Sentences of note

"In the US nearly half of all water withdrawals is used for cooling thermo-electric power plants."

From a Guardian Science debate series on the 'Water, food and energy nexus'. (Watch or listen as a podcast.)

Geo-engineering and climate change

I recently attended an absolutely superb seminar given by Prof. Edward Parson on geo-engineering. I occasionally hear interesting things about some of the possibilities on my favourite science podcasts from the Guardian Science, Scientific American and Nature but it is not really a topic I know much about. I learnt some fascinating things from this seminar.

Some simple examples of geo-engineering include painting roads and house roofs white so that they reflect the sun. More advanced examples include putting reflexive (e.g. sulphur) particles into the stratosphere which can reflect heat. As it happens, there is an article on today's BBC suggesting that cloud whitening towers could be built to slow warming across the Arctic. 

The single main message that geo-engineering massively widen the climate possibilities, in both the good and bad directions. In the best case, it may have the capacity to solve global warming. In the worst case scenario, it can wipe humanity off the face of the earth and re-create 'snowball earth'. 

Good things: 

* Within a couple of years it can achieve the kind of cooling that it would take decades of carbon capture to achieve. And this an be achieved by putting reflexive particles into the atmosphere from almost anywhere. We know this because Mount Pinatuba erupted it cooled the earth by around half a degree Celsius and this lasted for a few years.

* It is cheap. The direct costs of doing this are probably just a few billion dollars a year. Basically nothing.

* When placed into the lower atmosphere they could reduce some of the more local effects of climate change such as tornadoes, floods etc.

Problems:

* They don't solve everything. As pointed out by The God Species (one of my favourite books on climate change), the earth has many boundaries and crossing any one of them can have severe consequences.

* These technologies do not control earth and water temperatures in the same way so we are left with a much drier earth. This could effect things like the monsoon upon which billions of people rely.

* There may be ozone depletion which is worse that currently estimated. We will make the sky whiter and we are putting acid into the sky which will come down in the rain.

One option would be to use geo-engineering to buy time or just on a local level. But this itself carries the human-behaviour risk that we come to rely on these technologies and don't make the efforts we should to reduce climate change. In addition, if we use geo-engineering to, say, keep the planet 5 degrees cooler than it would be given the pollution we cause, and then one day we are unable or unwilling to use the technology, the earth would very suddenly gain those 5 degrees with all of the consequences.

We then have issues related international cooperation and conflict. Who has the right to decide to use this technology? Many large, wealthy and technologically advanced countries have the ability to do this and there would be winners and losers. Could it create international conflict? Could it be used as a tool for international conflict? If a country or group of countries take the lead, even if it is with the best intentions, there would be some losers. How do we compensate those losers? What if something goes wrong, the leaders could be blamed for it and perhaps accused of deliberately behaving in a malevolent way even when no such intentions existed. 

How do we create international laws and institutions which are capable of addressing these issues?

On the other hand, without this option, we could be heading for disaster already. We could behave badly and take humanity on a path to destruction. But we could also simply be unlucky. Even if we do everything we should do, climate change might still place human existence in peril. If we arrive at this point and have not already tested this technology, then we risk either not being able to develop it quickly or using it in a dangerous way.

Therefore, we somehow want to have the option to use this technology. BUT without it in any way causing a moral hazard problem - i.e. without it changing human behaviour. Knowing that we MIGHT be able to call on this in the future is not a good reason not to behave correctly now. AND we need to be able to think carefully about the scientific and institutional international context including all of the risks. Geo-engineering has the capacity to save humanity or kill us. Abandoning it has severe consequences and so might developing it if we are unable to manage it. Should be fun to watch the scientific progress and follow the emotional debates it will generate.

A couple of cool bike things

1. Strava. I used it for the first time today. Very cool app for smartphones keeps track of cycling times and distances, plots it all on maps and shows you the main climbs. No need for a special computer any more! (HT: SS)


2. Phones use a lot of battery especially if you are running GPS using strava. So what you need is a way to charge your phone using your bike. Enter Global Cycle Solutions. They design products that can improve lives in developing countries using bikes and I love them. You can buy your own from their website too!





3. Buy some bicycle art from this etsy store. Available in different sizes.

On environmental issues, businesses need government leadership

I've been wanting to write something about the Durban Climate Talks that was something more than the morbid curiosity with which I watch humanity choosing to cease to exist à la Easter Islanders by destroying all of the earth's natural systems on which we rely for survival. I like a lot the personal perspectives of my friend, Jo, who is attending the meetings. In the end, of course, countries decided to push our survival to the limit by agreeing to do something after 2020. Scientists say it will not avert catastrophic climate change and somewhat surprisingly for a country that already suffers extremely badly from the effects of climate change, India, were villains (who needs to drink water from the mountains anyway? and why should we care about monsoon patterns anyway?). All this is rather bad economics.

Thankfully, some companies are doing their best to go green despite a lack of Government leadership. But they are doing less than they otherwise would. One of the reasons is that they don't know what the standards will be and there are costs associated with setting standards only to have to change them. For this reason:

Of 300 bosses of big global firms recently quizzed by Ernst & Young, 83% said they wanted to see a legally binding multilateral deal struck in Durban to update the ailing Kyoto protocol and help to put a price on carbon emissions. But only 18% expect this to happen. The absence of a clear climate policy helps explain why, for example, investment in British clean technology fell from around $11 billion in 2009 to $3 billion last year. It would also suggest that any firm factoring a steep carbon price into its plans—as Shell does, assuming a notional price of $40 a tonne—should quietly lower it.

(see FULL ARTICLE in The Economist)

This applies in particular to new technologies such as that associated with electric cars. Israel is reportedly doing very well because the Government has already defined standards. Why invest in a system of recharging or changing batteries when the country may change standards? This partly explains why other countries are doing less well in this field.

A few companies fight against change. For example BA announced that an air duty rise will cost jobs. They are correct. But only in the short run and the alternative is far worse or, at least, far more expensive.

So there are two reasons why Government leadership is necessary: setting standards which are predictable and, applicable to everyone (fair competition) and forcing companies to adjust to the changes rather than fight them.

I recently read a book about the impact that humans have had on the environment and what the planetary limits are in different areas now and what can realistically be done. I recommend as essential reading The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas. There is also an excellent interview with him on The Guardian's Science Weekly. (I had pre-ordered this book in fact, and I plan to write a full review of it when I get time.)

He talks in great detail about the CFC (ozone layer) crisis. It is somehow seen today as if this was an easy one to fix but in reality it was far from easy. Governments needed to be strong armed into agreeing. Industry tried to resist saying that there was no alternatives.

Of course, any argument suggesting we could no longer have fridges or deodorants make people think twice. Indeed, I believe that all arguments saying that people's lives would be significantly worse following action to prevent climate change are doomed to failure. But this didn't happen. The industry developed new technologies and I am happy to report I as I write, I am sipping on a beer kept chilled in my fridge and smelling very nice, thank you very much.

The point is that clear legislation and leadership by Government gives industry an incentive to innovate. It gets around the short term profit motive. It gets around the risk of losing business if you go green but your competitor does not. It gets around the standards problem. Governments need to lead to avoid collective action failure (tragedy of the commons) and to create a level playing field.

And we need to have faith in human nature and the dynamism of the private sector to find solutions without lowering living standards. But this will only happen with Government leadership in the right areas (and, obviously, not interfering in business in the wrong areas).

One of the major justifications for having Governments at all is the ability to correct a collective action problem. In Durban they have failed and they all lose some legitimacy for this.

Apps for Climate

The World Bank has launched a competition: Apps for Climate

"This competition challenges participants to develop software applications related to climate change. The applications should serve to raise awareness, measure progress, or to help in some other way to address the development challenges of climate change. Submissions may be any kind of software application, be it for the web, a personal computer, a mobile handheld device, console, SMS, or any software platform broadly available to the public. The only other requirement is that the proposed application use one or more datasets from the World Bank Data Catalog available at data.worldbank.org or the Climate Change Knowledge Portal at climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org."