Filed under: Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis
Lord knows this shouldn’t need saying, but it does. Earlier this week I received a press release from a UK green electricity company claiming that for a couple of months last year wind power had provided 10% of the UK’s energy needs. Today, The Guardian prints a Reuters report saying that during the post-christmas gales it was 12.2%. The same report ended up at Scientific American and quite a lot of other places. In both cases the numbers came from the UK Renewable site (Reuters’ source here) with which I have no beef. But both had taken figures explicitly about electricity consumption and claimed that they reflected total energy use.
I really don’t understand how it is that people sitting in warm homes or offices with cars going past their windows think that electricity and energy are the same thing. But here are the numbers. Page 59 of the latest International Energy Agency figures (pdf) gives TPES (total primary energy supply) for the UK as 197mtoe (million tons of oil equivalent). Converting that into the sort of units electricity is measured in (the IEA provides a handy converter here) you get 2290TWh. In the same table on page 56 you will see that UK net electricity consumption given as 350TWh. So only about 15% of the UK TPES is consumed as electricity.
The two numbers are not quite equivalent. The share of TPES devoted to generating electricity is larger than the amount of electricity consumed, because more than half the energy content of coal and gas burned at power stations doesn’t actually get turned into electricity. So though I don’t have figures to hand on how much of the TPES is devoted to electricity generation, its probably around twice that much, which fits with my sense that about 30-40% of energy supply is used for generating electricity.
Anyway, everyone makes mistakes, but this one is both egregious, distressingly common and genuinely harmful. When people hear that Britain’s rather paltry wind fleet is generating 10% of its energy they are seriously misled about the scale of the decarbonisation challenge. In good months, as far as I can see, wind currently provides a bit less than half of the country’s renewable electricity, which means about 5% of its consumed electricity, which means less than 1% of its TPES.
The renewables company corrected its press release as soon as I pointed out the error. I trust that the Reuters and its subscribers will too.
Filed under: film
I’ve seen, and listened to via podcast a number of films-of-the-year lists, enjoyed them, agreed with them in parts, don’t see much reason to add another to them. But it was quite a filmish year for me, with my first visit to Sundance and over 50 cinema trips (dismal by professional standards, I know, or even real cinephile standards, but more than I think I’ve managed any other year), and a recap seems in order. So here are two lists, first of the ten films I most regret missing this year, then of moments in film that mattered to me.
What I missed that I regret most (in quasi chronological order)
- Benda Balili
- Submarine
- Meek’s Cutoff
- A Separation
- Tree of Life
- Project Nim
- Skin I live in
- Kill List
- Take Shelter
- Deep Blue Sea
Looks like my missed list would be a pretty good best of list in other parts. (I should say I have mostly only myself to blame — I think the excellent Greenwich Picturehouse showed all but two of those)
A similarly quasi-chronological list of moments that moved, mattered and stunned
- The girl in the car close to the end of Life in a Day, who hasn’t done anything special but wants to be in on what’s happening.
- The distraught shepherd phoning home from the high pasture near the end of Sweetgrass
- The doping/seduction/murder in Animal Kingdom. (Also the remarkable painterly scenes of the boy alone in the house at night; also the cut to the gallery scene; also…In dramatic terms, this was pretty much my film of the year)
- The bullet-time-ish moment where he finally gets it right in Source Code (quite ambivalent about the double coda after this, though I appreciate some of why it was needed). It’s like Ecclestone’s “Just this one time, everybody gets to live” moment in The Doctor Dances, one of the Moff’s great moments
- The God’s presence at Monaco sequence in Senna
- The bit where Elle Fanning acts at the boys in Super 8
- The amends made in the barber’s shop in The Interrupters
- The lift scene in Drive
- The automaton starts to draw in Hugo (actually, pretty much all of Hugo…)
- The Burj Khalifa exterior sequence in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
- The Siberian shore lingered on, repeatedly, through rippled panes of glass in How I Ended This Summer
- “Allow it” in Attack the Block; way to define a hero..
- The death/goat on the table in Il Quattro Volte
- The final stairway sequence of Russian Ark (yes, I know — but it was new *to me* this year…)
- “Rhinoceros“: Midnight in Paris (more generally, Corey Stoll; but for a moment, Brody…)
- “Loser loser loser” at the end of Moneyball
Filed under: Uncategorized
It’s not saying much to say that there might be more blogging here this year than there was last year. It may also have more film stuff than was its original intention, though I might get some planetary anthropoceney geoengineeringish photosynthetic stuff up too. Let’s just see how it goes, shall we?
Is this thing still on…
Apologies for a profound lack of blogging about the earth system and energy and climate and plants and the sun and geoengineering and stuff. I may try and catch up with some past product and do better in the future. I may not. In the meantime, here are my Oscar predictions, because that’s what I wanted to post today…
The Economist has an occasional column called Green View which looks at all sorts of environmental issues, though with a preponderance of climate stuff: in the past few months we’ve looked at arctic ice, business and biodiversity, tuna farming, Svalbard (of course), Climategate, malaria and climate change, the Hartwell paper, future urbanisation and a bunch of other stuff. Since I’m the Energy and Environment Editor I sort of own this slot, though I don’t write every one of the pieces that goes in. And since there’s a lot less blogging around these parts than there used used to be, I thought some of you might like to know this.
This page lists a whole lot of the columns (and a few other things that have strayed in by mistake), but as of a few weeks ago it is probably not being updated any more due to a change in the way we publish things on line. A couple of weeks ago there was a piece on what geoengineering could mean for different regions that might be of some interest to readers of this blog. Excerpt:
Uncertainty about who might do best from what sort of project allows discussions of geoengineering to take place without the parties to the debate knowing in any detail where any nation’s specific interests might lie. This introduces what the philosopher John Rawls called a “veil of ignorance”; making decisions as if such a veil existed, Rawls thought, was a good basis for justice. (If regional outcomes could be predicted accurately, a different Rawlsian idea, that of the difference principle, might come into play. This states that just action consist not just of improving things for everyone, but specifically for improving things for the worst off, and would give the effects of geoengineering on the least developed countries a particular importance.)
And this week, rather atypically, there’s a piece on the Earth’s core, and the way things you don’t expect to be transitory turn out so to be. Excerpt:
The Earth is a recycling scheme that has been running for a third of the age of the universe. Microbes and plants endlessly pull carbon, nitrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere and pump them back out in different forms. Water evaporates from the oceans, rains down on the land, pours back to the seas. As it does so it washes away whole mountain ranges—which then rise again from sea-floor sediments when oceans squeeze themselves shut. As oceans reopen new crust is pulled forth from volcanoes; old crust is destroyed as tectonic plates return to the depths from which those volcanoes ultimately draw their fire.
Anyone who likes that second piece might want to check out the essay in Seeing Further (Amazon UK) which I blogged about here, or the Earthrise piece I did for the Times a few years ago, which also covers some similar ground. (Out of ideas, or following a ceaseless process of re-creation? You decide…)
Filed under: Geoengineering, Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis, Published stuff
This week’s Economist carries an obituary of Steve Schneider. Excerpt:
Mr Schneider’s high profile as a proponent of action on climate change—he was the editor of an important journal, Climatic Change, and an influential member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) more or less from its inception—would have made him a favourite target for such antagonists anyway, but he came in for particular scorn because of his willingness to discuss the inevitable tensions between advocacy and academic integrity. Critics of Mr Schneider, including this newspaper, portrayed him as giving in to this tension, and being willing to tell “necessary lies” when it suited his purposes. He countered such attacks vehemently, saying such a conclusion rested on a slanted reading of what he had said on the subject. He had no time for advocacy without truth.
Many comments and memories on this post of Andy Revkin’s
Also, here’s a review of Steve’s last book, Science as a Contact Sport (Amazon UK|US) I did for China Dialogue. Excerpt:
To sit next to Steve Schneider while listening to someone else give a talk about climate science is like watching a DVD with a commentary track by an insightful but rather grumpy director. As the speaker makes her points, Schneider, a veteran climate scientist now at Stanford University, will mutter about who first made all the interesting points in the talk, and when this or that bit of science was first appreciated, and how stupid people have been not to act on this knowledge years ago.
The purpose is to remind anyone listening than climate science has a history, if a fairly brief one, and that the message of that history is reasonably consistent — scientists have believed much what they believe now about global warming for decades, and if climate scientists in general and Schneider in particular had been listened to better, the world would have faced up to the issue better and sooner.
This personal memoir by Schneider provides a similar effect…
Image courtesy of Stanford, I believe
The view from Mt Zeppelin, about 22:00
I’ve just been up to Svalbard, in the high arctic, for a symposium on climate change. Here are some excerpts from a correspondent’s diary over at The Economist.
…How sustainable it is for 40-odd people to travel a very long way in order to attend yet another meeting on climate change is obviously open to debate. At the same time, old Arctic hands say that it is impossible to appreciate what is happening in the Arctic without at least some experience of being there, and there is no real way of proving them wrong. There’s also the possibility that the combination of people, topic, setting and isolation (because of the nature of some of the research Ny Alesund is a wi-fi, Bluetooth and mobile phone-free zone) will conjure new freshness into potentially tired discussions. Certainly it’s not an opportunity to turn down. [whole entry]
…Perched up above the last working Longyearbyen mine (“Mine 7”, which produces only enough coal as the town’s power station needs) two radio telescopes gaze up into the sky. One, like most such dishes, can swivel around. The other is fixed, looking almost straight up; built to study the aurora, rather than the stars, it can see most of what it needs by looking straight up the earth’s near-vertical magnetic field lines. When turned on, these radio telescopes use as much as 20% of the electricity generated from the coal that is being mined out of the ground beneath as they tickle the northern lights above, listening for faint echoes. [whole entry]
…The air is cool. The light is warm. The colours have changed in response to the sky. The soil, such as it is, seems darker, richer. The plants have taken on a fuller set of greens, mixed through with lichen orange and the persistent, almost-afterburn purple of saxifrage in summer flower, deeper the longer you look. Standing water, of which there is a lot, has turned sky-vault blue—except for that which forms the larger, more distant ponds, and reflects the mountains beyond. The fjord, by contrast, is lighter now than the puddles, almost milky. [whole entry]
Two of the "Three Crown" peaks, after midnight
…In the late afternoon (sun west by southwest, over the airstrip) the symposium took to the water, heading to the top of the fjord to look at the glaciers under clearing skies. Bijou icebergs floated almost stationary in the still water. A flock of kittiwakes, startled, flashed up from their station at the point where meltwater and seawater meet. Scientists talked of kelp and copepods. The ice at the end of the Kongsfjord towered above us. But less so than once it would have. Many of the other glaciers no longer reach the sea, retreating to their mountain lairs, folded moraines left behind them.
Studies of fjord-floor sediments show that the glaciers are further back now than they were when Vikings sailed to Iceland and Greenland (and, possibly, Svalbard, though if so they left no trace of their presence for their descendants other than disputable references in some sagas). It is possible they were this shrunken in the northern hemisphere’s early post-ice-age warmth, 8,000 years ago, but that is not certain.[whole entry]
…By the time the passengers for the third flight have been ferried out to the airstrip, perhaps a kilometre out of town, the top of Mt Zeppelin, at 474 metres, is in cloud, too, and snow is beginning to blow in from the northeast. The base’s radio telescope, part of a worldwide network that defines the absolute reference frame for GPS navigation, among other things, scans the now slate-like sky with a whirring creak. It is because of the dish’s sensitive measurements that wifi, bluetooth and mobile phones are banned in Ny Alesund. The Dornier turns up, we pile in, and the base quickly vanishes below us. It will be the last fixed wing flight out of Ny Alesund for a while. [whole entry]
Ny Alesund, from the airstrip
All pictures by me, available under Creative Commons share-alike: More pics here
Filed under: Published stuff
Last weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Richard Thompson perform his “Thousand years of popular music” set as part of the Meltdown Festival on the South Bank. It’s not giving away too big a secret to reveal that it ends with this highly excellent Britney Spears cover.
As a result of this exposure, I found that the song kept coming back to me in odd moments as I set off on my subsequent travels (of which more will be blogged shortly). This prompted a memory of an earlier piece, written for Newsweek eight years ago, which I thought I’d paste here for whatever entertainment it brings.
**
Silly Ideas Are Attacking My Brain
I woke up this morning and, regrettably, I didn’t have the blues. Instead I had a bit of Britney Spears. Many people may enjoy thinking of Ms. Spears as they drift into the arms of Morpheus. Waking up with her, though, is disconcerting. The hook line to “Oops… I Did It Again”–a song only the deaf can avoid–was going round in my head before I’d had anything resembling a coherent thought. Indeed, it delayed the process considerably. I feel debilitated, and I’m thinking I might sue. While I’m at it, I may also lay into Pete Bellotte, Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer for “Love to Love You Baby.” This tune is currently being heard in a Diet Coke ad in which tediously pretty people make eyes at each other while the magnificently hangdog Wolf Saxon is scandalously neglected. That said, I may sue Wolf Saxon, too, for having such an unfeasibly memorable name. These people are contaminating my mind.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Reading Sarfraz Mansoor’s review of Gary Younge’s “Who are we” over coffee this morning I was struck (and who wouldn’t be) by the sentence
Of the 23 members of the new cabinet, 22 are white, 18 are millionaires, 15 are Oxbridge graduates and 13 went to private schools.
Which really is pretty disheartening. But it also piqued my slight irritation, because I tend to bridle somewhat at “Oxbridge” as a category (non UK readers: Oxbridge is a portmanteau word denoting the universities of Oxford and Cambridge). There are obviously great structural similarities between Oxford and Cambridge, as well as architectural ones and social ones. I remember that the first time I ever visited Oxford, having spent three years as a student at Cambridge, I had the odd feeling that someone had taken a townscape I was at home in, shuffled it, and redealt it in an odd new pattern. But there are also distinctions, and though I’ll admit that the narcissism of small difference (my absolutely favourite Freudian concept, and one of the great undervalued explicators of life) magnifies them, they may matter. While the variation within both universities is far greater than the difference between their means, from my utterly subjective view point Oxford tends more towards the worldly, the glib, the rosy, the rhetorical, Cambridge to the provincial, the constrained, the cold, the logical.
Linked in my mind to these prejudiced distinctions is the notion that, as well as being more conservative than Cambridge, Oxford is also more central to the political establishment. Evidence: all the UK’s university-educated post-1945 prime ministers had degrees from Oxford (a second degree in the case of Gordon Brown), none had degrees from Cambridge. (Less impressive evidence: I remember a nice joke in Yes Minister about the Oxford preponderance explaining its transport links, though on checking I find that’s actually rather more a joke about civil servants).
So, cappuccino finished, I decided to test out my hunch that the cabinet was in fact dominated not by Oxbridge, but by Oxford. Unfortunately, not so much. Of the 65% of the cabinet that went to Oxbridge 6 are from Cambridge, 9 from Oxford, a 40:60 split. A preponderance, yes, but not a significant one (one-tail p-value 0.30). Expand the universe to include the six people who, while not cabinet ministers, attend, or may attend, cabinet and you find that of 29 people 20 (69%) went to Oxbridge, 8 to Cambridge, 12 to Oxford — 40:60 again, p-value now down to 0.25.
Then it struck me that the problem might be that the Lib Dems in the cabinet were masking a true Tory Oxfordness. Superficially plausible, in that of the 5 Lib Dems in cabinet proper, all of whom went to Oxbridge (and all but one of whom were privately educated), the ratio is reversed, 60:40 in Cambridge’s favour. If a fully Tory cabinet replaced them with 5 Oxford graduates, the p-value would fall to 0.06. Alas, assuming they would be replaced only from Oxford stretches plausibility. In fact if you assume, following James Forsyth on the Spectator’s blog, that the Tories who were denied true cabinet seats by the advent of the Lib Dems are David Willets, Chris Grayling, Theresa Villiers, Greg Clark and Nick Herbert, you find that that quintet is also, as it happens, 60:40 Cantab.
Since I started writing this, the resignation of David Laws has slightly pushed things further against Cambridge. The Oxbridge subset of the cabinet is now 36:64 Oxford, p value 0.21. (The Scottish Lib Dems, from among whose ranks the new Scottish seccretary had to be chosen, are a decidedly un-Oxbridge lot.) Of the 7 people attending cabinet from Cambridge, two of them, Francis Maude and Owen Patterson, went to my college, Corpus Christi. Corpus is one of the smallest of the 20 odd colleges, so that is a truly striking result.
No one in the cabinet, alas, went to Hull. (Though one is, to my previously ill educated surprise, a former member of the NUM.)
Filed under: Uncategorized
"I tell you, it's just the beginning"
So Venter’s artifical bacterium is finally upon us (Science paper). Economist article (not by my hand) here:
Like Shelley’s protagonist, Dr Venter and Dr Smith needed some spare parts from dead bodies to make their creature work. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, though, they needed no extra spark of Promethean lightning to give the creature its living essence. Instead they made that essence, a piece of DNA that carries about 1,000 genes, from off-the-shelf laboratory chemicals. The result is the first creature since the beginning of creatures that has no ancestor. What it is, and how it lives, depends entirely on a design put together by scientists of the J. Craig Venter Institute and held on the institute’s computers in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California. When the first of these artificial creatures showed that it could reproduce on its own, the age of artificial life began.
The announcement is momentous. It is not unexpected. Dr Venter’s ambition to create a living organism from close to scratch began 15 years ago, and it has been public knowledge for a decade. After so much time, there is a temptation for those in the field to say “show us something we didn’t know.” Synthetic DNA is, after all, routinely incorporated into living things by academics, by biotech companies, even by schoolchildren. Dr Venter—a consummate showman—and the self-effacing Dr Smith (uncharacteristically in the foreground in the picture of the two above) have merely done it on a grand scale.
But if it is a stunt, it is a well conceived one. It demonstrates more forcefully than anything else to date that life’s essence is information. Heretofore that information has been passed from one living thing to another. Now it does not have to be. Non-living matter can be brought to life with no need for lightning, a vital essence or a god. And this new power will allow the large-scale manipulation of living organisms. Hitherto, genetic modification has been the work of apprentices and journeymen. This new step is, in the true and original sense of the word, a masterpiece. It is the demonstration that the practitioner has mastered his art.
Fine take from Ken Macleod (@amendlock) in the Guardian:
Vitalism isn’t a doctrine of any major faith, besides new age theosophies and other forms of muddled thought. In my teens I caught the virus of vitalism from reading Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine – and was cured of it, ironically enough, by a creationist tract that extolled the wondrous complexity of cellular machinery: complex and wondrous enough, I realised, for life to need no other explanation. That tiny machine didn’t need even the tiniest ghost.
Synthetic life, then, creates no problems even for creationists (after all, it’s intelligently designed!) let alone more sophisticated theists. This won’t, of course, spare us the usual TV studio parade of clergy (why them?) asked to comment – though they may find it easier than usual to give answers less stupid than the questions.
More significant than the clerics are their secular successors, the ethicists – paid to worry so we don’t have to. They’re already on the case.
Jamais Cascio (@cascio) makes some useful distinctions. More responses, many with insight, curated at Practical Ethics (@ethicsinthenews) and a set of very worthwhile opinions at Nature (free pdf) in which Steen Rasmussen makes a useful distinction:
The radical ‘top-down’ genetic engineering that Venter’s team has done does not quite constitute a “synthetic cell” by my
definitio…The top-down community seeks to rewrite the genetics program running on the ‘hardware’ of the modern cell, as Venter and his colleagues have done. Bottom-up researchers, such as myself, aim to assemble life — including the hardware and the program — as simply as possible, even if the result is different from what we think of as life.
There is so far nothing up at Rob Carlson’s Synthesis, but it will be worth checking when there is
(UPDATE: Here it is, and it was. This bit particularly pointed:
I doubt very much that the JCVI team, or the team at Synthetic Genomics, will be using this or any other genome in any economically interesting bug any time soon. As I note in Chapter 8 of Biology is Technology, Jay Keasling’s lab and the folks at Amyris are playing with only about 15 genes. And getting the isoprenoid pathway working (small by the Gibson et al standard but big by the everyone-else standard) took tens of person years and about as much investment (roughly ~$50 million in total by the Gates Foundation and investors) as Venter spent on synthetic DNA alone. And then is Synthetic Genomics going to start doing metabolic engineering in a microbe that they only just sequenced and about which relatively little is known (at least compared with E. coli, yeast, and other favorite lab animals)? Or they are going to redo this same genome synthesis project in a bug that is better understood and will serve as a platform or chassis? Either way, really? The company has hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank to spend on this sort of thing, but I simply don’t understand what the present publication has to do with making any money.
End update.)
I spent a fair chunk of the past week with Rob’s book Biology is Technology (Amazon US|UK, sample here) and if you want to grok this development in its fullness you would do well to do the same. For a different take with a lot to offer, check out Denise Caruso’s Intervention, too (Amazon US|UK).
Image from Tricia Helfer’s blog, used with thanks but no permission
