumps on a pipeline taking sulphur gases from ground level to the stratosphere (where it would be moored to a blimp) could be smaller than the pumps in his swimming pool; that there is a lot of stockpiled sulphur in Canada; that one sulphur-aerosol project using that stockpile could “solve the whole global warming problem for the northern hemisphere”; that in view of fossil fuel use (and possibly other things) “we’ve already engineered the earth”; that geoengineering could be “an excuse to pollute”, but that that is not necessarily a reason not to do it (the analogy is to not refusing care to a heart patient because she doesn’t have a healthy lifestyle); that unilateral geoengineering “would freak people out”; that he doesn’t dismiss global warming; that he wants to see geoengineering technology ready for use if the worst climate predictions come true, but not fielded as a matter of course; that a slow down in world GDP growth due to stringent carbon emission reductions would fall particularly hard on the legitimate aspirations of the poor; that “if you believe the scary stories are true, you should also admit that relying on reducing carbon dioxide emissions is not a very good answer”; that the scary scenarios could come about even if there are herculean efforts towards carbon dioxide emissions reduction.
So what’s to disagree with here?
The claim that a geoengineering scheme in Canada would “solve the whole global warming problem for the Northern Hemisphere” is wrong. It might at best be true only for an absurdly limited definition of global warming that was purely in terms of radiative forcing; I doubt if it is true in any other — that is to say meaningful — sense. (Even if it were true, it is certainly not knowably true; as Nathan says, climate models aren’t good enough to tell one such things.) Most obviously, if you cool the northern hemisphere while leaving the south to warm you will move the thermal equator; as a result the pattern of northern hemisphere climate in a world with greenhouse warming and a cooling cap on the north will not be the same as the pattern in a world that in which there was neither. A recent study by Ken Caldeira and Lowell Wood (Global and Arctic climate engineering: numerical model studies, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2008) doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0132), who both attended the meeting where the Superfrakonomics discussion is set, looked at idealised geoengineering schemes aimed at the Arctic; it found that they could not recreate a preindustrial climate in a doubled-carbon-dioxide world, but that they did do quite a lot to ameliorate such a world. That’s the most you can say, and it seems to me a very long way from saying “abracadabra, problem solved”. In general, anything aiming to be a long term solution to global warming would have to include flat carbon dioxide levels, though I would be willing to accept that it might also include some geoengineering. This sort of “geoengineering can be a solution in and of itself” stuff is really misleading, and needs to be rejected as such.
Then there’s “we’re already engineering the earth”. Again, no. David Keith nailed this trope, popular with geoengineering enthusiasts, ages ago: “Making a mess is not engineering”. Engineering is purposeful; what humanity has done to date, great though its impact has been, has not had any purpose at the level of the earth system (it has had other purposes, of course, but engineers have to mean to change the thing they are changing, and to make changes directed at a given and pre-specified goal)
“Transportation is not a large sector”: no, it is a large sector — in the US second only to electricity generation in carbon emissions. That said, in context, he was talking about Priuses, and private road transportation for passengers is a subset of transportation as a whole. But as it stands I think it’s fair to mark that as wrong.
The claim that reduced scattering of sunlight by aerosols, through direct and indirect effects, has had a greater effect on global warming than greenhouse gases in recent decades is also, as far as I know, wrong. Something similar is probably true for some areas, such as western Europe and the eastern US, but I know of no evidence for it being a worldwide phenomenon and would be surprised to hear of such evidence.
Doing without coal is economic suicide: as Tim Lambert has pointed out, tell it to the French. (again, Nathan may not have said this — it could be the Superfreaks’ point). Coal is very abundant and cheap and it will take a lot to make people give it up; but a lot can be done (as can CCS, though that, too, is hard.)
That’s about it for flat out disagreement.
There’s another claim — solar cells warm the world — that needs further unpacking and which I think I will leave for a later post.
There are some more which are judgment calls. It is true that building new energy infrastructure will require energy from the old infrastructure. But it’s not clear that the amount of energy needed to create new low and zero carbon energy infrastructure will be significantly grater than the energy that would be needed to recreate the old energy infrastructure, a process that is continuously ongoing. As replacement is just business as usual, it’s already be in the figures. So it seems a bit strange to treat this is as an extra burden, and a little unnecessary, in that the burdens of business as usual are heavy enough.
The 1992 NAS geoengineering schemes, such as artillery guns for lofting aerosols into the sky, may well have been fanciful; to those not acquainted with the details it’s not clear that a great big hosepipe sticking into the stratosphere is less so. If you’ve seen detailed engineering trade offs, though, you might be convinced of such a thing. You might also know whether the pumps needed are larger or smaller than those which service Nathan’s pool. On that, I must admit, I have no clue at all.
Lumping together the other claims, I find myself in broad agreement. First, on climate: Yes, I agree that global warming is real and needs addressing, but I too don’t think climate change is likely to lead to the extinction of the human race. I do think that An Inconvenient Truth (which I have not seen, but I have seen Gore’s presentation) is designed to scare people — which is a fair goal for someone raising an alarm — and when I saw him talk I felt he skirted close to the edge on sea level stuff. Volcanoes of large ass do have effects, and there may be a (very small) possibility of very bad events even after massive reductions in carbon emissions. If the sort of climate model one really wants is one that produces projections with a sub-kilometre grid, and does so fast enough that one can run large ensembles in reasonable periods of time — and that is indeed the goal of soem respectable people in the field — then expect to wait a couple of decades for the many exaflops required. Carbon dioxide is indeed used for its fertilization effect in greenhouses (can’t say that I know it’s used in most of them, but it is in a lot).
On emissions reduction it is clear that what has been done to date is insufficient, and though I know and respect people who think that cap and trade will do much to solve the problem I do not think their case is proven, in that I do not think that a cap and trade system of sufficient scope is necessarily politically achievable. It is true that “a lot of things people say would be a good thing probably aren’t”, though in the field of climate I would point to corn ethanol as the best example. There is definitely a risk that a slow down in world GDP growth due to stringent carbon emissions would fall particularly hard on the legitimate aspirations of the poor (I think that risk could be mitigated by the right policies, but I wouldn’t bet that it would be). There are also imaginable circumstances where one might want more options than emissions control alone.
On geoengineering I think leverage is a petty useful concept and use it myself, and I know there are mountains of sulphur in Canada. I agree that geoengineering, unilateral or otherwise, “would freak people out”, and that supporting research aimed at understanding what the technology might do and how it might work, as I do, does not mean endorsing deployment. I also agree that geoengineering could all to easily be seen as “an excuse to pollute” but that there would be circumstances in which that was not a good reason for not doing it.
So I think there are some factual claims that are wrong, some things which are dubious, and a lot to agree with. Getting things wrong is bad, but it happens. Letting them stay wrong in a chapter you have agreed to read over for accuracy is worse, and shouldn’t happen. That said, most of what is wrongest about the chapter does not seem to stem directly from Nathan, at least as represented in the finished product.
My overall feeling is that Nathan, who I’ve met a few times and liked, is convincing to himself and others, brash, capable of making mistakes, biased (as we all are). He is committed to particular technological approaches and overclaims for them (the besetting sin of the technologist); he does so in a big way here when he says a particular piece of geoengineering is a solution to the whole problem. This is reflected in the fact that it seems unclear, and may indeed be unclear to him, how much he thinks of geoengineering as a research project and how much as a truly likely option. He clearly likes to be contrarian, and a critical outlook and quick intelligence may make him unwilling to dig into and understand the basis of widely held positions in which he sees some immediate flaws. He could be more careful. But I can’t say I agree with Joe Romm that this all makes Nathan an “idiotic savant”.
Image from Flickr user SirWiseowl, used under a creative commons licence
Little of science or policy import in this post: mostly process.
Brad DeLong (all right one more i gotta correct the record) has used the Google cache to come up with pretty clear evidence that, pace Dubner (who may have been misinformed), there was originally a look-inside-the-book option for Superfreakonomics which has subsequently been withdrawn.
Joe Romm (anatomy of a debunking) posts quite a lot of correspondence with Ken Caldeira, some of which was in Dubner’s earlier post. One specific point to stress: Ken is in this email as elsewhere very clear that he supports geoengineering research and not geoengineering implementation under current conditions. That crucial subtlety does seem to be missing from the Superfreakonomics account of his work. In general, reading this through, it seems to me that my impression of the chapter last night is one I broadly still hold.
Paul Krugman looks at some lessons learned and points well enunciated in superfreakingmeta.
I note, by the way, that Google is currently of the opnion that no-one is using the term superfrakonomics, or for that matter superfrak’donomics. Given the number of BSG fans in the better parts of the blogosphere this surprises me…
Those interested in more on geoengineering from this blog, rather than a load of links to today’s controversy, might want to browse further in the geoengineering category; a nice start is this post and the article it links to, and the IMO post is quite fun too.
Update: missed this, an email exchange with Superfreakonomics author Steven Levitt. He doesn’t really get some of the issues, but does say:
I do think also that there is something to be said for raising some skepticism about the current climate models and predictions…they are stated and restated as if they are fact, when in practice I suspect, and good scientists agree, that there is enormous uncertainty and things we cannot or at least could not know.
Probably, though, our message on geoengineering would have come through better if we had written the chapter differently.
