Category: Environment

Duffy on global warming

John Quiggin108 Comments

Via Immanuel Rant, I found this piece by Michael Duffy in Saturday’s SMH, pushing global warming denialism. Immanuel points out that Duffy has been more than a little economical with the truth, saying

Duffy is correct to warn us not to overlook agendas and political interests and how they affect science. The trouble is that Duffy’s “cold, hard look� forgets the mote in his own eye. Kellow and William Kininmonth (also mentioned) are members of The Lavoisier Group. The group was created by Ray Evans of Western Mining and is an astroturf operation.

The article is full of similar examples. Sceptic Bob Carter is described as “an environmental scientist at James Cook University”. At least when I knew him there, he was a geologist working (not surprisingly) with the mining industry, and his current affilation is still with the School of Earth Sciences Nothing wrong with that, as Duffy himself says, but, why the misrepresentation.?

Then there’s the reference to a conference held by

The Friedrich Naumann Foundation, a liberal think-tank,

which

held a climate seminar in Germany in February and conducted a poll of the 500 climate researchers who attended. A quarter doubted that the modest warming of the past 150 years is due to human activity.

For most Australian readers, the term “liberal’ without capitalisation might imply a moderate progressive, perhaps an Australian Democrat. Duffy doesn’t bother to inform us that the Foundation is liberal in the classical sense. It stands for

he reduction of state interventionism, the advocacy of decentralization and  privatization, the cutting of existing state regulations and of bureaucratic red tape in our daily lives.

In other words, it’s an ideological clone of the CIS, IPA or Cato. It appears to have close ties with the last of these, a well-known promoter of junk science on this and other topics. Duffy could have been honest with his readers and called it a “free-market thinktank”, but that would have alerted them to possible bias. I managed to find a report on the meeting here, but it’s in German and I can’t really follow it. It doesn’t appear to me that those in attendance were climate scientists, though some of the speakers were.

It seems to be just about impossible to attack the consensus view on global warming without resorting to dishonest misrepresentation. Duffy is no exception to this pattern.

Update Tim Lambert has more.

And, given his past form, I’m not surprised to learn that Duffy is an exponent of rightwing postmodernism.

As you’d expect from someone hired as the “right-wing Philip Adams’, Duffy poses as a critic of postmodernism, as in this Counterpoint episode where he links it to Leninism, eugenics and contempt for ordinary people, and defends science as a source of truth.

But, when science says something Duffy doesn’t like, for example on global warming, he’s happy to embrace the “social construction of reality” thesis, as propounded by political scientist and Lavoisier Institute member Aynsley Kellow.

Further update It turns out (see the comments thread) that the respondents to the survey described by Duffy were not, as he says, climate scientists attending a conference in 2005, but members of meteorological societies who responded to a survey sent out in 1996! It’s scarcely surprising that a lot of respondents took the view, at that time, that anthropogenic climate change was not proven. IIRC, the IPCC took the same view. I’ll put this one down to sloppiness rather than deliberate deception, but it’s illustrative of the point that Duffy is not engaged in a serious search for truth here.

Yet further update 20/4 A lengthy search suggests that the claimed result does not refer to the 1996 survey, but to another survey undertaken by the same researcher in 2003. The results are apparently here but I can’t get them to work on any of my browsers.

You can’t keep a good lie down

John Quiggin24 Comments

The long-discredited Oregon petition against global warming seems to be getting another run – presumably it is circulating somewhere in the wilder reaches of the blogosphere. Miranda Devine gave it a run in yesterday’s SMH, in a piece loaded with errors and inventions.

Her basic complaint is that efforts like the Oregon petition, Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus and so on, are unfairly attacked by greenies. Leaving aside the fact that these dishonest stunts deserved to be attacked, Devine is the last person who has any right to complain about excessive vitriol in debate. She can dish it out, but she can’t take it, apparently.

Profits are 150 per cent of GDP ??

John Quiggin43 Comments

Yesterday’s Fin had a piece by Louise McBride arguing for cuts in personal income tax rate, and including the claim that, according to Tax Office stats, Australian companies had a total taxable income of $1.1 trillion, far more than individuals (about $300 billion), even though individuals pay far more in income tax.

One thing I recommend to my students is to keep in their minds round number estimates of as many key economic magnitudes as possible, so they can be alerted by implausible claims, and can cross check. My first example is that Australia has a population of roughly 20 million, GDP of roughly $800 billion and therefore per capita GDP of $40 000 (the population number is close enough to do for quite a few years, GDP needs updating every couple of years to be within 10 per cent).

Alert readers will already have noticed that McBride’s stats imply that company profits are approximately 150 per cent of GDP. I know capitalism has been doing well, lately, but this seems unlikely. Unfortunately, I won’t have time to chase down the actual source for a while, so if anyone does have some free time to look at the tax stats and give me a hint as to what is going on, that would be great.

Kyoto comes into effect

John Quiggin80 Comments

This is a good day for the planet, which has had mostly bad days lately. Still, even with US (and FWIW, Australian) participation, Kyoto would only have been a first step towards tackling global warming. As it is, we have a first step towards a first step.

Copenhagen collapse

John Quiggin14 Comments

The wheels are coming off Bjorn Lomborg’s attempt to undermine the Kyoto Protocol. The Economist, which backed Lomborg’s exercise, published an interesting piece on climate change recently, noting that some members are dissenting, and ending with the observation, from Robert Mendelsohn, a critic of ambitious proposals for climate change mitigation, who worries that “climate change was set up to fail.â€?. This was my conclusion when I reviewed the book arising from the project.

It’s a pity, because, done well, the Copenhagen project could have been a really good idea, and even as it is, a lot of valuable work was done.
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An interesting find

John Quiggin25 Comments

While researching desalination, I found this interesting presentation (big PPP file) from the Water Corporation, including (slide 22) an estimated cost of $6.10 for a Kimberley pipeline with a capital cost of $11 billion[1]. It’s from a 2004 GHD report, so there’s no question of its being a political stunt. The pumping requires two 600 MW power stations, which suggests (if my mental arithmetic is right) around 50kw-hours for each Kl of water delivered. I’ve extracted the relevant slide here.

As an aside, I saw in the Fin that the proponents are suggesting diverting as much as 80Gl of the flow to irrigation along the way, leaving only 120/Gl for Perth. It’s unrealistic to expect any contribution to the capital costs from irrigation users, so the entire capital cost would have to be spread over the 120/Gl supplied to Perth, and the unit pumping cost would probably also rise. The delivered cost could easily exceed $10/Kl.

Update As Rob Corr points out, towing icebergs from Antarctica would be a lot cheaper.

Further update Rob’s source puts the iceberg option at $3.20/kl, but I’ve found another study that puts it at $17.00. So a canal at $10/kl would split the difference between these two.

fn1. Either the implied rate of return here is well below the one I used or the capacity is higher. I’d guess they are assuming bond financing and low depreciation. Still this sounds like a more realistic figure than the $2 billion Tenix estimate being used by Barnett. The power stations alone would chew up most of that.

Desalination

John Quiggin8 Comments

Reader Nic White asks for some comments on WA Premier Geoff Gallop’s desalination plan, and I’m happy to oblige, as this is a topic I’ve been meaning to do some work on. We’re talking here about about desalinating seawater or groundwater for human use, rather than schemes for reducing salt inflows to river systems like the Murray-Darling, another big topic in itself.

There are two basic ways of going about this. One is distillation. The most common approach to distillation is to evaporate the water, leaving salt and other pollutants behind, and capture the steam, but freezing and vapour compression. The other is to separate pure water using reverse osmosis or electrolysis. The first approach is the traditional one, but it’s inherently energy-intensive, so unless you have a cheap source of waste heat, it’s becoming outdated. The top candidate at present is reverse osmosis, which involves passing the water through a membrane, and using pressure to reverse the normal osmotic flow from high salt concentration to low. The current energy cost is about 4.5KwH for each Kl of seawater desalinated (the cost increases with the salinity of the source). Electrical energy is required, so this would come in around 25c/kl. The main operating cost comes from the need to replace the membranes.

I found this report (1.2 Mb PDF) which focuses on small scale plants for remote areas, up to 50/kl a day or around 15Ml/year. I assume there are significant scale economies beyond this, but it’s worth noting that, unlike large-scale engineering works, desalination is an incremental option, so you shouldn’t have problems of excess capacity. Operating costs are estimated at 65c/kl for a source with 2000mg/l up to $1.89 for 35 000 mg/l (seawater), for an output salinity less than 500mg/l. I’d guess the optimal way to go would be to accept more saline output and dilute it with fresh water. At a rough guess, I think a larger scale plant could produce water with operating costs of $1/kl

Capital costs are about $1600/kl/day or about $5/kl/year for small scale plants. That’s $5 million for each GL of annual capacity, compared to $10/GL in the unlikely event that the canal alternative could be delivered for $2 billion[1]. Assuming BOOT financing as I did for the canal (a high-cost option, but I want to be fair), the annual capital charge would be around 70c/kl, for a total of $1.70/kl, before reticulation and any additional treatment.

At that price, desalination is a pretty expensive option, and I’d expect to see some fairly dramatic reductions in optional water uses, like watering lawns. Before going to seawater desalination on a large scale, it would be sensible to work through the cheaper options, such as conservation, repurchase of irrigation water and use of groundwater in appropriate locations. This large PowerPoint file has some interesting data.

The availability of desalination as a backstop also suggests we need to take a sceptical look some of the more overblown rhetoric implying that urban Australians are going to run out of water. If we conservatively put the cost of large scale desalination up to $2.50/kl and assume water use of 200kl/person/year (you could manage a suburban lifestyle, including a water-efficient garden but no lawn on half that) it’s still only $500/person/year or $1500 for a three-person household. Not trivial, but cheaper than broadband or cable TV.

fn1. In my post, I suggested staged construction costs of $3 billion (still v. conservative) which gives a capital cost of $15/kL capacity and an annual capital charge of about $2/kl.

Responding to the critics, part 2

John Quiggin

Today’s Fin (subscription only) has a couple of letters responding to my review of Lomborg’s “Global Crises, Global Solutions
. One from Brent Howard takes the Copenhagen panel to task over their approach to discounting the future costs of global warming. I agree, and will maybe post more on this later. The other, from Rajat Sood, is odd. He doesn’t address the main review at all, focusing instead on my summary of The Sceptical Environmentalist. Sood denies my initial claim that Lomborg did not argue that the scientific evidence on global warming was wrong, focusing instead on the idea that it would be better to spend money on aid projects. (full letter over the fold) I expected the review to be attacked from various directions, but this one surprised me.

In response, I can’t do much better than quote Lomborg himself

Let us agree that human activity is changing our climate and that global warming will have serious, negative impacts. Nonetheless, all the information from the UN climate panel, the IPCC, tells us that it will not end civilisation … The end-of-civilisation argument is counterproductive to a serious public discourse on our actions. We do have a choice. We can make climate change our first priority, or choose to do other good first.

If we go ahead with Kyoto, the cost will be more than $150bn (£80bn) each year, yet the effect will first be in 2100, and will be only marginal. This should be compared with spending the $150bn each year on the most effective measures outlined in the Copenhagen Consensus, saving millions of lives. The UN estimates that for just half the cost of Kyoto we could give all third world inhabitants access to the basics like health, education and sanitation.

It’s true that Lomborg spends some time in his book discussing arguments that the threat of global warming may be overstated in scientific terms, but (wisely) he doesn’t rely on any of them.Here are a couple more sources, favourable and hostile, giving broadly similar summaries of Lomborg’s position.
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Follow-up on the tsunami appeal

John Quiggin2 Comments

I’ve now received confirmation from everyone who pledged money to the tsunami appeal with a total of $2455. As I mentioned, the generosity of the cosponsors meant that the appeal raised more than twice as much as I had planned to give myself, while using only half of the money I’d allocated. I gave the rest to the UNICEF Darfur appeal.I plan another appeal on similar lines when I think the time is appropriate.

In the meantime, if you’d like to help a needy (and excellent) blogger, Gary Farber would be a worthy recipient. The topic of prioritising aid is bound to come up, so I’ll address it briefly. Most of us, even the relatively generous, give so little of our incomes in charity that the real alternative is an item of personal consumption rather than an alternative charitable object. The same is true for national governments.

My sincere thanks again to everyone who helped with this and especially to those who dug deep into their pockets.