So why is all the publicity focussed on beef and agriculture but little on air travel and Sun holidays which are the worst offenders of all in co2 emissions.
Three reasons:
- Everybody likes to think they're against climate change, but they have much less idea about:
- the economic impact of going back to 1990 CO₂ levels (since when the global population has gone up 40%)
- practical approaches to implementing such a reversal
- Most people are quite innumerate and/or ignorant of the energy economy, and so can't compare the impact of different efforts.
- People are in favour of approaches that least affect them.
Hi Joe et al,
Can you answer the following questions please?
1. Do you believe climate change is happening?
Yes.
2. If so, what do you think are the causes?
- Natural variability
- Changes in solar output
- CO₂ and aerosols from volcanoes and wildfires
- Chemical weathering of rocks
- Variations in Earth's orbital parameters (precession of the apsides etc.)
- Changes to the configurations of the continents affecting:
- ocean circulation and the thermohaline current (e.g. isthmus of Panama)
- chemical weathering (e.g. the Tibetan plateau)
- Loads of other things we know about
- Loads of other things we don't know about
- Anthropogenic inputs
- Land clearance for the last ten thousand years
- Agriculture
- Industrial CO₂ and aerosols
- Feedback effects that we're less sure about, affecting:
- Earth's albedo (due to lower ice coverage)
- accelerated CO₂ emissions from arctic tundra
- accelerated methane emissions from ocean clathrates
- ocean circulation overturning rate
- Loads of other things we don't know about
3. Do you think it is necessary to do something about it?
Yes, but not at all costs.
4. What are your solutions?
First, we should accept a few things. In the future there will be extreme climate change that we can't do anything about. We already live in an extreme period: we are in the middle of a slight warming in one of the coldest periods in geological time. And it's already one of the longer interglacials of the Quaternary ice age, quite possibly due to the anthropogenic effects of land use changes since the Neolithic. If so, human induced climate change is an unqualified good thing, as otherwise we'd be living (or dying) in this part of the world under a mile of ice.
Second, we should not just dismiss the current situation by saying "the climate always changes". Just because we are overdue an ice age does not mean we shouldn't be concerned about warming. There are significant potential impacts from sea level rise, changing weather patterns, and extreme weather events. There are also guaranteed economic impacts from certain approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That is why I am very distrustful of climate change extremists. On the one hand you have ignorant people who, for dogmatic reasons, insist that anthropogenic climate change is a myth. On the other hand, you have people who insist that we must use all methods, no matter how costly
and ineffectual, to delay climate change. The latter are a bigger threat to society in my opinion, as squandering resources on useless approaches will cost us dearly when we most need them.
Therefore, I believe we should have regard for the risk/reward calculus. We should not let the science deniers off the hook, nor should we let the
policy response zealots talk about changes without enumerating their negative, as well as positive, impacts. Overall, the world has benefitted enormously from increased energy usage. Dramatically fewer people are in poverty in recent decades. Hundreds of millions have joined the global middle class just since the turn of the millennium. Unfortunately, some of that has involved increased debt levels, unproductive use of resources, and unfair concentration of wealth. But ultimately all the wealth comes from either stuff we grow, or stuff we dig out of the ground, primarily energy commodities.
Energy is the world's most basic currency. Everyone needs more of it -- so that there is electricity to make cities safer at night, so that seawater can be desalinated and deserts irrigated, and countless other life-enhancing activities. Without it, children can't study after dark to lift themselves out of desperate poverty, women die from inhaling smoke from the cow dung fires they have to cook on, and other such horrible degradations inflicted on energy-poor people. It's why China is building a coal-fired generating plant every week. And the biggest, most important thing we have to get through our heads is:
we have neither the moral authority, nor any practical way, to stop them.
So we need to start with practicalities, not handwringing and pious platitudes. And the most practical starting point is to accept that the world is going to use more energy, not less, and there's nothing we can (or probably
should) do about that. So then we can consider how our increased energy usage can have less environmental impact. Well, we're already doing lots of that through:
- better home insulation
- more energy efficient buildings
- use of less carbon-intensive fuels
- use of renewable energy sources
It is possible to do things better. The European Union, for example, uses a lot less oil per dollar of GDP than the USA. On the other hand, the USA leads the world in greenhouse gas emission reductions. How come? Because natural gas has become cheaper than coal for producing electricity. And burning natural gas creates 60% less CO₂ than even the most efficient modern coal plant. Germany, on the other hand, is burning increasing amount of dirty brown lignite, due to its misguided populist move away from nuclear after the Fukushima Daiichi accident. That's why we should be promoting global natural gas usage and Liquefied Natural Gas processing. China's south coast LNG plants already import the same amount of gas as total UK consumption (around 3 Tcf). And they intend to increase that by 600% over the next ten years. Think of the amount of CO₂ from coal that can be avoided. Yet you have doom-mongering Greenies claiming that our natural gas has to be left in the ground. It's insane!
The future has to involve a broad mixture of approaches. Wind, and especially solar power have a role to play. But they are not universally available and not problem free, and need technological breakthroughs in grid storage. Though crucially important, they are never going to be the whole answer. The British Isles doesn't receive enough sunlight to power its car fleet, let alone anything else. Other renewables can be safely ignored. Geothermal is very niche, and anybody telling you that wave and tidal power can solve anything has sipped too much of the Green Kool-Aid. Biofuels are downright immoral, with corn ethanol, palm oil and sugar cane relying on either environmental degradation or near slave labour.
The eventual answer -- which will make most hypocritical Greenies incandescent with anger (I wonder could we harness that
) -- has to involve a huge increase in nuclear power. It is not only zero-carbon, but also the safest form of power generation we have. And that's just today. In the near future we will have fission power plants capable of burning up existing nuclear waste stockpiles, and in the slightly longer term we will almost certainly have nuclear fusion producing very low and easily manageable levels of active waste. The future of inexhaustible green energy is most definitely nuclear.
So in summary, my answer is:
- Quit the useless handwringing;
- Stop proposing pathetic measures that hurt the existing economy with almost no impact on the problem;
- Use economically practical renewable energy sources;
- Increase the use of "bridge fuels" like natural gas;
- Stop killing the nuclear industry through excessive and piecemeal regulation;
- Start a "Manhattan project" approach to new nuclear technologies;
- Remember that:
- if we kill our economy, then we have no options;
- if we have enough cheap energy we can transform the carbon content of the atmosphere through direct air capture, which is already technologically (but not yet economically) feasible.