Geoengineering – A Tool to Calculate the Cost of Climate Change

Posted on May 13, 2014 by climatechangefork

Cost-benefit analysis is a systematic approach to estimating the strength of various alternative options, determining the best approach, and therefore justifying certain activities in various fields. It is often required by law to justify new government regulations. Climate change is no exception. Often with climate change, the costs calculated are those of the present, while the benefits are primarily seen as belonging to the future. As I have mentioned before (February 18, 2013) economists tend to discount the future. In the context of climate change, this discounting involves assumptions about future availability of better technologies as well as resources for mitigation and adaptation. To use a personal example that I often use in class – in my lifetime the global population has risen from about 2 billion to 7 billion, and the GDP/Person has risen from about $2,000 to about $8,000. The total global wealth has increased by factor close to 15. At the same rate of increase, toward the end of the century an average global citizen will be as rich as an average American is today. The natural inclination is to do nothing now and leave the work to our future rich descendants (our children and grandchildren).

What about the cost? Here is what the IPCC wrote in its recent Working Group 2 Summary for Policy Makers report:

Global economic impacts from climate change are difficult to estimate. Economic impact estimates completed over the past 20 years vary in their coverage of subsets of economic sectors and depend on a large number of assumptions, many of which are disputable, and many estimates do not account for catastrophic changes, tipping points, and many other factors. With these recognized limitations, the incomplete estimates of global annual economic losses for additional temperature increases of ~2°C are between 0.2 and 2.0% of income (±1 standard deviation around the mean) (medium evidence, medium agreement). Losses are more likely than not to be greater, rather than smaller, than this range (limited evidence, high agreement). Additionally, there are large differences between and within countries. Losses accelerate with greater warming (limited evidence, high agreement), but few quantitative estimates have been completed for additional warming around 3°C or above. Estimates of the incremental economic impact of emitting carbon dioxide lie between a few dollars and several hundreds of dollars per tonne of carbon (robust evidence, medium agreement). Estimates vary strongly with the assumed damage function and discount rate.

The topic is a subject of active research. A summary of a European Union project on the topics is given below:

ClimateCost (the Full Costs of Climate Change) is a major research project on the economics of climate change, funded from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme.

The objective of the project is to advance knowledge in three areas:

  • Long-term targets and mitigation policies.
  • Costs of inaction (the economic effects of climate change).
  • Costs and benefits of adaptation.

The projects is addressing these objectives through seven tasks:

  1. Identify and develop consistent scenarios for climate change and socio-economic development, including mitigation scenarios.
  2. Quantify in physical terms, and value as economic costs, the effects of future climate change (the ‘costs of inaction’) under different scenarios for the EU and other major negotiator countries (China, India). This analysis will be at a disaggregated level, undertaken, where possible using spatial analysis (Geographic Information Systems, GIS). The analysis will include market and non-market sectors (coasts, health, ecosystems, energy, water and infrastructure). The analysis will also quantify and value the costs and ‘benefit’ of adaptation.
  3. Assess the potential physical effects and economic costs of major catastrophic events and major socially contingent effects.
  4. Update the mitigation costs of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, consistent with medium- and long-term reduction targets/ stabilisation goals for the mitigation scenarios, including (induced) technological change, non-CO2 GHG and sinks, and recent abatement technologies.
  5. Quantify the ancillary air-quality co-benefits (in physical and economic terms) of mitigation, using a spatially detailed disaggregated approach to quantify benefits in Europe, China and India.
  6. Develop and apply a number of General Circulation Models (GCMs) and Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to integrate the analyses.
  7. Bring the information together to provide policy relevant output, including undertaking analysis of policy scenarios.

What does all of this have to do with geoengineering?

Under the term “geoengineering,” one can include suggestions for attempts to globally counter the damage that we are making to the chemistry of the atmosphere by trying to restore the conditions through human interventions. In 2012, the IPCC compiled a special report on the topic. Here are two paragraphs that define the issues (IPCC, 2012: Meeting Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Expert Meeting on Geoengineering. IPCC Working Group III Technical Support Unit, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany, pp. 99.):

Background:

The concept of geoengineering can be traced back to the 1960s with a US report calling for research on “possibilities to deliberately bringing about countervailing climatic changes” to that of CO2 (Marchetti, 1977). The term geoengineering itself was originally used in the 1970s by Marchetti (1977) to describe the context of the idea of injecting CO2 into the ocean to reduce the atmospheric burden of this greenhouse gas. Since that time, the term has evolved considerably, coming to encompass a broad, and ill-defined, variety of concepts for intentionally modifying the Earth’s climate at the large scale (Keith, 2000). As a result, discussions of geoengineering in both academic and public contexts have sometimes convoluted characteristics from different techniques in ways that have unhelpfully confused discussions. Nonetheless, since Paul Crutzen’s 2006 editorial essay (Crutzen, 2006), scientific, policy and media attention to geoengineering concepts has grown rapidly. Several assessments have been conducted at the national level (The Royal Society, 2009; GAO, 2011; Rickels et al., 2011).

Terms and Issues:

Geoengineering refers to a broad set of methods and technologies that aim to deliberately alter the climate system in order to alleviate the impacts of climate change. Most, but not all, methods seek to either (a) reduce the amount of absorbed solar energy in the climate system (Solar Radiation Management) or (b) increase net carbon sinks from the atmosphere at a scale sufficiently large to alter climate (Carbon Dioxide Removal). Scale and intent are of central importance. Two key characteristics of geoengineering methods of particular concern are that they use or affect the climate system (e.g., atmosphere, land or ocean) globally or regionally and/or could have substantive unintended effects that cross national boundaries. Geoengineering is different from weather modification and ecological engineering, but the boundary can be fuzzy.

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) refers to the intentional modification of the Earth’s shortwave radiative budget with the aim to reduce climate change according to a given metric (e.g., surface temperature, precipitation, regional impacts, etc). Artificial injection of stratospheric aerosols and cloud brightening are two examples of SRM techniques. Methods to modify some fast-responding elements of the longwave radiative budget (such as cirrus clouds), although not strictly speaking SRM, can be related to SRM. SRM techniques do not fall within the usual definitions of mitigation and adaptation.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) methods refer to a set of techniques that aim to remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere by either (1) increasing natural sinks for carbon or (2) using chemical engineering to remove the CO2, with the intent of reducing the atmospheric CO2 concentration. CDR methods involve the ocean, land, and technical systems, including such methods as iron fertilization, large-scale afforestation, and direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere using engineered chemical means. Some CDR methods fall under the category of geoengineering, while this may not be the case for others, with the distinction being based upon the magnitude, scale, and impact of the particular CDR activities. The boundary between CDR and mitigation is not clear and there could be some overlap between the two given current definitions.

Among the earlier efforts in this direction were the attempts to seed barren stretches of the ocean with iron fertilizers. The thinking was that iron was the missing ingredient preventing vegetation from growing there; once we seeded these stretches with the missing ingredient, vegetation would grow and start to sequester carbon dioxide, thus shifting the balance. There were a few experiments that proved that the concept was valid. I told my wife about these efforts and she almost started with divorce proceedings. “How dare you play with God’s creation? (she is not religious) What about unintended consequences (like poisoning the oceans for example)?” She was not convinced even after I mentioning that we are already doing just that continuously by dumping all of the products of our waste into the atmosphere. Under the “Terms and Issues” of the IPCC, ocean fertilization falls under the CDR category. It gets worse; seeding clouds to alter the radiation balance falls under the SRM initiatives and is intended to restore the changes that we force on the system through the atmospheric chemical changes. As I have mentioned before (March 25, 2014) the radiation balance changes not only the energy cycle but also the water cycle. Under these conditions, whenever anybody – globally – got weather that they don’t like, they would immediately blame it on the guys that are doing the cloud seeding… great.

However, in my opinion, there is one very useful way that one can use geoengineering with no fear of unintended consequences. Conceptually, geoengineering is based upon existing technologies. One can price said existing technologies. Therefore, we can take the known atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses of a certain year – say 2010, calculate what it would take to chemically restore the atmosphere in future years to that level, and define this number as the cost of climate change at that time. Once the standard and the methodology are decided, the numbers shouldn’t be controversial. This way we will be pricing the cause instead of the uncertain effects. That way, we can directly calculate the cost-benefit analysis for any mitigation efforts that we might choose to adopt.

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Elisa Wood Guest Post: Microgrids

Posted on May 6, 2014 by climatechangefork

This week, with her kind permission, I am reposting two articles by Elisa Wood. She is an editor at EnergyEfficiencyMarkets.com and has been writing about energy for more than two decades for top industry publications. Her work has been picked up by CNN, the New York Times, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal Online and the Washington Post. She also writes for Renewable Energy World magazine, Power Engineering International and AOL Energy, and is a correspondent for McGraw-Hill/Platts Energy.

Last May (2013), she interviewed me for an article about adaptive rebuilding in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, the Moore, Oklahoma tornado and the increasingly prevalent occurrence of extreme weather events. This week, I am bringing her into my conversation about microgrids.

Microgrids: Coming or No?

Elisa Wood 
May 09, 2013

You know that experience, when you buy a new car, and suddenly you see the model everywhere? Since Superstorm Sandy I’ve had the equivalent experience with the term ‘microgrid.’

Policymakers and thought leaders in the U.S. Northeast started talking microgrid in earnest shortly after the October 2012 storm leveled swaths of their region. Lately, the term seems to arise in almost every interview I do about transmission and reliability — whether about the U.S., Japan, Sweden, India or other areas of the world.

These small, electricity islands have been around for a long time, but mostly confined to colleges and military bases. Are we about to see more widespread development?

Microgrids are smaller versions of the larger grid, but the power plants are closer to the customer. Hence, they have fewer miles of wire that is vulnerable to falling trees. They are typically connected to the larger grid. But when the grid goes down, the microgrid can disengage and keep operating. So microgrids are used as a way to maintain electric reliability in carved-out areas.

I recently asked three respected smart grid experts for their views on a potential microgrid boom, and they gave me three different slants.

“Truthfully, I think microgrid is a very good concept — it has certain applications — but not in general,” said GE’s John McDonald, director of technical strategy and policy development for GE Energy Management’s Digital Energy.

He sees microgrid as successful in rural areas on military bases and at universities. “But you wouldn’t want to have, in the Continental U.S., the grid be composed of thousands of little microgrids. It would be very difficult to manage that,” McDonald said.

Bradley Williams, vice president for industry strategy at Oracle Utilities, has a different view. Information technology can solve problems that inhibit more widespread use of microgrid, he says.

“The military bases and campuses are piloting this, but that is just the beginning,” Williams said.

He envisions communities driving future microgrid development, particularly those with building codes that require solar, wind or other forms of self-generation.

“I do think it is coming: it will not be driven by the utilities,” he said, adding that utilities will get on board once they know microgrids pose no danger to line workers — an information management issue that Oracle is working on.

Meanwhile, Michael Gordon, CEO of Joule Assets, describes the coming microgrid as a bundling of distributed generation and virtual power plants, which can serve utility resource needs.

Microgrid will help alleviate a kind of inefficiency beginning to emerge on the grid as more and more consumers and businesses buy their own generators following each big storm, he said.

“People are installing things that are not cost-effective because they don’t want a one week outage,” said Gordon, whose New York company helps create energy reduction assets.

What’s coming are microgrids made up of consumer-producers who will sell into the various electricity markets, Gordon said. The consumer will finance and build the asset and then sell energy, efficiency or demand reduction. The utility may act as buyer.

It is not only Superstorm Sandy that is spurring talk of microgrid. Discussion heightened about the concept, as well, after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.  The Sendai microgrid at Tohoku Fukushi University continued to provide power while the rest of the grid failed, points out a PWC report, “The Future of Microgrids: Their Promise and Challenges.”

Microgrid also is gaining steam because of the Obama administration’s push for more combined heat and power, which is often included within a microgrid. Obama wants the U.S. to build 40 GW of CHP by 2020.

Here are a couple of microgrid developments to watch in the U.S.

The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection in February announced that it is evaluating 27 microgrid projects for possible funding. The projects were among 36 that sought $15 million in available state grants. Some of the projects are sizable — as large as 10 MW. Governor Dannel Malloy has recommended an additional $30 million for the program over the next two years.

In nearby New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo has created an energy highway blueprint to modernize the state’s electric system, which has resulted in several proposals, some of them microgrid.

Many other examples exist of the growing use of microgrids. Readers, please feel free to use the comment section here to let us know about them.

Elisa Wood is a long-time energy writer whose work has been picked up by CNN, the New York Times, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. Click here to see her articles.

The information and views expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author and not necessarily those of RenewableEnergyWorld.com or the companies that advertise on this Web site and other publications. This blog was posted directly by the author and was not reviewed for accuracy, spelling or grammar.

The blog has been reposted on Climate Change Fork, with the author’s permission; no changes have been made from the original post.

This article is published under a cross licensing agreement with RealEnergy Writers.com. 

Why Insiders are Bullish on Microgrid

March 10, 2014 By

microgrid graphic

Microgrids are coming to the US, but they face some significant roadblocks. What’s driving the sudden upswing in their development? And what’s getting in the way?

A panel of microgrid experts tackled these questions last week at the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) BuildingEnergy 14 conference in Boston.

Ed Krapels, founder of Anbaric Holding, acknowledged that he might appear to be a somewhat unlikely supporter of microgrids. Krapels is a long-time developer of transmission. But even as he continues to develop transmission, he has become bearish on transmission and bullish on microgrids.

“I’ve learned in the last 15 years that building transmission is almost impossible in the Northeast,” he said, pointing to Northeast Utilities’ Northern Pass project, as an example. Fierce opposition from New Hampshire landowners has delayed the line, which is meant to bring 1200 MW of hydroelectricity from Canada into New England.

Once the US figures out the right business model for microgrids, they will “take off in the same way independent development of power plants has taken off,” Krapels said.

Galen Nelson, director of market development at Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, said that the biggest barrier to microgrid is not technical or financial but political. The solution lies in “changing the way we think about this business model and moving a lot of powerful players in the right direction,” he said.

Massachusetts regulators have a grid modernization proceeding underway that includes a look at microgrids. The state plans to designate funds and issue a solicitation that is likely to include a microgrid component, he said.

Meanwhile, nearby Connecticut has issued two solicitations already for microgrids, one last week. The state has exhibited “strong political will” to create a regulatory framework that accommodates microgrids, said Genevieve Sherman, senior manager at the Clean Energy Finance and Investment Authority.

“Utility franchise rights in Connecticut are now essentially erased for municipal microgrids. So if you have a microgrid in Connecticut that is serving what is considered a municipal critical facility, you can string wires wherever you want, and the utility is not allowed to sue you – although that could still be challenged in court,” she said.

That leads to the big elephant in the room. How will utilities react to this new wave of microgrid development? Will they block or embrace it?

Read Part II of this discussion on EnergyEfficiencyMarkets.com. Or have the next part delivered directly to your mailbox by subscribing to Energy Efficiency Markets’ free newsletter.

The blog has been reposted on Climate Change Fork, with the author’s permission; no changes have been made from the original post.

This article is published under a cross licensing agreement with EnergyEfficiencyMarkets.com.

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Microgrids – History is Catching Up.

Posted on April 29, 2014 by climatechangefork

Two weeks ago (April 15, 2014), I discussed some of the changes necessary in the electrical grid to accommodate sustainable power sources. To a major extent, the blog was based on an MIT report titled “The Future of the Electrical Grid.” Appendix B.2 of this report provides a brief tutorial on the “Fundamentals of Electrical Power.” Two key sentences in this Appendix describe the origin of the two most fundamental terms – voltage and current:

 Voltage can be considered analogous to the pressure in a water pipe. Voltage is measured in volts (V), and for large values expressed in kilovolts (kV) or megavolts (MV).

Current is a measure of the rate of flow of charge through a conductor. It is measured in amperes. Current can be considered analogous to the rate of flow of water through a pipe.

Water infrastructure is intimately connected to that of electrical distribution – and not only through terminology. As President Obama’s comment during his visit to California (April 1, 2014 blog) and the MIT report clearly indicate, both distribution systems need major upgrades. This need of an upgrade is not confined to the US; it is global. But there are some major differences – both between the distribution systems of water and electricity – and the upgrade requirements of developed and developing countries. I will discuss the needed modifications to the water infrastructure and the interconnections between the water and energy infrastructures in future blogs. Right now, I would like to focus on some specific aspects of the electrical grid.

The MIT report describes the early history of the electrical grid in the United States in these words:

Thomas Edison introduced the first electric power system in New York City in 1882. This direct current (dc) system initially served 59 customers in the Wall Street area at a price of about $5 per kilowatt hour (kWh). It operated at 100 volts and mainly supplied electric lights. By the end of the 1880s, many cities had similar small central stations that each served only a few city blocks.

To the extent that the industry was regulated, city governments performed this function. City governments also became major customers for street lighting and trolley services and could extract various concessions in exchange for the right to string wires. Soon, they also became owners. By 1900, municipally owned utilities accounted for about 8% of total U.S. generation. Vigorous debates about the relative merits of government- and investor-owned utilities continued in the U.S. through the 1930s, when federal policies were established that today still favor government-owned and cooperative utilities.

Today, this description fits the definition of a microgrid, which – according to Wikipedia– is an example of distributed generation of electricity:

A microgrid is a localized grouping of electricity generation, energy storage, and loads that normally operates connected to a traditional centralized grid (macrogrid). This single point of common coupling with the macrogrid can be disconnected. The microgrid can then function autonomously. Generation and loads in a microgrid are usually interconnected at low voltage. From the point of view of the grid operator, a connected microgrid can be controlled as if it were one entity.

Microgrid generation resources can include fuel cells, wind, solar, or other energy sources. The multiple dispersed generation sources and ability to isolate the microgrid from a larger network would provide highly reliable electric power. Produced heat from generation sources such as microturbines could be used for local process heating or space heating, allowing flexible tradeoff between the needs for heat and electric power

The early grid fits this definition except for the aspect regarding connectivity. There was no main grid – this was the only grid.

Recently, microgrids have started to become very popular – both in the US and other developed countries. Next week, Elisa Wood, of EnergyEfficiencyMarkets.com will present a guest blog on the current interest in microgrids in the US.

My own interest in microgrids started in a different place. In a previous blog (September 3, 2012), I wrote about “Three Shades of Deniers.” For me the most disturbing shade was the “Fatalists”:

This group fully agrees with both the science and its predicted impact, but believes that since the task of preventing it is so enormous as to be practically undoable, they might as well enjoy life for as long as it lasts. Unfortunately, many in this group are good scientists.

The usual example that this group provides is India, citing that with more than one billion people – approximately 25% of them without electrical power – it will be impossible to prevent major increases in global greenhouse concentrations. I decided to travel there – to see for myself and, hopefully, try to do something about it. I fully realize that the issue is global, not unique to India. As I mentioned in a previous blog (April 15, 2014) close to 1.5 billion people do not have access to electricity, yet in large part due to the recent, much better, global access to phones, they are fully aware of how access to electricity can improve quality of life.

So the question is what they are doing to gain such access, and whether these measures justify the skepticism of the fatalists. I was able to interest a colleague of mine, Prof. Vinit Parmar from our film department, and we went exploring. We went to a region of India called the Sundarbans, which is part of the West Bengal State, near the city of Kolkata (Calcutta). The region is shared by India and Bangladesh and is the home of one of the world’s largest deltas, formed by the outlets of the Ganges, the Brahmaphutra and the Meghna rivers into the Bay of Bengal. About 4 million people live on the Indian side of the border. The land’s topography has made it difficult to extend the Indian electrical grid, and until 1995 most of the inhabitants lived a Hunter-Gatherer way of life: “hunting” fish and gathering honey in the Mangrove forest. Around 1995, the Indian government (with some help from the US government) decided to do something about it and try to deliver electricity to the region. They decided to do it by skipping the coal stage, instead delivering the electricity in the most sustainable way that the budget would allow.

We tried to monitor this process through a documentary film; to accomplish this we needed some help but the result, along with the full list of contributors, can be seen in the short film “Quest for Energy.”

The film illustrates the initial delivery of electricity in the small town of Gosaba. This delivery comes by way of a microgrid that runs through some of the main streets in town. Here, the microgrid doesn’t function as an additional, supplemental aspect of the main grid. In fact, since in this case, the microgrid is the only grid, in a sense, it resembles the main grid in the US more than 100 years ago. The proliferation of microgrids in rich countries is a boon to developing countries like India because it promotes further exploration and improvement of such technology. Hopefully these innovations will continue to be applicable not only in rich countries, where the microgrids function mostly as a form of adaptation, but also in poor countries where in many regions they are the only game in town.

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The Wicked Son

Posted on April 22, 2014 by climatechangefork

Happy Earth Day!

This will be the last Passover-inspired blog. As in the previous two blogs, I will try to close the gap between a very ancient tradition and present and future needs that are compatible with the objectives that we have set for ourselves. This blog will be posted on Tuesday, April 22. On this date we celebrate both Earth Day and my wife’s birthday. One of the best presents that we can give to the world on Earth Day and to my wife on her birthday is to try to shift our bad behavior. People who would be considered Wicked Sons by the Hagaddah will have to try to modify their habits to closer to those of Wise ones and in the process to make the world a better place for all of us. Public education, in its true sense of educating the public, is probably the best vehicle to help us achieve such a modest goal. Fortunately, a group of top entertainers and journalists are trying to achieve this through exposure to commercial television. This blog will go through some of my initial personal responses.

About 8 months ago (August 6, 2013) I responded in a short comment to an Op-Ed in the New York Times called “A Republican Case for Climate Action.” The article, which was written by four prominent Republicans with extensive governmental background on environmental issues, included strong advocacy for national and international steps to mitigate climate change. I made the prediction there that the article would be a game changer in the political dispute on the topic. I was wrong. While the political dispute has continued, I haven’t read or heard anybody who referenced the Op-Ed. My editors made the comment that it would be much more effective to attach such comments by way of a Letter to the Editor, as that format was devised by the papers to serve just such an objective. I take my editors’ advise to heart.

Recently, I had the opportunity to respond: more than a week ago, an Op-Ed in the New York Times appeared in anticipation of a new Showtime series of “Years of Living Dangerously.” The piece was written by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger and published on April 9, 2014 under the title “Global Warming Scare Tactics.” Here are the first three paragraphs:

OAKLAND, Calif. — IF you were looking for ways to increase public skepticism about global warming, you could hardly do better than the forthcoming nine-part series on climate change and natural disasters, starting this Sunday on Showtime. A trailer for “Years of Living Dangerously” is terrifying, replete with images of melting glaciers, raging wildfires and rampaging floods. “I don’t think scary is the right word,” intones one voice. “Dangerous, definitely.”

Showtime’s producers undoubtedly have the best of intentions. There are serious long-term risks associated with rising greenhouse gas emissions, ranging from ocean acidification to sea-level rise to decreasing agricultural output.

But there is every reason to believe that efforts to raise public concern about climate change by linking it to natural disasters will backfire. More than a decade’s worth of research suggests that fear-based appeals about climate change inspire denial, fatalism and polarization.

Following my instructions, I immediately followed up with a response. Here is the full letter:

To the Editor:

Please find enclosed my submission to the “Letters to the Editor” section of the New York Times.

Re: “Global Warming Scare Tactics by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger” – Op-Ed April 9, 2014.

The point that Nordhous and Shellenberger raise in their piece goes way beyond this particular Showtime series (Years of Living Dangerously) of which they were only able to see the trailer (The 1st episode is already available on “Showtime on Demand”). It speaks to a much more general method of warning for any impending future disaster that requires immediate preventive actions. In climate change the requirements are more stringent because the required mitigating actions are global and thus require collective political decisions. The authors are absolutely right – in that it is necessary to keep in mind the psychology of the viewers.

The Scientific American just commented on a poll conducted by Stanford researchers, who found that – based on 21 surveys of almost 20,000 people in 46 states – the majority of Americans (in both Red and Blue states) believe that: temperatures are rising, human actions are part of the cause and government action is needed to limit greenhouse gas emission. That said, fewer than half of the polled residents in almost all states believe that global warming is extremely important to them personally.

Most people do not see the inherent contradiction in the attitude that a collective disaster will leave them untouched. A credible method of mass communication, such as the coming Showtime series, will at least keep the conversation going and buy time for the much slower educational efforts to bear fruit. Bless all involved.

I received the standard acknowledgement from the Times, stating that they are being swamped with letters (more than a 1,000 a day) so if I am not notified within a week about acceptance for publication, I am free to do as I wish with the letter. Since the deadline has passed, the letter is now under my full control. Yesterday (April 16, 2014) four responses showed up in the Times. As my wife commented, I shouldn’t take the rejection personally because my competition apparently included people who are much more famous than I am, and all of them expressed similar reservations to mine.

Since the Op-Ed was published, the first episode showed (there are 8 more to go). It included three segments; one of these segments, Narrated by Don Cheadle, focused on the droughts in Texas and California. In California the prominent belief is that climate change is an important contributor to the cause, while in Texas they believe that it is an act of God. Cheadle is going to Texas to follow and interview Katherine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and a devout evangelist. Harrison Ford is the narrator of the second segment, which focuses on Indonesia’s burning of the rainforest to make room for palm trees to produce palm oil, and the government’s complicity in this exercise. The third segment, narrated by Tom Friedman, tries to correlate the civil war in Syria with the severe drought that started at approximately the same time.

It is obvious from their piece that Nordhouse and Shellenberger don’t understand the series or its aims. The series was not designed to frighten but instead as a call to action. Since the required action is global and collective and requires political action, the series represents one of the best available tools to reach the widest possible audience. A well designed website complements the TV viewing.

Let’s get back to Passover and some definitions. My letter to the Times mentions a Scientific American piece, which shows research that most Americans – in both red and blue states – believe in man’s contribution to climate change.  While most view this as being a result of our heavy use of fossil fuels, the majority also believe that climate change will not impact them personally. Such an attitude fits perfectly with the Haggadah’s description of a Wicked Son, and how to deal with him:

What does the wicked one say? “What is this service to you?” He separates himself from the responsibility. And because he does so, be honest with him and tell him: “This is because of what Adonai has done for me, when he took me out of Egypt.” Emphasize you and not him, because even if he had been there, he would not have been worthy to be redeemed.

The story is part of the story of the four sons: in addition to the Wicked one we have the Wise one, the Simple one, and One that does not know how to ask questions. The corresponding passage about the Wise one goes as follows:

What does the wise one say? “What are these testimonies, laws and statutes that Adonai, our God, commanded you?” You should teach him the laws of the Passover: We do not finish eating with the Afikomen at the Passover seder.

Many have taken this to mean that a wise person must be able to acquire knowledge, and then use that to interpret the world around him.

Throughout the ages, the Four Sons have acquired rich symbolic interpretations. A good example of this is David Mamet’s book: The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Jewish self-hatred, and the Jews. Hopefully, the Showtime series will succeed in converting many Wicked Sons to Wise ones.

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Problems for a Contemporary Joseph

Posted on April 15, 2014 by climatechangefork

I am writing this blog one day before Passover. Barring unforeseen circumstances, the blog will be posted on Tuesday, April 15, the day of the 2nd Seder. Using Joseph as my timely hero is still permissible. Unlike the previous blog (April 8, 2014), which focused on an uncertain past, this blog will focus instead on an uncertain future. As it was written, Joseph’s achievement was predicting (based on interpreting God’s enlightenment in the form of Pharaoh’s dreams) the upcoming variability of food supply and rearranging the system accordingly: storing food in the good years to be distributed in the bad years.

If such an enlightening force were to show up today, what would be his/her job description? It would have to include preparing an infrastructure to adapt the world for a changing climate. The climate is changing at a human pace that has, and likely will continue to result in rising temperatures, sea level rise, and a rising variability of droughts and floods. This has/will also contribute to water stress, and therefore agricultural stress – mainly in the poorest parts of the world. Therefore, the job would also require alleviation of this water stress through energy-intensive desalination. In order to mitigate human-driven climate change, we need to go through energy transition; replacing predictable energy sources with highly variable ones.

The job description would also necessarily include drastic changes in the ownership distribution of the infrastructure, the regulatory structure and the price that each of us pays for energy and water. It would not take long for a contemporary Joseph to conclude that the best way forward would be to scrap the entire system and start from scratch to tailor the system to the uncertainties of the future. This would probably not work, however, because those with vested interests in the status quo will always fight with all their might to prevent such a thing from happening – in this case, by denying the uncertainties of the future. If we retain our democratic systems, the present fight in the USA over Obamacare will look like child’s play.

As usual, I will try to move from inflammatory generalities to some details. The necessary steps need to be taken – not in the ill-defined future, but now. The changes to the infrastructure of moving energy and water are already in motion. The fact is that the infrastructure is not suited to such changes, and they are already having their impacts.

Two weeks ago, when I discussed President Obama’s visit to California to offer a bit of help and sympathy in dealing with the recent drought, I included his quote:

Obama joked about the lengthy and incendiary history of water politics in California, saying, ‘I’m not going to wade into this. I want to get out alive on Valentine’s Day.’

He could have said the same thing about the history of water and energy policies throughout the entire country. Since the impact of climate change is not local but global, I will focus on the present situation in the United States, as well as the challenges that the world is facing as developing countries try to reach the status of developed countries. As we go along, in this blog and in future blogs, we will realize that many of the issues are global and that the job description of contemporary Joseph would have to go well beyond national boundaries to encompass the world.

In terms of the energy infrastructure, I will focus on the electrical grid. My main source of information about the electrical grid is a report that was compiled by MIT scientists. The report was issued toward the end of 2011 and is part of a series of reports that examine the infrastructure changes that need to be implemented as part of a strategy toward more sustainable energy sources. These reports include “The Future of Nuclear Power” (2003), “The Future of Geothermal Energy” (2006), “The Future of Coal” (2007), “Update to the Future of Nuclear Power “(2009), “The Future of Natural Gas” (2011) and “The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle” (2011). I have no doubt that these reports would be a required reading for our contemporary Joseph. The scope of changes that need to be implemented can be best accomplished by understanding the present situation.

The following Appendix of the MIT report (mentioned above), which heavily “borrowed” from the Department of Energy’s publications, explains the history of the electrical grid system in the US, giving us a better perspective on the here-and-now.

Thomas Edison introduced the first electric power system in New York City in 1882. This direct current (dc) system initially served 59 customers in the Wall Street area at a price of about $5 per kilowatt hour (kWh). It operated at 100 volts and mainly supplied electric lights. By the end of the 1880s, many cities had similar small central stations that each served only a few city blocks.

To the extent that the industry was regulated, city governments performed this function. City governments also became major customers for street lighting and trolley services and could extract various concessions in exchange for the right to string wires. Soon, they also became owners. By 1900, municipally owned utilities accounted for about 8% of total U.S. generation. Vigorous debates about the relative merits of government- and investor-owned utilities continued in the U.S. through the 1930s, when federal policies were established that today still favor government-owned and cooperative utilities.

The transformer was first demonstrated at scale in Germany in 1891. This innovation enabled the use of relatively high-voltage transmission capable of carrying alternating current (ac) power overlong distances with relatively low losses. In 1896, George Westinghouse began the hydroelectric development of Niagara Falls, transmitting significant power to Buffalo, New York, more than 20 miles away. This inaugurated the practice of locating generators at some distance from load centers and linking them by high-voltage transmission, then using transformers to lower the voltage delivered to ultimate customers.

Since then, engineering research and the development of new materials have enabled the use of ever-higher voltages. In the U.S., ac lines with voltages of up to 150 kilovolts (kV) were in place by 1910, and the first 245 kV line was commissioned in 1922. The invention of the transformer and high-voltage lines allowed private utilities to expand beyond municipal boundaries and take better advantage of economies of scale. Such expansion compounded problems with municipal regulation and led to state regulation of investor-owned electric utilities, generally with the utilities’ active support. This trend began with the establishment of regulatory commissions in Wisconsin, Georgia, and New York in 1907. By 1914, 30 states had regulatory commissions, and today all states and the District of Columbia have them.

Vertically integrated, investor-owned firms— performing generation, transmission, and distribution as the sole provider within designated service areas—emerged as the dominant model. States enabled these firms to charge prices that allowed them to cover their costs.

… This evolution was politically rather than technologically determined. Because the U.S. political system was highly decentralized until at least the 1930s and most electric utilities operated within a single state, state regulation was the politically natural successor to supervision by municipal governments. In a different political context, in England local utilities were unable to expand for political reasons, and the system remained highly fragmented until a 1926 law mandated the establishment of an integrated nationwide grid. In the U.S., due in part to strong faith in private enterprise over the first three decades of the 20th century, the relative importance of publicly owned utilities declined during this period.

… The federal role in the electric utility industry began in 1906, when legislation authorized the sale of surplus power from federal irrigation projects, giving sales preference to municipalities. Navigable waterways had been under Federal jurisdiction since the early 19th century, and the Federal Water Power Act of 1920 both codified federal powers over navigable waterways and established the Federal Power commission, later the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), to issue hydroelectric power licenses.

… The Federal Power Act of 1935 empowered the Federal Power Commission to regulate the wholesale transmission and sale of electric power. The Rural Electrification Act of1936 established the Rural Electrification.

Our contemporary Joseph will also find that presently (as of 2011) more than 20% of the World (close to 1.5 billion people) lacks access to electricity. Due to the larger prevalence of mobile phones than corresponding electrical grids, these 20% who lack access are fully aware of how life can be improved with access to electricity, and they are trying hard to get it. Joseph will find out that the way they are deciding to get access to electrical power has major impacts on all of us. We badly need Joseph’s wisdom to help with this transition.

It is not surprising that the ways in which the poorest people in the world are currently trying to gain access to electrical power closely resemble the ways in which we got our own access more than 100 years ago. Hopefully, a new Joseph can teach all of us how to learn from the experience. In future blogs I will try to draw some parallels between power and water infrastructure in the developing world with the earlier experiences of the developed world.

 

**As always, I welcome your feedback to my blog. I check my comments section regularly — please let me know what you think; start a discussion about one of my posts; tell me how you heard about Climate Change Fork. It’s always nice to hear if you like my blog, but I much prefer actual interactions.

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Waiting for Joseph

Posted on April 8, 2014 by climatechangefork

In a few days, my family, together with Jews all around the world, will start celebrating Passover with the seder meal (seder in Hebrew means “order”). Meanwhile, I assume that following recent tradition, President Obama and many on the White House staff will join in the celebration. The events that we celebrate are described in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Exodus and involve the emancipation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt.

The Bible is not a history book and the early parts of the Bible do not describe historical events that can be independently corroborated. Here is what Wikipedia shows as its origin:

Since the nineteenth century, most scholars have agreed that the Pentateuch consists of four sources which have been woven together. These four sources being combined together to form the Pentateuch sometime in the sixth century BCE. This theory is now known as the Documentary Hypothesis, and has been the dominant theory for the past two hundred years.[6].

The assembly of the Pentateuch is believed to have taken place in the Persian period about 2,500 years ago. This means that the books now stand on their own as a central focus of all three monotheistic religions.

During the Seder we read the Haggadah (“tell” in Hebrew) and pass the stories down through the generations.

The Haggadah briefly describes how the Israelites came to be in Egypt and how they were enslaved there, but the story is described in much greater detail in the book of Genesis. Joseph, the son of Jacob, played a decisive role in the beginning of this process. Here are two paragraphs from the King James Bible translation that describe the role that Joseph played in Egypt at the time:

33Now therefore let Pharaoh look out a man discreet and wise, and set him over the land of Egypt.

34Let Pharaoh do this, and let him appoint officers over the land, and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven plenteous years.

35And let them gather all the food of those good years that come, and lay up corn under the hand of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in the cities.

36And that food shall be for store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through the famine.

37And the thing was good in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of all his servants.

38And Pharaoh said unto his servants, Can we find such a one as this is, a man in whom the Spirit of God is?

39And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, Forasmuch as God hath shewed thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou art:

40Thou shalt be over my house, and according unto thy word shall all my people be ruled: only in the throne will I be greater than thou

47And in the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls.

48And he gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same.

49And Joseph gathered corn as the sand of the sea, very much, until he left numbering; for it was without number.

For me, this Seder is an opportunity to do more than thank God for freeing my ancestors from slavery at an uncertain point in a distant past. It is also an opportunity to thank God and the few surviving American soldiers from units associated with the American 30th division that saved me, my remaining family, and 2,500 other Bergen-Belsen inmates from a very uncertain future by intercepting the train that was transporting us from Bergen-Belsen to the Theresienstadt concentration camp that was further from the front line. The liberation took place on April 13, 1945. First Seder this year falls on the evening of April 14.

Going through the chores of buying some of the Passover necessities, my mind kept drifting to Joseph – not for the reasons that he was promoted to the second most powerful man in Egypt a few thousand years ago (again – we don’t have an independent source for this information except for the Bible) – but for his parallels to present existential needs. By all accounts, our current needs bear a great deal of resemblance to those he is written to have encountered in Egypt.

As written, he was able to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams to mean that seven bad years would follow the seven good years. Based on this knowledge, he was able to regulate the lands’ production over the good years and the bad years, and save Egypt from starvation during the bad years.

A pattern of seven good years and seven bad years, however, is very easy periodicity to handle (especially if you can accurately predict such periodicity).

Here is one of the main findings of the new IPCC 5th report of the Working Group II that was just published, as presented in the highly readable Summary for Policy Makers:

Impacts from recent climate-related extremes, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones, and wildfires, reveal significant vulnerability and exposure of some ecosystems and many human systems to current climate variability (very high confidence). Impacts of such climate-related extremes include alteration of ecosystems, disruption of food production and water supply, damage to infrastructure and settlements, morbidity and mortality, and consequences for mental health and human well-being. For countries at all levels of development, these impacts are consistent with a significant lack of preparedness for current climate variability in some sectors.14

The variability that Joseph was able to interpret for the Pharaoh was simple and predictable in today’s terms – easily handled by storing some products in the good years to be used in the bad years. By today’s understanding, weather – even without human intervention – is notoriously chaotic, meaning that its very high sensitivity to initial conditions can produce almost random final results. It is chaotic both in terms of temporal and spatial distributions. As the IPCC makes absolutely clear, human influence amplifies the variability considerably. This manifests itself in the water cycle in terms of floods, droughts, and extreme weather events. It is also apparent through both extreme heat events and record-breaking low temperatures (such as those many of us experienced during this last winter).

To regulate the increased variability, we need a “super Joseph” to help us adapt global networks of energy delivery (power grids) and water delivery to deal with these changes on a global scale. The next few blogs will focus on where we are on these issues.

Update: A new article about desalination in The Poughkeepsie Journal, written by two graduate students at Bard’s Center for Environmental Policy, mentions my work on the subject. You may remember one of them, Emily McCarthy, for her questions in my post on March 11th, 2014 about my Bard CEP talk.

As always, I welcome your feedback to my blog. I check my comments section regularly — please let me know what you think; start a discussion about one of my posts; tell me how you heard about Climate Change Fork. It’s always nice to hear if you like my blog, but I much prefer actual interactions.

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Hamlet in California

Posted on April 1, 2014 by climatechangefork

For the last three years or so, we have observed (and in the case of many, lived through) the California drought. During the last week, we waited for news about the mud slide in Washington State with 25 confirmed dead (some identified and some –as of yet –not) and a score still missing. Spring is just beginning, bringing with it the expectations of heavy floods after a winter with record snow. Yet, for many, the central question is – climate change or not climate change? The appropriate Shakespearian continuation seems to be “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.”

Let’s go into some more detail:

In mid-February President Obama visited California to offer some help in the non-ending drought that they are facing.

Here is a local glimpse of that visit:

President Obama toured the parched fields of the Central Valley on Friday, assuring ranchers and farmers that he was committed to addressing the effects of California’s drought because ‘what happens here matters to every working American – right down to the food that you put on your table.’

Obama’s administration announced $170 million worth of initiatives to help the valley’s ranchers and people struggling to make ends meet because of the drought…

During a roundtable discussion with ranchers and community leaders in Firebaugh (Fresno County), Obama joked about the lengthy and incendiary history of water politics in California, saying, ‘I’m not going to wade into this. I want to get out alive on Valentine’s Day.’

The bulk of the aid package that the White House unveiled Friday consists of $100 million for ranchers facing livestock losses and $60 million to help food banks in the hardest-hit areas.

From there the President went to Palm Springs to play a few well-deserved rounds of golf on beautifully watered green lawns.

The worsening drought in California will force a first-ever complete cutoff of federally supplied irrigation water to most farm districts throughout the state’s Central Valley heartland this year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said on Friday.

The projected 2014 zero allocation to all but a handful of agricultural districts supplied by the federally run Central Valley Project comes three weeks after forecasts of similarly drastic cuts were announced by managers of a separate water-delivery system operated by the state. California grows roughly half of all U.S. fruits and vegetables, most of that in the Central Valley, and ranks as the No. 1 farm state by value of agricultural products produced each year.

On February 25, during a Senate Hearing, John Holdren, the White House Science Adviser, was challenged by Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) for misleading the public in claiming that the drought is a consequence of anthropogenic (human caused) climate change. The reprimand was partially based on Roger Pielke’s testimony (July 18, 2013). Who is Roger Pielke? As he says in his self-written bio before the testimony, his degrees were in mathematics, public policy and political science and he was a professor of environmental science at the University of Colorado.

His “take home points” in his testimony include the following:

  • It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally. It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.
  • Globally, weather-related losses ($) have not increased since 1990 as a proportion of GDP (they have actually decreased by about 25%) and insured catastrophe losses have not increased as a proportion of GDP since 1960.
  • Hurricanes have not increased in the US in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900. The same holds for tropical cyclones globally since at least 1970 (when data allows for a global perspective).
  • Floods have not increased in the US in frequency or intensity since at least 1950. Flood losses as a percentage of US GDP have dropped by about 75% since 1940.
  • Tornadoes have not increased in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since 1950, and there is some evidence to suggest that they have actually declined.
  • Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.” Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”
  • The absolute costs of disasters will increase significantly in coming years due to greater wealth and populations in locations exposed to extremes. Consequent, disasters will continue to be an important focus of policy, irrespective of the exact future course of climate change.

John Holdren is generally too busy to respond immediately to any climate change deniers, but in this case he was directly challenged by a United States senator, so he chose to respond in detail a few days after his testimony. His detailed response was posted on the White House blog post (the battle of the bloggers). Here are some highlights:

Linking Drought to Climate Change

In my recent comments about observed and projected increases in drought in the American West, I mentioned four relatively well understood mechanisms by which climate change can play a role in drought. (I have always been careful to note that, scientifically, we cannot say that climate change caused a particular drought, but only that it is expected to increase the frequency, intensity, and duration of drought in some regions, and that such changes are being observed.)

The four mechanisms are:

  1. In a warming world, a larger fraction of total precipitation falls in downpours, which means a larger fraction is lost to storm runoff (as opposed to being absorbed in soil).
  2. In  mountain regions that are warming, as most are, a larger fraction of precipitation falls as rain rather than as snow, which means lower stream flows in spring and summer.
  3. What snowpack there is melts earlier in a warming world, further reducing flows later in the year.
  4. Where temperatures are higher, losses of water from soil and reservoirs due to evaporation are likewise higher than they would otherwise be.

These lines were the milder parts of the response. The most pointed parts were focused on nailing Pielke for picking and choosing almost all of his quotes, and disengaging them from their original context (go to my last week blog, March 25, 2014 to read more about the role of original documents in argumentations.)

On March 9, an OP-ED in the New York Times, written by Martin P. Hoerlig, a Research Meteorologist at NOAA (National Oceanic and Research Administration) touched on the same topic:

CALIFORNIA is now in the midst of the third year of one of its worst droughts on record. As our planet gradually warms from our rampant burning of fossil fuels, it’s only natural to wonder what role climate change has played in California’s troubles.

The answer is this: At present, the scientific evidence does not support an argument that the drought there is appreciably linked to human-induced climate change…

It resembles the droughts that afflicted the state in 1976 and 1977. Those years were at least as dry as the last two years have been for the state as a whole…

One way of accounting for the combined effects of rainfall and temperature on drought is to examine soil moisture. Long-term soil moisture observations are not readily available, but have been estimated using sophisticated models. The 2012 report on extreme events by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change examined the evidence for regional changes in soil moisture since 1950, and made the following assessment for western North America…

The new IPCC report is a long document. It comes as a report of three working groups, with each presenting its own section of more than 1000 pages. Only the first of these working groups reports has been released (it came out late last year), while the second working group’s report is expected any day. Given the sheer volume of the full document, everybody will have plenty of opportunity to fish for whatever sentence fits their unchanging world view. One such relevant quote, taken from the summary of the first working group report, is given below:

Changes in the global water cycle in response to the warming over the 21st century will not be uniform. The contrast in precipitation between wet and dry regions and between wet and dry seasons will increase, although there may be regional exceptions (see Figure SPM.8). {12.4, 14.3}

Climate scientists have a common understanding (as explicitly stated by John Holdren in his aforementioned response to Pielke’s testimony) that specific, localized, events can never be claimed to be caused by climate change; one can never claim that such events could not take place in the absence of human contributions. However, a statement that disconnects severe droughts from climate change must therefore by design disconnect climate change from any changes in the water cycle – including floods and other severe weather events. Since most of the serious impacts of climate change manifest themselves through changes in the water cycle, such disconnections, in my mind, are not much different from denying anthropogenic climate change in the first place, no matter the credentials of the deniers.

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Do We Have To Argue? Do We Even Know How To Argue?

Posted on March 25, 2014 by climatechangefork

A few years ago I was attending an academic retreat. These usually take place somewhere outside the campus and they often involve overnight stay. They are generally organized as a forum in which to discuss an institution’s important policy issues. In this case, the subject of discussion was the changes in the institution’s general education requirements.

During lunch I was sitting near a friend that specializes in the history of the Middle East. Since I grew up in Israel (I hold dual American – Israeli citizenship) the lunch chat quickly drifted to a discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is Jewish and the student population he teaches is mixed. I asked him how he teaches such a controversial topic to a mixed student population who, in most cases, hold fossilized opinions on the topic. Since, among many student populations, climate change is as confrontational as the Middle East conflicts, I was interested in learning his practices. He smiled at me and said: “simple: I rely on original documents.” I shifted the conversation to a different topic because I didn’t want to be confrontational and point it out to him that since he is the one responsible for the selection of the original documents, his teaching is not much different from preaching.

A few months ago, an early, unofficial version of the first part of the 5th IPCC reports was released. Even before the official release of the report, the Heartland Institute released its own report that denies the existence of anthropogenic climate change. They presented it in the same format (if a bit longer) as the IPCC report. I thought that this was a teaching moment, especially because the Heartland arguments hadn’t yet been sliced and diced by the media. I wrote earlier on some aspects of these reports (October 1 and October 15, 2013). The timing was in the middle of the semester; the students read the textbook, and I gave them some quizzes to make sure that they actually understood the issues and were ready for the midterm exam. Among other things, I wanted to test how they would do at arguing the issues. To prepare for the test, we went through the arguments section of the wonderful website Skeptical Science. The site is probably the best available resource for arguments and counter arguments. In the test, I gave the students the assignment of arguing in response to one assertion each from the Skeptical Science and Heartland sites. This section of the test is shown below:

Part B

Some of the deniers’ more popular arguments against anthropogenic contributions to climate change are summarized below (http://www.skepticalscience.com/). Construct a thoughtful, data based, response to one of these arguments.

a.      Climate’s changed before
“Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age.” (Richard Lindzen)
b.      Models are unreliable
“[Models] are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behaviour in a world with different chemistry, for example in a world with increased CO2 in the atmosphere.”  (Freeman Dyson)

Part C:
Arguments against the new IPCC recent report came out even before the original report. The two arguments below have appeared recently in http://heartland.org/media-library/pdfs/CCR-II/Summary-for-Policymakers.pdf. Construct a thoughtful, data based, response to one of these arguments.

a.      CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere “greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population.
b.      Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8% increase in atmospheric CO2, which represents 34% of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.

They didn’t do well. I decided, therefore, to devote a significant portion of the remainder of the semester to practicing argumentation on these kinds of issues.

Well, since argumentation is an “academic field,” but is not my specialty, my logical response was to call on some experts for help. The first department that I approached was the Department of Speech Communication Arts and Sciences. The present Chair is a friend and the previous Chair was arguably the best debater on campus. Unfortunately, the previous Chair had already retired by then and the department doesn’t have anybody to teach argumentation. They have asked a lawyer on campus to give the course on argumentation (this is supposed to be their bread and butter). I knew that argumentation in law is not the same as arguing on climate change but I decided to try getting through to him. He didn’t respond to my request. Next, I tried Philosophy – I went through their course offerings – no argumentation. Our college has a very good forensics club with a national reputation. I asked about the faculty adviser to the club, but found that there wasn’t one. Fortunately, I had an Honors College Physics major that took a course with me on climate change and was member of the forensics club, and asked her to come to my class to teach the students how to argue. She did a great job.

At this junction, I decided that learning how to argue and how to construct a decent argument should be an important objective of the course that deserves classroom effort.

As I have mentioned before (March 18, 2013) I am now using Team Based Learning (TBL) to teach my class and find this method to be very effective. In the lingo of this methodology teaching relevant argumentation can count as “application.” The class is already divided to teams of 7-8 students each. I gave every team one of the Heartland arguments and asked them to construct opposing and supporting presentations for the arguments and present them to the class toward the end of the semester. A few days later I got an email from one of the teams telling me that all of them fully agree with the Heartland argument. I asked them to try harder. They did, and since they had to divide the teams into those students presenting the supporting arguments and those opposing, by the end of the semester, we reached a more or less balanced positioning. But the balanced positioning didn’t convince anybody. Something was missing here and the semester was coming to its end. It became clear to me that I was unintentionally ending with the same strategy for arguing controversial issues as my history friend had been using to teach the Middle-East conflicts – a biased selection of observations.

In the case of Heartland and the IPCC, their findings are shown as conclusions to detailed full reports that are more than 1000 pages long. Obviously, none of the students read these reports in their entirety (they took the arguments in both cases from the provided “Summaries for the Policy Makers”), so they took the claims in the arguments on both sides to be equally valid.

This semester I decided to repeat the exercise with somewhat different rules. Every time that students need to make an argument, they are advised to refer to the three basic cycles shown below. As far as I know, none of these are controversial. Please stay tuned for the results.

Arguments:

Deniers vs. Believers – try to convert the opposing group to your side.

Elements:

  • Refute the premises of the other side
  • Support your own premises
  • Comment on the methodology of argumentation

Carbon CycleEnergy CycleWater CycleIn the next blogs I will focus on causal relation between the drought in the Western US and climate change as a case study to explore.

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Publishers

Posted on March 18, 2014 by climatechangefork

My book, Climate Change: The Fork at the End of Now was published in the early summer of 2011. I wrote it as a textbook for the general public, and it was used mainly for general education – both in my school and a few other schools. Some members of the “general public” with no special background in the sciences also bought and read it. I was not, for obvious reasons, able to follow this audience closely and became aware of that only after they contacted me.

Like many other books and articles on contemporary issues, the book was out of date the moment that it came out. I wrote about the obvious reasons for that in a previous blog. (October 22, 2013). The sale figures were decent for such a book – decent enough for my publisher to approach me during the spring of 2013 to start talking about a second edition. We met, started to exchange ideas and contacted people that have used the book.

During this summer, however, while I was traveling abroad, I got an email from my publisher saying the following (any identifying words omitted):

I am terribly sorry about the long, long delay in getting back to you with a decision about your proposed plan to revise your book, Climate Change.

As I believe xxxxx and I have both let you know in recent weeks, the owner xxxxxx has been reviewing our editorial strategy going forward.  As a result, a decision has been made by xxxxxxxxx will from this point on be focused exclusively on what we call “collections” publishing:  groups of 20-40 small concise monographs organized around a particular engineering topical theme aimed at primarily upper level undergraduate and graduate level college students.

So this means that I will not be publishing any more stand-alone books, particularly for professional/reference use.  Moreover, I have been asked to not pursue any revisions of our currently published books.  That latter directive may, perhaps, change in the future.  But for now, I will have to decline a new edition of your book.

I was obviously upset but I accepted that it was a business decision. I changed my focus, starting on the demanding task of trying to pass the publishing torch. Because of the relative complexity of the efforts required to find a new prospective publisher, I have decided that the search will proceed serially; one publisher at a time, to eliminate the possibility of wasting precious publishers’ time in case of overwhelming enthusiasm to take on the job.

First, I approached a well-known publisher that I thought would be receptive. I received this response (again omitting identifying marks):

Thank you very much for forwarding this material and explaining your plans for a second edition of your textbook on the science of climate change. Although the topic is very much of interest to us and the book appears to offer an excellent introduction to the subject, it is not a fit for xxxxxxxx textbook program, which focuses on graduate level texts.

I wish you the best of luck in finding a suitable publisher for the new edition of the book. Thank you again for the chance to consider it.

Since this reason was basically identical to my existing publisher’s new changed business plan, the response made me think more generally about “graduate level texts” for highly interdisciplinary programs.

I have some experience in this business. I founded and directed (for 13 years) the Environmental Studies program at my school, which involves the participation of 14 departments. I also recently developed an interdisciplinary graduate course (Master’s level) called “Physics and Society.” The objective of the course is to engage students to apply the advanced quantitative skills that we teach our majors to broader societal issues. We used the following formal rationale to justify the course:

Rationale: “Physics and Society” is now a forum of the American Physical Society with its own publication; the most prestigious Physics journal – “Physical Review Letters” – includes a “catch all” section titled “Soft Matter, Biological and Interdisciplinary Physics.” A “typical” article in this section is titled “Environmental Versus Demographic Variability in Two-Species Predator-Prey Model” (prl – 2012- by Ulrich Dobramysl and Uwe C. Taber). Last year (2012), a new division of the American Physical Society was formed that is dedicated to Climate Change. The new division is the “Topical Group on the Physics of Climate” (GPC).

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Physics (among other definitions) as: “science that deals with the structure of matter and the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the observable universe.”

The goal of physics is to formulate comprehensive principles that bring together and explain all discernible phenomena. With 7 billion people (October 2012) and growing, humans have become part of the physical environment. For most of our graduate students, the Master’s is a terminal degree that should lead to job opportunities. The objective of the course is to explore career opportunities beyond the usual boundaries of textbooks that include human activities.

The anchor throughout the semester was a selection from periodic reports issued by agencies such as the United Nations (IPCC) and the US National Intelligence Council that attempt to predict the future of the world and define activities necessary in the present to optimize the prospects of such a future. Typical driving forces that are estimated in such reports include the following:

  • Population growth
  • Economic growth
  • Income distribution
  • Governmental practices – power distribution
  • Environmental impact
  • Climate change
  • Science & Technology
  • Energy
  • Water
  • Food

Throughout the course, students adopt specific driving forces to perform a technical quantitative study of topics such as Gini coefficients (Income Distribution), tipping points (Climate Change), climate sensitivity (Climate Change), demographic distribution (Population growth), and frequency of extreme events (Climate Change). Class work is dedicated to the mutual dependence of the forces, again searching for issues that might benefit from attention of physicists.

Samples of Required Reading include:

None of these books can be classified as “graduate level texts,” yet the material was completely foreign to all of the students and they were thankful for the exposure.

Meanwhile, Congress has finally approved a budget. Research organizations such as the National Science Foundation got their 2014 budget that they can allocate as research grants. Congress did not specify to which research areas the money should go; however they did add this directive: “further growth of interdisciplinary research initiatives shall not come at the expense of the core disciplines.” Many have seen this as code for do not give any more money to climate change research.

They say when it rains, it pours – but in this case, I think the situation is more of a drought.

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Bard CEP Talk

Posted on March 11, 2014 by climatechangefork

Last Wednesday, I did a talk, Desalination as Adaptation as part of Bard College Center for Environmental Policy’s National Climate Seminar. The seminar, which is biweekly, was in the form of a conference call. Unfortunately, this format is completely new to me, and we had several technical difficulties. I apologize for the poor sound quality and regret that the talk had to end early. I will be posting some of the Q&A transcripts in the comments section below, since they are so hard to understand. I welcome your questions, hope that you will join the conversation in the comments section below.

I am including below a transcript of my talking points, and my answers to several questions emailed to me by students who were listening to the talk.

Transcript of talk:

Thanks to all of you. Before I start, let me say few words about my setting here. The timing of the seminar has small overlap with my regular climate change class. I have invited the students to hear the exchange during the seminar.  As usual, many of them have conflicts and I have no idea how many will show up out of the 50 students take the class. To accommodate everybody, our IT guys helped me connect my iphone to the class audio system for everybody to hear. Two students, Desiree Dymond and Dylan Tobia are standing near me to warn me about the timing and help me in case I have difficulties in hearing your questions and comments.

I have asked Eban to be able to post the audio file on my blog so my students will be able to join all of you in the discussion.

I would like to thank you for hosting me and I would like also to thank Sonya Landau for suggesting to you my participation in this important seminar. Sonya is a graduate of Bard College and she now works in the public relations office LCG Communications with Linda Gross. In that capacity, Sonya is my right hand lady in publishing my blog and trying to help me spread the word to the furthest possible reach. Sonya has coordinated with Eban the poetic title – Desalination as Adaptation.

Friday morning I woke up with my usual breakfast and the New York Times. As usual, my wife got the first section and I got the rest. I started with the business section. One of the front-page articles started with the following intro: “The part of the past that you deem most relevant can be critical in determining your outlook for the future.” The article had absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this seminar but I have decided to go along with that sentiment.

I was born in Warsaw, Poland 3 months before the German invasion that started WWII. I was born to a Jewish family and I survived the war with my mother, spending the first three and a half years of my life in the Warsaw ghetto and the next two years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. On February 13, 1945 I was saved by a unit of the American Army. After the War I went to Palestine (now Israel) where I grew up in boarding schools to follow in the army and University. I was trained as a scientist to try to quantify the physical environment with a focus on energy.

My present work is targeted at the modest objective of trying to assure long term survival of the planet as a supportive habitat of the human race. I define “long term” arbitrarily as 1000 years – a random number that has been cited as the time needed to develop the technology necessary to move from this planet to an alternative suitable planet in case we succeed in making this planet uninhabitable. So I define myself as a “quantitative survivalist.”

When I was born the global population was about 2 billion. Less than two years ago we crossed the marker of 7 billion – that’s an addition of 5 billion people in my lifetime. Over this period the average GDP/person in constant US$ has increased from around $2000 to about $8000. The GDP per person of the US is more than $50,000. The resources to support this growth came mainly from the physical environment. The price that we are paying is that we have become part of said physical environment.

The basic ingredients that characterize such survival are population, energy, food, water and natural resources.

The main life ingredients are described in terms of three cycles: The energy cycle, the carbon cycle and the water cycle. All three of these cycles are now being directly shaped by humans. Without human influence all three cycles balance nicely. Human influence drives all of them out of balance.

Climate change is caused mainly through the imbalances that we introduce in the carbon cycle through emission of greenhouse gases that impacts our energy balance. Most of the impact of these changes comes through the water cycle. The changes come in the form of sea level rise, extreme weather events and changes in the spatial and temporal pattern of precipitation.

There is a growing interest now to find exoplanets (Planets that are outside our solar system). There is even greater interest to find planets that can accommodate life. The interest is driven by scientific curiosity about our place in the Universe and, more pessimistically, attempts to find ways to save humanity in the case that we fail and make our planet uninhabitable. For a planet to be able to accommodate life, it must first accommodate liquid water on its surface and stay around long enough for the chemistry to take shape.

The water cycle is driven by solar energy that evaporates water into the atmosphere. The salt remains in the ocean. So the water cycle is a global gigantic desalination process with total recycling capabilities on a global scale – great system. The water vapor condenses in the atmosphere and joins the weather system. About 10% of the water returns to land in the form of rain or snow. The rain and snow eventually find their way back to the Ocean. With about 70% earth covered by Ocean, we will not run out of water – so long as the planet can stay habitable.  Yet – increasingly we are running into severe shortage in the water that we can use – fresh water.

We use fresh water in agriculture to grow our food, in industry to drive our manufacturing and much of our energy needs, for drinking and for sanitation. As our numbers and our standard of living increase we need more fresh water. To satisfy our needs we borrow from storage pools and deplete our reservoirs. Water stress means that the storage pools are getting dry and that the natural water cycle cannot satisfy our needs.

What can we do?

  • We can use less
  • We can recycle
  • We can add to the water cycle through technological desalination.

We are doing all three but some of us are doing more than others

Let me elaborate a bit on desalination. We can mimic the natural water cycle by doing artificial thermal desalination through enhanced evaporation and condensation. This is an energy intensive process. In a place like Saudi Arabia where energy is low cost and money is in abundance, this is the preferred method. The largest desalination plants are the thermal desalination plants in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries. A much more efficient method is the reverse osmosis method.

If I take a cup of concentrated salt water and dump it into a container of fresh water, the salt will spread around very quickly through the entire sample, making a larger amount of diluted salt water (you can safely try it). If I want to do it in a controlled way I can put a membrane on the cup that can transport only water. What will happen is: water will move from the container to the cup in an attempt to equalize the concentration. The reason for that is one of the most basic laws of Physics called the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The process is called osmosis defined as the spontaneous net movement of solvent molecules through a partially permeable membrane into a region of higher solute concentration. To desalinate, I need to accomplish the reverse. To do that, I need to invest energy in the process. We know how to do that. The process is called reverse osmosis (RO).  Let’s get some numbers:

From 1990 – 2008 global desalination capacity rose from 3.7 Billion US gallons/day to 17.5 Billion US gallons/day; a rise of more than 350% or an average of 20% per year.

In 2012 global desalination capacity reached 20 Billion US gallons/day.

Largest capacity RO plants (all around 120 million US gallons/day):

Largest capacity thermal desalination Plants:

  • Saudi Arabia – 225 million US gallons/day. Under construction – SA – more than 250 million US gallons/day.
  • California – the largest desalination facility (basically the only one) – near San-Diego (Carlsbad) to be operational in 2016 has a planned capacity of 50 million gallons/day with a construction time about 20 years.

Probably the most important thing that we can do is integrate all three water saving methods with the natural water cycle. Equally important, to adapt to the great spatial and temporal variability in the natural water cycle, we have to be able to adjust our water supplement to complement the natural variability.

Israel is doing just that. My last blog details some of the issues that Israel had to confront in doing that.

What is the global situation and why should we care? Let’s go through some numbers again: Average water use in the US is about 150 gallons/person. day – in Kenya it is 13. The largest water users everywhere are in agriculture to produce our food. 70% of Kenyans are employed in agriculture as compared to 1% of Americans.

Close to a billion people lack access to clean water and sanitation. Water recycling and desalination need resources that most countries can not afford. As the situations in many countries show, water doesn’t recognize borders and when people are desperate, security threats cross borders as well. What we do in the rich world should be addressed to solve global issues and not confined to our own backyards.  In the rich world we should be willing to provide the technology and resources to address the global water stress through integration of saving, recycling and desalination.

Dear Professor Micha Tomkiewicz,

We are the graduate students from Bard CEP that asked you a couple questions during your National Climate Center talk. Our names are Emily and Sonam. Thank you again for joining our talk on Wednesday. We are currently writing our blog post as a response to the talk and we have a couple follow up questions for you. If you could answer a couple of these questions for us, whichever ones you wish to answer, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Emily McCarthy and Tso Sonam

I understand this question is a bit of an extreme case, but bear with me for a moment: 2 earth system scientists, Timothy Lenton and Andrew Watson, wrote a book “Revolutions that Made the Earth” that argues that large changes in the amount of energy available to the biosphere have, in the past, always marked large transitions to the way the world works. They then consider that growing availability of solar and nuclear over coming centuries may mark the greatest new energy resources since and they suggest that the energy may be used the change the hydrologic cycle with massive desalination equipment, or a whole lot of other changes that this burst in energy could cause. In our graduate studies, we have seen that humans can completely change some earth cycles by our actions …

Our question is: at what amount of world-wide desalination, would you say that we should stop? It is good to think of where you would have to expanding the quantity of water being desalinated.
Great questions. I haven’t read Lenton & Watson’s book, though I probably should. From the title, I would expect it to cover something about Terraforming (the artificial formation of a planet with characteristics of the Earth) but your explanation makes it clear that is not the case. I would be a bit more comfortable answering your questions if I could remove the descriptive adjectives such as “large transitions,” “large changes,” and “massive desalination equipment,” but I can live with them.

Solar and nuclear are the two basic forms of energy that describe everything we are using. For example, energy forms such as wind, biofuels and hydropower all derive their energy from the sun. The fossil fuels from which we get our chemical energy originally derived their energy from photosynthetic organisms, which in turn derived their energy from the sun – the difference is that they did it millions of years ago. Tidal energy is probably the only form that cannot be characterized directly as either solar or nuclear.

Solar energy drives the water cycle. However, the water cycle operates on a global scale as part of the weather system, so we don’t always get the water when and where we need it. As our demand for fresh water grows, we need to supplement the water cycle. By this, I mean that when there is a short supply, such as in drought, we can draw from the desalinated supply, and when we have enough or more than enough (floods) from the natural cycle we don’t use the desalination facility. This necessarily means that we construct water systems that can move large quantities of water whenever –to wherever they are needed. This also requires an efficient water management system to ensure that the price that we pay for the water covers the cost and that the investment in the construction will be economically viable.

In last week’s blog I described the water management system in Israel, which approximately satisfies these requirements.

We need to expand desalination only to the most necessary level. That means that if we are good with the other management tools that we have such as efficient water use and recycling, our needs will be manageable.

What progress in particular would you like to see happening? Improved technology and research? or outreach and education? Or getting industry / investors/ government involved directly?

How do you feel about combined power and desalination plants?
Combined power and desalination plants are fine but they are not necessary. They each require specific settings and we should not have any issue moving either the energy or the water to wherever it’s most needed. The main argument against using desalination is the large amount of energy that we use to operate desalination plants. We are becoming much more energy efficient with the technology but we still need large amounts of energy. The only sustainable scenario here is to find an equally sustainable energy source. This of course would also contribute to the cost.

What do you think about trying to encourage industry to desalinate instead of cities?
The way it works now is that industry desalinates and not cities. In most places the cities don’t even initiate the desalination capabilities but instead contact the water authority to supply the water when needed at an agreed price.

Do you encourage other desalination processes other than the major families of reverse osmosis and distillation?
Right now, reverse osmosis is the leading technology – one that is being continuously improved. We don’t have too many options here because the process itself is a reverse osmosis process – the real issue is how we achieve it: through a thermal process (distillation) or through application of pressure.

Have you thought about a collaboration with a separation processes engineering class about a design project? They could perform a design of a theoretical plant and then perform an economic assessment of the investment. Desalination is often covered in these classes.
As I mentioned in my chat, I don’t work in the desalination industry and I am a bit old to switch jobs but there are plenty of very gifted engineers and scientists that are doing fine work.

Do you think private-public partnerships could be useful for desalination?
Public-private partnership is not only very useful, but absolutely necessary for desalination. I don’t see any way to run an efficient water management system without such a partnership.

Do you think desalination ever poses any environmental justice threats?
Which are the highest variable costs of operation, and which parts of the equipment are the most expensive (pressure vessel, membrane) in general?
The price of energy constitutes about 50% of the cost. We are making great strides in reducing membrane and vessel cost. These are a fixed price, since they do not scale with the amount of water that we desalinate, while the energy used does.

I sort of reversed the orders of the last two questions because the issue of environmental justice is probably the most challenging issue in the discussion. I will be delighted to continue the discussion starting with your opinion on how to address the environmental justice issue. It is important here to define the scale that we are taking about (global, country, individual?).

Take care and thank you.

As always, I welcome everyone’s feedback, questions and comments – I would love to continue the conversation with you in the comments section.

Update: the Bard CEP blog just posted about desalination and my talk: Desalination as Adaptation: Energy intensive, but sometimes necessary. I want to thank them again for inviting me to participate in their National Climate Seminar.

 

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