Following my recent post, a number of commenters suggested that I ought to respond more directly to the arguments of James Hansen and others for a CO2 target of 350 parts per million, as opposed to the 450 ppm that forms the basis of much current policy discussion. I’m using this paper as a basis, and take the following two points as its central claims
* To avoid unacceptable risk of passing a point of no return beyond which explosive feedbacks (icecaps melting etc) are inevitable, we should aim to reduce CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm by 2100. This is below current levels and won’t be achieved simply by ending net emissions
* We can achieve part of this (maybe a reduction of 60 ppm) through reforestation, biochar and similar measures
* Further reductions will require expensive technological solutions, estimated cost $200/tonne or $20 trillion to remove 50 ppm. Given a maximum point around 450 ppm and 50 ppm from reforestation, that’s about the amount required.
What then should we do? In particular, how much should we be willing to pay now, to avoid high costs in the second half of this century?
It’s important to note a big shift in focus here. Most of the discussion so far has been along the lines “What do we need to do by 2050 to avoid unacceptable damage to the climate later this century”. Looking ahead for a century is challenging, to put it mildly. But the questions raised by Hansen shift the time-scale for action out another 50 years, and the consequences are centuries into the future. That means there are huge uncertainties that are difficult to reason about. As a starting point, I’m going to follow Hansen and co-authors in treating the problem as if it were deterministic, with a known target of 350 ppm and costs as stated.
With these drastic simplifications, the problem is not all that hard, and can be made a bit simpler with the right choice of parameters. The question is, how much would we pay (in $/tonne) today (I’ll say 2010) and around 2050 (I’ll say 2045) to avoid a cost of $200/tonne in 2080 (all in constant value dollars). With a 2 per cent discount rate (I’ve argued at length that this is a good choice), the answer is given by the rule of 70: values double every 35 years. So, we ought to be willing to pay $50/tonne now and around $100/tonne in 2045.
I’ll come back to this a bit later and discuss less simplified estimates. The main point that would suggest a higher current price is a lower trajectory with the same endpoint implies less residence time for CO2 in the atmosphere and therefore less risk.
John Quiggin 
Fran, I should note that Hyperion is a conceptual design only.
When they have a working prototype I’ll be more convinced about their specific technology.
That said, the concept of a small, factory-built reactor appears fundamentally sound.
Getting back on the topic of John’s post, I think it’s important to consider the implications of the observation air capture will be required at some time in the future. What should we be doing now, given that assumption?
My take is that the opponents of CCS need to think carefully about precisely what they oppose, and that we should start funding research relating to air capture.
@Robert Merkel
I’ll take CCS seriously when the people who put their hands out for the research argue for a price on CO2 that would make commercial roll out of the technology feasible. It will be even better when they can show that economically viable storage sites for all of the CO2 resulting from the burning of all coal do exist and when their cost includes a fund that will ensure that the funds exists to make sure that every site is secure for all eternity. Good luck with all that.
We do have ‘air capture’ technology. Algae farms could do it.
1) Commercial-scale algae farms are probably a fair bit further off viability than the boosters would have you believe.
2) Assuming you can grow gigatonnes of algae, what are you going to do with the resulting carbon to ensure it stays out of the biosphere for a substantial period of time? You’ve exchanged one waste disposal problem for another.
Pardon the length of this post, Its something I feel quite passionate about…
As a general comment about carbon pricing and what can be done, this document is a very interesting read. It is from the International Energy Agency, their Energy Technologies Perspective 2008, Executive Summary. http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/ETP2008SUM.pdf
In it they describe two scenarios they can see for the extent to which we can adapt our energy systems to address AGW, their ACT Map, the lower scale path and their BLUE Map, a higher level of activity. There assessment of what it would take to achieve the BLUE Map is a CO2 price of perhaps $200 USD /tonne. Possibly as high as $500/t
Then on page 5, figure ES.2 they show the likely rise in emissions under a business as usual scenario and the impact that the various activities under their BLUE Map would have on the outcome to 2050. Note the scale that, and time frame over which they believe different technologies could contribute to the outcome.
The important point to note is that the area under the curve from now to 2050 after their BLUE Map scenario has been applied is over 900 Billion Tonnes of CO2. And emissions are still at 14 Billion tonnes per year at 2050.
And this does not include emissions from agriculture, land clearance, and other non-energy emissions. It does not include any provision for a decline in the ‘sinks’ that currently draw down around 1/2 of the emissions humanity generate. It does not include any provision for possible major releases of Methane from melting permafrost and Methane Clathrates. Or any wide spread dieback of forests as a consequence of increased temperatures.
Another report released this year assesses that Humanity can only release another 500 Billion tonnes CO2 from all activities to stay within 2C peak warming. And a recent paper highlights the time lag if emissions peak substantially above 450 ppm before declining. Temperature rise of 2C and higher will be with us for at least 1000 years.
The potential for the combined impact of climate change, population growth, the looming hydrological crisis, famine then wars and societal collapses as a consequence does not bear thinking about. Some commentators are predicting a world population of only 1 Billion by 2100. A century of misery and death, starting in any serious way in several decades time. And that doesn’t include what happens to the remnant of humanity in subsequent centuries.
We will be dead and gone by then, but our grandchildren will be living and dying in that nightmare world. Not a nice thought for what our legacy will be as we head to our deathbeds.
So, in a discussion in John’s forum that focuses on economic modes of thinking about the problem, cost/benefit analyses, time cost of money, technologies etc, let me suggest a heresy.
This is a far more profound problem that transcends economic thinking. This is a moral question. The greatest crises in human history. And if we don’t do a good enough job of solving it, the end of history.
We need to mobilise the entire world to solve this problem, and perhaps economic considerations may need to be put to one side.
When Winston Churchill faced the prospect of an imminent Nazi invasion, if they had invaded England and were overrunning the country, do you think he would have been concerned about the effect on the stockmarket, that there weren’t enough bullets because they might cost too much? That they might loose the country because of money concerns?
If we are to avoid catastrophy we need to be thinking far more radically about the societal changes needed. For the technical challenges of new energy systems on the scale needed cannot be done fast enough. This is not a problem of economics but of logistics.
So, while we must pursue all the technology options at a pace far more rapid than we are doing at present, the only answer that will keep us adequately within a safety zone is rapid emissions reductions NOW. How do we do this? Energy rationing, Vegetarian diets world wide and the culling of our cattle, sheep & goat herds. Stop the production of cement. Stop all land clearance now. Shut down all unnecesary industries. Now! One child per family, world wide for the next 5 generations Now.
And as I am sure you can all see, the flow on consequences of this throughout the worlds economy would be vast. The GFC would be a storm in a teacup by comparison. So everyone in the world would need to share the burden of these costs equally. No nations protecting their people at the expense of other nations. For if we don’t act this radically the threat to our grandchildren is real and monstrously appalling. Far greater than the consequences of any of the actions I suggest.
John. You asked what are we willing to pay to go below 450ppm. Is the avoidance of the threat of the End of Civilisation, species extinction on a massive scale, perhaps the risk that Homo Sapiens may be heading down the path to extinction, is the avoidance of the risk of the End of Meaning sufficient justification. Think of all the people who have gone before us since the dawn of civilisation. We hold the meaning of their lives in our hands, in our trust, just as we hope our descendents will hold the meaning of our lives. We are the Keepers of the Dead, of everything that has gone before.
Surely sacrificing our IPod lives, our lives of simply consuming ‘stuff’ isn’t such a terrible price to pay to avoid that?
The crisis we face will radically change and devastate our societies if we do not solve it and the only adequate responses to prevent it are almost equally radical changes in what we do and the way we think about how to organise our world. Business as usual, maintaining the current expectations we hold of how thing will be done and how the future will unfold is no longer possible. Utterly radical change is now absolutely certain. The only choice we face is which radical change. The more benign one we create intentionally by our actions now. Or the appalling one we create in 2-4 decades unintentionally by our inertia and inaction now.
As I am sure you are all aware, our chances of triggering such a change are not good, politically, socially, psychologically. But that change is the only game in town. Forget the politicians, the business leaders, they will only go where the people lead them, even the honest and brave ones. We need to convince all our fellows in this world of the urgency of this. Get out and spread the word. Loudly! Widely!
And if you feel we can’t do these things, then tell your grandchildren why you can’t. Look them in the eye and explain why. Write a letter for your great-grandchildren to read, explaining why we did some things to protect their future but not too much. We couldn’t give up our way of life for them, couldn’t give up our IPods and cars and all that consumer society ‘stuff’ that is all so terribly important to us. Tell them why we where too afraid of loosing the seeming certainties of how we think about life to dream of new ways of life for our future that also gives them a future. Tell them!
Or we could go nuclear.
@Robert Merkel
While they are not yet viable as a source of biofuel that is price competitive with crude oil without a carbon price, they certainly would be viable as a means of capturing CO2 if there were even a modest carbon price — say $25 per tonne — because you could use open ponds. Cross contamination with rival algae wouldn’t be the problem it is for fuel because you’d merely be looking for the most rapidly growing algae strain. I understand that in the UK they are talking about artificial algae trees near expressways at about $40,000 each.
The Briggs studies from UNH merely examined the viability of algae-to-fuel.
Dry, pack in some cheap inert material (salt from desal? sand?) wrap in some non-permeable polymer and dump at sea in deep waters where, sequestered from light and oxygen, at enormous pressure and at barely above zero, it should remain stable indefinitely. Alternatively you could place them in abandoned mineshafts under sand and lime.
Some you could of course use to foreclose combustion of new fossil fuels, so although you wouldn’t be sequestering CO2, you would be preventing new fossil harvest — or at least you could be if it became mandatory to use only liquid fuels sourced from feedstock raised in the same cycle as the fuel use.
@Glenn Tamblyn
Glenn
I admire your passion, but what your proposals lack is any coneivable vehicle for the ideas to be realised in practice. In theory, it would be possible to do most of what you advocate — not sure about what the payback on not making cement and steel would be — these are pretty fundamental. Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with most of it.
The trouble is that engineering five generations of one child families would be, err, tough to do. Getting people not to pull up the drawbridges and start squabbling would also be damn near impossible. Getting the world’s governance on one page on things like this would be like herding cats, especially when you’re saying we all have to take the world back to something like the middle ages. Even if people largely believe that disaster will follow, cognitive dissonance kicks in, and people invent reasons to disbelieve. Hell, people do that already and we aren’t proposing that.
We have to help the planet dismount the tiger slowly while bringing the people who are living in less than dignified circumstances into dignified circumstances. By all means let’s stop land clearing and aim for revegetation. Let’s try and make meat (especially from ruminants) a delicacy as a consequence of carbon pricing. Let’s cut the spending on armaments and on wasteful travel. Let’s use nuclear power to replace dirty power, raise standards of living in the LDCs and empower women to have jobs and education and ensure older people are healthy enough to participate in economic activity and in that context let’s stabilise population at about 9 billion by 2050 and then try to edge it back sharply over the next century after that to something like 2-3 billion.
It’s risky but IMO, there’s nothing better.
John, for those who think CCS technology is but a pipe-dream might want to come out of their slumber for GreenGen plant at Lingang Industrial Park of Tianjin has already started. The first phase of the GreenGen plant is expected to be on line in 2011 generating some 250 megawatts of electricity as well as realizing 2000 tons/day of coal gasification. The ultimate aim is to have a 400MW IGCC GreenGen power plant before 2020 with efficiency of between 55%-60% and over 80% of the CO2 separated and stored.
@Fran Barlow
Fran
I agree with you about the ‘err, tough to do’ aspects of what I have said. In fact that is a massive understatement. I have not put them foward as a concrete action plan.
What I am saying is that without actions of the scale I am talking about and possible many others, then ‘let’s stabilise population at about 9 billion by 2050 and then try to edge it back sharply over the next century after that to something like 2-3 billion.’ is not a problem. There is a reasonably strong probabliity that by centuries end, not 2150, the population will be down to 1 Billion and human civilisation may look like something out of Mad Max. Reasonable probability, locked in, in play today. Population control guaranteed. But we wont like the methods employed to achieve it. When Mother Nature ( to use a bit of a metaphor) has a serious problem she calls on her loyal servants to sort it out. There are only 4 of them, and they ride horses. And right know they are saddling up, getting ready to ride in a few decades time.
Discussions in forums like this have within them an unstated or unrecognised assumption. That whatever happens in the future, our capacity as individuals and societies to deal with it and cope or adapt will be undiminished. The problem is ‘out there’ but we will be just as capable in the future as we are now. We will cope and adapt.
But the types of scenarios that could play out through this century will undermine our capacities, personally, governmentally, socially. Knowledge can be lost because each new generation needs to be taught anew and the schools aren’t working because of civil strife. Social capacities can decline as we are hit by stress after stress. Famine devastates a nations capabilities. Governments can slowly loose their capacity to govern their land and people. Any nation, even the USA or Australia.
If the world in the futue is still made up of enough countries like Sweden or the USA, certainly we can continue to adapt and cope. But if social collapse means too many countries are more like Somalia then no we can’t cope and we loose control of our future. And no country is assured protection from this when everything starts to go too badly wrong – Famine is one of the worlds great levellers.
The history of Civilisation is that most of them die. Environmental collapse is a factor in the end of many of them. And in our overpopulated, massively interconnected world, we are all vulnerable to the same risks if we get it wrong. But another huge risk, which I see in the debate about AGW generally, and in this forum is the seeming failure to recognise that the catastrophic can happen. Civilisations fall because they don’t believe they can. So they take steps, some steps, but always too little to late.
When a ship is in peril, engines failed, drifting with rocks nearby the prudent course of action for the captain is to order ‘Abandon Ship’. The ship hasn’t hit the rocks yet but it could. If the captain delays too long giving the order then the passengers may not make it to the boats in time. And when you take to the boats, you have to leave most of your possessions behind. Are we at the Abandon Ship moment, where we have to tear our societies and how they work apart and put them back together again differently in order to save them? No not yet. But I fear it is much closer than we realise. And if we don’t act strongly enough, and leave driving through massive change too late then our societies will be torn apart, but we wont be able to put them back together again.
The scale and intensity of our reactions to AGW are out of synch with the level of threat. We know there is a cliff out there somewhere but we still stumble along hoping to avoid it but instead keep stumbling towards it. Its like we are in a daze. We are out of time for measured responses. If Copenhagen doesn’t produce a result which is effectively leading the world to War against the threat we face, then they haven’t got it. They are still in that daze.
Its like we are in a daze. How we achieve the magnitude of change needed is really a problem beyond any one of us. But we dont stand any real chance of doing whatever it is that must be done unless 6.8 Billion people are working on the problem.
This threat is unique in human history, and it requires a response from humanity that is equally unique.
Sorry for the verbosity. Fear does that to you.
Crikey John, if people think this is a rat race, think again, in Papua New Guinea they have found a Bosavi woolly rat the size of a cat weighing in at one & half kilograms and measuring 82 centimetres in length from its nose to its tail.
Mosh # 108
This quote from the Four Corners write-up for tonight’s show,
“China believes it will have a fully operating “clean coal” fired power plant in place by the middle of the next decade, but it just doesn’t know quite where or how it will store the captured carbon dioxide.
As one advisor to the Chinese government told Four Corners, carbon capture and storage is not commercially viable and probably won’t be for 20 years.”
It’s one thing to have a highly efficient IGCC coal plant operating, and good on them for that, but where do you put the CO2?
Glenn #104, well said, you put a lot of thought into that post.
Salient Green, I don’t believe in fiction.
Salient Green, if you look at PCOR Williston Project in the USA the basin is estimated to have 1 Billion tons storage capacity.
@Salient Green
If you can’t get passionate about the end of civilisation, what is life about. Now how do we move the world to solve it. I am now in my 50’s and never expected to reach this situation at this point in my life. Spending the rest of my life fighting for our survival. And no, I am not some aging hippy/greeny. My background is in Engineering & IT. I believe that the lack of quantitative and systems thinking is a major part of the problem and its use needs to be a big part of the solution. But it is ultimately its a people problem. If 6.8 Billion people can get themselves into this mess unintentionally, surely they can get themselves out of it with a bit of serious intentionality. But in achieving the solution no part of our social, economic and political life, beliefs or values can be sacrosanct. Every aspect of life needs to be on the table as potential parts of the solution.
Now lets go convince 6.8 Billion people.
Piece of cake
Glenn Tamblyn, there actually is another option, exemplified by schemes like the following: We build millions of air scrubbers producing concentrated flows of atmospheric CO2. We mine billions of tons of olivine rock, pulverize it to maximize the surface area, and let that concentrated CO2 interact with it in such a way that it forms a solid carbonate deposit. And then we dump these mineral carbonates back in the earth.
I actually think it extremely unlikely that any form of climate catastrophe is going to happen. The climate blogger Tamino recently said that matters are urgent because at present rates we’ll reach 450 ppm in thirty years. Thirty years is more than enough time for the multitude of options now under consideration – both lower-emission infrastructure and CO2-extraction technology – to flower into dominant global industries. Personally I worry much more about the other effects of population increase, like not enough food and the general devouring of the biosphere, and about the other high technologies which will come along in that timeframe, like nanotechnology.
Mitchell, you’re assuming that change will be gradual (in human terms). There’s no guarantee of that.
Fran, very plausible. I’d also suggest river deltas as a promising place to bury stuff.
But we still need case studies to a) figure out more accurate cost estimates, b) demonstrate that the storage methods are safe, environmentally benign and effective, and c) negotiate treaty amendments to allow dumping waste at sea.
Fran, here is some discussion (a few years old, now) of some of the potential problems with using algae to produce biomass. One apparent issue is that algae isn’t exactly easy to harvest.
@Glenn Tamblyn
Glen said “I believe that the lack of quantitative and systems thinking is a major part of the problem and its use needs to be a big part of the solution.”
I also think the lack of systems thinking is yet another unfortunate product of the idea of shrinking government investment….its quite clear big coal isnt going to be a willing part of the funding or the solution for this mess….so who exactly is going to be big enough to stand up to the major polluters when a carbon price that forces them to participate is the only way forward? If anyone watched the ABC tonight re “future gen” turning into “never gen” as funding (both government and industry) disappeared and the project was abandoned then if you are like me you can only wonder at the trillions of taxpayers money thrown into rescuing the large financial institutions but the balking at 1.8bill for a carbon sequestration technology investment. I think that says it all….unwilling ineffective governments.. and unwilling industry fighting tooth and nail against a solution.
Robert, if change becomes *that* rapid we can offset it with aerosols and cool the earth down again (or even just the Arctic, I would think) in a few years. That can buy us time for as long as we care to keep it up. But I think this has to be regarded as a low-probability contingency in any case.
Alice, the Four Corners segment tonight contributed very little to the CCS debate and was wishy washy.
This gets back to a question that I raise periodically: can an economy be stable, or growing, over the long term when population is stable or declining slowly? Because the answer to that question determines just how painful an adjustment to the new environmental conditions will be. I’m not aware of any economic strategies for managing an economy that has a declining population; anyone know of any research on this?
As to what steps may be taken to cut down on emissions, I think that a lot of people fall into the pattern of doing what the herd does – in other words, some energy consumption is by habit rather than necessity or in the production of something. Personally, I’ve done without a car for all but two years of my adult life – a few months in the USA I needed a car to travel 3 mile to work because there were no footpaths from home to work! I needed a car for medical reasons for another 18 months or so, and that is it. The rest of the time I’ve used public transport, mountain bike or racing bike, foot, taxi, shared transport, train and (rarely) plane. It is amazing just how little need there is to own a car. I’m not moralising here. I just wasn’t driven to getting a car the moment I was old enough to get my license. Having occasional access to a car is handy though. The drop in perceived quality of life is offset by the regular exercise and less stress of sitting in peakhour traffic – on a train or a bus you can read a book or newspaper or something. And if enough people did this then ironically the peakhour traffic phenomenon would be a thing of the past.
Societies could move a bit more towards community-based functions – for example, public libraries – that provide a shared resource rather than everyone owning their own private “copy” of said resource. The car is a case in point – why not provide access to cars and trucks from a pool, and vastly reduce the numbers of cars in the world. I’m not suggesting this for everything, but for high emission private resources it may be worthwhile. At some point we are going to need to make hard choices about the things we can do without, if large rapid cuts to emissions is to be achievable.
Perhaps Australia should drop the foolish notion of CCS and put that money to use in trying out large solar, small local power generation for neighbourhoods, different types of housing for different local climate conditions, moving road freight to rail instead, connecting major cities by fast rail instead of reliance on planes, and so on.
While a price on GHG emissions can assist with the above, we probably need some inducements to start moving that way on mass. Old habits die hard.
@mitchell porter
I agree that population – with its rapid growth – is becoming a major problem in its own right. The more of us on this planet, the more we get in each other’s way. Once water access becomes scarce, and sea levels have risen a metre or so, an awful lot of people will be looking at shifting to where there are better pickings.
In New Scientist this week they mention – again – the notion of geoengineering. Such projects like a large “shade cloth” in space which reduces the total sunlight reaching Earth, dumping heaps of iron into the sea, big mother CO2 filters to suck it out of the atmosphere, and so on are part of the geoengineering push. Now while there is no great harm in thinking about these things, surely it is a matter of priority to pick existing technologies that are in commercial use now, rather than placing our bets on something like a gigantic parasol in space. Money spent on one such project means something other project might not get done. We need to choose wisely.
While on the topic of geo-engineering, one thing I haven’t seen is an analysis of the political obstacles to implementation of these geo-engineering solutions. For example, if the “parasol” project is done by an international consortium, how will they decide which part of the Earth is to be shaded 24/7? I vote for Wales but others might think differently…
@mitchell porter
Mitchell
You might care to read the recent British Royal Society report into GeoEngineering solutions to reversing/mitigating AGW.
I admire your confidence in the pace at which technogical solutions can be rolled out on planetary scales. The nature of exponential growth in anything is that you get very little effect/benefit in the early years/decades. Then it kicks in more strongly in later decades. These constraints applies to any of the technological solutions we might look at. Lead times of decades to go beyond the Golly Gee Wizz stage. Unless there is a radical change in the people landscape that determines how fast things can happen. Even with billions of people behind them, things still take time!
Before then the world faces a major hydrological crisis. Major underground water supplies in some very key agricultural areas are under severe stress and many have 20 – 40 years left. Glacial runoff into major river systems in Asia particularly may peak for a couple of decades as the Glaciers of the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau recede and melt. Then flows to many of the major rivers of Asia will decline radically during the dry season. At the same time as water tables vanish. These are water supplies that feed 2-3 billion people. Many of them living in countries with Nuclear Weapons. Just as Famine and social disruption as a consequence is starting to kick in (and god save us, not Nuclear war over food, water & land) the negative impacts of climate change will start to have more than a nuisance value around the world. Just as the awareness of the people of the world focuses on the fact that these things are starting to kill millions of people. Then psychological and social factors start to kick in, disrupting the cohesion and stability of countries. Suicide rates climb – suicide is already a relatively common occurance in India when wells run dry. The stability of many countries, even the most affluent. As I said Famine is a great leveller and affluence wont save you if there ain’t no water.
I could readily imagine that at the 30 year mark technologies such as this could well be approaching meaningful scales. If the political and economic will is there to locate and fund millions of scrubbers around the world, then transport the catch to marry it up with billions of tonnes of rock and then transport this out to sea to dump it. How many decades before the political and economic will is there?. 1, 2, 3. Before the start point of the exponential growth needed to take any meaningful solution to a planetary scale. Please, let that phrase roll around in your mind for a while. PLANETARY SCALE.
Then how many decades will it take to bring CO2 levels down again once the activity is operating at a planetary scale? How much CO2 have the oceans absorbed in that time which will start to outgas again as we bring the atmospheric level down meaning we have to soak up more CO2? What is happening to Methane levels over that time? Is the Amazon still standing?
And through all this are our societies still functioning well enough to carry out these activities? How much have crop yields dropped due to reduced water availability and crops being forced to grow outside their thermal optimum range – a rule of thumb used by crop ecologists is that grain crop yields drop 10% for each 1C rise in average temperature? How many people are starving? In a world where population will probably reach 9 billion before things start to go pear shaped.
We have no idea what the social experiment of stressing societies to see what there breaking points are will result in. Its a very interesting academic experiment. But not one we should be conducting on our own planet, on our own population. Please find another planet to carry it out on.
Our problem is fundamentally a people and societal problem. None of the activities we might undertake are likely to be fast enough or large enough to help enough without profound people pressure, unprecedented in human history to make them happen. And saying that technology X is the answer is dangerously seductive. The technology will save us Hoorrah. So the mass of humanity dont have to act beyond a mumbled agreement that ‘yeah, we should do that’. Then we will. At a piss week level.
This is a people problem. Not an economic one, not a technology one. Those things are just tools. It depends on the tool user.
As to Robert Merkel’s comments about the speed of Climate Change, see what James Lovelock has to say in his latest and probably last book on Gaia. Look up the temperature records for the Younger Dryas 12,500 year ago. Its speed of onset and speed with which it ended. Temperature change of 5-10 degrees in 10 years. We don’t know enough about how climate systems go from steady change to major flip-flops. And all of human history has been spent in a period of climate stability. Perhaps civilisation was only possible because of that stability.
We are heading for uncharted waters. We aren’t as clever or as capable as we think we are. Knowledge isn’t power, and it isn’t wisdom. Its just a tool. And a tool can hurt you if you use it wrong.
Our problem is about risk management. And we don’t know enough so we need to err on the side of caution. Radically on the side of caution. We really don’t want to see what tricks Mother Nature has left in her bag of tricks just to show how clever we are. Humility where Mother Nature is concerned is vital. Not because we want to live ‘in harmony with her’ or any of that warm touchy-feely stuff. Because she is a clinical cold-hearted bitch who eats uppity species for breakfast. Live by her rules, within her limits and H Sapiens can prosper for a very long time. Take her on and she’ll waste us.
@Robert Merkel
The problem with this source Robert is that it is really focused on the (admittedly considerable) challenges of exploiting algae for fuel, which is why there is all the talk of EROEI. Precisely because you want to deliver fuel on demand, and in predictable composition, you need predictable algal composition so that you get the right quantities of starch and lipids and so forth.
If on the other hand all you want to do is generate large quantities of biomass to lock up the CO2, that’s easy. You just scoop the algae off the top and put it into a drying shed on racks until it’s dry enough to pack. Minimal handling and who cares what it is composed of?
On the question of EROEI though, it’s easy to become confused. As a matter of general principal if you are producing an energy source you’d like the energy input to be less than the energy output (otherwise why not just keep the energy you already have?). Also, precisely because this necessarily has to be profitable and energy is costly, if you’re not making a profit it isn’t feasible. What is sometimes lost in all this is that not all forms of energy are equally valuable. Having non-dispatchable energy isn’t as useful as dispatchable energy. If you could harness 10% of the energy from a landslide at low dollar cost and get something you could put into a power plant or a car as a feedstock, the fact that the EROEI was only 10:1 wouldn’t make a difference to its feasibility. It’s estimated for example that the world’s principal grain-based food staples have this calorific EROEI (meat from ruminants is several times worse) but we humans don’t care because without food, we die and the energy inputs aren’t edible.
Similarly, if one used energy from some renewable sources — say wind turbines, or concentrating solar or geothermal for example — as the inputs to algae production, then the EROEI doesn’t really matter, except to the extent that it is a factor in the cost of the final products. Right now, liquid fuels are still comparatively cheap, and using algal biomass instead of something with a similar HHV (like lignite @ 8000 BTU per pound) to burn in a biomass plant would not be cost-competitive. If you were going to produce algae (and you weren’t simply trying to sequester CO2) then something like spirulina would make more sense since this would be a low carbon low potable water sourcve of high grade protein, with which you could displace much more energy- nutrient- and water-intensive protein sources.
Glenn Tamblyn, the science tells us that reducing significant global CO2 emissions will help stop the gravitation towards the ‘tipping point’ stage and point of no return.
Hansen, Lovelock, Brook … all on a crusade for nukes. That’s quite a line up, and I don’t doubt their motives for a moment. These guys certainly aren’t nutbar denialists, or apologists for Big Nuclear. I reckon its time for the environmental movement to reconsider its kneejerk opposition to nukes. Its an option we can’t ignore, and certainly far more feasible than CCS.
Terje working for the coal industry eh? Enough said.
carbonsink #126, the ‘kneejerk opposition’ by the environmental movement you refer to is actually a well considered realization that moving to nukes is actually just Business As Usual, in the form of acceptance of continual Growth of power use, consumption and exploitation of the natural world.
In short, nukes will just enable us to go further into overshoot, BAU, robbing from future generations and leaving a slightly different kind of mess to them.
@carbonsink
I don’t think the opposition to nuclear was kneejerk. Up until about five years back I was strongly opposed, largely, I believed on pragmatic grounds though there was in the background something of the disdain for large corporations, the idea that ‘it’s not natural’, objections to ‘legacy debt’, overblown fears of waste leakage, Chernobyl etc …
What I think should be done is to invite people to consider questions of comparative risk. The coal fuel cycle is killing people every day in large numbers. The nuclear fuel cycle is not. Coal burning does irreversible (in meaningful time frames to humans) harm to the biosphere. Nuclear does not as the waste is small in volume and easy to sequester. Nuclear power is the only fuel source that could power human civilisation at projected consumption increases for the next 1,000 years, whereas coal at current projected consumption has maybe 90 years or much less with CCS, if it ever works, even putting aside the damage to the planet.
We have some stark choices —
a) radically cut consumption to something like what it was per person in the middle ages (and stop those who consume very little and are on the margins of existence from consuming any more) and ban all non-renewable power
–>Unlikely to be saleable and barbaric in its implications for most of humanity
b) Business as usual and let the chips fall where they may
–> Likely to trigger catastrophic decline in the life chances of humans within the next 50-70 years; probably a major resource war; large parts of the planet uninhabitable and biodiversity crashes
c) Scaling back of first world energy consumption based on reconfiguration of cities and patterns of consumption, improvements in energy consumption in developing world, increased use of all renewables plus nuclear to bridge the gap, stabilisation of population by 2050 followed by persistent decline over the following 100-150 years.
Renewables are not going to suffice. On a global scale they could perhaps account for 20% of what we currently consume, and that at very significant cost. More importantly one has to replace like with like. One cannot replace the job that coal does except with an energy source that delivers power of the same quality and on the same scale, and fossil fuels aside and geothermal in the handful of places where it might be viable, that leaves us with nuclear. And whatever the management problems associated with nuclear people should know that the vast majority of the planet aned even more so their governments will not choose privation to protect the biosphere. Nuclear is the competitor not of renewables but of coal and to a lesser extent natural gas. Moreover, when having trashed the planet, coal runs out, nuclear will be used because there will be no other choice, but of course by then the option will be taken in circumstances where conflict is likely to be very serious. If, sooner or later we are going to adopt nuclear, then sooner would be better because we can foreclose the damage, keeping the wolf from the door while we come up with something better, and preserve the usages of civilised society. This is the legacy we must leave.
That is how we must talk to those who are environmentalists opposed to nuclear power.
John, it seems people still are confused as to what is going on worldwide when it comes down to saving the planet. Here is one example for those who are out of touch with reality, ‘780 organizations and almost 800.000 individuals from all European countries have signed petition against nuclear power in Europe. The petition was handed over to EU-energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs in April 2007’.
Nuclear is not coming now or in the near future.
@Michael of Summer Hill
Michael
How will we know when we have passed each tipping point? Have we passed any already? Methane release has already started in the Arctic, albeit on a tiny scale so far.
Even if we turned off the CO2 tap completely 5 minutes from now, warming will continue for decades before temperatures plateaus. And we won’t achieve zero net emissions for many decades, at least.
To me the key Tipping Point, to which all other issues are subordinate is when we reach the point that the survival of civilisation and humanity becomes a matter of luck. With the best will in the world and with all possible endeavours by all of humanity, our survival still comes down too luck.
And my key point is that that tipping point is much closer than we think. Maybe we have already passed it.
When you fall off a tall bridge, it can take a long time before you hit the bottom and go splat. But once you have fallen, it is out of your control. In our case that fall may take a century, but what matters is when we reach the point were we can’t prevent it. And the wild card in all this that can blindside our thinking is that we don’t/can’t easily imagine how the decline of the capacities of societies under pressure can diminish our ability to act. We in the West have a certain hubris. A presumption about our capabilities that is easily punctured. Just ask many people in the third world.
Take the recent case of Tim Holding in Victoria (I am assuming you are posting from Australia). Once he started down that icy slope he couldn’t stop himself.
Is humanity wise enough to recognise how steep the slope we are on is. In reality probably not. Therefore we have to act as if we are split seconds away from that point of no return and act accordingly until we can be CERTAIN that we are safe. And we aren’t certain at present. Very far from it.
And I see some of this hubris in this forum and others. All the schemes, ideas and technologies people propose have merit and yes we will employ many of them. But where is the sense of desperate, desperate urgency? And what I sometimes see, speaking as an engineer about these things, is a certain disconnect between the ideas proposed, and the recognition of the vast scale, lead times and complexities of what is proposed. The disconnect between qualitative thinking and quantitative. And Mother Nature is the Goddess of Numbers, the Mistress of the Quantitaive. No matter what your intentions, as an individual or as a species. If the numbers don’t add up, you loose.
Apollo, The Pyramids, The Great Wall of China. These are trifles compared to what we need to do. This is an undertaking unprecedented in human history except for one thing.
The only activity that compares to what we need to do is the activity that caused this mess. Billions of people transforming the planet as an unintended consequence of living their daily lives; thats easy, we have already done that. But, Billions of people transforming the planet as an act of coordinated intentionality. That is the greates endeavour in human history.
We can do it. But we need every resource, every person, every belief and attitude on the table as tools the be used. If something seems sacrosanct and something we can’t consider, then actually we should distrust that and consider it. Shut the stock markets for 20 years so we can ram rod through changes. Suspend the use of money. Not concrete suggestions but examples of how widely we may need to think. I think it was Einstein who said something like ‘If an Idea has caused a problem, usually you can’t solve the problem with the same Idea’
We must think widely, more widely than humanity has ever done before and try to get as many other people as possible to do the same. If some of this proves to have been unnecessary then what of it? The price will still have been worth it.
@Fran Barlow
Fran
I agree with much of your basic point. However, as you have seen from our previous conversations not totally. My view is that the only viable course is a modest dose of Plan A, with Herculean efforts to avoid the barbarity part of it, to buy time for Plan C. Otherwise without that dose of Plan A, Plan C will look a hell of a lot like Plan B. See my previous post to Michael. The key issue here is the quantitative thinking about scale, lead times, complexity etc.
But your right. Selling even a few drops of the medicine called Plan A is a massive task.
Here’s Hopeing
“I think it was Einstein who said something like ‘If an Idea has caused a problem, usually you can’t solve the problem with the same Idea’”
“If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?” Will Rogers
We have to hope that the new climate dynamics (in fact ecosystem dynamics) will be supportive. And be thankful that the Australian political system will not influence the outcome.
No Glenn Tamblyn, we have not passed the ‘tipping point’ stage but we are getting to a point of no return if we don’t do something now to mitigate the effects of greenhouse gases. The lastest reports suggest that by targeting investments now will lead to 10-20% improvement in climate conditions.
@Michael of Summer Hill
Michael – there is no way we can know if we have reached a tipping point – that’s fundamental if you understand the climate as a complex system. Even without doing anything we cannot know if the climate is moving to a radical shift. What we can know is that pushing the system away from a currently stable (or slowly changing) dynamic increases the probability of moving to a different state which may not be supportive.
Glenn – a few comments.
My basic response to what you are saying, the most important thing to observe, is that your picture of the future leaves out something enormous. You portray a complicated situation in which humanity runs up against limits, but that is not the full story. The other thing which is missing is the continued development of technology, not just along lines which offer alternatives to unsustainability, but which open up powers and possibilities that have simply never before existed. Nanotechnology and artificial intelligence pack the biggest punch, but robotics, genetics, and neuroscience also add up to a completely novel change in the human condition.
Even in a scenario in which literally billions of people die because of environmental catastrophe, these other developments will still come; it only requires one autarkic high-technology society, sustaining itself with precisely the post-fossil-fuel options being discussed here, to maintain a culture of technical R&D. And of course there would be far more than just one high-tech hermit kingdom, even under the worst scenario.
So as a statement of what our existential position as a species is, I have to regard a futurism which says sustainability is the problem for the next century as lacking. Basically, a nano/neuro/bio/AI society would have the means to undo every unsustainable trend coming out of the 20th century, but it must also deal with the new threats and challenges intrinsic to artificial life and artificial intelligence. And they are very severe threats. Furthermore, they are coming so rapidly that it is not an option to deal with sustainability first and then high technology later. Now in practice that’s not actually a problem; the world is diverse, there are separate groups struggling on both fronts and they will continue to do so, whatever they think of each other. So my basic point is just that though you have attempted to obtain the bird’s-eye view, and frame all our interconnected problems as a whole, the situation contains other factors which in the end will be, not just important to the outcome, but decisive.
Nanks, if I am not mistaken the current thinking is that we are only 2-5 degrees Celcius away from the point of no return.
@Glenn Tamblyn Tim Holding
He later commented that even when he did get to the bottom and saw another hiker he didn’t realise the trouble he was in so didn’t seek assistance …
@mitchell porter
Michael
Yes, quite possibly. Where I would disagree with you is in your use of one word
‘will’
Replace that with ‘may’ and I think you are closer to the mark.
Are you familiar with the idea of ‘The Singularity’ or ‘The Spike’ that has been discussed by several authors over the years. The basic idea is that a number of factors affecting society are subject to non-linear or exponential growth curves. Environmental issues, the growth of human knowledge, computing power, a whole range of factors that are all going asymptotic this century, all climbing to levels that from our current perspective a practically infinite. That as a result of this we literally cannot see the future out to 2100. It is literally an unimaginable, alien lanscape.
The universe doesn’t like infinities that much. So I am not sure I subscribe to their ideas totally but they have some validity. Moores Law for example that computing power doubles every 18 months has stood the test of time so far. But it is what you might call an Observational Law. So far it has held true but there is no underlying physical law that necessitates that it will continue to apply indefinitely. Quantum computing may work, it may be a fizzer. We can continue to reduce the feature size of electronic circuits for some time yet but building electronics out or quarks is never going to be possible.
The is a certain Technological Determinism to the expectation that developments in knowledge and capability will continue indefinetly, automatically. I have a metaphor I sometimes use for this. You know Base Jumping – the Extreme Sport of leaping of cliffs, bridges and tall building with a parachute on your back. Well… ‘The Base Jumpers Fallacy’. An inexperienced Base Jumper climbs to the top of a tall building and leaps off. Down they go. WhooooHooo, what ride! Part way down someone leans out of a window and screams out ‘Pull the ripcord! Pull the ripcord’ The Base Jumpers reply. ‘I don’t need to. Its been pretty good so far’. Their fallacy? The expectation, the presumption that past events are necessarily a guide to future actions and events. Moores Law is potentially an example of such a fallacy. There is no underlying intrinsic physical process driving its necessary continuation. Unlike say the collapse of a sufficiently large star to create a Black Hole – underlying physical processes driving to that outcome. Causation rather than simply Observation.
However, the point to note about the Singuarity thinking is that there are negative trends such as climate change that when they go critical cause devastation. And positive trends such as the things you mention that may be totally trasnformative and perhaps profoundly positive. By centuries end we may have so much computing power that all humans have downloaded themselves into computers, we have become nearly immortal cybernetic organisms that have begun the exploration of the galaxy as electronic signals across space. Maybe.
So it seems to me that the race is on. Will the negative trends tear us down, or the positive one transform us. But the negative trends are driven more by Causative factors – physics, chemistry, conservation of energy etc, while the positive trends are more Observational. So the negative trends, unaddressed, WILL be devastating, while the positive trends MAY come to fruition and MAY save us. And as you say, they may also bring their own chhallenges.
And my sense is that the negative trends are way ahead in the race at present.
Also your statement that all it takes is one society to achieve this to transform the situation. Maybe. But my point that social stresses and collapse can undermine a societies capacity to function applies to the positive trends. An AI researcher may be beavering away at their computer at the research institute building this positive future but the staff canteen has no food for lunch, and there is no food at home in the fridge and the supermarket shelves are empty because of world wide food shortages compounded by massive drought this year. How many days is it before the AI research grinds to a halt, because that researcher, just like every other person has to look to higher priorities – finding enough calories to stay alive. The positive trends falter.
Without water you die in days, without food you die in a month. And as the old saying goes – ‘No society is more than 7 meals away from Revolution’ The USA was on the brink of Revolution during the Great Depression. So the negative trends have a great potential to cut the positive trends off at the knees.
So my position on how we need to look to dealing with the negative and positive trends that are developing is that we should completely ignore the possible transformative positive trends and focus all our efforts on preventing the negatives. Solar power is not a future possibility. It is here now. It isn’t economic yet. Who cares. Take economics out of the picture and just do it.
Then if the positive trends continue, if they do go sufficently asymptotic to really help, to really transform our lives, WOW, What a Bonus. But our plans should not be premised on them.
In Gambling, such as playing Poker, the secret of successful gambling is to know the odds, play quite dispassionately and never place big bets. Place lots of snaller bets. Win some, Loose some and if you know the odds you should come out ahead. But if the game is One Hand, Winner Takes All, that’s a sucker play. You only play that way if you can afford to loose the bet.
My sense is that most people still, unconciously, dont get the finality of our situation if we loose the bet. They think we will get to play more hands. And my feeling is that we are closer to that One Hand, Winner Takes All situation than we think. And we have bet the farm.
@Michael of Summer Hill
The whole point of the ‘limit warming to 2C’ argument is that is felt, by the experts, IPCC etc to be the threshold at which the risk of ‘tipping points’ is still acceptably low. Not certainty. Just good odds.
And on Methane, we may already have reached it’s tipping point. Methane release in the Arctic has already started. Only low levels at present. If that doesn’t escalate, it isn’t the tipping point yet. But the current low level of release, maybe 10 million tonnes per year at present, has occurred when average warming in the atmosphere is only at 0.8C. A recent study out off the Univeristy of Florida highlighted the potential for 1-2 Billion tonnes per year. That would be a tipping point.
If the current rate of permafrost melt and emissions is occurring at 0.8C average warming, what will the rate be at 2C warming which is largely locked in and in the pipeline over the next few decades? Even at current temperatures, will the emissions rate climb as more permafrost melts, exposing more ancient vegetation available to decay. If the growth of emissions is non-linear with temperature rise then major increases are possible. We just don’t know at present. What is happening in the Arctic is probably the scariest thing happening out there right now.
And at 5C, the smelly stuff hits the fan.
@Glenn Tamblyn
Sorry, I should have said Mitchell
carbonsink:
What Hansen has actually said:
— A Letter to Obama (emphasis mine)
Hardly a crusade for nukes in general.
Anyone who claims that energy efficiency, renewable energies and a smart grid do not deserve FIRST PRIORITY in our effort to reduce carbon emissions, or who claims CCS is nonsense, can’t say Hansen’s in line with you just because both of you would support 4Gen nukes. I would, too, to clean up the mess left by the nuke plants, and because the completely broken economic system worldwide favors such solutions and sabotages better competitors. He’s also proposing to use some of the money collected to dispose of waste to advance 4th gen nuclear power – instead of starving research to drastically improve renewable energy.
As for Lovelock, he’s ALWAYS promoted even the most inefficient and dirty nukes, saying he’d gladly live right on top of a nuclear waste pile, etc. He doesn’t think nukes (or anything else) will prevent another PETM, actually. He just likes nukes and hates greenies. Any chance he gets to score points off them, he’ll take.
@Marion Delgado
A missing piece in the puzzle for renewables and the provision of Base Load power is energy storage. Some renewables are intrinsically energy storing or continuously available – wave, tidal to some extent, Thermal Solar with storage, Geothermal if it can be made to work. Some storage and balancing can be done using many distributed sources over the grid, using HVDC etc. But to have a system where any energy source that can produce power can be a useful addition to the system, we need energy stores to balance out the system. (And grids flexible and smart enough to manage this multitude of components) Whether this is batteries in every home, battery banks at the end of each street, or huge battery farms on the grid (and other energy storage technologies as well) is really a resource optimisation question.
Hi JQ and others,
The UK Royal Society has recently released a paper about global warming and geoengineering (released 1 Sept 09). It seems quite good, and the panel of authors is fairly impressive. In relation to this blog, it is of particular relevance to discussion of biochar and reforestation as methods of combating climate change (reducing CO2). The report can be accessed at: http://royalsociety.org/document.asp?tip=0&id=8729 (or just google it).
Glenn Tamblyn – Climate Scientists have made an egregious mistake in declaring that science proves AGW. The science behind Feedback Control Theory proves that AGW is wrong. This science is relevant to the issue of earth’s climate and Climate Scientists apparently do not understand it or are unaware of it. It is obvious from your comments that you do not understand the science of Feedback Control very well either.
I learned about feedback control in graduate engineering school. Although it is now a bit dated, my old text Dynamics of Machinery by Richard M. Phelan, 1967, gives a fairly tractable presentation starting at Chapter 7.
The planet’s climate can be evaluated using Feedback Control Theory with average global temperature as the output. With that, and knowledge of paleo temperature data it is trivial to show that there is no significant positive feedback from average global temperature. This is shown in one of the pdfs at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true . Without net positive feedback there is no AGW. The other pdf presents a rational explanation of the temperature run-up towards the end of the twentieth century.
Following is an explanation to supplement that presented in the link. Earth has only one significant source of energy and that is the sun. Earth’s climate system can be evaluated as a simple Feedback Control System where the ‘plant’ (Control Theory talk) includes all factors (known and unknown) that influence average global temperature (agt) and the output is agt. Consider the system having a feedback loop from agt and a hypothetical controller where the feedback either enhances (a positive feedback) or diminishes (a negative feedback) the input from the sun. Short of a sustained overwhelming external upset, if feedback is positive then temperature trending up must continue to rise and temperature trending down must continue to fall (Trends are long enough to average out oscillations with periods up to several decades).
Paleo temperature data has been determined from ice core data and is readily available. Observation of this data reveals that up-trends changed to down trends and vice versa. This could not happen with positive feedback from agt. Without positive feedback, the IPCC’s Global Climate Models show only nuisance warming of about 1.2C from doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Others have determined much smaller values. Without AGW there is no human caused climate change.
Glenn, your base jumpers need to meet some black swans.
Dan, your basic argument seems to be that the claimed positive feedback does not exist because in some periods, CO2 trends and temperature trends did not move together, or even moved in opposite directions. But since they do move together at other times, this only shows that the relationship, whatever it is, is not an utterly simple one. But that much can already be seen from the way that the temperature graph is much spikier than the CO2 graph, on page 2 of your “AGW Mistake” paper.
The basic argument *for* positive feedback can be seen on page 7 here: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/AGUBjerknes_20081217.pdf
Apart from the curve-fitting, the other key fact, as far as I am concerned, is that the Milankovitch forcings alone cannot produce the full temperature difference between glacial and interglacial. Something is amplifying them. So the model according to which orbital forcings produce an initial small change, which changes greenhouse gas levels, which amplify the temperature change, producing a positive feedback which runs until geographic constraints on the size of the ice sheets provide an overriding negative feedback – that’s the model which makes sense to me.
Dan
“Earth’s climate system can be evaluated as a simple Feedback Control System”
To the extent that the Earths Climate System can be regarded as a Feedback Control System, it is anything but ‘simple’. That has to be one of the all time monumental simplifications.
The system is actually made up of a large number of components, multiple feedback loops both positive and negative, time constants that vary from hours for things like water vapour condensing out to months and years for things like inter-hemispheric mixing in the atmosphere, decades for ocean thermal response, to millenia for planetary oribital variations, quasi random elements and a fair dose of Chaos Theory. Within the ‘Climate’ there are actually multiple components that respond with temperature changes at different rates. Ice core data and other proxies give us indicators of troposphere (lower atmosphere) tenperature. What about the upper atmosphere, oceans, land surface temperatures and the cryosphere How do you factor in albedo changes from changes in vegetation cover, precipitation rates, ice cover etc. What are the non-linearities in how sea ice extent changes depending on how ocean currents warm and the way in which changes in the locations of current can cause them to impact on floating ice sheet – currently there are concerns that the major current in the Southern Ocean, having warmed 1C has moved and may start colliding with the Ross Ice Sheet, hastening its melt. Other factors that act as feedbacks (again positive & negative) on feedbacks include other processes that withdraw CO2 from the atmosphere over different time scales such as weathering of rocks. I could go on…
Control Theory may have some very limited applicability to analysing AGW, but the control diagrams you would need to describe it would be one godawfully complex spiders web. Try to analyse that and as my old Fluid Mechanics lecturer would have said. ‘It would make smoke come out of the computer’
Control theory as you put it forward here, looking for simple feedbacks between broad aggregates of one factor and a simple measure of another is simply the wrong mathematical tool for the job. If it were an effective mathematical tool, don’t you think the worlds climate scientists would be using it?
In IT, where I have spent a lot of my working life there is the GIGO rule (Garbage In, Garbage Out). In Control Theory when applied to extremely complex systems the rule should perhaps be SIGO – Simplifications In, Garbage Out
What you put forward here is liking trying run the Apollo mission using grade 4 arithmatic.
@iain
Iain.
My point about the BJF is the idea that the ‘presumption’ of past experience and thinking being applicable is a dangerous fallacy. Even if it is valid a lot of the time, we too easily give the backward looking perspective too great importance. It’s basic human psychology why we do it, but it still can catch us out. One of the hardest things we can ever have to do is make dispassionate judgements about when we can rely on our past ‘certainties’ and when we have to jettison them. Our certainties are so reassuring that we can be too reluctant to relinquish them. For the Base Jumper, the consequences are given the technical term ‘splat’
But yes Black Swan thinking is one way of looking at it. I’ll bet Joseph Banks was one very startled naturalist when he first saw them.
Glenn, You reveal again that you do not understand how a control system works and that earth’s climate can be evaluated as one. All factors that influence average global temperature are taken in to account. All of those that you list and even all of those that no one has yet discovered. The Control Theory based analysis does not predict climate itself but shows, using paleo temperature data, that feedback from average global temperature is not significantly positive. Force that limit on the GCMs and they then may produce reasonable predictions instead of the erroneous predictions such as those over the last decade which have turned out to be wrong. It may be little comfort but Climate Scientists apparently don’t understand Control Theory either but as the atmospheric CO2 continues to increase and the average global temperature trend doesn’t they may begin to look for what they have missed.
@Dan Pangburn
Amazing Dan
“All factors that influence average global temperature are taken in to account. All of those that you list and even all of those THAT NO ONE HAS YET DISCOVERED” (my emphasis)
This really is Nobel Prize stuff.
Several points Dan. If you are making a claim, back it up. I notice the pdf you refer to in your earlier post does not include any references to any published scientific papers by yourself or anyone else. You make claims about Sunspot activity and heating of the Earth. I assume you can back this up with the body of research from the Solar Physics community in support of the relationships you claim.
In the document you mention you say the following:
“The extremely low sunspot activity associated with the LIA (see e.g. Fig. 2 at
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/scarewatch/really_cooling.pdf ) suggests that there is a connection between sunspots and the rate that the earth’s surface receives energy from the sun. Also, it is known that energy leaves the earth in proportion to the fourth power of its absolute temperature. Thus a rather simple energy relation can be developed where the energy received by the earth is proportional to the integral of the sunspot activity and the energy leaving the earth is proportional to the fourth power of the absolute temperature of the earth. This was done”
Several point: “suggests that there is a connection”. This is rather ambiguous wording. Are you saying Causation or Correlation?
“This was done” – By whom. References or citations please
“Also, it is known that energy leaves the earth in proportion to the fourth power of its absolute temperature” Of course, the Stefan Boltzman Law
“energy received by the earth is proportional to the integral of the sunspot activity” Waaahhh? Dan, Thats gobbledegook. And you most definitely need to provide some serious research backup for that claim. Your graph purporting to show this simply has a vertical axes with numbers from 0 to 3000 and the label ‘APPROX PROPORTIONAL TO NET ENERGY”. What does that mean? The Heading for the graph is Proportional to T^4. I thought this graph was somethimg to do with a correlation to Sunspots and energy IN to the Earth. But the Reference to the 4th Power law is energy OUT. Huh?
And surely you can find a more authoritative source for any correlation between sunspot activity and the Little Ice Age than “http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/scarewatch/really_cooling.pdf”
Dan
If these claims have validity, what are you doing here cluttering up John’s site which is more Economics and Policy related.
Why aren’t you out in the trenches, arguing your case in the Climate Science / Mathematics / Solar Physics Peer Reviewed Journals. When you have done that and those professions have looked at your work, realised they have all had it all wrong – ‘Gosh, how could we have forgotten Susnpots and Control Theory, silly us’ -and you have then turned all this on its head. Then come back here. Why are you talking to the wrong people Dan?