Category: Environment

Nuclear power: the last post

John Quiggin411 Comments

I’m getting tired of comments threads being derailed by disputes over nuclear power. So I’m going to give everyone a final chance to state their views on the question, then declare this topic off-limits. Here are my views:

* If there is no better option, I’d prefer an expansion of nuclear power to continued reliance on fossil fuels (particularly coal) to generate electricity

* We don’t have enough information to determine whether nuclear power is more cost-effective than the alternatives (conservation, renewables, CCS) and we have debated this question at excessive length (a fact which itself reflects our lack of info)

* In practical terms, there is no chance of any movement towards nuclear in Australia for at least the next five years.

So, I’m going to ask everyone to have their final say, and come back in five years when we might have something new and relevant to say.

Update I’ve been asked by Fran Barlow in comments to reconsider my policy, and here is my response. If I see anything new and interesting (to me, that is) on the topic, I’ll post on it, and open up discussion. Readers who see something suitable are welcome to email me and tell me. Otherwise, nothing more on this until further notice, please, including in open threads.

High Penetration Solar Deployment

John Quiggin99 Comments

We’ve had a lot of discussion here of the difficulties of integrating solar PV (and wind) into an electricity network. Even leaving aside some obstinate reiteration of the baseload demand fallacy, I think it’s fair to say that most of us are arguing on the basis of very little information

Here’s a link to a US government agency studying High Penetration Solar Deployment. No results as yet that I can see, but this should prove interesting.

Straws in the wind

John Quiggin169 Comments

Serious action to reduce CO2 emissions has been stymied in Australia and the US for the moment. So, to get an idea of what is likely to be feasible, and on what timescale, we have to look at Europe, which has both a working Emissions Trading Scheme and a bunch of special incentives to promote renewable energy. At least on the latter point, there is some cause for optimism.

Here’s a graph of new installed capacity and decommissioned capacity for 2009 from The European Wind Energy Association (link here was broken and is now fixed-JQ). The results pretty much speak for themselves, but I’ll add a couple of observations.

The fact that solar PV was a major source of new installed capacity surprised me. Until now, solar (along with fusion) has been one of the contenders for the tag “the energy source of the future and always will be”. But, on current trends, solar is set to be a major contributor in the future. Of course, the outcome so far has been the result of large subsidies, such as feed-in tariffs. But, even as the subsidies are cut back the volume of installations continues to grow. Before long, solar could be competitive with coal on the basis of the ETS and peak-load pricing, without the need for an extra “renewable” subsidy. Gas is likely to be cheapest for some time to come, but there are sound reasons for not wanting to depend entirely on an energy source that can be cut off at short notice.

The other point is that for coal (and also, less surprisingly for nuclear) installed capacity showed a net decline. The combination of the ETS and strong political opposition has made the construction of new coal-fired power stations in Europe almost impossible, at least without a commitment to CCS or some other sweetener.

On this issue, where Europe has led, the rest of the world will follow sooner or later. The big question is whether it will be too late. The good outcomes we are seeing in Europe suggest that, even with a few years’ slippage, big reductions in emissions will be possible in time to stabilise global climate.

Water, water everywhere

John Quiggin50 Comments

There’s been a lot happening in water policy lately, and for once, most of the news is good. Most importantly, it’s been raining, a lot. The total volume of the recent rains has been estimated at around 6000 Gigalitres. Even after diversions, evaporation, absorption by the soil, refilling of water tables and so on, there will be somewhere between 600 and 1000 GL to flow down the Murray and stave off the disaster threatening the Lower Lakes, as well as many upstream ecosystems.

Meanwhile, the Rudd government’s decision to bite the bullet and start buying water from irrigators willing to sell has been thoroughly vindicated. The money has been a huge benefit to farmers keen to move out of agriculture, or from irrigated agriculture to dryland, and has done a lot to soften the impact of the drought. Most recently, a couple of irrigation districts have voted to sell en masse with a resulting saving in the cost of irrigation channels and other infrastructure. In a situation where too much water had been allocated to irrigation, and where (despite the current rain) there is likely to be less in the future, this is a necessary part of the adjustment process.
Read More »

A bit more on solar PV

John Quiggin34 Comments

I wanted to develop a few more points on solar PV. Like quite a few commenters, I think subsidies for rooftop solar PV installations are not a first-best policy option, and probably not even second-best. But the fact remains that a relatively modest subsidy is enough to make this a reasonably attractive choice (in comments to the previous post, Uncle Milton describes it as ‘marginal’, which is about right – at the margin, there’s just enough to make it an appealing option for suitably located households).

It doesn’t look so good as public policy. Assuming 6 KWh/day, the energy saving is around 2MWh/year, which, if it displaced brown coal would save about 2.5 tonnes/year. If the public subsidy is $5000, and the real annual interest rate faced by the government is 4 per cent, that’s about $100/tonne.

There are certainly better options than trying to achieve a large proportion of our emissions reduction goals through an approach like this. But lets suppose that the kind of political noise being made by Tony Abbott and others forces us into a high-cost winner-picking approach. Now suppose we decide to reduce emissions by 500 million tonnes a year (about 90 per cent of existing emissions), using approaches that are, on average as efficient as residential rooftop PV, that is, at an average cost of $100/tonne. The cost would be $50 billion a year or about 4 per cent of GDP, that is, about 2 years worth of annual growth in income per person.

In other words, even using highly inefficient approaches, the cost of climate stabilization would be marginal in comparison to the ordinary fluctuations in GDP associated with the business cycle, let alone the variations in personal income (IIRC, the coefficient of variation is more than 20 per cent).

This is a point that seems to be resisted vigorously both by advocates of ‘business as usual’, and by lots of people who think that the existing order of things is doomed by virtue of necessary increases in the cost of energy. The arithmetic above shows that this can’t be true[1], but I doubt that I will convince to many people of that.
Read More »

Science the victim of dishonest attacks

John Quiggin230 Comments

That’s the title of my Fin column for Thursday 11 March 2010, which naturally picked out The Australian newspaper as a prime vehicle for these attacks. The Oz replied next day, with characteristic mendacity, pointing out that, on the same day they

ran an opinion piece by climatologist James Hansen, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief who also happens to be known rather snappily as the “father of global warming”.

Only problem was, they weren’t running Hansen to defend science against their attacks, but because his policy views (he opposes an ETS and supports nuclear power) could be used in their continuing wedge campaign. The piece (can’t find it to link ran under the headline “”Only carbon tax and nuclear power can save us”

Anyway, here’s my piece
Read More »

Climategate:The smoking gun

John Quiggin137 Comments

In writing my previous post on the “Climategate” break-in to the University of East Anglia computer system , I remained unclear about who was actually responsible for the break-in theft of the emails, which were then selectively quoted to promote a bogus allegation of scientific fraud. It seems unlikely at this point that the hacker/leaker wll be identified, so as far as criminal liability is concerned, we will probably never know.

Looking over the evidence that is now available, however, I think there is enough to point to Steven McIntyre as the person (apart of course from the actual hacker/leaker) who bears primary moral responsibility for the crime.
Read More »

Touring the Murray

John Quiggin9 Comments

A few weeks ago, following the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society conference in Adelaide I drove with my Risk and Sustainable Management Group colleagues David Adamson and Sarah Chambers to Melbourne, going by way of the Murray River. David and Sarah had been to the Coorong in a pre-conference tour and on our trip together we managed to visit all the remaining ‘icon’ sites – these are the sites that are supposed to best represent the environmental values of the Basin.

There was quite a striking pattern, though not so surprising given the way water allocation works in the Australian federal system. The South Australian (downstream) sites, the Coorong and Chowilla, were much drier than would be expected under normal conditions, even allowing for a long drought. Things were much better in the Victorian (upstream) sites (Hattah Lakes, Gunbower Forest and the Barmah-Millewa). The Murray channel itself, which is the sixth icon site, shows the same pattern. There’s a problem with the icon sites approach – they are supposed to be representative indicators, but the temptation is to throw a lot of resources at the icon sites, and ignore everything else.

There are some reasons for optimism though. Most obviously, it’s been raining an awful lot in Queensland since our return, and some of that water is bound to make its way down the Darling and on to South Australia (we’re now trying to estimate how much). There’s also a major project going on at Chowilla to ensure that at least some of the floodplain there can actually get flooded from time to time. And, with the drought at least partly broken, the Rudd government’s policy of buying back water rights from holders willing to sell looks as if it will pay off. Hopefully, this will mean an end to some of the sillier engineering projects on the table, which will save only small amounts of water at very high cost.

There’s a set of pictures from the trip at my Flicker site

Read More »

Lindzen and “No statistically significant warming since 1995”

John Quiggin51 Comments

I discussed the ‘no statistically significant warming since 1995’ talking point in this post. For those who came in late, this talking point has been around the delusionist blogosphere for some time, though with a lower profile than ‘global warming stopped in 1998’, and was put as question to Phil Jones of UEA in a BBC interview. Jones answered honestly, if a bit clumsily, that the data period since 1995 is marginally too short to derive a statistically significant trend, a response which was headlined by the Daily Mail as “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995?” and became the talking point of the day. As has been widely noted, confusing not statistically significant’ with ‘not significant; in the ordinary sense indicates either deliberate dishonesty or ignorance of a point covered in excruciating detail in every introductory stats course.

But where did this silliness come from? I’d seen Janet Albrechtsen quote Lord Monckton on the point, and it seemed about right for him, an innumerate debating point that would take a fair while to refute, during which time he could move on to the next one.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered the point being made (and apparently originated) by Richard Lindzen of MIT who is (or ought to be) by far the most credible figure on the delusionist side. In a piece published on “Watts Up With That” Lindzen says ‘There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995’ and in this piece for Quadrant he gives a variation, saying “has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years” and “the fact that warming has ceased for the past fourteen years is acknowledged” . Note the slide from “has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years ” to “warming has ceased”, committing the basic newbie error against which all budding stats students are warned.

Lindzen has published a couple of hundred papers in climatology, so I think we can assume he knows that the statement “there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995” means nothing more than “given the variability in the data, we need at least 15 observations to reject the null hypothesis at 95 per cent confidence”, a fact so trite as not to be worth mentioning.

It is sad to see a respected scientist reduced to this kind of thing. And as far as I can tell, all this is simply to avoid admitting that he backed the wrong horse back in 1990, when he bet that he was smarter than the majority of climate scientists who thought humans were (probably) causing global warming. The data since then has supported the majority view, but instead of revising his position, Lindzen has resorted to dishonest statistical trickery.

To quote The Economist, with respect to the Daily Mail

Since I’ve advocated a more explicit use of the word “lie”, I’ll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie.

But at least the Daily Mail headline writer could plead ignorance. Lindzen has no such excuse.

Update: More on this from Deep Climate

Four lies and an empty set

John Quiggin119 Comments

The switch from ‘scepticism’ to an overtly anti-science, and anti-scientist, position has paid some dividends for the advocates of delusional views on climate change. Although the only wrongdoing in the CRU harassment/hacking campaign was that of the hackers and their allies (more on this soon), the false charges of scientific fraud got much more media attention than their refutation, and the early responses to alleged FOI breaches (including that of some pro-science writers such as George Monbiot) failed to recognise of the deliberately vexatious misuse of FOI by the anti-science group. In this context, the discovery of a genuine error in the 1700 page IPCC Fourth Assessment Report regarding projected changes in glaciers could easily be spun into something much bigger.

It seemed for a little while as if the delusionists had scored another win, when Phil Jones, the scientist who has been most viciously target by the hackers/harassers gave an honest answer to a deliberately loaded question prepared by them and put to him in a BBC interview

BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods…

This was headlined by the Daily Mail as “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995?.

But, now it looks as if this is starting to backfire. Anyone who has successfully completed a basic course in statistics knows that “statistically significant” has a special meaning which bears almost no relationship to the usual sense of the term “significant”, and this fact is beginning to sink in.

Read More »