Judy Curry on The Hartwell Paper

Judy Curry has initiated a discussion on The Hartwell Paper.  You can find the paper here.  Thanks Judy!

The Iron Law, Even in Boulder

The Boulder Daily Camera today has an article about Boulder's efforts to add more renewable energy to its electricity mix.  The reason is not simply about burnishing Boulder's green credentials:

Initially, the grassroots advocacy that pushed the City Council to let its franchise agreement with Xcel expire came from Boulder residents who wanted the city's electricity to come from more renewable sources, such as wind and solar. Part of the pressure also came from the very real possibility that Boulder would not be able to meet its own goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions without changing where the city gets its energy from.

But Jonathan Koehn, the city's regional sustainability coordinator, said adding more renewables is only part of the equation.

"We've heard a lot of concern that, perhaps, more clean energy is driving this analysis," he said. "But this is about long-term economic stability. When we talk about what our portfolio might look like in the future, we don't have a predetermined notion of a certain percentage of renewables. What we want is to be able to analyze how we can have long-term stable rates."

But adding renewable generation -- the price of which is not at the whim of highly fluctuating fuel costs -- is one way to make rates more stable, Koehn said.

Don't Try This at Home

 

I cannot be said to be a Man U fan.  But I think anyone should be impressed by Wayne Rooney's new goal scoring celebration.  Sure tops last week's effort ;-)

Oil Price Floor?

The FT has an important but quiet article on a recent report by the IIF:

Saudi Arabia could need the oil price to average more than $100 a barrel by 2015 to sustain the big public spending rises it plans in an effort to forestall the political unrest sweeping the Middle East.

The oil market is growing increasingly worried about Riyadh’s fiscal needs as it fears that they could force Saudi Arabia to pursue oil policies similar to those of Venezuela and Iran, traditionally the price hawks at the Opec oil cartel.

The break-even oil price the Gulf kingdom requires to balance its budget will jump from $68 last year to $88 this and then $110 in 2015, according to new estimates by the Institute of International Finance, a leading industry group.

Space Shuttle Costs: 1971-2011

In this week's Nature, Rad Byerly and I have a short correspondence on the overall program costs for the Space Shuttle program (see figure above and data table below).  The sources for the data are my 1994 paper on costs (PDF), the 2004 CAIB report and NASA annual budget submissions.  The data are adjusted to 2010 values using OMB GDP price deflators (XLS).  Obviously the information for 2011 is an estimate.  The shuttle has been launched once this year's planned total of 3 missions.

Here is an excerpt from our correspondence:

Some 20 years ago, we found the programme to be slightly over budget and severely short in capability (R. A. Pielke and R. Byerly in Space Policy Alternatives Ch. 14, 223–245; 1992). We used 8 years of cost and schedule experience to predict performance for the subsequent 20 years of the shuttle programme.

The US Congress and NASA spent more than US$192 billion (in 2010 dollars) on the shuttle from 1971 to 2010 (see ‘A costly enterprise’). The agency launched 131 flights; two ended in tragedy with the loss of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. During the operational years from 1982 to 2010, the average cost per launch was about $1.2 billion. Over the life of the programme, this increases to about $1.5 billion per launch (R. A. Pielke Space Policy 10, 78–80; 1994).

For the period 1991–2010, we originally projected an average cost per flight of about $800 million. The actual cost was about $1 billion. We overestimated both the flight rate during this time (8 predicted flights versus 4.7 actual) and the annual costs (about $6.2 billion predicted versus $4.7 billion actual).

The actual cost for each flight of the programme falls squarely in the middle of the envelope we constructed, with projected uncertainties.

Here is the figure that shows that envelope of uncertainties from our 1992 paper with the red star indicating how things actually turned out.

Here is how we end our correspondence:

The shuttle is the costliest US spaceflight programme ever undertaken. As it comes to an end, we should celebrate its successes, and draw lessons to inform future human spaceflight ventures.

For further information see:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. (1993), A reappraisal of the space-shuttle program. Space Policy 9 (2) 133-157.

Below is the data table that was used to generate the figure that appears in Nature and at the top of this post.  Note that costs are for fiscal years and flights are for calendar years.

Year	Current	Constant'10	Flights
1971	$78.50	$348.12
1972	$155.90	$660.12
1973	$296.70	$1203.75
1974	$656.70	$2486.14
1975	$1010.70	$3463.08
1976	$1813.60	$5797.39
1977	$1652.50	$4914.76
1978	$1645.90	$4585.74
1979	$1896.50	$4890.56
1980	$2125.20	$5035.55
1981	$2254.70	$4863.02	1
1982	$3459.10	$6982.69	3
1983	$3498.70	$6765.08	4
1984	$3445.80	$6425.52	5
1985	$3120.10	$5635.38	9
1986	$3344.10	$5903.25	2
1987	$5453.20	$9377.05	0
1988	$3302.70	$5502.69	2
1989	$4214.20	$6758.84	5
1990	$4293.00	$6640.75	6
1991	$4564.40	$6802.99	6
1992	$4775.00	$6936.13	8
1993	$4078.00	$5795.35	7
1994	$3778.70	$5258.78	7
1995	$3155.10	$4299.71	7
1996	$3178.80	$4249.96	7
1997	$3150.90	$4136.78	8
1998	$2927.80	$3795.62	5
1999	$3028.00	$3874.19	3
2000	$3011.20	$3778.14	5
2001	$3125.70	$3831.29	6
2002	$3278.80	$3953.77	5
2003	$3252.80	$3842.25	1
2004	$4377.00	$5040.96	0
2005	$5028.10	$5607.84	1
2006	$5111.30	$5512.12	3
2007	$4346.00	$4554.26	3
2008	$4713.00	$4826.82	4
2009	$3793.50	$3827.47	5
2010	$3863.60	$3863.60	3
2011	$989.00	$989.00	3

You Take the Risks, We'll Take the Watts

Germany's moratorium on nuclear power has not necessarily reduced Germany's reliance on nuclear power by as much as one might think. From Der Spiegel:

Germany has been importing nuclear power from France and the Czech Republic since it switched off its seven oldest nuclear power stations last month in the wake of the Fukushima accident, power company RWE said on Monday.

A spokesman for RWE confirmed a report in Bild newspaper that Germany had become a net importer of power since March 16. Previously, Germany had been a net electricity exporter because of its rising output of power from renewable energy sources.

RWE said the country's power imports from France and Czech have been amounting up to 3,000 megawatts and up to 2,000 megawatts respectively. Three quarters of France's power supply comes from nuclear energy while the Czech Republic relies on reactors for 34 percent of its energy needs.

Hildegard Müller, head of the German Association of Energy and Water Industries also said on Monday that power imports were up. "Since March 17, there has been an increase in imports. Flows from France and the Czech Republic have doubled," she said.

Practical Advice for Experts Who Testify Before Congress

Last week’s House Science Committee hearing on climate change was political theater as usual (image above from the witness table looking up at the Chairman). But one small part of that hearing helps to illustrate the challenges that face experts when they agree to testify before Congress, and the choices that they face between advocacy and arbitration, to use the terminology found in my book, The Honest Broker.

In the middle of the hearing there was an exchange on sea level rise between Ralph Hall (R-TX), the committee chair, and Kerry Emanuel, a scientist at MIT who I have known for quite a while and for whom I have a lot of respect.

Hall prompted the exchange with these comments (quotes below are from this webcast):

HALL: Do you recollect when Dr. Holdren was here -- he’s the president’s science advisor --on the sea level rise? His testimony was that it would rise 12 feet. You know when the ice all falls and melts into the ocean. The proper person measured it, as you know the very next year the so-called gold standard of scientific consensus by global warming advocates projected that the oceans would rise by 7 and 23 inches. So that’s who’s advising the president and that’s the reason that we are in all the trouble we’re in right now.

About 5 minutes later when being questioned by another member, Emanuel took the opportunity to direct some comments back to Hall:

EMANUEL: Mr. Chairman, I think that you misquoted Dr. Holdren. He was referring to what would happen if all of Greenland’s ice disappeared. That is not projected to happen. But his numbers are correct, if it did we would see a sea level rise of about 22 feet. Unfortunately it is a risk. It’s way out there because we don’t understand the physics of ice, but I think that is what he is referring to.

Hall responded to Emanuel and they engaged in a short exchange:

HALL: In a recent hearing Dr. Holdren was sitting right there where you are there and he said that the Republicans needed to be educated on the issue. In an August 2006 interview with the BBC news he reportedly said that if the current pace of change continued catastrophic sea level rise of four meters – that’s 13 feet not 12 feet – I was wrong, was within the realm of possibility. While you were going with the interview I asked “how sure were you about your prediction”? And the hard cold facts were that the very next year the so-called gold standard of scientific consensus by global warming advocates projected that the oceans would rise between 7 and 23 inches between now and 2100. How sure was the scientific community of its predictions, that’s my recollection of it, but you probably know more about it than I do.

EMANUEL: I would only simply add to that that the IPCC in making a projection very explicitly excluded any calculation of the melting of land ice. I think they were wise to do that because we don’t understand the physics very well.

HALL: All I was trying to emphasize was that he guessed it 13 feet and he was 12 feet wrong.

EMANUEL: I think that his statement that it was within the realm of possibility is correct.

HALL: I’m not very good on math. In school there were three things I couldn’t do and that is add and subtract.

EMANUEL: The notion that it is within the realm of possibility is correct on his part. That is different than a projection.

HALL: You make a good point and you’ve been a good witness.

A big problem with this exchange is that both Hall and Emanuel are incorrect in their assertions.

First, Hall’s recollection of John Holdren’s testimony is incorrect. On February 18, 2011 Holdren was the sole witness at a Science Committee hearing where Hall asked him about his sea level projection (quotes from this webcast):

HALL: In August, 2006 -- you knew I was going to ask you about the interview that you had with BBC News, didn’t you? – you reportedly said that if the current pace of change continues catastrophic sea level rise would be 4 meters – that is 13 feet – was within the realm of possibility. While you were giving the interview, how sure were you about your prediction? Do you know that the very next year the so-called gold standard view of the scientific consensus by global warming advocates projected that the oceans would rise between 7 and 23 inches, not 13 feet but less than 2 inches (sic) between now and 2100. Let me ask you, how sure was the scientific community of their prediction?

HOLDREN: There are several questions there but let me start with the most recent, the one of sea level rise. At the time there had been two peer reviewed referred publications in the scientific literature that pointed out that twice in the last 19,000 years the rate of sea level went up as much as 3-5 meters per century. Under forcings – that is, influences on the climate, but natural ones in this case – that were in the same range or smaller than the forces that are now being imposed on the climate, we believe mainly by human activity. At that time, therefore, the view that a sea level rise of as much as four meters which was in the middle of the range of 3-5 was a reasonable statement based on what was in the peer reviewed literature. Subsequently newer analyses have reduced that figure somewhat but the upper end of the range remains in the domain of 1-2 meters over the century we’re now in at worse.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change arrived at the estimates which you’ve quoted Mr. Chairman the explicitly excluded and they said so in a footnote the dynamic processes which led in the past to these more rapid increases in sea level and they said they were leaving those out because they didn’t believe that the scientific basis for modeling them quantitatively was yet adequate to support a particular number. Since that time – that was the 2007 report of the IPCC whose scientific inputs were finalized in December 2005 – since that time there have been extensive new analyses which have supported the proposition that the sea level rise in this century could be in the range of one to as much as two meters. That is not a particular prediction, the range of uncertainty is large, but even half a meter would be an extremely consequential matter for people and businesses with ocean front property.

It was not the first time that Holdren had been asked about that 2006 BBC interview in which he said:

[Holdren] added that if the current pace of change continued, a catastrophic sea level rise of 4m (13ft) this century was within the realm of possibility; much higher than previous forecasts.

It was also not the first time that Holdren had explained to Congress that he had changed his mind since that interview took place. For instance, in December, 2009 Holdren testified before the House Select Committee on Global Warming and discussed the BBC interview with Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI)

SENSENBRENNER: You gave an interview in August of 2006 with BBC News in the UK. And you said that a sea-level rise of up to 13 feet was in the realm of possibility. However, that is 11 feet higher than what the IPCC has estimated over this period of time, which is somewhere between seven and 23 inches.

HOLDREN [a bit later in the hearing]: Well, let me, Congressman, take the opportunity of this particular question to answer part of Congressman Sensenbrenner's, because he referred to the IPCC's finding in its fourth assessment report about sea-level rise.

In that report, the IPCC made clear that they were only considering the thermal expansion of seawater and a small contribution from the melting of mountain glaciers in their sea-level rise estimate for the 21st century, leaving out deliberately the mechanism thought to have caused the more rapid rises in sea level that have occurred from time to time in the geologic past.

And the reason they left out those mechanisms that are capable of causing more rapid sea-level rises, they explained in their report, was that we do not yet understand those mechanisms well enough to model them and arrive at the sort of quantitative conclusion that the IPCC was emphasizing. And, in addition, we didn't know at that time, we didn't have enough data to know whether, on balance, the Antarctic ice sheet, the larger of the two, was gaining mass or losing mass.

Since that IPCC report, there has been a great deal of additional work on these questions. We now know that both the Antarctic and the Greenland ice sheet are losing mass. We know that the rate of sea-level rise today is more than twice the rate of sea-level rise averaged over the 20th century.

And the current best estimates of the peak sea-level rise to be expected in this century are one to two meters. That is not as high as my number from 2006. The advancing science has ruled out the high end of that range. But it makes me wrong in 2006 by about a factor of two.

So when Hall told Kerry Emanuel that Holdren had testified that sea levels could rise by 13 feet, he was in fact misrepresenting what Holdren had told him earlier this year, which was that he has changed his views based on more recent research.

But Emanuel, for whatever reason, decided to defend the statements attributed to Holdren. The result was that Emanuel claimed that Holdren meant something different than Hall suggested and he also indicated that a sea level rise by 2100 was indeed “within the realm of possibility.” Ironically, this contradicts what Holdren actually said, that “advancing science has ruled out the high end of that range.”

Tad Pfeffer, a colleague of mine here at the University of Colorado and an expert on sea level rise reacted to this when I shared it with him as follows, quoted with his permission:

Holdren is doing the best he can with a bad situation. His job, and the job of many others, would be a hell of lot simpler if we had never got into the 3-to-5 m SLR in the next century business in the first place. We knew that the circumstances at 18K and 125K are not good analogs for today right from the start (global ice coverage at 18K was very different than today and the evidence for very fast sea level rise at 125K was and remains very weak), but the notion of 3-to-5 m SLR in the next century was allowed to flourish over the next few years regardless. We wrote the 2008 kinematic constraints paper specifically to put a stop to that business, which it has to a large degree, but now the volatile history of the projected numbers, from less than 1 meter at AR4, to several meters post-AR4, to 1-to-2 m max today, are generating a lot of scrutiny, and the 'catastrophic' 3-to-5 m ideas, especially, are being used as bludgeons against people like Holdren who are trying to explain the behavior and train of thought of supposedly rational scientists.

It is my view that sea level is an example of a context in which the scientific community lost control of a narrative (and some might say helped to push it along) in a manner that has contributed to damaging the credibility of the climate science community. Holdren’s 2006 BBC statements were a part of that process, which I discuss more generally in Chapters 7 and 8 of The Climate Fix.

What are the lessons here for experts who testify before Congress?

I can think of several:

1. Decide what your role is. Regardless of which party invites you, decide whether you are there to defend that political party’s views (on science or policy) or if you are there to share what you know about questions for which you have expertise. These are not always the same thing.

2. Appreciate that statements that you make in the media that cherrypick, emphasize extremes (on any side of an issue) or otherwise go out on a limb could set your scientific colleagues up for difficulties in the future when they are asked to defend those statements in a political setting.  At that point, the scientist being asked to defend the dodgy statements may face a trade-off between scientific accuracy and political solidarity.

3. Speak for yourself and let others speak for themselves. This is of course can be very difficult when participating in a shared campaign, either for action or a perspective. Even if you are not actively participating in that campaign you may be forced to render a judgement on it, e.g., "Ms. Scientist the IPCC consensus says X, what do you think?"

4. Recognize that when incorrect statements are made in a public setting, the consequences for you as an expert will be much higher than for politicians. That is just the way that it is.  The consequences for folksy, grandfatherly Ralph Hall of being wrong will never be as significant as for a scientist testifying before him. So always be able to defend claims that you make.

5. Stick to your area of expertise when testifying as an expert.  This seems obvious but is routinely violated.

6.  Finally, it should be obvious that a decision to accept an invitation to testify is a political act.  No, it does not mean that you shared the political agenda or scientific views of those who invite you.  But it does mean that your participation in the process will be more thoughtful and more effective if you have considered your role in the political process, and especially your stance on advocacy versus arbitration.  The risk of not thinking these issues through is of course a greater likelihood that you'll simply be a stage prop in a political theater.

On sea level rise, the statements made by Holdren in 2006 to the BBC as AAAS President and environmental activist were far less measured and responsible than his statements made in 2009 and 2011 on the same subject as science advisor to the president before Congress. The difference -- which I attribute as much to setting as to any changes in the science of sea level -- helps to illustrate the difference between an expert who seeks to use science selectively as a basis for political advocacy and one who wishes to faithfully arbitrate scientific questions for policy makers. While these roles are not necessarily mutually exclusive, typically a choice must be made.

Postscript: I emailed a draft of this blog post to Emanuel for his comments and he wrote back that he has no issues with the characterizations made here on the exchange with Hall. He did say that during the hearing he did not catch Hall's reference to 2100 and thought that he meant sea level in the very long term. Emanuel was unaware of Holdren's earlier statements on sea level rise. Nonetheless, Emanuel takes strong issue with Hall's reference to the IPCC sea level rise estimates without noting that they omit land surface ice dynamics. Emanuel remains troubled with how the Republicans are treating climate science.

Highlights From Butler v. Connecticut

Adventures in Democracy

The carbon-infused intrigue of high-level Australian politics got a big boost yesterday from Kevin Rudd, foreign minister and former prime minister.  Rudd appeared on ABC's Q&A last night and made news by (a) saying that he made a mistake in delaying the proposed emissions trading scheme last year and (b) suggesting that a few in cabinet (unnamed by Rudd, but whom most everyone apparently believes to be Julia Gillard, current Prime Minister, and Wayne Swan, Treasurer) wanted to ditch the ETS altogether.

Why is Rudd saying this?  And why now?  Caveat emptor warning, speculative political tea leaf reading ahead . . .

One scenario might be that Rudd sees his way back to Prime Minister.  Here is how that might work.

With Gillard and Labor suffering in the polls, in part due to the proposed carbon tax, Rudd can distinguish himself from Gillard by championing the ETS and disfavoring the carbon tax.  His comments on Q&A were suggestive that Gillard never wanted an ETS in any case, perhaps suggesting that she never really intends to transition from a carbon tax to an ETS as she has proposed.  The subtext here is of course Julia Gillard's promise before the election not to introduce a carbon tax and then reversal of that decision after the election.

If Labor continues to take a beating in the polls and Rudd's poll numbers continue to look more favorable than Gillard's then the "all in" strategy would be to mount a leadership challenge in the form of calling an election.  Rudd would campaign on the fact that he was wrong about the ETS, come out against the carbon tax, and in one fell swoop pulling the rug out from under Gillard and the Coalition.  With Labor staring down a defeat it would have little choice other than to dump Gillard in favor of Rudd.

During the Q&A discussion Rudd was given the explicit chance to dispel speculation about a future leadership challenge, and he did not.  He also stuck it to Julia Gillard with a smile on his face.  He did not in the discussion once express support for the "carbon tax" preferring instead to speak to the need to "price carbon."  Politicians speak carefully and what they say and don't say can mean a lot.

Of course, none of this appears to make much difference for Australia's decarbonization.  Palace intrigue is just that in the absence of good policy proposals.

Global Warming: It's Worse Than You Think

My favorite climate scientist and several of his colleagues have a new paper out on global land surface temperature trends (Montandon et al. 2011).  They perform an interesting analysis in asking the degree to which the spatial distribution of land surface stations is representative of land surface types found on Earth.

They find that the major surface temperature records (i.e., NCDC, GISS, CRU, GHCN) are not spatially representative (see their Figure 2 above).

What happens if you weight the land surface record to account for this bias? Their preliminary result (which they emphasize is preliminary) is that land surface trends would actually increase if properly weighted. If this is the case then it potentially presents a headache for the climate modeling community because it would exacerbate the divergence between land surface and tropospheric trends that we documented in Klotzbach et al. 2009 (see this, this, and this).

Does this study have policy implications? Not for me, but it does show that there remain interesting scientific questions to ask and maybe surprises yet to be found in the greenhouse.

The Size of India

India recently completed a census:

India's population reaches 1.21 billion -- 623.7 million males and 586.5 million females -- larger than the combined population of Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, the United States and Bangladesh, according to the latest Census report released Thursday.

This is an increase of 181 million people since the last census, which is equivalent to the population of Brazil, said the 2011 Census report released by Indian Home Secretary G.K. Pillai and the Registrar General of India in the capital.

The northern state of Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state in India, and the combined population of Uttar Pradesh and the western state of Maharashtra is larger than that of the United States.

The Relative Size of the Middle East

Source

Neville Nicholls on Australia's Extreme Rainfall

Neville Nicholls is one of Australia's leading climate scientists. He is also a long-time participant in the IPCC and current president of the Australian Meteorological & Oceanographic Society. I first met Neville in the mid 1990s (at a meeting in Vietnam I think) and I have had nothing but great respect for him ever since. In his latest "AMOS - President's Column" he asks, "What caused the eastern Australia heavy rains and floods of 2010/11?"

He begins his answer by pointing to the strength of the current record La Niña event and the relationship of the SOI (Southern Oscillation Index, a measure of the strength of La Niña and El Niño events) and Australian rainfall (see his figure above).  He concludes:

Given the well-known relationship between the SOI and heavy rains in eastern Australia (eg., McBride and Nicholls, 1983) we can conclude that the fundamental cause of the heavy rains this past six months was indeed this record La Niña event. Other heavy rain years (1917/18, 1950/51, 1973/74, 1975/76) were also the result of strong La Niña events. The relationship between rainfall and the SOI is very strong, with a correlation coefficient of 0.66. So, the heavy rains were not caused by global warming, but by a record la Niña event – a natural fluctuation of the climate system.

But he doesn't stop there. He next asks: "But perhaps 2010/11 was a record La Niña because of global warming?"  His answer:

There has not been any trend in the SOI over the past 111 years, despite the warming of global mean temperature of about 0.75°C over that period. Nor do climate models consistently predict increased strength of La Niña events from enhanced atmospheric content of greenhouse gases (eg., Vecchi and Wittenberg, 2010). So there is no reason, at this moment, for us to suspect that global warming is increasing the frequency or intensity of La Niña events.

He doesn't stop their either, and next asks, "But was the impact of the 2010/11 La Niña on Australian rainfall stronger because of the record warm sea surface temperatures around northern Australia in 2010?"  His answer:

These waters have increased substantially over the last century and are now about a degree warmer than early in the 20th century. If these warmer waters were enhancing the impact of La Niña on Australian rainfall we might expect to be seeing heavier rains in recent decades, relative to the rains that accompanied earlier strong La Niña events. There is some evidence of this (eg., Nicholls et al 1996), and there has been a weak tendency towards increased rainfall since 1900, independent of the influence from the El Niño – Southern Oscillation. Perhaps this trend towards increased rainfall might be related to the warmer sea surface temperatures – but much more work is needed to test this. The effect, if there is one, does not look very strong.

He concludes:

The record La Niña event was the fundamental cause of the heavy rains and floods, ie it was a natural fluctuation of the climate system. There may be a global warming signal enhancing this natural variability, but if so then this effect has been quite subtle, at least thus far.

Australian Carbon Follies

The Australian government's proposed carbon tax is politically and substantively problematic.  However, the Coalition's proposed policy in response does not even rise to that deeply troubling level.

The Coalition's shadow minister for climate, environment and heritage, Greg Hunt, was asked on ABC Lateline by Steve Cannane about the role of soil in sequestering carbon as part of the Coalition's proposed policy:

STEVE CANNANE: How much land across the country will be needed to be turned over to carbon soil to meet your emissions targets?

GREG HUNT: I've seen the Government's approach on this and what we've been told is that it is possible to capture - if you increase soils by half a per cent per annum in a small percentage of Australian soils you can capture 150 million tonnes per annum. Now there are differing estimates. There are differing estimates ...

STEVE CANNANE: Over what kind of land mass are we talking about here?

GREG HUNT: We are talking about a land mass, if you are achieving the 150 million tonnes, of an area of roughly 100 square kilometres. Not tens of thousands, but 100 square kilometres of intensive agriculture would make an extraordinary achievement on many of the estimates.

One problem with Hunt's reply is that the math doesn't add up -- 100 square kilometers is 10,000 hectares. That would imply an uptake of 15,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year!

What does Hunt do when called on his mistake?

Rather than just say "Oops, I misspoke" he claims that when he said 100 square kilometers, he actually meant a square 100 kilometers on a side.  He even doctored the transcript of the Lateline interview on his offical website to indicate that he said something that he did not:

STEVE CANNANE
How much land across the country will be needed to be turned over to carbon soil to meet your emissions targets?

GREG HUNT
I've seen the Government's approach on this and what we've been told is that it is possible to capture - if you increase soils by half a per cent per annum in a small percentage of Australian soils you can capture 150 million tonnes per annum. Now there are differing estimates. There are differing estimates ...

STEVE CANNANE
Over what kind of land mass are we talking about here?

GREG HUNT
We are talking about a land mass, if you are achieving the 150 million tonnes, of an area of roughly 100 squared kilometres [100km by 100km]. Not tens of thousands, but 100 squared kilometres of intensive agriculture would make an extraordinary achievement on many of the estimates.

It is easy enough to check the video of the interview to see what Hunt actually said (starting at 9:30) and to realize that the transcript on his official web site is falsified.



The second and deeper problem with Hunt's "corrected" statements is that while they may reflect what he wish he had said, they are nonetheless scientifically incorrect, and not by a little bit.  Lateline followed up with Hunt on his error, noting the altered transcript, and Hunt explained:

When I talk about the 100 squared, that's all about a hundred by a hundred square kilometres or a hundred kilometres by a hundred kilometres, 10,000 square kilometres, a million hectares. You can play a game, respectfully, or we can be serious about what's the calculation here. A million hectares at a 150 tonnes of C02 equivalent per hectare is the figure that we're talking about, but that's the intensive number.

The further problem that Hunt has following his "correction" is that his figure for how much carbon dioxide can be sequestered per hectare exceeds estimates from Australian government scientists by a factor of 75 to 450 tonnes per hectare:

The best estimates that we've come up with right now, which is based on a fairly serious review of the scientific literature that's been published over the last 20 years or so, we see that on a C02 basis, somewhere between 0.3 tonnes of C02 equivalents per hectare per year, up to an upper limit of around about two tonnes of carbon per hectare per year on average.

Taking Hunt's numbers for the amount of carbon dioxide to be sequestered in soil and the government scientists estimates for the annual flux, the resulting calculus suggests that 65% of the entire Australian continent would be needed to sequester about 40% of current carbon dioxide emissions.  There is about as much chance of that happening as Australia decarbonizing to Japanese levels by 2020 (PDF).

Julia Gillard's carbon policy may be a mess, but it seems that the best thing that it has going for it is that the Coalition's effort is mired in the dirt.

The Talking Points Memo Julia Gillard Should Have Written

[UPDATE 3 April: The Talking points memo that the Labor party actually wrote is here in PDF.]

If Julia Gillard decided to follow the proposals in The Climate Fix for putting a price on carbon, then what would her proposed carbon tax look like and how might it be sold?

I suggest an answer to this question in an op-ed now up at ABC News Australia.  Based on the many comments on the article so far, the warning in the last paragraph seems appropriate!  Please have a look and if you have comments for me, please share here.

More Praise for The Climate Fix

Harold Lasswell, one of the founders of the policy movement in academia of the mid-twentieth century, once wrote that "the whole aim of the scientific student of society is to make the obvious unescapable." So it is high praise indeed to read Mark Sagoff's fine review of The Climate Fix, just out in Issues in Science and Technology, where he writes:

The great achievement of The Climate Fix is to make the obvious obvious. No small feat in these confused times.

Global Temperature Trends

THIS POST FIRST APPEARED 9 DEC 2009. SEE THIS FOR MORE.

In an earlier post I made the case that one needs to know only two things about the science of climate change to begin asking whether accelerating decarbonization of the economy might be worth doing:

• Carbon dioxide has an influence on the climate system.
• This influence might well be negative for things many people care about.

That is it. An actual decision to accelerate decarbonization and at what rate will depend on many other things, like costs and benefits of particular actions unrelated to climate and technological alternatives. In this post I am going to further explain my views, based on an interesting question posed in that earlier thread. What would my position be if it were to be shown, hypothetically, that the global average surface temperature was not warming at all, or in fact even cooling (over any relevant time period)? Would I then change my views on the importance of decarbonizing the global energy system?

And the answer is ... no!

My concern about the potential effects of human influences on the climate system are not a function of global average warming over a long-period of time or of predictions of continued warming into the future. A point that my father often makes, and I think that he is absolutely right, is that what maters are the effects of human influences on the climate system on human and ecological scales, not at the global scale. No one experiences global average temperature and it is very poorly correlated with things that we do care about in specific places at specific times.

Consider the following thought experiment. Divide the world up into 1,000 grid boxes of equal area. Now imagine that the temperature in each of 500 of those boxes goes up by 20 degrees while the temperature in the other 500 goes down by 20 degrees. The net global change is exactly zero (because I made it so). However, the impacts would be enormous. Let's further say that the changes prescribed in my thought experiment are the direct consequence of human activity. Would we want to address those changes? Or would we say, ho hum, it all averages out globally, so no problem? The answer is obvious and is not a function of what happens at some global average scale, but what happens at human and ecological scales.

In the real world, the effects of increasing carbon dioxide on human and ecological scales are well established, and they include a biogechemical effect on land ecosystems with subsequent effects on water and climate, as well as changes to the chemistry of the oceans. Is it possible that these effects are benign? Sure. Is it also possible that these effects have some negatives? Sure. These two factors alone would be sufficient for one to begin to ask questions about the worth of decarbonizing the global energy system. But greenhouse gas emissions also have a radiative effect that, in the real world, is thought to be a net warming, all else equal and over a global scale. However, if this effect were to be a net cooling, or even, no net effect at the global scale, it would not change my views about a need to consider decarbonizing the energy system one bit. There is an effect -- or effects to be more accurate -- and these effects could be negative.

Of course, not mentioned yet is that action to improve adaptation to climate doesn't depend at all on a human influence on the climate system, warming or cooling or whatever. Adaptation makes good sense regardless. So clearly my policy views on adaptation are largely insensitive to any issues related to global average temperature change.

The debate over climate change has many people on both sides of the issue wrapped up in discussing global average temperature trends. I understand this as it is an icon with great political symbolism. It has proved a convenient political battleground, but the reality is that it should matter little to the policy case for decarbonization. What matters is that there is a human effect on the climate system and it could be negative with respect to things people care about. That is enough to begin asking whether we want to think about accelerating decarbonization of the global economy.

To fully assess whether accelerated decarbonization makes sense would require us to ask, are there any other good reasons why accelerated decarbonization might make sense? And it turns out, there are many.

Kohlekraft? Ja Danke

Over the weekend, Germany's state of Baden-Württemberg saw historic election results with the long-time ruling Christian Democratic Union party being dumped by voters after 58 years in power in favor of the newly ascendant Greens. 

Conventional wisdom holds that the election's dramatic results were a consequence of the Japanese nuclear crisis and Chancellor Angela Merkel's clumsy efforts in announcing a moratorium on the nuclear plant extension that she had previously championed. I find this line of argument convincing, as well as the role played by Stuttgart-21, the controversial train station.  However, not all agree.

One point is clear, with political leadership of Baden-Württemberg the Greens have inherited a difficult, so might say impossible, set of conflicting political realities.  They promise a focus on continued economic growth and jobs (image above) and an shutdown of the state's nuclear power reactors.

The state is 45 percent owner of Energie Baden-Württemberg, or EnBW, which generates about half of its electricity from nuclear power plants. In its election platform, the Green party promised to shut down one plant immediately and the other in 2012. Both have been shut down temporarily because of a moratorium declared by Mrs. Merkel after the disaster in Japan.

It is unclear where the replacement power will come from, said Georg Zachmann, an energy specialist at Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels.

“In Baden-Württemberg there will be some very tough choices to be made,” Mr. Zachmann said. “The Greens now own assets that they do not want. It’s kind of a poison pill.”

Financial markets and analysts have more certainty about where that replacement power will come from:

"Getting rid of old nuclear plants means plants will run more coal and gas. That means around 70 million tonnes of extra carbon dioxide will be emitted and carbon is up on this prospect for now. The question is how much is this worth in terms of additional carbon price?" said Emmanuel Fages, analyst at Societe Generale/orbeo.

European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, who before his position in Brussels was Prime Minister of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, also supported the view that coal will act as a substitute to nuclear in Germany.

The policies and politics of  Baden-Württemberg bear watching.

Like it or Not

Writing in Saturday's FT, Ed Crooks reviews several books on innovation.  Of William Holstein's book, The Next American Economy, Crooks writes:

The heart of The Next American Economy is nine impressively thorough case studies of “clusters” of successful US businesses, mostly making innovative products such as new types of batteries and adhesives. A veteran reporter, Holstein expended a lot of shoe leather in his researches, from Massachusetts to California, and he does an excellent job of describing what he sees and letting his subjects speak for themselves.

The point that crops up with startling regularity in their stories is the importance of government, both national and local, in helping these businesses to grow. A North Carolina technology company called Protochips, for example, pays warm tribute to the efforts of state and federal government agencies in helping it to export, including “excellent” Japanese translation.

Often, the positive contribution of government comes from the Pentagon, sometimes through its lavish spending on contracts with high-tech companies, and sometimes through its own research. As he and several of the other writers point out, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency laid the foundations of what became the internet.

The lesson Holstein draws is that, “Whether we like it or not, the federal government is involved in the economy, and must be.” In other words, for good or ill the government has a huge influence over the economy and it would do better to use that influence effectively in pursuit of thought-out strategic goals.

This is very well stated. The essential and unavoidable nature of government involvement in processes of innovation is a point that is often missed in policy debates. A better debate starts with the acknowledgement -- like it or not -- that government has an important role in innovation. The more interesting policy questions are what the role might be in particular contexts to help steer innovation in desirable directions.

Roger Bilham on Honshu Earthquake and Tsunami

Roger Bilham, a professor of geology here at Colorado and a world expert on earthquakes, is just back from Japan and has put up a report on the earthquake. The image above, from his report, shows the planet's largest earthquakes from 1900. Of the notable 40-year gap starting in the 1960s Roger writes:

The Honshu earthquake is one of 5 earthquakes in the world to have exceeded Mw=8.4 since 2004. Initial estimates of its magnitude (Mw=8.9) have now been superceded by its Mw=9.0 status. The recent 5 mega-quakes were preceded by a four decade gap that followed a cluster of megaquakes between 1950 and 1964. No significance to the gap has been established although there appears to have been a reduction in global energy release after the 1960 cluster

Of the effects of the earthquake and tsunami on the Fushima nuclear power facility he writes:

The Fukushima Nuclear reactor successfully shut down in the Mw=9 earthquake. This must be considered a success, because shaking intensities were apparently close to Mercalli Intensity VII. Thirty minutes later a tsunami flooded the reactor buildings. In hindsight it appears impossible to believe that nuclear power stations were located on a shoreline without recognizing the engineering difficulties attending prolonged immersion by a large tsunami. In 1896 a 33 m high tsunami drowned the Sanriku coastline 200 km to the north of Fukushima. A 23 m wave surged on the same coast in 1933, and in 1993 a 30 m wave swept over Okushira Island. The Fukushima plant was protected by a 5.7 m tsunami barrier but the wave height here apparently exceeded 10 m, flooding the generators and electrical wiring in the basement and lower levels of the power plant. Nuclear power plants are simply not designed to be immersed in sea water.

A 33 m tsunami?  Wow.

In his travelogue, Roger reminds us that seismologists are not like the rest of us:

I chose the 14th floor rather than the 3rd floor because being a seismologist, I wanted to really experience large aftershocks at first hand. Only the following day did I realize there was no 13th floor so I guess the 13th floor had been labeled 14.  I slept through two M=5.5 events but awoke with delight to a Mw6.2 about 80 km away.  Like thunder and lightning, if you count the time between the first jolt and the rolling surface waves you can gauge the distance quite well.

During the 2 am aftershock, the building heaved mightily and erratically at first, and then in the next ten seconds settled to a long swaying motion with gentle creaks of approval from the furniture.  There was that uneasy feeling in the middle about whether it was going to get bigger.  But no, it stopped eventually.  Pretty lame sort of event in fact - no sirens, no screaming from nearby rooms.  I found out later I was the sole occupant of the 13/14th floor.

Thanks Roger for the report!