Resisting The Consensus: A Climate Change Thread

Burning wood is the worst thing you can do for carbon dioxide emissions

I have an opinion article in The Times today:

Never has an undercover video sting delighted its victims more. A Greenpeace investigation has caught some Tory MPs scheming to save the countryside from wind farms and cut ordinary people's energy bills while Lib Dems, Guardian writers and Greenpeace activists defend subsidies for fat-cat capitalists and rich landowners with their snouts in the wind-farm trough. Said Tories will be inundated with fan mail.

Yet, for all the furore wind power generates, the bald truth is that it is an irrelevance. Its contribution to cutting carbon dioxide emissions is at best a statistical asterisk. As Professor Gordon Hughes, of the University of Edinburgh, has shown, if wind ever does make a significant contribution to energy capacity its intermittent nature would require a wasteful "spinning" back-up of gas-fired power stations, so it would still make no difference to emissions or might make them worse.

And wind is not the worst of the renewables. By far the largest source of renewable energy is bio-energy (ie vegetable matter turned into solid, liquid or gaseous fuel), which is expanding fast and doing less than nothing to cut emissions. Even the big three green multinationals - Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF - have come out against biofuels.

Last year, despite a decade of subsidies and the desecration of quite a bit of countryside, 96.8 per cent of our total energy still came from fossil fuels and nuclear. The rest came from bio-energy (2.6 per cent), leaving a derisory 0.6 per cent from wind, hydro, solar, wave, tidal and geothermal put together. It is therefore a little-known fact that 77 per cent of Britain's renewable energy involves burning something. (All these figures for 2011 are from the Department of Energy).

And there is nothing carbon-saving about bio-energy. Take wood, a more carbon-rich fuel even than coal. As the environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York, has shown, when you burn wood more carbon dioxide is emitted than from coal for the same amount of energy.

Yet Britain is dashing to replace coal with wood. Many coal plants are being subsidised to switch to biomass. Drax in North Yorkshire, the country's largest power station, is switching partly from coal to biomass while Eggborough, in the same county, will convert fully to become Britain's leading renewable power plant.

By 2030, according to current plans, the UK will be burning five times the maximum timber harvest that Britain could conceivably produce. So most of it will be - and already is being - imported in the form of pellets, lumber, olive pips and peanut husks. Some will come from tropical rain forests, or will raise prices enough to encourage the felling of more rain forests.(Remember, it is fossil fuels we have to thank for reversing the great deforestation of these islands in the Middle Ages - Britain now has three times as much forest as in the 1800s.)

Although today's dash back to biomass is driven by European carbon-emissions reduction targets, not an ounce of carbon will be saved. Its champions argue that because trees grow in place of those chopped down, wood is almost carbon-neutral, whereas fossil fuels are not. But, as Professor Helmut Haberl, of the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, has pointed out, this makes no sense. Carbon is carbon. Land grows plants whether it is used for biofuel or not. Chopping down a tree to burn its wood oxidises the tree's carbon atoms decades before they would be released by decay. It could take 200 years to break even in carbon terms by planting new trees.

So it is a ludicrous myth that biomass cuts carbon emissions.

Of course, the biomass dash is excellent news for woodland owners (such as me) who are now incentivised to thin and fell woodlands at a faster rate in the hope of making, or more likely losing less, money on the management of woods. It is less good news for the coal industry, in which I also have an indirect interest. But it's the least fun for those of us who pay electricity bills, where the subsidy is artfully concealed.

The Renewable Heat Initiative, encouraging us to heat our homes at public expense with wood rather than gas, is even worse. Wood is much higher in carbon than gas, so if you switch from gas heating to wood you generate more CO2 emissions; not to mention depriving beetles of rotting logs and woodpeckers of beetles. Lorries will soon be delivering 25,000 tonnes of wood chips a year to Heathrow's Terminal 2. Compared with gas, this is madness in economic, ecological and traffic terms.

Growing crops to be turned into biofuel makes even less sense. For a start, the diesel and fertiliser come from fossil fuels, so some of the world's biofuel crops are not carbon neutral when harvested, let alone when burnt. Those that are, such as Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol, rely on cheap labour. But it's worse than that. Biofuels are displacing food crops, which raises prices and in turn encourages forest clearance to grow more crops. A Leicester University study found that such "indirect land use changes" might take 423 years to pay back the up-front carbon debt.

Copying Germany, Britain's farmers are now being enticed by subsidies to install anaerobic digesters. Contrary to popular myth these digest, not manure, but raw crops, mainly maize. Again this makes no sense.

Britain's dash for renewable energy is already costing its hard-pressed economy tens of billions of pounds a year - and rising. Yet it will not make a dent in carbon dioxide emissions, let alone enough to affect climate.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, huge cuts in carbon dioxide emissions are happening. America is now producing less CO2 than it did in the early 1990s, and 30 per cent less per head than it did in in 1973. It has done this while cutting rather than raising energy bills and generating revenues rather than consuming subsidies. The reason? Cheap gas replacing coal, thanks to fracking. If you are worried about carbon dioxide, why not choose a technology that works rather than one that doesn't?

Winckle wrote:Get a strawberry floating blog.

he House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology hears testimony on climate change in March 2011.[/ars_img]If you had the chance to ask questions of one of the world's leading climatologists, would you select a set of topics that would be at home in the heated discussions that take place in the Ars forums? If you watch the video below, you'd find that's precisely what Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) chose to do when Penn State's Richard Alley (a fellow Republican) was called before the House Science Committee, which has already had issues with its grasp of science. Rohrabacher took Alley on a tour of some of the least convincing arguments about climate change, all trying to convince him changes in the Sun were to blame for a changing climate. (Alley, for his part, noted that we have actually measured the Sun, and we've seen no such changes.)

Now, if he has his way, Rohrabacher will be chairing the committee once the next Congress is seated. Even if he doesn't get the job, the alternatives aren't much better.

There has been some good news for the Science Committee to come out of the last election. Representative Todd Akin (R-MO), whose lack of understanding of biology was made clear by his comments on "legitimate rape," had to give up his seat to run for the Senate, a race he lost. Meanwhile, Paul Broun (R-GA), who said that evolution and cosmology are "lies straight from the pit of Hell," won reelection, but he received a bit of a warning in the process: dead English naturalist Charles Darwin, who is ineligible to serve in Congress, managed to draw thousands of write-in votes. And, thanks to limits on chairmanships, Ralph Hall (R-TX), who accused climate scientists of being in it for the money (if so, they're doing it wrong), will have to step down.

Many governments have set a goal for limiting climate change: two degrees by the end of the century, and no more. However, most projections show we're lagging badly. Unless we accelerate a transition to renewables and nuclear, we're going to shoot right past that 2°C limit. But even as the hand-wringing about missed targets and bad trajectories has increased, it's been relatively rare to see a detailed analysis of the potential consequence. The World Bank has now stepped into that breach.

In a report released today, the World Bank analyzed the consequences of allowing temperatures to reach 4°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Even the well understood problems—up to a meter of sea level rise, winter months that are warmer than our current summers—sound pretty ugly. The report also notes the possibility of tipping points and synergies make some of the impacts much harder to predict.

The report itself is a collaboration between the Bank's Global Expert Team for Climate Change Adaptation and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics. In addition to taking a different perspective on the problem of climate change, the report comes at a valuable time. It's been five years since the release of the fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the fifth isn't due until late next year.

So, what are the chances of adding an extra 4°C by the end of the century? The report estimates that, even if all countries are able to meet their current emissions pledges, there's still a 20 percent chance we'll hit 4°C by the end of the century. The longer we wait to meet those pledges, the harder it will be in part because it means we've already built fossil fuel infrastructure that has a life span of decades.

What does a world that much warmer look like? To give a sense of how hard it is to imagine, the report notes some points in the last glacial period were only 4.5°colder than present temperatures—and there were ice sheets covering a lot of the Northern Hemisphere. We've already hit levels of CO2 in the atmosphere that haven't been seen in over 15 million years. To reach 4°C, they'd have to roughly double again. And these changes would take place at a pace that probably has few geological precedents.

So, even the report's authors admit that predications are a challenge. Still, they do their best to try to paint a picture, and boy, is it grim.

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
FACT: The HadCRUT3 surface temperature index shows warming to 1878, cooling to 1911, warming to 1941, cooling to 1964, warming to 1998 and cooling through 2011. The warming rate from 1964 to 1998 was the same as the previous warming from 1911 to 1941. Satellites, weather balloons and ground stations all show cooling since 2001. The mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8 C over the 20th century is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects"). Two science teams have shown that correcting the surface temperature record for the effects of urban development would reduce the warming trend over land from 1980 by half. There has been no catastrophic warming recorded.

MYTH 2: The "hockey stick" graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature decrease for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.
FACT: Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the "average global temperature" has been rising at the low steady rate mentioned above; although from 1940 – 1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare. The "hockey stick", a poster boy of both the UN's IPCC and Canada's Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It is a computer construct and a faulty one at that.

MYTH 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.
FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased. The RATE of growth during this period has also increased from about 0.2% per year to the present rate of about 0.4% per year,which growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years. However, there is no proof that CO2 is the main driver of global warming. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth's oceans expel more CO2 as a result.

MYTH 4: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.
FACT: Greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume. They consist of varying amounts, (about 97%) of water vapour and clouds, with the remainder being gases like CO2, CH4, Ozone and N2O, of which carbon dioxide is the largest amount. Hence, CO2 constitutes about 0.039% of the atmosphere. While the minor gases are more effective as "greenhouse agents" than water vapour and clouds, the latter are overwhelming the effect by their sheer volume and – in the end – are thought to be responsible for 75% of the "Greenhouse effect". (See here) At current concentrations, a 3% change of water vapour in the atmosphere would have the same effect as a 100% change in CO2. Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention these important facts.

MYTH 5: Computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming.
FACT: The computer models assume that CO2 is the primary climate driver, and that the Sun has an insignificant effect on climate. You cannot use the output of a model to verify or prove its initial assumption - that is circular reasoning and is illogical. Computer models can be made to roughly match the 20th century temperature rise by adjusting many input parameters and using strong positive feedbacks. They do not "prove" anything. Also, computer models predicting global warming are incapable of properly including the effects of the sun, cosmic rays and the clouds. The sun is a major cause of temperature variation on the earth surface as its received radiation changes all the time, This happens largely in cyclical fashion. The number and the lengths in time of sunspots can be correlated very closely with average temperatures on earth, e.g. the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. Varying intensity of solar heat radiation affects the surface temperature of the oceans and the currents. Warmer ocean water expels gases, some of which are CO2. Solar radiation interferes with the cosmic ray flux, thus influencing the amount ionized nuclei which control cloud cover.

MYTH 6: The UN proved that man–made CO2 causes global warming.
FACT: In a 1996 report by the UN on global warming, two statements were deleted from the final draft. Here they are:
1) “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases.”
2) “No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to man–made causes”
To the present day there is still no scientific proof that man-made CO2 causes significant global warming.

MYTH 7: CO2 is a pollutant.
FACT: This is absolutely not true. Nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere. We could not live in 100% nitrogen either. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is. CO2 is essential to life on earth. It is necessary for plant growth since increased CO2 intake as a result of increased atmospheric concentration causes many trees and other plants to grow more vigorously. Unfortunately, the Canadian Government has included CO2 with a number of truly toxic and noxious substances listed by the Environmental Protection Act, only as their means to politically control it.

MYTH 8: Global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes.
FACT: There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that supports such claims on a global scale. Regional variations may occur. Growing insurance and infrastructure repair costs, particularly in coastal areas, are sometimes claimed to be the result of increasing frequency and severity of storms, whereas in reality they are a function of increasing population density, escalating development value, and ever more media reporting.

MYTH 9: Receding glaciers and the calving of ice shelves are proof of global warming.
FACT: Glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for hundreds of years. Recent glacier melting is a consequence of coming out of the very cool period of the Little Ice Age. Ice shelves have been breaking off for centuries. Scientists know of at least 33 periods of glaciers growing and then retreating. It’s normal. Besides, glacier's health is dependent as much on precipitation as on temperature.

MYTH 10: The earth’s poles are warming; polar ice caps are breaking up and melting and the sea level rising.
FACT: The earth is variable. The western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer, due to cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean, but the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder. The small Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica is getting warmer, while the main Antarctic continent is actually cooling. Ice thicknesses are increasing both on Greenland and in Antarctica. Sea level monitoring in the Pacific (Tuvalu) and Indian Oceans (Maldives) has shown no sign of any sea level rise.

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT GRCADE

MYTH 1: It's a place to put your own blog full of nothing but other peoples articles.
FACT: GRcade is an internet forum, along the lines of many which have existed in the past. These are used for discussion, usually between people who have some sort of common interest. Sadly, recent surveys have shown that this thread consists of one person who seems to revel in the lack of any repercussions towards spamming the topic and ignoring the possibility of debate, preferring to continue cherry-picking minimal sections of posts to reply to flippantly.

Slartibartfast wrote:Winner of the ICE papers competition is about thorium nuclear power.... 2030 they reckon will be the earliest the first station is operating (the paper is free to view).