Satellites Confirm Half-Century of West Antarctic Warming

The Antarctic Peninsula juts into the Southern Ocean, reaching farther north than any other part of the continent. The southernmost reach of global warming was believed to be limited to this narrow strip of land, while the rest of the continent was presumed to be cooling or stable.

Not so, according to a new analysis involving NASA data. In fact, the study has confirmed a trend suspected by some climate scientists.

“Everyone knows it has been warming on the Antarctic Peninsula, where there are lots of weather stations collecting data,” said Eric Steig, a climate researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, and lead author of the study. “Our analysis told us that it is also warming in West Antarctica.”

Figure at right: Red represents areas where temperatures have increased the most during the last 50 years, particularly in West Antarctica, while dark blue represents areas with a lesser degree of warming. Temperature changes are measured in degrees Celsius. Credit: NASA/GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio > Print resolution image

The finding is the result of a novel combination of historical temperature data from ground-based weather stations and more recent data from satellites. Steig and colleagues used data from each record to fill in gaps in the other and to reconstruct a 50-year history of surface temperatures across Antarctica.

Over the years, climate research in northern latitudes led researchers to believe that the Arctic is where impacts of global climate change would be seen first. Less certain is how climate is affecting Antarctica where inland temperatures are known to plunge to -112°F, and ground-based weather stations have been sparse.

It’s this sparse data collection — from ground-stations on the Antarctic Peninsula and previous reports that much of East Antarctica has experienced cooling since 1978 — that led the International Panel on Climate Change to conclude in its most recent report that Antarctica is the one continent where we have failed to detect human-caused temperature changes.

With funding from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, Steig and colleagues set out to reconstruct Antarctica’s recent past. Ground-based stations have recorded temperatures since 1957, but most of those readings come from the peninsula and areas on the edges of the continent. But at the same time, scientists such as study co-author Joey Comiso of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have been gathering measurements from a series of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instruments deployed on satellites since 1981.

To construct the new 50-year temperature record, the team applied a statistical technique to estimate temperatures missing from ground-based observations. They calculated the relationship between overlapping satellite and ground-station measurements over the past 26 years. Next, they applied that correlation to ground measurements from 1957 to 1981 and calculated what the satellites would have observed.

The new analysis shows that Antarctic surface temperatures increased an average of 0.22°F (0.12°C) per decade between 1957 and 2006. That’s a rise of more than 1°F (0.5°C) in the last half century. West Antarctica warmed at a higher rate, rising 0.31°F (0.17°C) per decade. The results, published Jan. 22 in Nature, confirm earlier findings based on limited weather station data and ice cores.

While some areas of East Antarctica have been cooling in recent decades, the longer 50-year trend depicts that, on average, temperatures are rising across the continent.

Figure at right:The northern section of the Larsen B ice shelf, a large floating ice mass on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, shattered and separated from the continent on March 5, 2002, and represents a major impact that climate warming can have on the region. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

West Antarctica is particularly vulnerable to climate changes because its ice sheet is grounded below sea level and surrounded by floating ice shelves. If the West Antarctic ice sheet completely melted, global sea level would rise by 16 to 20 feet (5 to 6 meters).

To identify causes of the warming, the team turned to Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who has used computer models to identify mechanisms driving Antarctica’s enigmatic temperature trends.

Previously, researchers focused on Antarctic ozone depletion, which influences large-scale atmospheric fluctuations around the continent — most notably, the Southern Annular Mode, which speeds up wind flow to isolate and cool the continent.

Shindell compared Steig’s temperature data with results from a computer model that can simulate the response of the atmospheric system to changes in land surface, ice cover, sea surface temperatures, and atmospheric composition. He found the ozone-influenced Southern Annular Mode is not necessarily the primary influence on Antarctic climate. Instead, it appears that smaller-scale, regional changes in wind circulation are bringing warmer air and more moisture-laden storms to West Antarctica.

“We still believe ozone depletion can increase wind speeds around Antarctica, further isolating the interior,” Shindell said. “But it’s clear now that it’s not such a dominant influence on temperature trends.”

Reference

Steig, E.J., D.P. Schneider, S.D. Rutherford, M.E. Mann, J.C. Comiso, and D.T. Shindell, 2009: Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year. Nature, 457, 459-462, doi:10.1038/nature07669.

Ranking geo-engineering options for mitigating climate change impacts

Fig 1. Comparisons of aspects of five geo-engineering proposals

I recently came upon this interesting mini-review in Nature Geoscience which looked at the cost-effectiveness of different geo-engineering options for mitigating climate change impacts (for an earlier discussion on BNC, see here). The paper is entitled “Ranking geo-engineering schemes“, by New Zealander Philip Boyd. A full-text PDF version of the article is available here for download. Here is the abstract, and a few snippets:

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Geo-engineering proposals for mitigating climate change continue to proliferate without being tested. It is time to select and assess the most promising ideas according to efficacy, cost, all aspects of risk and, importantly, their rate of mitigation. …        Appraising the relative merits of geo-engineering designs for a purposeful perturbation of the Earth system is essential: funds to investigate such proposals in detail are limited, and not all schemes can be put in place if we are to monitor the Earth system’s response to each scheme with any confidence. …        This possibility of unwanted side-effects must be factored into the cost of schemes (Fig. 1). In addition, unintended changes in the Earth system could, to an unknown degree, cancel out the mitigation of climate change driven by geo-engineering, causing a reduction in the estimated efficacy of a scheme and an increase in its cost. …        Up to now, the relative merits of various geo-engineering schemes have mainly been discussed in the context of risk and cost, with a few reports on individual schemes also looking at efficacy. But restricting an evaluation to these three factors is of limited value. Two disparate recent studies, one using climate modelling to explore the implications of delaying climate mitigation, the other on designing a global response plan to confront climate change, suggest that relief from climate warming will be needed very soon. The timescale to advance each scheme from development to implementation to verification and hence mitigation is therefore of primary importance. If geo-engineering is to have a role in stabilizing our climate, we must apply metrics that incorporate efficacy, cost, risk and time in order to rank where future research effort is best focused. …        Funding research into only a few promising schemes, according to such metrics, may lead to one or two relatively reliable mitigation options that can be placed in a ‘climate-change toolbox’. In the near future, we must decide the relative importance of time, cost, risk and efficacy in tackling climate change if it is decided to press ahead with a geo-engineering approach. Of course, it could transpire after such an analysis that climate mitigation strategies with a very low risk but apparently higher costs, such as direct carbon capture and storage, are the best approach. As the costs of inaction and of delaying the mitigation of climate change are rising, an initial high investment — matched with a very low risk — may seem more and more reasonable.

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Options considered by Boyd in his trade-off analysis include carbon burial (long-term physical storage of atmospheric CO2, under pressure, below the Earth or within the deep ocean), geochemical carbon capture (dissolving CO2 in bicarbonate ions in seawater or in solid form such as limestone), atmospheric carbon capture (wind scrubbers using chemical absorbents – artificial trees), ocean fertilisation (enriching surface waters with iron or other nutrients to promote phytoplankton growth, with the hope that the extra carbon captured via photosynthesis would then mix with the deep ocean), stratospheric aerosols (injection of sulphur particles into the stratosphere to reflect incoming sunlight to space, simulating the volcano effect), cloud whitening (spraying seawater droplets skywards to simulate the ship contrail effect), and sunshades in space (rocketing off a huge number of mirrors into space to intercept sunlight at the Lagrange point [see below for discussion of the probable impact of this]).

Mongabay has also written an overview here, and The Oyster’s Garter here.

Overall, I judge the paper to represent an interesting and logical thought experiment — acknowledging that the situation we now face, with so much warming in the pipeline, is already sufficient bad to require hard-nosed evaluation of planetary scale ‘triage’ to reduce the ‘fever’. Otherwise, we may never get back important features of the Earth system such as Arctic sea ice, nor stave off the extinction of many species already under stress from human impacts for which climate change becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Needless to say, no one would credibly argue that geo-engineering is a replacement for mitigation of carbon emissions. A business-as-usual scenario of coal burning, taking atmospheric CO2 to 750 to >1000 ppm (directly or via carbon-cycle feedbacks), will force the climate system so far out of whack that no ‘patch up job’ will be sufficient. No, the context under which geo-engineering might need to be considered is if a measured analysis shows that even with major emissions reductions, the  impacts of committed warming will be so bad as to warrant using additional ‘terraforming’ of planet Earth. Are we at that point already? Dunno. But let’s have that risk assessment and necessary R&D done, just in case.

Finally, a biologically related question. Can ‘geo-engineering’ protect ecosystems and humanity from climate change impacts, should global warming start to run out of control?

Well, not really, at least according to another paper by Lunt and co-authors (get the pre-print full text here) entitled ” ‘Sunshade World’: A fully coupled GCM evaluation of the climatic impacts of geoengineering“. In a fascinating application of a Global Climate Model (HadCM3L), these authors take a hard look at the impacts of the sunshades-in-space idea described briefly above. That is, the (expensive and logistically challenging) option of installing a few trillion 1m diameter reflective mirrors between the Earth and the Sun, to reduce incoming solar radiation by 2-5%. Costs and logistics aside, would this mitigate climate change impacts?

The answer is complex, but the upshot is that such a geo-engineering solution-of-last-resort would seem to create as many problems as it solves. The tropics would cool, which might spare rain forest biomes or cause them to revert to savanna, but polar amplification of the warming is predicted to continue, leading to the elimination of Arctic sea ice and the probable continued destabilisation of land-based polar ice sheets.

This solution could avoid major heat waves that threaten coral reef systems with bleaching. The global hydrological cycle would likely become less intense, with the atmosphere being drier overall. However, ocean acidification due to high CO2 would be unaffected by this geo-engineering, and this impact alone is likely to be catastrophic for species such as corals, forams and pteropods that secrete a calcite or aragonite skeleton, potentially disrupting entire strands of the marine food web.

Interestingly, the authors speculate that the sort of conditions implied by this scenario (lower total solar irradiance and high atmospheric CO2 concentration) would have the side effect of re-creating a world similar to the Cambrian period, 500 million years ago – the dawn of the Phanerozoic, when visible life first became abundant.

Prescription for the Planet – Part II. Newclear energy and boron-powered vehicles

Put all energy cards on the table to fix climate change fully

Newclear energy and boron-powered vehicles Put all energy cards on the table to fix climate change fully Posted by Barry Brook on 16 January 2009 I know I’ve been pushing the energy supply bandwagon a lot recently, with relative little attention to climate science issues (and even less to the ‘pseudo-sceptics’!). I guess that in some ways reflects the ebb and flow of my perceived priorities, what I happen to be reading, and what I consider particularly urgent or crucial to communicate at the time. Anyway, as a heads up, I’ve got some interesting things (at least I think!) to say about climate sensitivity (’it’s nailed’), warming in the pipeline (lots), changes in species distributions (new modelling — a selfish promotion of my own research) and geoengineering (ranking options), among other things, which I plan to cover here on the blog in the coming weeks. But for now, bear with me for a bit more on energy policy, as I feel my thinking on this issue is sharpening and I’d like to continue to bounce ideas off you guys. This week I wrote an Op Ed for the relatively new opinions website set up by ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation — Oz’s national TV/Radio broadcaster). It’s called ‘Unleashed‘, and attracts a diverse audience, to say the least (that can be good and bad…). My article’s about the energy solutions required to ‘fix’ the climate crisis fully, and of course discusses renewables, energy efficiency and nuclear energy. Even before reading through the 170 or so comments this generated, I could see the need to write a follow-up piece in the coming weeks for the ABC site which explains the ‘newclear option’ in more detail. But before I did that, I had to set the scene/mindset about the fundamental requirement — solutions that fix the climate+energy bugbears completely, not half-measures that only delay the worst problems but end up solving nothing (I absolutely knew by doing this [ignoring the details of nuclear power] that I was risking a whole bunch of ill-informed feedback!). So here’s my first effort at broaching the nuclear issue to a different audience. Oh, and now I’m formally ‘outed’ as a nukie! So much the better. Judge for yourself whether my first piece would have convinced any ‘antis’ to look again at nuclear being ‘one of the cards on the energy table that makes up the royal flush’. ———————————————————- Nuclear power: a real solution (ABC Unleashed, 16 Jan 2009) The climate changes because it is forced to do so. That may sound a little strange, but ‘forcing’ is a real technical term for any pressure that causes the ‘average weather’ to shift. Positive forcings (e.g. increased solar activity, more greenhouse gases) induce global warming, whereas negative forcings (e.g. more low-level clouds, volcanic dimming) result in cooling. Climate system feedbacks (e.g. melting ice, more water vapour) act to enhance these processes. That’s the way it’s always been, throughout Earth’s long history. When the planet is thrown out of energy balance by a change in forcing, it must respond, by warming or cooling. It can’t be bargained with and it has no room to compromise. It will do what it must do. It’s the laws of physics. So there’s no point in half-fixing climate change. If this is our strategy, whether implicit or explicit, people may as well enjoy the Platinum Age (as Ross Garnaut calls the last few decades) and be done. Cap-and-trade systems to reduce emissions by some percentage are a good example of an ultimately useless ‘half-fix’ policy. Due to the long lifetime of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere (about 20 per cent of CO2 released today will still be airborne in 1000 years), it is only the total amount of CO2 released by humanity during the fossil-fuel age that really matters. We must limit total emissions. In order to stop forcing the climate system towards further warming – to avoid the worst predicted impacts of climate change – we therefore have to stop using coal, oil and gas. We cannot afford to burn all of the available reserves of these, and other carbon sources, such as tar sands and oil shales. But modern society needs energy. Lots of it. Although there is plenty of scope for more efficient use of energy in developed nations, the developing world is desperately striving for energy growth. The obvious source of energy for these emerging economies is the same source used by the developing world to build its wealth and prosperity. Wishing this weren’t so won’t make that fact go away. But if neither the developed or developing worlds can risk using coal, oil and gas, where does this energy come from? Renewable energy, for instance solar, wind and wave power, is clean, and there are huge amounts of it available. But it is diffuse – vast areas of land or coastline must be harnessed to use it on a significant scale – and it is mostly intermittent, so a distributed grid with plenty of storage and backup is essential. Scaling up renewables to be a viable replacement power source on a planetary scale is an incredible logistical challenge, and quite possibly not ever achievable. This above should not be taken to imply that I do not support expansion of renewable energy and widespread adoption of energy efficiency measures. In some places there are wonderful opportunities for these. For instance, Australia could cut its greenhouse emissions by around 30 per cent, at no net cost, due to the payback from lower power bills thanks to more sensible use of energy. Further, Australia has a wealth of renewable energy options at its disposal (huge deserts that are perfect for solar thermal power, long stretches of windy coastline for large turbines, and a large endowment of deep hot dry rocks that have the potential to supply baseload geothermal energy). Sadly, that isn’t the case everywhere. Some nations with large populations have few renewable energy sources available to them. And even for Australia, it will almost certainly be too difficult and costly to run our entire energy economy using renewable power, without sufficient non-coal backup. Nuclear energy may well be that backup, or indeed a mainstay for future energy generation. For instance, there is a technology developed at the Argonne National Laboratory USA called integral fast reactor nuclear power, which burns up 99 per cent of the nuclear fuel, leaves no long-lived waste, is passively safe (’meltdowns’ are exceedingly unlikely) and does not generate weapons-grade material (see Integral Fast Reactor [IFR] nuclear power – Q and A, for more details). It’s been researched for over 10 years and is ready for demonstration. It warrants further attention. One risks ire from many sides when discussing nuclear energy as a climate solution. Those climate sceptics with a vested interest in the fossil fuel forever status quo will say there is no climate or energy supply problem to fix, so why bother? Hardened environmentalists will tell you that nuclear in any form is unsafe, polluting, risks weapons proliferation, and is unnecessary given renewable power sources (even when briefed about how integral fast reactors solve all of these concerns). No matter. It is vitally important that everyone else, and that’s most people, understand the real issues. So my basic point is this. Do you wish to fully solve the climate crisis? Or alternatively, do you want a secure energy supply that is not dependent on foreign oil and other dwindling, polluting sources? If you are merely satisfied with half-fixing these problems, then sure, hold your ideological ground. But if you’re honest about seeking real solutions, it’s time to lay out all of the future-of-energy cards on the table, for open and rational discussion. Nuclear may well be the ace in the deck, or it may be the card that makes up the royal flush. Either way, don’t throw it on the discard pile.

Prescription for the Planet – Part II – Newclear energy and boron-powered vehicles

In Part I of this review, I talked through some of the logistical and ideological challenges facing society in trying to solve the climate and energy supply crises. All pretty grim. But with Part II of my review of the book Prescription for the Planet, by Tom Blees, we’re already through the nadir of depression and apparent helplessness, and on to the optimistic upslope.

The experimental sodium-cooled EBR-II nuclear reactor, which operated at Idaho National Laboratory for three decades (1964 to 1994).

This post, part II of VI, is concerned with chapters 4 and 5:

- Chapter 4: Newclear Power (pg 117-139)

- Chapter 5: The Fifth Element (pg 141-154)

The play-on-words title of chapter 4 pretty much sums it up. It’s a hand-holding walkthrough of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) nuclear power technology that I’ve already discussed on BraveNewClimate in two earlier posts. Blees reckons this is the new, clear choice for future power generation. First there’s some history — a description of the highly successful Argonne National Research Laboratory EBR-II reactor programme which spawned the IFR project (see diagram). Then there’s an excellent primer on basic nuclear physics for the uninitiated, which does a great job at describing how fission reactors work and the difference between thermal light water reactors (almost all present-day nuclear reactors are of this type) and fast-spectrum reactors (like IFR — though Blees tends to use the term fast breeder reactors, I tend to prefer the IPCC AR4 Working Group III terminology, because if avoids those negative historical connotations many people associate with plutonium breeders for weapons).

Importantly I think, considerable space is devoted to explaining the difference between the proliferation-resistant elecrochemical pyrometallurgical processing and recycling, compared to the proliferation-promoting PUREX (Plutonium and Uranium Recovery by EXtraction). This is a key point, because from my wider reading, I’ve concluded that weapons proliferation risk remains one of the greatest hurdle to overcome in convincing most ‘anties’ (Blees’ shorthand for anti-nuclear types) that a large-scale uptake of IFR will not heighten the risk of a catastrophic nuclear exchange or a terrorist attack using nukes.

P131 has a schematic diagram of a ‘pool design’ for a Liquid Metal cooled Fast Breeder reactor (LMFBR), like that deployed in the EBR-II. It’s stunning in its elegance and relative simplicity. The design is also ‘passively safe’, in that the inherent physical characteristics of the metal fuel pins means that should they overheat (due, for instance, to a loss of coolant flow or heat sink), they expand, and in doing so decrease their density to the point where the fission reaction simply shuts itself down. No critical  dependence on getting those graphite control rods down in time!

Incidentally, other Gen III+ advanced reactors designs also use ‘walk away’ safety measures, such as having valves holding back emergency cooling water that are held shut by the power system (so if the power goes off for any reason , the valves automatically open and shut down the reaction). But the neat thing with IFR is that it’s the fuel that does the job — although a variety of other safety features are also inherent in the IFR design. Conclusion? The chance of one of these reactors melting down, Chernobyl-style, is virtually zero (something like one in a couple of hundred million per year). I could go on here, but really, it’s better to leave it to Blees — go read Chapter 4 if you want to know more about IFR!

Now if you thought the chapter 4 material was ambitious, then chapter 5 is no let down either. In brief, it’s a proposal by Blees to replace our liquid fuel dependence — mostly related to our vehicle fleet of cars, buses, trucks etc. — with an alternative, completely recyclable energy carrier. And no, it’s not hydrogen. It’s a pure form of the semi-metal, boron — element number 5 on the periodic table (now you know where the chapter title comes from). We’re into more speculative territory here, because most of the ideas upon which Blees bases his transport fuel vision is theoretical, but it has a solid physical grounding.

For instance, it has certainly been shown that metals can ‘burn’, and that they store an incredible amount of energy per unit volume. Boron, for instance, weight for weight, stores around 6 times the energy of petrol (gasoline for the Yanks). It’s just that the fuel tank gets heavier, not lighter, as you burn it, because the combustion products accumulate as an oxide rather than being released as an exhaust gas — so it about equalises with petrol in terms of overall efficiency. To get boron to burn, you need to ignite it in pure oxygen — an idea attributed to a regular commenter at BNC, Graham Cowan — perhaps he can add some further details in the comments section. To reverse the oxidisation, you need to supply energy. Electrical energy will do — derived, for instance from… yep, that’s right, IFR power stations. It’s hard to to this chapter justice in a brief overview — you need to read it yourself to appreciate the thought Blees has put into this nascent yet ultimately very attractive idea. But for another perspective, here’s Jim Hansen’s take on it from his Trip Report (if you recall, I cited his description of IFR prospects in an earlier posting).

Boron-Powered Cars and Greenwash (Jim Hansen’s notes)

Blees properly ridicules FutureGen, commonly dubbed NeverGen, as a greenwash construction of the coal industry, intended to make it look like they were working on cleaning up their horrendous environmental damage.

Blees suggests that hydrogen-powered cars are a greenwash of the oil and auto industries, while they continue to stick us with gas-guzzlers. That charge may be too strong, but it seems fair to say that they have not been looking at alternative vehicles as hard as they should have been. Also I need to point out a possible personal bias: I have been driving a hydrogen-powered car over the past two weeks [a BMW executive recognized me on an airplane and offered a free trial – for the first time I can look my Mercedes-driving lawyer friends on the level, even though it was just a trial – don’t get excited, the hydrogen cars are not for sale, would be very expensive if they were, and there was only one place, in Jersey City boondocks, where I could fill it up].

Blees thinks that there is a superior alternative to hydrogen. Here is the basis of the idea. If a metal is ground into fine enough dust, nanoparticles, it will burn. We could burn iron-dust in our cars, capture the rust-dust, take the rust home, and cook it to drive the oxygen off, thus recovering our initial iron dust, which we then could use to power our car on its next trip. We supply energy at the time of cooking. Iron is just the energy carrier.

So iron dust is an alternative to hydrogen as an energy carrier to power our post-fossil-fuel cars. Iron dust (unlike hydrogen) has the advantage of being non-explosive, but (among other things) it is heavy and gets heavier as rust. Enter a better idea: boron. It is much more energy dense than iron: it takes a quart of boron to match the energy in a gallon of gasoline. A tank (box) of boron would cost a few hundred dollars, but you only need to buy one tankful, when you buy your car. After that you just take the boron oxide to a store, a Seven-Eleven would be happy to serve, and trade it in for a box of boron (anyone can handle this material). Blees figures that processing boron oxide back to boron would cost only tens of cents. Even if he is too optimistic (or if Exxon/Mobil sees to it that he is put 6-foot under – they are not likely to appreciate competition from Seven-Eleven), it should be much cheaper than gasoline. If the processing from B2O3 back to B is done with carbon-free electricity, it takes care of the carbon emissions problem. Blees, as you might guess, envisages the energy coming from IFR nuclear plants.

O.K., let’s go back a step. It is widely agreed that electric cars can be a solution for a piece of vehicular needs, and plug-in hybrid-electrics are a partial solution for the remaining piece. We should start with those technologies because they are ready to go, and batteries will improve, even though it has been slow going. But we must have something other than gasoline for complementing the electric part. Hydrogen, used in a fuel cell as opposed to being burned in an internal combustion engine, has the great advantage of emitting only water vapor as an exhaust product. Hydrogen could be produced at remote sites where renewable energy, such as wind or solar, is plentiful (or by IFR). But it has technological challenges, as described well in Science a few years ago, and more so in Joe Romm’s book, The Hype About Hydrogen.

Automakers have been working hard on hydrogen for several years. Some of the technological problems must have been solved. All I can say is that the hydrogen-BMW drove great, better than any car I have ever owned, with enough getty-up for even a Texas cowboy (I am not a Texas cowboy). The car also had a gasoline tank, to avoid stranding with no hydrogen, and at push of a button switched seamlessly between hydrogen and gas.

In dismissing hydrogen Blees relies in part on a note by Tromp et al. (Science, 2003) suggesting that hydrogen leakage might threaten the stratospheric ozone layer. But Michael Prather (Science 302, 581, 2003) looked harder and found that it is unlikely to be a problem with realistic hydrogen leakage rates. There are greater challenges for hydrogen, though.

Getting the price of hydrogen vehicles down to a reasonable level is a big challenge and there would need to be a distribution system analogous to gas stations, perhaps replacing them. Boron must have challenges too, but maybe less. Blees says the boron must burn in pure oxygen, which requires miniaturization of an oxygen supply system for the car. I wonder if collecting the boron oxide and converting it back to pure boron is as simple as claimed? Also, the product of hydrogen (in a fuel cell) is water vapor, which we do not have to worry about. That is the big draw of hydrogen: zero pollution. I wonder if we can burn boron without tailpipe pollution?

Bottom line: Blees has stimulating, revolutionary vision. The jury is still out on hydrogen vs boron vs something else. But I am confident that there are better alternatives than fossil fuels. It is time to start working much harder on such alternatives.

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Part III will look at chapters 6 and 7, covering everything from nuclear batteries to gasified garbage!

Latest info from NASA’s Dr. Anthony Del Genio

Separating Natural from Anthropogenic Influences in Twentieth Century Climate Data Records

Determining the human contribution to observed variations in Earth’s climate is made more difficult by the fact that the climate system also varies naturally, due to interactions of different parts of the atmosphere with each other and with the underlying oceans. These natural variations exist on time scales of several years to decades. The shorter the time span of the data record, the more difficult it is to separate systematic changes due to human activities such as greenhouse gas emissions and the production of aerosol particles from natural variations.

60S - 60N Surface Temperature Time Series

Figure 1. Changes in global surface temperature between 1900 and 2003 associated with the long-term global warming trend in two different datasets, GISTEMP and ERSST. The orange curve shows the temperature change in the GISTEMP data with all effects included. The blue dash-dot curve shows the contribution of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to the observed temperature fluctuations. The brown triangles show the temperature variations when the ENSO effect is subtracted from the original data. The red squares show the portion of the remaining variation that is associated with the long-term global warming trend in the GISTEMP data, and the green circles show the corresponding long-term global warming trend in the ERSST data. (Click for large GIF or PDF of figure.)

Some natural climate fluctuations like the seasonal cycle are simple to account for, since they occur on a well-known, fixed time scale. Other important natural climate influences like El Niño, the recurring warming of ocean waters in the tropical east-central Pacific Ocean, are more difficult to extract from climate datasets for two reasons. The warming does not occur at fixed time intervals, but ranges from 2-4 years. Furthermore, it can take 3-6 months for the effects in the east-central Pacific to be felt elsewhere around the globe, depending on how the circulation of the atmosphere communicates these effects to remote locations.

Scientists at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and at the GSFC Global Modeling and Assimilation Office developed a technique to account for both the immediate effect of El Niño at its tropical Pacific source location, and its delayed effect elsewhere in the world. Once the El Niño contribution to climate variations is defined, it can be removed from a long-term climate data record, allowing longer-term climate variations to be documented. Even after this is done, some longer term natural variations remain, most notably a phenomenon called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) that causes irregular shifts in the climate roughly every few decades. Fortunately, the spatial pattern of climate shifts due to the PDO is different from that associated with systematic human influences, and objective mathematical techniques can be used to separate them. The scientists applied this procedure to several 20th century surface temperature datasets, and also to late 20th century “reanalyses” that combine surface and satellite data with a numerical weather prediction model to produce a best estimate of variations in atmospheric temperatures and winds.

Figure 2.Spatial patterns of the long-term global warming contribution to the observed temperature trends in the GISTEMP (upper panel) and ERSST (lower panel) datasets. Orange and red colors represent warming and blue colors represent cooling over the period 1900-2003. (Click for large GIF or PDF of figure.)

The analysis shows that the leading contributor to variations in surface temperature over the 20th century is a largely systematic upward trend in most locations that appears to be consistent with estimates of the effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. A few locations over land exhibit weak cooling over this time, perhaps a signature of the effects of increasing aerosol particles due to combustion and biomass burning, or a result of changes in land use. The most notable new result is the finding that the tropical Pacific has warmed significantly more slowly (and maybe not at all near the equator) than the rest of the world over this time, a feature that is not captured by most climate models simulations of 20th century climate changes. This slower warming of the tropical Pacific induces changes in the atmospheric circulation that can be seen in the reanalyses, but two different reanalysis products that incorporate different amounts of satellite data in different ways produce conflicting estimates of the change in circulation.

Aside from the long-term upward trend, the analysis captures the decadal natural fluctuations due to the PDO. A new finding that emerges from this analysis is that in addition to a well-known natural climate shift in 1976, another natural climate shift in the opposite direction apparently occurred in the mid-1990s. This latter climate shift makes it especially difficult to interpret trends seen in satellite or surface datasets that are only a decade or two in length, since an apparent upward trend in something like temperature may be partly anthropogenic and partly natural over a time period in which only one natural climate shift occurred.

Figure 3. Upper panel: Changes in global surface temperature over the period 1900-2003 associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) in the GISTEMP and ERSST datasets. Middle and lower panel: Spatial patterns of surface temperature change due to the PDO in both datasets. Orange and red colors represent warming and blue colors represent cooling. (Click for large GIF or PDF of figure.)

Fortunately, by combining information about the spatial patterns of the anthropogenic and natural climate variations, it is possible to draw some conclusions. For example, an upward trend in ocean heat content from 1993-2003 has been interpreted by previous workers as a sign of anthropogenic influences that create an imbalance between the sunlight absorbed by the Earth and the heat it emits to space. At first glance the PDO shift in the mid-1990s might call such an interpretation into question. However, the spatial pattern of the PDO includes warming in some places and cooling in others; in fact, changes consistent with the PDO can be seen in the geographic pattern of observed ocean heat content changes. But in the global mean these warming and cooling changes nearly offset each other, so the overall upward trend in observed ocean heat content can only be explained by anthropogenic effects, which exhibit warming almost everywhere. On the other hand, satellite-observed changes in absorbed sunlight and emitted heat in the tropics over the period 1985-2000, which appear to have caused a strengthening of the tropical atmospheric circulation, could in principle be either anthropogenic or natural in origin.

By examining the spatial pattern of both types of climate variation, the scientists found that the anthropogenic global warming signal was relatively spatially uniform over the tropical oceans and thus would not have a large effect on the atmospheric circulation, whereas the PDO shift in the 1990s consisted of warming in the tropical west Pacific and cooling in the subtropical and east tropical Pacific, which would enhance the existing sea surface temperature difference and thus intensify the circulation. Thus, it can be concluded that the observed 15-year trend in radiative imbalance of the tropics is probably a signature of natural rather than anthropogenic climate variations.

Reference

Chen, J., A.D. Del Genio, B.E. Carlson, and M.G. Bosilovich, 2008: The spatiotemporal structure of twentieth-century climate variations in observations and reanalyses. Part I: Long-term trend. J. Climate, 21, 2611-2633, doi:10.1175/2007JCLI2011.1.

Chen, J., A.D. Del Genio, B.E. Carlson, and M.G. Bosilovich, 2008: The spatiotemporal structure of twentieth-century climate variations in observations and reanalyses. Part II: Pacific pan-decadal variability. J. Climate, 21, 2634-2650, doi:10.1175/2007JCLI2012.1.

Contact

Please address all inquiries about this research to Dr. Anthony Del Genio.

Prescription for the Planet – Part I

As foreshadowed in my previous post on Integral Fast Reactor nuclear power, I recently ordered Prescription for the Planet, by Tom Blees (subtitle: The Painless Remedy for Our Energy & Environmental Crises). Well, it’s now arrived, and I’ve set about reading through it with a careful eye for detail. After 3 chapters, I can already confidently say that it’s GREAT (don’t worry, you’ll get the pun in later posts).

Anyway, I’ve decided to review this incredibly important book on BNC in 6 parts, because there is just so much useful material for discussion and dissemination [for readers interested in variety, don't worry; the part-book-reviews won't all come in a sequential stream -- no more than 1 or 2 per week]. This post is concerned with chapters 1-3:

- Chapter 1: A World of Hurt (pg 7-33, following a 5 page introduction)

- Chapter 2: Pie in the Sky (pg 34-109)

- Chapter 3: A Necessary Interlude (pg 111-116)

Blees has made the intro, chapter 1, and the first 2 pages of chapter 2 available for a free, appetite-whetting download, here. Here is the book’s blurb:

Solving our planet’s most pressing dilemmas requires more than simply setting goals. We need a roadmap to reach them. Technologies that work fine on a small scale cannot necessarily be ramped up to global size. Worldwide environmental and social problems require a bold vision for the future that includes feasible planet-wide solutions with all the details. Prescription for the Planet explains how a trio of little-known yet profoundly revolutionary technologies, coupled with their judicious use in an atmosphere of global cooperation, can be the springboard that carries humanity to an era beyond scarcity. And with competition for previously scarce resources no longer an issue, the main incentives for warfare will be eliminated. Explaining not only the means to solve our most pressing problems but how those solutions can painlessly lead to improving the standard of living of everyone on the planet, the lucid and provocatively written Prescription for the Planet has arrived not a moment too soon. There is something here for everyone, be they a policymaker, environmental activist, or any concerned citizen hoping for a better future.

So, what’s in the first section? The introduction talks a little about the zero-sum game played by the developed world. It goes something like this. The world, being finite, is like a pie (not a magic pudding!), whereby if you (a given nation) take more than your fair share of resources (a large slice), then there will naturally be less for everyone else (smaller slices). As Blees notes, “The lack of enthusiasm for helping to lift the poorest nations out of their misery can be traced to the nagging fear that enlarging their piece of the pie will inevitably diminish what is left for the rest of us“. But with energy, he reckons this need not be an inevitable corollary. This topic has been explored in a somewhat fanciful yet interesting way, in the comments section of an earlier BNC post on the Fermi Paradox.

Chapter 1 covers terrain that is mostly familiar to my regular readers. The world is hurting due to global warming (working up an accelerating pace), the overconsumption of natural capital, air pollution, oil shocks, deforestation and water wars. He also discusses the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation and the lingering problem of ‘nuclear waste’ — the byproduct of current-generation nuclear reactors that will remain dangerous and difficult to manage for hundreds of millennia (there is 50,000 tonnes of the stuff in the US alone). There was not a lot that was new to me in this chapter, but for those who are relatively poorly informed about the state of the sustainability emergency (all of the above constitute elements of this overarching crisis), this chapter provides an excellent primer. Blees writes with clarify and verve.

Chapter 2 takes a hard look at the potential for a range of possible low-carbon energy solutions, and ends up being similar in its approach to that of Ted Trainer (Renewable energy cannot sustain an energy intensive society). Blees includes fewer technical details and specific calculations on the limits to massively scaled up renewable energy, but (to my mind at least), he ends up being even more persuasive than Ted on the emergent conclusion: supplying most of our energy from renewable sources is NOT simply a matter of current-scale implementation x 1000 (or 1,000,000). It’s on a diminishing gains curve, and moreover, when all the hard-nosed estimates based on current implementation experience are worked through, the cost and scale of doing this are simply mind-boggling.

Blees covers carbon trading (ouch, he’s savage on this!), biofuels (not microalgal biodiesel I might add), ‘clean coal’, natural gas, energy efficiency (this gets a big +), electric cars (and who killed them), solar power (photovoltaic and thermal – a desert mirage?), wind power (with a note about subsidies), hydroelectric (not so safe),  geothermal (lots of potential but…), hydrogen (not likely or desireable), fusion power (eventually…), and current-gen nuclear fission (well, you know the story here). Some of the figures herein are real eye-openers.

It’s a huge overview, but incredibly valuable (if depressingly blunt about the limits of these options). In short, after reading this and other material, I’m now firmly in the camp of those who subscribe to the view that whilst renewable energy and related techs are going to provide a useful contribution to future energy supply, they are going to fall well short of delivering what is required if we (global society) are going to go carbon neutral (actually, carbon negative) within the next few decades, as the Earth system (and the limits of fossil energy) now clearly demands.

Read chapter 2, please. It is critical that everyone understand this information.

Then an interlude (chapter 3). A time to take a breather and look at whether it’s time for despondency (hint: it’s not), given the seemingly insurmountable climate, energy and resource challenges we face, and the starkly apparent inadequacy of renewable energy as a complete replacement package. The quote at the start of the chapter summaries the problem neatly: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function” (attributed to physicist Albert Bartlett) [As someone who has spent a fair deal of their research career modelling the resource constraints imposed upon natural systems, I say amen to that!] Blees then explores the impediment to alternatives. Here is an excerpt that captures the position of the climate change denialists perfectly:

“Our earth is a finite sphere, and thus it is undeniable that population must remain within some sort of limits. In a world groaning under the burden of billions of people, it is simply delusional to deny the threat that overpopulation poses to our planet. Yet even with the world’s population projected to increase 50% by mid-century, many of the world’s most influential leaders seem oblivious to the situation. This is illustrative of a general disconnect between scientific progress and the evolution of social consciousness. The advances of science seem to have outpaced humanity’s ability to adapt. Rather than encouraging people to examine pressing issues with logic and reason, an antagonistic anti-intellectualism has taken hold of many, certainly in America at least. So we find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand we have the seemingly unstoppable march of science, and on the other an anachronistic mindset more suited to life in the Dark Ages...”. (Remind you of any group in particular?)

He also has a go, quite rightly, at those who are at the other extreme:

“It would be deluded at best to pretend that energy conservation and self-denial are going to make a dent in this problem, yet that is about as far as some environists (environmentalists whose mental portion is substantially inoperative) are thinking. And it is every bit as foolish to believe that we can dramatically increase the world’s population while we maintain the fossil fuel power model. Self-denial is not a policy. Neither is denial…Neoluddites will have to be kicked to the curb, then hopefully most of them will be able to open their eyes to the reality and become part of the solution rather than remaining part of the problem. Likewise the fossilized thinking of the fossil fuel forever advocates must be abandoned, and not a moment too soon. Indeed, we can only hope it’s not too late“.

The above quote should not imply that Blees has dismissed the value of energy efficiency and energy conservation. They’re no-brainers, with multiple benefits — he (in chapter 2), I, and just about everyone else, agree with this. It’s just not going to deliver a solution to the climate or energy problem that is fully, or even mostly adequate, as is required.

Part II will cover chapters 4 (”Newclear Power”) and 5 (”The Fifth Element”).

Spot the recycled denial VI – Chris Kenny

In this series, I aim to teach you to recognise the recycled denialism that is rife in the public arena these days.

I don’t refute this nonsense by constructing a new argument each time which, point-by-point, shows why their claims are not supported by the evidence. This is pointless, since the majority of non-greenhouse theorists (’pseudo-sceptics’) blithely ignore any such counterpoints and simply repeat the same arguments elsewhere. Instead I rebut by hyperlinking to some of the wealth of explanatory material out there on the world wide web. For reasons of general accessibility, the articles l link to are predominantly pitched for a lay audience – but they are consistent in linking to the peer-reviewed primary scientific literature (sometimes I’ll link straight to the journal papers). I focus primarily on the science content of the piece, except where non-science arguments are clearly false and demand correction.

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Chris Kenny is a former journalist and senior adviser to state and federal Liberal governments who writes a regular Opinion column for my local News Corp. paper, the Adelaide Advertiser. He also often guest hosts a radio talkback show on FIVEaa and is now a senior reporter on Channel 9’s A Current Affair. Over the past 3 months alone he’s written 3 articles attacking the science behind global warming (sea levels are not rising, CO2 is good, it hasn’t warmed since 1998, etc.). A man on a mission.

In the past, blogger Ian Musgrave has done a good job of debunking Chris’ nonsense in his ‘The Advertiser’s War on Science‘ series. But now it’s time for me to once again take up the ‘Spot the Recycled Denial‘ cudgels to tackle Chris’ New Years Eve 2008 rant, entitled ‘As the planet cools, check the science ‘.

First, here’s a snippet of this Op Ed:

APART from the global financial crisis, the main issue this year has been global warming. Or, rather, the fear of global warming.

Inconveniently for global-warming alarmists, global average temperatures have, for 10 years running, fallen short of those recorded in 1998.

Still, there has been plenty of action. The Federal Government has outlined its planned carbon tax scheme, the U.S. has elected a President promising to tackle carbon emissions and diplomats have agonised unsuccessfully over a truly international scheme.

All this action suggests the remedy is running ahead of the detailed diagnosis. The raw temperature figures allow room for significant scientific interpretation.

The consensus view is that the past decade has still been historically warm and the trend is up, so it’s just a matter of time before the 1998 records are topped. Dissenters say we are seeing the end of a warming phase and we may be entering a cooler period.

We all know the climate changes constantly. The critical question is whether carbon dioxide emissions from human activity are significantly affecting climate patterns.

The full article can be read here…

As per the revised format of this series, rather than reproducing the article in full and hyperlinking the refuted claims, I’ll simply list them below with two or three random relevant links (of the huge number now available to the serious internet investigator!) to the scientific information or direct debunking. It will be up to you to look at the original article and pinpoint these recycled arguments:

1. Global warming stopped in 1998.

[Short response: A recycled argument based on cherry picking a strong El Nino year. Not based on any statistical analysis of the temperature time series, which shows ongoing warming, especially when the ENSO signal is removed. Ignores ocean heat content accumulation, which is the key measure of global warming.]

More information:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/11/23/what-bob-carter-and-andrew-bolt-fail-to-grasp/

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998.htm

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11645

2. We may be entering a cooling period.

[Short response: Presumably he means if the sun gets stuck in its current sunspot low. Yet a simple calculation will show that less than 10 years of greenhouse gas forcing offset the difference between the peak and trough of the solar cycle, so this is not possible without widespread and sustained vulcanism - is he predicting this? A bold prognosticator indeed.]

More information:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/09/14/what-if-the-sun-got-stuck/

http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/anti-global-heating-claims-a-reasonably-thorough-debunking/#m15

http://www.skepticalscience.com/heading-into-new-little-ice-age.htm

3. Climate is always changing.

[Short response: Climate changes because it is forced to -- it doesn't change because it suddenly 'decides to', and it doesn't just flip-flop randomly. It has to be pushed in one direction (warming) or another (cooling) by positive forcing or feedbacks (e.g. brighter sun, addition of greenhouse gases, lower albedo) or negative forcing/feedbacks (e.g. dimmer sun, drawdown of greenhouse gases, increased atmospheric dust, greater ice cover, increased volcanic activity).]

More information:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/

http://www.nerc.ac.uk/about/consult/debate/climatechange/summary.asp#paleo

4. Australia’s emissions are minuscule compared to other polluting nations, so we shouldn’t take action until they do.

[Short response: Australia's emissions are about 1.5% of the global total, but we ship about about another 2-3% worth of coal. Our per capita emissions are amoung the highest of any country, so our individual responsibility is far greater than the world average -- the average Australian would have to reduce their emission by half just to be equivalent to the average European -- and much further again to get down to an average Chinese or Indian.]

More information:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/12/26/save-a-bit-here-ship-a-whole-lot-there/

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/1/9/172316/4448

http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/08/30/australias-soaring-carbon-emissions-put-kyoto-out-of-reach/

5. We ain’t deniers!

[Short response: Yes, you are.]

http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2008/09/24/the-popular-media-as-climate-change-deniers/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/12/how-to-be-a-real-sceptic/

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Cartoon-about-global-warming-alarmism.html

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/will-full-ignorance/

6. David Bellamy and Phil Chapman are credible.

[Short response: No, they're not.]

http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/david-bellamy-victim-but-of-who/

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/04/the_australians_war_on_science_11.php

7. There’s no proof! Prove it! (from retired CSIRO scientist [a coal geologist] Dr Guy LeBlanc Smith)

[Short response: If you want proof, do pure mathematics. Otherwise, seek hypotheses that are repeatedly consistent with evidence. As cce succinctly says:

"Eventually, after listening to all of this evidence and reasoning, a skeptic will demand that you prove it to them. In order to “prove” that humanity is heating up the atmosphere, we’d have to create an experiment with two or more models. This would involve constructing a new planet, identical in every way to the Earth except with no human influence. Then we’d speed up time so we can observe any differences between the two planets. Obviously, we can’t do that. We are instead running the experiment on our only working model: our home, the earth.

So when skeptics demand proof, first of all they don’t understand the scientific definition of the word, and secondly, they are asking the impossible. No amount of evidence will change their opinion if they require an experiment that is impossible to construct."]

More information:

http://cce.890m.com/attributing-mankind/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1641/B570708

http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-global-warming.htm

8. Uncertainties mean we should wait before taking action.

[Short response: Climate scientists are as sure as it is scientifically possible to be [see point 7 above] that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change, and that this will result in damaging impacts which will increase in magnitude as emissions continue and temperatures continue to rise. Detailed economic modelling has clearly shown that the cost of inaction greatly outweighs the cost of action, even when impact-related uncertainties are incorporated into these analyses.]

More information:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11658

http://www.garnautreview.org.au/chp11.htm#11_2

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/1/24/18548/9954

9. Sceptics and ’sceptical research’ are suppressed.

[Short response: All scientists, in every field, play by a common set of' 'rules'. This involves having their work (scientific papers) scrutinised for quality, reliability and repeatability by a set of independent (usually confidential) experts -- this is known as blind peer review. Nothing is or can be 'suppressed' by some conspiratorial coterie; but only work of reasonable quality and veracity tends to get through the peer review filter and be published in reputable journals. Indeed, as any practicing (actively publishing) scientist will tell you, science does not and cannot work by collusion. The IPCC is a UN review body with scientists nominated by each participating country; it conducts no primary research because its job is to summarise the already peer-reviewed scientific literature.]

More information:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/michael-crichtons-state-of-confusion/

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/13/23211/495

http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2008/11/16/skeptic-scientist-is-censored-or-not/

10. The supposed consensus among scientists is a sham, 650 scientists have disputed anthropogenic global warming.

[Short response: Climate warming due to human activity is mainstream science involving a huge number of research disciplines; consensus does not mean that every single scientist agrees with man-made climate change, but that the vast majority does agree; this is reflected in the peer-reviewed literature, for which surveys have found >99% of the primary scientific literature explicitly or implicitly endorse this view; former Science editor Donald Kennedy said: "Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science"]

More information:

http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/inhofes-mauvais-blague/

http://cce.890m.com/?page_id=15

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/inhofe-global-warming-deniers-47011101

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To his credit, Chris does say “Finally, we do need to give the planet the benefit of the doubt, so improved energy efficiency and some other measures are indisputably sensible. But at the same time, we must continue the serious research and debate.”

No arguments there about energy efficiency or ongoing serious research, but I wonder what ‘debate’ he is referring to? If it is the multitude of scientific debates about climate feedbacks, sensitivity, tipping elements, relative impacts of climate change on natural systems, etc. then I do agree. But if recycled points such as ‘Is the Earth cooling’ is what he means, then he’s asking to shadowbox with strawmen.

Strangely, Chis also recommends the Gristmill Skeptics website in the links at the end of his article. I wonder if he read it?

Renewable energy cannot sustain an energy intensive society

At least that is the argument put forward by Dr Ted Trainer from the University of New South Wales. To quote:

It is commonly assumed that greenhouse gas and energy problems can be solved by switching from fossil fuel sources of energy to renewables.  However little attention has been given to exploring the limits to renewable energy.  The main problems are to do with the magnitude of the supply tasks that would be set and the difficulties that would be encountered integrating large amounts of intermittent renewable energy into supply systems. [I] argue that wind, photovoltaic, solar thermal and biomass sources, along with nuclear energy and geo-sequestration of carbon could not be combined to provide sufficient energy to sustain affluent societies while keeping greenhouse gas emissions below safe levels. The case is strongest with respect to liquid fuels and transport. [There are also strong] reasons why a “hydrogen economy” is not likely to be achieved.

So where is Ted coming from with such a dismal conclusion? Ted’s principal thesis is that itermittency of supply is the Achilles’ Heel of renewable energy when operating at the scale of complete, society-wide energy replacement. The problem is far worse if projected rates of economic and energy growth are factored in, and worse again if we try to imagine a scenario where the currently developing world nations attempt to achieve the same standard of living as those in the developed world.

Ted has put together a 37 page primer which summaries the content of his recent book published by Springer (Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society; Trainer, T 2007, 200 p.). With his permission I have made a PDF copy of this primer available for download here.

Some selected quotes from his primer help illustrate the basis of his arguments and the underpinning of his calculations (EJ = exajoules of energy, GW = gigawatt):

[R]enewable sources tend to be alternative rather than additive.  Therefore it is not a matter of having each renewable source carrying a fraction of the load all the time.  If we build one unit of wind power and one unit of PV power we would not necessarily have two more units of renewable energy capacity; sometimes we would have no more, e.g., on calm nights.  This means we might have to build two or even four separate systems (wind, PV, solar thermal and coal/nuclear) each capable of meeting much or all of the demand on its own, with the equivalent of one to three sitting idle much or all of the time.

…

It is evident from the graphs from Oswald et al., Coelingh, and Davey and Coppin that no matter how much wind capacity we added there would still be several times a month even in the best wind time of the year when more or less the whole X GW needed would have to come from coal or nuclear plant, and that we could cut carbon emissions to the very low required level only if we had perhaps 5X GW of wind capacity and dumped most of the energy it generated (or stored it very inefficiently as hydrogen.)  Clearly the gains from “over-sizing” the wind system would be savagely offset by the rise in total system capital costs, and it would not pay to have much more than X GW (peak) of wind plant, meaning plant capable of delivering on average about .25 of demand (or whatever the average wind system capacity fell to in view of the need to use very large areas.)

…

[concerning solar thermal] Some of these numbers are uncertain but when combined they indicate that the total energy loss might be 35% of the meagre gross output, meaning that a net delivered amount well under 10 W/m might reach users.  If so plant capable of delivering 1000 MW in winter would need 100+ million square metres of collection area.  At the estimated SEGS cost of $800/m (Trainer 2008) the plant would cost $80 billion.

…

The climate data seems to show that despite their storage capacity solar thermal systems would suffer a significant intermittency problem and in winter would either need storage capacity for four or more cloudy day sequences once or twice each winter month, or would need back up from some other sources.  This means they could not be expected to buffer the intermittency of other components in a fully renewable system.

…

For 2100 it is not likely that we could assume any coal use, on the grounds that no CO2 emissions will be permissible.  If 9 billion people had the per capita average energy consumption Australians are likely to have by 2050, i.e., c. 500 GJ/person the gross target would be 4,500 EJ.  If energy saving and conservation advance reduced this to 3375 EJ, and if low temperature heat could easily be derived from solar sources (again not a valid assumption for Europe and US in winter), the energy “service” target for renewables would become 2,530 EJ.

If the 844 EJ of electricity was to come equally from wind, PV and solar thermal, wind capacity would have to be about 560 times as great as it was in the early 2000s.  We would need 72 PV panels per person, at Sydney insolation, and therefore many more in Europe.

The 464 EJ for transport (i.e., the amount driving wheels) would require generation of 928 EJ of electricity ( or twice as much again if via  hydrogen) making the total electricity task 1,172 EJ, and therefore requiring a wind capacity  some 1,180 times as great as in the early 2000s (assuming the task is divided equally between wind, PV and solar thermal), again ignoring intermittency and integration problems.

There should be no need to continue.  Clearly if the 2050 budget is impossible then one that is 4 times as big and unable to use geosequestration will be far more so.  Note that the never-questioned business as usual expectation of 3% p.a. economic growth from here to 2100 would see a global economy churning out more than 16 times as many goods and services in that year as is produced and consumed each year now.

And so on (these are just a few snippets). He covers all the major renewable energy types (wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, geothermal, wave), as well as energy storage issues (hydrogen, vanadium batteries, compressed air, pumped water, ammonia), conversion and transmission losses, system integration problems, liquid fuels and total energy budgets. You really do need to read the whole primer in order to properly appreciate the detailed and well-worked basis of his numbers and the system-wide scope of his analysis.

Ted’s ’solution’ is, strictly speaking, that there is no direct  solution. He says that a consumer society of the type we know today simply cannot be sustained in the post fossil fuel era. He sees the only alternative as being is that a rapid transition must be made to a ’simpler way’, focused on well-organised regional communities which have low energy demands and a local production base — admitting that the chance of achieving this is slim at best. Trainer is thinking much deeper here than just addressing the energy crisis — the simpler way is his solution to the sustainability emergency in general (climate, energy, water, food, biodiversity). More details can be found on Ted’s website.

Trainer has also written a telling critique of the energy assumptions embedded within the Garnaut Review, pointing out that the review’s discussion of the scale-up issues for renewables amounts to nothing more than a few throw-away lines and a lot of optimistic ‘technology development will solve these problems’ type statements otherwise lacking substantiation.

What do others think of the work of Trainer? The Energy Bulletin has done a review of his book, and concludes:

Trainer’s figures on renewables have been and will continue to be disputed. However, one thing is not in dispute. The move away from fossil fuels will be much much easier with some of the cultural changes that he describes as “The Simpler Way”.

I must admit I struggled to find many direct criticisms of Trainer’s calculations, either in the peer-reviewed literature or on the internet (though there is this from Barney Foran from Monash University), but if you can track them down I’d like to be alerted to them.

There are certainly a lot of technical papers which show how a distributed and diversified renewable energy grid can enhance the supply potential of renewables to near-baseload, but none that deal directly with the long-term storage problem that can lead to supply failure for short periods (e.g., large-scale renewables may be baseload for 25 days of every month and yet still fail to provide a reliable supply for the other 5-6 days, which would obviously create serious problems for today’s ‘always on the go’ society). Perhaps the critiques are there, and are able to show where Trainer has gone wrong — if so, please do alert me to them in the comments section below.

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Where do I stand on this? As BNC readers would know, I am strongly in favour of a massive rollout of renewable energy and energy efficiency. I think Trainer’s primer is superficial in its discussion of bioenergy because it focuses on the inadequacy of first-generation (crop-based) biofuels and doesn’t consider the potential of microalgal biodiesel or hydrogen-producing microbes (although his general point about a reliance on ‘future tech’ to make this stuff work is valid). His dismissal of nuclear is based on the limitations and wastefulness of Gen II LWR nuclear — he has not even considered Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) nuclear power (though I have since alerted Ted to this and he is looking into it, like we all are now!).

I would like to say Ted is being overly pessimistic about total delivery potential and the huge redundancy demands of large-scale renewables, but his stark calculations appear to be quite robust (alas). That says to me that whilst achieving a diversified renewable energy supply will remain a high priority, it will simply not be enough. If we are to close all coal-fired power stations within the next two decades, as is required, an IFR-type technology will have to be a large (perhaps primary) contributor to achieving this.

Otherwise, it’s back to a simpler way, either by design or inevitability.