The past few weeks and years have seen a bushel of papers finding that the natural world, in particular perhaps the ocean, is getting fed up with absorbing our CO2. There are uncertainties and caveats associated with each study, but taken as a whole, they provide convincing evidence that the hypothesized carbon cycle positive feedback has begun.
Of the new carbon released to the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, some remains in the atmosphere, while some is taken up into the land biosphere (in places other than those which are being cut) and into the ocean. The natural uptake has been taking up more than half of the carbon emission. If changing climate were to cause the natural world to slow down its carbon uptake, or even begin to release carbon, that would exacerbate the climate forcing from fossil fuels: a positive feedback.
The ocean has a tendency to take up more carbon as the CO2 concentration in the air rises, because of Henry’s Law, which states that in equilibrium, more in the air means more dissolved in the water. Stratification of the waters in the ocean, due to warming at the surface for example, tends to oppose CO2 invasion, by slowing the rate of replenishing surface waters by deep waters which haven’t taken up fossil fuel CO2 yet.
The Southern Ocean is an important avenue of carbon invasion into the ocean, because the deep ocean outcrops here. Le Quere et al. [2007] diagnosed the uptake of CO2 into the Southern Ocean using atmospheric CO2 concentration data from a dozen or so sites in the Southern hemisphere. They find that the Southern Ocean has begun to release carbon since about 1990, in contrast to the model predictions that Southern Ocean carbon uptake should be increasing because of the Henry’s Law thing. We have to keep in mind that it is a tricky business to invert the atmospheric CO2 concentration to get sources and sinks. The history of this type of study tells us to wait for independent replication before taking this result to the bank.
Le Quere et al propose that the sluggish Southern Ocean CO2 uptake could be due to a windier Southern Ocean. Here the literature gets complicated. The deep ocean contains high concentrations of CO2, the product of organic carbon degradation (think exhaling fish). The effect of the winds is to open a ventilation channel between the atmosphere and the deep ocean. Stratification, especially some decades from now, would tend to shut down this ventilation channel. The ventilation channel could let the deep ocean carbon out, or it could let atmospheric carbon in, especially in a few decades as the CO2 concentration gets ever higher (Henry’s Law again). I guess it’s fair to say that models are not decisive in their assessment about which of these two factors should be dominating at present. The atmospheric inversion method, once it passes the test of independent replication, would trump model predictions of what ought to be happening, in my book.
A decrease in ocean uptake is more clearly documented in the North Atlantic by Schuster and Watson [2007]. They show surface ocean CO2 measurements from ships of opportunity from the period 1994-1995, and from 2002-2005. Their surface ocean chemistry data is expressed in terms of partial pressure of CO2 that would be in equilibrium with the water. If the pCO2 of the air is higher than the calculated pCO2 of the water for example, then CO2 will be dissolving into the water.
The pCO2 of the air rose by about 15 microatmospheres in that decade. The strongest Henry’s Law scenario would be for the ocean pCO2 to remain constant through that time, so that the air/sea difference would increase by the 15 microatmospheres of the atmospheric rise. Instead what happened is that the pCO2 of the water rose twice as fast as the atmosphere did, by about 30 microatmospheres. The air-sea difference in pCO2 collapsed to zero in the high latitudes, meaning no CO2 uptake at all in a place where the CO2 uptake might be expected to be strongest.
One factor that might be changing the pressure of CO2 coming from the sea surface might be the warming surface waters, because CO2 becomes less soluble as the temperature rises. But that ain’t it, as it turns out. The surface ocean is warming in their data, except for the two most tropical regions, but the amount of warming can only explain a small fraction of the CO2 pressure change. The culprit is not in hand exactly, but is described as some change in ocean circulation, caused maybe by stratification or by the North Atlantic Oscillation, bringing a different crop of water to the surface. At any event, the decrease in ocean uptake in the North Atlantic is convincing. It’s real, all right.
Canadell et al [2007] claim to see the recent sluggishness of natural CO2 uptake in the rate of atmospheric CO2 rise relative to the total rate of CO2 release (from fossil fuels plus land use changes). They construct records of the atmospheric fraction of the total carbon release, and find that it has increased from 0.4 back in about 1960, to 0.45 today. Carbon cycle models (13 of them, from the SRES A2 scenario) also predict that the atmospheric fraction should increase, but not yet. For the time period from 1960 to 2000, the models predict that we would find the opposite of what is observed: a slight decrease in the atmospheric fraction, driven by increasing carbon uptake into the natural world. Positive feedbacks in the real-world carbon cycle seem to be kicking in faster than anticipated, Canadell et al conclude.
There is no real new information in the Canadell et al [2007] analysis on whether the sinking sink is in the ocean or on land. They use an ocean model to do this bookkeeping, but we have just seen how hard it is to model or even understand some of the observed changes in ocean uptake. In addition to the changing ocean sink, drought and heat wave conditions may change the uptake of carbon on land. The infamously hot summer of 2003 in Europe for example cut the rate of photosynthesis by 50%, dumping as much carbon into the air as had been taken up by that same area for the four previous years [Ciais et al., 2005].
The warming at the end of the last ice age was prompted by changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun, but it was greatly amplified by the rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. The orbits pushed on ice sheets, which pushed on climate. The climate changes triggered a strong positive carbon cycle feedback which is, yes, still poorly understood.
Now industrial activity is pushing on atmospheric CO2 directly. The question is when and how strongly the carbon cycle will push back.
—–
Canadell, J.G., C.L. Quere, M.R. Raupach, C.B. Field, E.T. Buitehuis, P. Ciais, T.J. Conway, N.P. Gillett, R.A. Houghton, and G. Marland, Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, doi 10.1073, 2007.
Ciais, P., M. Reichstein, N. Viovy, A. Granier, J. Ogee, V. Allard, M. Aubinet, N. Buchmann, C. Bernhofer, A. Carrara, F. Chevallier, N. De Noblet, A.D. Friend, P. Friedlingstein, T. Grunwald, B. Heinesch, P. Keronen, A. Knohl, G. Krinner, D. Loustau, G. Manca, G. Matteucci, F. Miglietta, J.M. Ourcival, D. Papale, K. Pilegaard, S. Rambal, G. Seufert, J.F. Soussana, M.J. Sanz, E.D. Schulze, T. Vesala, and R. Valentini, Europe-wide reduction in primary productivity caused by the heat and drought in 2003, Nature, 437 (7058), 529-533, 2005.
Le Quere, C., C. Rodenbeck, E.T. Buitenhuis, T.J. Conway, R. Langenfelds, A. Gomez, C. Labuschagne, M. Ramonet, T. Nakazawa, N. Metzl, N. Gillett, and M. Heimann, Saturation of the Southern Ocean CO2 sink due to recent climate change, Science, 316 (5832), 1735-1738, 2007.
Schuster, U., and A.J. Watson, A variable and decreasing sink for atmospheric CO2 in the North Atlantic, J. Geophysical Res., in press, 2007.
Edward Mazria says
For new maps of sea level rise along the US coast, beginning with just one meter, see: http://www.architecture2030.org/current_situation/coastal_impact.html
David B. Benson says
Matt (440) — The idea of wind power backed up by biofuels sounds quite appealing. Locally, the power professors are quite concerned regarding grid stability and reliability when significant amounts of ‘negative load’, i.e., wind power, are introduced into the grid. Since the reliability requirement is much higher than 99% availability, this is certainly an issue. However, using biofuels to produce power when the wind isn’t blowing means that there are no significant power grid issues, provided the wind generators and the biofuel generators are approximately co-located (although I’d have to ask how close together that is).
I know of one demonstartion project going forth in The Netherlands in which the biomass reactor and generator is physically adjacent to the wind towers.
Jim Galasyn says
Re Joe reading Cool It!: While you’re at it, Joe, why don’t you check out the claim that a not insignificant amount of Cool It! is plagiarized:
http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/Goodall.htm
Pekka J. Kostamo says
Correlation is not necessarily causation. “Catching cold” is common(and quite obsolete)terminology.
In reality you catch a virus of some sort, mostly in the cold season. However, getting one should not be over-simplified as a function of temperature. Also humidity plays a complex role, so does a number of social habits. “Catching cold” is an occupational hazard i.e. for school teachers, they do get all of them during the (cold) school year.
True, in Northern Europe houses are well insulated and heated, which reduces the risk of “catching cold”. It is also true that people there tend to be reticent and prefer a typical 2 meter distance from each other on most social occasions, making life for an active virus a bit more difficult.
In fact, I noticed recently a poster in a doctors office: “PLEASE, NO HANDSHAKES” -a clear departure from the previous protocol. Maybe a good idea to limit risks of a “common cold” – and a sick leave for the staff.
Jim Galasyn says
Also re the claim about deaths due to “excess cold”, I don’t think there’s any question that Lomborg makes this claim:
Fog’s rejoinder:
Jim Eager says
Re 440 Matt: “how about you explain what technology you would use to to deliver 800B watts across 8 hours, which was the US peak demand last year. Remember, you can’t have it available if only if the sun is shining brightly. You can’t have it available only if the wind is blowing. It has to be there with 99% certainty. Additionally, the annual need is 3.6T KWH over a year.”
On the use of nuclear power as a baseload backup to the intermittent nature of many alternative sources I have to agree with Matt for once, and I say this reluctantly coming from a long time anti-nuke stance. We simply can not afford to not use all of the tools available.
That said, Matt, you make no mention of the fact that we have to seriously reduce that very 800B watts/8hr, 3.6KW/yr consumption level, and that there is truly huge potential for reducing consumption and cost in doing so. You need to shed this unsustainable notion that our society and economy must make no sacrifices in current consumption levels for fear of any shrinking of gdp. The fact of the matter is that it is our current profligate gdp that is unsustainable, both in terms of resources consumed and waste produced.
Jim Galasyn says
Re energy production for the 21st century, there’s an interesting new post at TheOilDrum describing the likely energy mix that will pertain into 2050:
World Energy to 2050: A Half Century of Decline
The upshot is that coal is likely to be king for a long time.
Majorajam says
All of which answers nothing of what I asked you Joe. Perhaps that is down to reading comprehension or perhaps that is your way of arguing. In any case, please don’t take this to mean I care, except to point out two things:
First, the climate consensus is not that AGW is very likely, but virtually certain (as per the IPCC at least). Careful now, that hand may not be moving as much more quickly than the eye as you might think.
Second, you are not defending economics- at least not from me- but one individual economist, and without actually defending him I might add, but rather by suggesting that his single paragraph email closes the debate. Please be aware that obscuring the difference between the two is fraudulent. If such fraudulence is what you mean by ‘participation in debate’, then I know more than I did before your last answer, which is more than I expected to know.
Related to the second, a physical scientist cannot argue for optimal resource allocation- that’s a strawman, and a rather weak-kneed one at that. The question is whether an economist can do so, if so what the community are saying, which broad camps of economists have the most compelling arguments/glaring deficiencies and of course, if there is a consensus, what precisely that is. Just fyi, despite the professor’s playing fast and loose with his wording, (yet another red flag), there is not remotely a consensus on the appropriate policy or analytical framework in the community, or surely this would’ve precluded the commissioning of the Stern report for starters, to say nothing of Weitzman’s very poignant paper (which, fyi, has been endorsed by some of the members of Mendy’s ‘consensus’).
Timothy Chase says
Ellis (#438) wrote:
I would recommend checking out the following:
Dissolved Carbon Dioxide (from Chemistry 3650 “Environmental Chemistry”)
http://www.chem.usu.edu/~sbialkow/Classes/3650/CO2%20Solubility/DissolvedCO2.html
It shows the manner in which Henry’s Law applies to dissolved carbon dioxide and how the law is used to calculate the levels of different carbonate species. It also explains why a lower ph-level at the surface of the ocean (due to the absorption of CO2) reduces the rate at which the ocean can absorb CO2.
Looks like the Wikipedia entry will need to be updated. In any case, chill – more CO2 gets absorbed that way.
Ray Ladbury says
Matt, the storage issue is not one that can be dismissed so lightly. It has not been resolved anywhere in a manner that is really safe, although I think the Swedes come closest. Yucky Mtn is a sham. The strategy of “bury it and forget it” is not adequate, and until we do solve this problem, nuclear opponents will have valid objections. Now, I am one who feels that Nuclear power will have to form part of the mix. I’m also one who is a serious skeptic of nuclear fusion (the energy source of the future…and it always will be).
For now, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit to be harvested from increased conservation, implementing renewables where we can and subsidizing and improving public transport among other things. What is important now is to establish the necessity of addressing the current threat.
AK says
Re:
330
390
440
The answer has been waiting in the wings since 1975 and is still being pursued. Solar Power Satellites. There are a number of options being discussed, and hard numbers are hardly available yet, but in general it has been agreed since 1975 that it was feasible (given expected technical development) but too expensive.
But, in addition to solving long-running problems, it would also provide great technological spin-off, and have the potential to mitigate population problems as well as climate.
Chuck Booth says
Re # 438 Ellis “Seems to me Henry’s Law can not be used to describe the process you described.”
To follow up on David’s inline comment, Henry’s law does predict that the concentration of dissolved CO2 gas will be proportional to the CO2 partial pressure, with the proportionality factor represented by the CO2 solubility coefficient at a particular temperature and salinity. The Wikipedia passage you quoted means that Henry’s Law doesn’t predict the total CO2 in solution, as some of that (or most, depending on the pH) is in the form of bicarbonate ion and possibly carbonate ion. The details of this can be found in any textbook of physiology, limnology, chemical oceanography, and related subjects.
Ellis says
[Response: Henry’s law assumes thermodynamic ideality, and the real world is non-ideal, but only slightly so for CO2 in equilibrium with the atmosphere. If you want to sound like an educated rube, instead of an uneducated one, you can refer to the fugacity of CO2 rather than the partial pressure, but the number is the same in either case, 380.E-6. Henry’s law works well enough for the purpose to which I put it. David]
Thank you for your measured response.
In an ideal world the syllogism,
Henry’s law assumes thermodynamic ideality
and the real world is non-ideal
would be followed by,
therefore you cannot use Henry’s Law in the real world.
But, as you say the world is not ideal, perhaps you could explain further the relationship between atmospheric CO2 equilibrium and the chemical reaction of CO2 and H2O, as they relate to Henry’s law.
As for an educated rube stating, “you can refer to the fugacity of CO2 rather than the partial pressure, but the number is the same in either case, 380.E-6.”, at least you and I would know that person is only trying to obfuscate the facts with technical jargon. Since, we would know that fugacity is assumed to be partial pressure, the fact that the number is the same would not surprise us. Of course we might wonder where exactly 380.e-6 came from. And don’t worry I’m hip, as long as the results are good, the research can be well enough.
[Response: CO2 joins with H2O to make H2CO3. In practice it is difficult to distinguish these two species, so they are lumped together operationally into a species known as H2CO3*. In the ideal world, the concentration of H2CO3* would be exactly proportional to the partial pressure of CO2 in the gas phase. In our world, there are non-ideal effects but the at the pCO2 of the atmosphere the corrections are miniscule. On Venus it would be more of an issue. Then the CO2 reacts with the carbonate buffer chemistry in seawater, the same chemistry as in our blood, according to the reaction H2CO3 + CO3(2-) -> 2 HCO3(-). The impact of the buffer chemistry on the amount of CO2 that the water can hold is not small at all, actually natural seawater can hold maybe 10 times as much CO2 as it would if there were no CO3(2-) to react with. If this is what the Wikipedia article is referring to, I stand much corrected. Of course the buffer chemistry is crucial to getting the uptake right. I think of the two as separate steps; Henry’s law gives us the H2CO3* concentration, and the impact of the rest of the chemistry comes on top of that. David]
Joe Duck says
Hank – fair enough but don’t have book yet. I am looking online now for the source of the 1,500,000 dead by cold stat. Somebody above suggested it was unfair to use European cold death stats but I now think this was because those are 1) in the context of the “european heat wave” sensationalism and 2)global stats are harder to verify.
Cold vs Heat death quote is at following URL – FYI I directed people to the quote before: http://lomborg.com/cool_it/sample/
Nick I can’t let your statement go unchallenged regarding the Copenhagen Consensus:
…a group of economists hand-picked to give a predetermined answer
Of the *four* Nobel Prize winning economists who participated in Copenhagen Consensus, who would you say was a bad choice? I agree that the time scale may have been flawed (which tended to lower the priority of the CO2 mitigation proposal authored by Dr. Mendelsohn), but the process in general is a superb approach to resource allocation, which is why the UN and other policy makers pay attention to the Copenhagen Consensus approach as a good policy help. Which of the top Copenhagen Consensus projects would you replace with some other project?
Hank Roberts says
Amazing. Discover Magazine, August, he actually told them “Just in the past decade, Europe has lost about 15 million people to the cold …” and they just printed it without comment.
That’s 10x the reported number of ‘excess deaths’ in winter months for Europe — and the reports attribute much of that to influenza, heart attacks and so on, statistically more frequent in winter, and worst in Spain and Portugal where houses aren’t well insulated, not in northern European countries.
Well, it’ll be very interesting to see if his book cites a source.
Fifteen million dead from the cold in a decade, and nobody but Lomborg’s noticed it and it’s not in the public health reports.
Just amazing.
Barton Paul Levenson says
Matt posts:
[[So, JS, how about you explain what technology you would use to to deliver 800B watts across 8 hours, which was the US peak demand last year. Remember, you can’t have it available if only if the sun is shining brightly. You can’t have it available only if the wind is blowing. It has to be there with 99% certainty. Additionally, the annual need is 3.6T KWH over a year.]]
1. A national or regional grid would nearly always have substantial power input despite local conditions.
2. I know it gets dark at night; so do those working on solar power. Solar thermal electric plants store excess heat during daytime peak hours in molten salts, which can then be used to generate electricity at night or in cloudy weather. Some STEC plants come close to operating 24 hours. And yes, we’d need backstops. I believe, though, that if we make an effort to make it happen, we can be at perhaps 80% renewables and 20% fossil fuels in no more than 30 years.
Nick Gotts says
Re #464 “the process in general is a superb approach to resource allocation, which is why the UN and other policy makers pay attention to the Copenhagen Consensus approach as a good policy help.”
Eminent economists including Jeffrey Sachs and John Quiggin do not agree it is a superb approach. What is your evidence concerning the UN and other policy makers.
“Which of the top Copenhagen Consensus projects would you replace with some other project?”
The entire process was in my view ludicrous, as the amount of money was absurdly small, the discount rate absurdly large, and the very idea that the “projects” constituted a set of independent items that could usefully be ranked using cost-benefit analysis misconceived. I am not going to be drawn into it in this way.
With regard to the selection, here’s what Quiggin, who does see some value in some of the papers in the publication resulting from the process, says (http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/01/21/copenhagen-review/):
“Criticism began with the composition of the panel. With four Nobel prize winners, it was certainly an eminent body. But the members weren’t notable for a focus on the problems of Third World economic development. They included experimentalist Vernon Smith, econometrician James Heckman (who later withdrew), and economic historians Robert Fogel and Douglass North.
Fogel has done important research on population and nutrition, but the other Nobel prizewinners, and most other members of the panel, were not experts in the main fields under discussion. As Jeffrey Sachs (who headed of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health) observed, the timeline was far too short for the panel to gain requisite expertise, lasting only a few months in total; the background papers circulated for a few weeks, and in the final discussions, the panel had 5 days to review 32 proposals.
The point can be sharpened by looking at some of the Nobel prizewinners who would have seemed like obvious choices for such a panel, including Kenneth Arrow, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Solow and Amartya Sen, all of whom have made extensive contributions to the debate on economic growth and development.
Comparing the two lists, the omissions are, broadly speaking, towards the left of the economics profession and those who have commented on climate change have supported policy initiatives such as Kyoto. Conversely, the members of the Copenhagen panel were generally towards the right and, to the extent that they had stated views, to be opponents of Kyoto. Indeed, Lomborg’s argument that spending to mitigate climate change would be better directed to aid projects was first put forward by Thomas Schelling, one of the Copenhagen panellists.
The same lack of balance was evident in the selection of ‘opponents’. For Robert Cline’s paper on climate change, Lomborg picked vigorous opponents of Kyoto, Robert Mendelsohn and Alan Manne, and the result was an acrimonious debate. But for most of the other issues under consideration, the differences between the parties to the discussion were matters of emphasis and nuance, to the extent that the ‘opponents‘ were eventually redescribed as providing ‘alternative perspectives’.
It is clear from reading the papers and the discussion reports that the panellists approached the task in a serious and fairminded way. But, inevitably, the narrowness of the selection meant that many important issues were prejudged or not discussed. Undoubtedly the likemindedness of the panel members assisted in the stated objective of achieving consensus. It is not clear, however, that a consensus confined to a narrow ideological subset of the economics profession is going to be of much help in achieving broad agreement on solutions to global problems.”
and later:
“In summary, the Copenhagen Consensus project was created as a political stunt. It was designed, in every detail, to produce a predetermined outcome. Having got the desired outcome, the organiser has shown little or no interest in pursuing any of the other issues raised by the project.”
SecularAnimist says
David B. Benson wrote: “Locally, the power professors are quite concerned regarding grid stability and reliability when significant amounts of ‘negative load’, i.e., wind power, are introduced into the grid. Since the reliability requirement is much higher than 99% availability, this is certainly an issue. However, using biofuels to produce power when the wind isn’t blowing means that there are no significant power grid issues, provided the wind generators and the biofuel generators are approximately co-located …”
I would point out that the USA already has “significant power grid issues” as demonstrated by the large scale blackouts of recent years. The issue of upgrading the electrical grid already needs urgent attention.
And all the more so, if the grid is going to successfully integrate diverse, distributed, intermittent electrical generation from rooftop photovoltaics and small-to-large scale wind turbines along with new storage technologies (eg. flywheels) and universal net metering, as solar/wind advocates such as myself want.
And all the more so yet, if we are going to put a large number of new nuclear power plants on the grid, as nuclear advocates want.
And all the more so yet, if we are going to largely electrify both public and private transport, as both solar/wind and nuclear advocates must want, if any of those technologies are to reduce GHG emissions from oil used in the transport sector.
We need a new, “smart” electrical grid — a power-grid Internet, what Al Gore calls the “Electranet” — that can integrate diverse, distributed, intermittent electricity producers and consumers, along with both distributed and centralized storage, at any scale from individual homes to large power plants and factories.
Jim Eager wrote: “Matt, you make no mention of the fact that we have to seriously reduce that very 800B watts/8hr, 3.6KW/yr consumption level, and that there is truly huge potential for reducing consumption and cost in doing so.”
The potential is indeed huge. I saw a report on cable TV last night about generating electricity from the waste heat of industrial processes. The example they gave is a company that manufactures generators that sit on top of a smokestack, where they capture the waste heat, use it to heat water and drive a turbine generator. A factory that installed one of their generators was generating enough electricity for 70 homes from heat that would otherwise have been wasted, actually producing a surplus of electricity and selling the excess to the utility. The report estimated that full implementation of this technology could produce half of all the electricity used in the USA.
Between obvious efficiency improvements, reduction of profligate waste, the full implementation of solar and wind (both large scale centralized and small scale distributed generation), full implementation of existing storage technologies, and the next-generation electrical grid that we need to build anyway, there are plenty of solutions for dramatically reducing carbon emissions from electricity generation without an expansion of nuclear, and indeed while completely phasing out nuclear power as well as fossil fuel generation.
There is no need to accept the very real problems, dangers, risks and costs of nuclear power. I would guess that given the nuclear industry’s influence with the government, they will most likely succeed in obtaining the multibillion dollar taxpayer subsidies, guarantees and insurance that they are demanding before they will build any new plants, and some new nuclear plants will probably be built in the US. They will be enormously expensive, and take a long time to build, and suck up resources that would more effectively be used elsewhere, and expose many people to serious dangers, and any contribution they might make to reducing GHG emissions will be too little, too late.
Hopefully, by the time the first of the new nuclear power plants goes online, in 10 years or so, the real solutions — efficiency, clean renewable energy, and the next-generation grid — will meanwhile have been actively implemented and GHG emissions will be headed down to “safe” levels.
J.S. McIntyre says
re 461
The answer has been waiting in the wings since 1975 and is still being pursued. Solar Power Satellites. There are a number of options being discussed, and hard numbers are hardly available yet, but in general it has been agreed since 1975 that it was feasible (given expected technical development) but too expensive.
Ak, while I’ve long been an advocate for moving off planet to seek out the resources we need to keep our civilization functioning, the power satellite solution is a long-term solution, as are many of the proposals made by John S. Lewis in his book. I think (my opinion, nothing more) it is a valid assumption we need to have a long-term, permanent and self-sufficient presence in orbit, before power satellites become feasable as a long-term solution to power needs. But it should definitely be on the table, along with Lewis’ long-term proposal re harvesting energy from the gas giants.
As the late Robert Heinlein once said (I believe this is the right attribution), “It’s raining soup out there.”
Jim Galasyn says
So Matt, even with the low-end estimate of 1500X the background rate of extinction, do you agree with Lomborg that “biodiversity loss is not a catastrophe”?
Because I think it requires a certain kind of madness to believe that the accelerating destruction of the natural world is not a catastrophe, and that the situation is somehow actually improving.
This self-styled “environmentalist” is selling complacency in the face of the sixth mass extinction, and it seems that as long as some people are making money, he’s fine with it.
Jim Galasyn says
Re Lomborg’s absurd estimate of deaths from cold, it seems to me that his error is confusing “deaths from excess cold” with “excess deaths from cold.”
James says
Re #468: [I saw a report on cable TV last night about generating electricity from the waste heat of industrial processes. The example they gave is a company that manufactures generators that sit on top of a smokestack, where they capture the waste heat, use it to heat water and drive a turbine generator.]
You do see the problem with this as a means of eliminating CO2 emissions, don’t you? The heat is presumably produced by burning fossil fuels: that fuel still is burnt with the cogeneration system on-line. You’ve just made it a little more efficient, that’s all.
[There is no need to accept the very real problems, dangers, risks and costs of nuclear power.]
But there is a need to differentiate between the real problems &c, and the unreal ones that have been ingrained in the public consciousness by decades of anti-nuclear activism.
David B. Benson says
SecularAnimist (468) — I assure you that the newer, smarter electric grid is underway, being researched here and elsewhere. The primary obstacle to grid stability appears to be the inability to build more transmission lines. The obstacles are largely due to NIMBY, not technical issues.
Dave Rado says
Re. #467, Nick Gotts, my favourite quote in Quiggin’s article is the following:
This sums up the hypocrisy of the argument. Those who claim to buy into it are mostly not those with any track record in aiding developing countries. Similarly, it is notable that during the period that Denmark was cutting Denmark’s foreign aid programme, the UK and Germany, both Kyoto signatories, were strongly increasing theirs, thereby conclusively disproving Lomborg’s “opportunity cost” hypothesis.
Dave Rado says
Joe Duck, #464, see here.
David B. Benson says
James (472) — Energy efficiency reduces the need for other sources for the energy, possibly from burning additional carbon.
J.C.H. says
An person who has a cancer that was likely caused by tobacco use will often say they would give everything they own to go back in time and never start using tobacco.
What discount rate are they employing?
Rod B says
I’m all in favor of developing renewable energy sources, and quickly (for a number of reasons). But I think it not helpful to present a Pollyanna case and, to pick a phrase normally tossed the other way, cherry pick the trade-offs. Nuclear energy may not be the ultimate solution, but it doesn’t come close to the extreme negative case offered by SecularAnimist. J.S. is amazingly cavalier with the benefits of renewables and the elimination of things like electric reliability and availability. (For the record 25% transmission loss is not anywhere close, other than with exceptionally long high-voltage AC lines, like maybe (I’m assuming here) Glen Canyon Dam to LA, or from wind power farms to anywhere (though they might switch to DC to save some transmission losses at the cost of conversion losses.)) Discarding the 99% availability standard (actually higher than that) out of hand sounds like the true goal is simply to get us back to nature and near pioneering days (sans all the wood burning, of course!) with a couple of bulbs and a transistor radio during the day and nada during the night — unless you’re one of the elite that can install a 30 meter propeller in the back yard to go with their 30 square meters of silicon. I wonder what condominiums will do, let alone my favorite bake shop that runs big ovens all night. I guess burn the trees that Charlie had to cut down to make way for his propeller.
If this sounds derisive, I apologize. I was shooting only for cynical, which I thought was deserving.
AK says
Re: 469
If we’re going to use lunar materials, we need to have long-term semi-self-sufficient presence on/under the Lunar surface (IMO). However, given existing technology, I doubt we need more than we already have in orbit. Activity could be remote-controlled from earth, as long as sub-second human responses aren’t required. Note that with many parallel instances of a process in orbit, and no human lives in play, the downside cost of a low but non-zero level of accident would be substantially reduced. This would not only reduce the costs by at least an order of magnitude, IMO, but speed the learning curve and allow further generations of cost reduction and efficiency improvement.
The same applies to operations on the moon. There would be critical issues regarding habitat and safety, but the vast majority of industrial processes could be remote controlled from locations safely out of the risk zone, so the some accident level could be allowable, again reducing the cost.
Remember, all the proposed plans depend on a near exponential early growth curve (especially considering the very high learning factor early on), so the earlier the whole thing starts the earlier production power will come on line.
Not to mention, of course, the front-end political efforts needed to get the whole thing underway. An early general perception that space-based solar power is a critical mid/long-term component of any climate mitigation/remediation process will be a prerequisite to proper timing.
In that regard, I’ll offer a link in this thread to today’s scoop:
Giving Climate Change a Kick
via Chris C. Mooney.
Rod B says
re “…The answer has been waiting in the wings since 1975 and is still being pursued. Solar Power Satellites…”
Interesting, clever, and a little cute, But, PULEEEEEZZE!
David B. Benson says
Rod B (478) — You are right in saying “25% transmission line loss is not anywhere close”. You are wrong in implying it is higher. You might have just looked it up first:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses
Nigel Williams says
What will space-based power systems do the earth’s energy balance? Even if the collectors shade the earth and then send all the energy captured down a ‘pipe’ then that energy will add to the energy beneath the upper atmosphere, and hence add to warming, as in the normal course of events some of that energy will have been reflected.
If the collectors don’t shade the earth, then its a total add to the energy balance. It might get rid of a bit of CO2 (if we don’t count the manufacture, launch and maintenance mission’s emissions – and that’s a sum I’d like to see), but it is forcing more external energy into the climate system. Seems a bit dumb, to me.
Seems we need a ‘Sheriff of Space’ to vet such ideas before we launch, much like the International Maritime Organisation is doing with bio-engineering of the oceans. http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/11/a-new-sheriff-f.html
Rod B says
re “…We need a new, “smart” electrical grid that can integrate diverse, distributed, intermittent electricity producers and consumers, along with both distributed and centralized storage, at any scale from individual homes to large power plants and factories….”
You forgot walk the dog, put out the cat, and stir the soup. [;-)
Though I agree, as 473 assumes (a bunch too optimistically), that it ought to be pursued. Same goes for the Power Satellite thing/process. As J.S implies (469), no idea is so far fetched that it shouldn’t be studied by some enterprising scientist. Just not part of the problem/solution situation at hand.
David B. Benson says
Rod B (483) — Sorry, it is nowhere near “a bunch too optimistically”. In comment #473 I indicated one problem and earlier the problem of so-called negative load, together with one solution. The limitations on grid stability are fairly well understood and the approapriate communications infrastructure is being successfully researched. The main limitation is being able to rapidly compute new operating points which are safe. Without faster computers (not expected for electric power generation computations) there is a limit on negative load. So some producers will sometimes be shut out by the communications and control structure. It is up to regualtors and legislators to determine which algorithms are considered to be ‘fair’ in the light of this necessity.
If there were urgent need, the entire western grid could be up and going this way within three years at most. So far, the reliability councils and DoE are content to do further research before settling on a design. So perhaps seven-twelve years from now…
Nigel Williams says
Besides, the only sort of power ‘distribution’ system that will be extant in a century or so will be ‘deeply distributed’. If you haven’t got your electricity generation system on your roof or in your back yard, you will be literally ‘powerless’. Energy storage (like water storage) becomes an individual responsibility and you won’t get much help from your friends if your lights go out.
But we will need the existing fossil-fuel-based economy to produce all those miles of copper wire, those silicon panels and those ICs for the voltage regulators. So we need to decide what items are on the critical path for our survival very soon, and get the toy factories of Asia producing domestic and commercial-size passive energy supply kits as fast as their production lines can move. With the enormous production capacity the world has it will not be hard to do – all it takes is the will and financial structures to hold it all up while to do it.
And we better be quick, as loss of the glaciers will see the Asian work force running out of water, and sea level rise will swamp some of the great industrial areas and quite a bit of electricity generation fairly soon in the process. We need the output of alternative solutions in the warehouses high on a hill ASAP.
It’s a Battlestar Galactica scenario, where we are having to manufacture right now all the things we need for a multi-generational journey into the unknown. If in doing that we exacerbate global warming for a bit by cranking up production to a war-time footing for the production of essential supplies for the journey then that too is the price we must pay. We’ve got the ticket; we now have to take the ride.
AK says
Re: 482
The estimated effect of doubling atmospheric CO2 is about 4 watts/meter2. At ~1.2×1014 meters2 that’s an added heat retention of ~5×1014 watts. A figure I’ve heard thrown around for total human energy requirements is 20 terrawatts = 2×1013 watts. Thus, if total energy requirements were met by space-based solar power, it would add up to 4%, that is 1/25th of the amount caused by CO2.
Except to preliminary start-up, the vast majority of the material would be acquired and launched from the Moon, in most of the scenarios described. Assuming some power was on-line early on in the process, no CO2 would be involved in manufacture or launch of on-going personnel and key materials from earth. Launch vehicles would presumably use LOX/LH2, which produces no CO2. There would be some addition of water to the stratosphere (and higher), but current aviation already adds a lot of that.
It isn’t dumb, just visionary. Of course, at some point long in the future thermal pollution may become an issue, but if necessary orbiting mirrors could be deployed to counteract the energy added to the earth’s surface by space-based power. Meanwhile, once power generation and mass collection are deployed, it would become feasible to move a good deal of industry into space, freeing the surface of both the energy requirements and other by-products.
There are much more important reasons to set up a “Sheriff of Space“, such as the risk of uncoordinated orbits causing collisions, and power beams accidentally getting shadowed by large structures. OTOH, I doubt a project of this order will be set up without the cooperation of many governments.
Matt says
#470 Jim Galasyn: So Matt, even with the low-end estimate of 1500X the background rate of extinction, do you agree with Lomborg that “biodiversity loss is not a catastrophe”?
Does it pain me what a leopard is hunted to extinction? Of course it does. Does it pain me if I never see another mosquito? Nope, unless someone tells me they have a very important role in this world.
Because I think it requires a certain kind of madness to believe that the accelerating destruction of the natural world is not a catastrophe, and that the situation is somehow actually improving.
Is your worry about killing the last one of anything, or is it about killing anything? Certainly you live in an area that used to be forest, drive on roads that used to be fields. Work at a company that used to be wooded. So everything you have done in life so far seems to indicate you don’t mind killing things as long as you think there are plenty more. I don’t think we differ in that viewpoint. I suspect Lomborg agrees with you there.
Just curious, but how do you feel about genetically modifying plants to make them more resistant to blight and thus making a species artificially stronger?
Matt says
#466 Barton Paul Levenson: 1. A national or regional grid would nearly always have substantial power input despite local conditions.
Let’s say you havea wind farm that will generate 1M Watts 60% of the time, but you don’t have any idea when it will actually be generating that 1M watts. How many similar wind farms do you need to be 99.9% certain you will have at least 1M watts? 9 worst case. Now in practice it’s not an all or nothing, so perhaps you get very close at 5 or so.
But these are real problems to be solved as wind (and solar) become a larger part of the grid. Anything that increases the peak:average ratio (supply or demand) is a headache for engineers. Believe it or not, a homeowner that puts in just enough solar cells to cover his bill in may is bad, because he hasn’t put enough in to substantially reduce his peak demand from the electric company, but he’s put in enough to reduce his average, thus his peak:average has gone up and he’s caused the power company to have to deal with a larger peak:average.
2. I know it gets dark at night; so do those working on solar power. Solar thermal electric plants store excess heat during daytime peak hours in molten salts, which can then be used to generate electricity at night or in cloudy weather. Some STEC plants come close to operating 24 hours. And yes, we’d need backstops. I believe, though, that if we make an effort to make it happen, we can be at perhaps 80% renewables and 20% fossil fuels in no more than 30 years.
China just built a massive hydro project for storing energy, and it came in at $42/kwh of storage. It was 16M m3 of water with a 600m height. It cost $1.1B. Presumably they looked at alternatives before spending $1B, and decided this was most cost effective.
At those prices, to store 24 hours of energy the US needs (9.9B KWH), it would take $990B if the Chinese built it. To acquire that land and placate the environmentalists and pay the higher work and materials wage woudl probably be 10X that. So I’d guess we could store 24 hours (average) of the US electricty needs for $9T. And I’m being kind with that figure. The $42 figure is simple potential energy of water, and includes nothing about conversion losses.
Storing electricity costs a lot. But it’s a very important piece of a strategy that relies heavily on solar and wind. Unfortunately, it’s neglected in all the analysis I’ve ever seen from pro-alt energy folks. Reason, of course, is that while there’s a solid fossil fuel back bone, the alt energy can skate by and contribute when it can. But when (if) it becomes critical to rely on heavily on alt energy, then storage and reliability become very important, and cause the economic case to implode.
Rod B says
re 484: “…the entire western grid could be up and going this way within three years at most…..perhaps seven-twelve years from now……”
Well, maybe. Sometimes the prognostication of the enthusiastic happens; sometimes not. It just seems that, in the ultimate, coordinating and syncing 50 million sources/sinks combos is neither easy nor done. Though maybe some of the 49 million + very small power nodes have an insignificant effect — I don’t know.
Matt says
#456 Jim Eager: You need to shed this unsustainable notion that our society and economy must make no sacrifices in current consumption levels for fear of any shrinking of gdp.
Just being practical. Bite off too much and engineering projects often times don’t survive. Everyone here should have very well known examples, if even just a story they saw on TV.
Annual energy consumption grows 2.5 to 3% and has averaged at least that since Edison lit the first bulb. We can get some efficiency gains, of course, but even if we find an additional 10% efficiency improvement in everything, it takes just 5 years to erase that. And then what? You are back at the 2.5 to 3% figure.
Some like to point to what Japan has acheived with conservation (and they are leading) and clever electronics, but population decline plays a role there and they are still seeing YoY gains of 0.7%
J.S. McIntyre says
re 481
“Rod B (478) — You are right in saying “25% transmission line loss is not anywhere close”. You are wrong in implying it is higher. You might have just looked it up first:”
David, it was not Rod who mistakenly put the figure higher; it was I.
I was wrong. I should have taken the time to check it, as you did, instaed of running off of something related to me in conversation a long time ago.
Matt says
#468 SecularAnimist: I would point out that the USA already has “significant power grid issues” as demonstrated by the large scale blackouts of recent years. The issue of upgrading the electrical grid already needs urgent attention.
And you think sporadic generation options such as solar and wind help this issue?
Primary reason for increased outages is that we used to average 25-30% margin (difference between max supply and peak demand), while we now has less than 15% margin.
Biggest reason for this is that as more utilities became invester-owned, profit took precedence over reliability. Build in the margin, the reliability will return.
Tim McDermott says
OK, back-of-the-envelope time for solar power satellites.
These birds need to be in geosynchronous orbit if we want to have a steady supply of power from them.
In a brief search of the web, the cheapest price I could find for putting mass on geosynchronous orbit was $4700/kg. The best power density of PV was more than 6 g/w. Rounding (this is boe, after all) this comes out to 6 g/w times 5 $/g = 30$/watt. Just for putting the PV material on orbit. Supporting structure, power conversion and transmission extra, orbit keeping mechanics extra. Engineering the bird and building the ground station(s) extra.
I don’t think this economically viable. Not for a long time.
Tim
Matt says
#460 Ray Ladbury: Matt, the storage issue is not one that can be dismissed so lightly. It has not been resolved anywhere in a manner that is really safe, although I think the Swedes come closest. Yucky Mtn is a sham. The strategy of “bury it and forget it” is not adequate, and until we do solve this problem, nuclear opponents will have valid objections. Now, I am one who feels that Nuclear power will have to form part of the mix. I’m also one who is a serious skeptic of nuclear fusion (the energy source of the future…and it always will be).
Nobody is talking about burying and forgetting anything. But this is definitely one of those issues that few will ever be convinced to change their position on. I worked USGS as an intern in the late 80s, and the the scientists there were pretty positive about YM at the time.
Of course, Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace changed his mind about nuclear. But as you already proved with Lomborg, I suspect Moore only started Greenpeace and spent 30 years with the organization so that some time down the road he could support nuclear with even more credibility. Very, very sneaky!
Matt says
#452 David B. Benson:The idea of wind power backed up by biofuels sounds quite appealing.
Agree, but I still don’t understand how biofuels can fill the huge gap that will exist on the windiest days and the calmest days. Assume a 100 MW wind farm. It’s not uncommon to 10:1 span between windiest months (Dec Jan) and calmest months (Jul Aug).
Take a 100MW wind farm. With 25% efficiency, we get 219M kwh/yr. More in Dec and Jan, but lots less–perhaps 4.4M kwh/yr in Jul Aug. That means biomass has to make up 214M KWH in July, and again in August, some in sept, etc.
I think the wind farm needs to have about 450 acres of biomass for every acre of windfarm to offset the less windy summer months. Of course, some wind farms will do better, some will do worse. But the key numbers here are 750 kwh/m2/year for wind farms, 55M BTU/acre/year for corn, 10:1 ratio of windiest:calmest months, around 2.5:1 ratio for peak:avg and avg:min.
Matt says
#445 Gavin’s Inline: Response: Get a grip. Al Gore is not a scientist and he doesn’t conduct scientific research. Instead, he quotes estimates and results from the literature. I have no particular insight into species extinction rates, and so I will defer to the people who study it, as should Lomborg. Nowhere in Gore’s statement is a statement of his belief and since I am not psychic I will not presume to know either what he believed in 1992 when he wrote that book, nor what he believes now with the benefit of a further 15 years of research. I have a lot more confidence that E.O. Wilson’s estimate about the consensus than Lomborg’s. – gavin]
I believe I have a firm grip!
Lomborg isn’t a scientest either as I’ve noted several times and I think as everyone understands from reading his bio. Lomborg has quoted numbers within range–I’d argue more in range with consensus–than Gore and Lovejoy quoted.
EO Wilson from (1): ” It means that each year 0.25% or more of the forest species are being doomed to immediate or early extinction. How much is that in absolute numbers, as opposed to rate? If there are 10 million species in the still mostly unexplored forests, which some scientists think possible, the annual loss is in the tens of thousands.”
He’s being very mealy-mouthed with words here when he says “doomed to immediate or early extinction.” Early extinction? Either we made them extinct or we didn’t. Species have rebounded. Species have been found again after we thought they were extinct. What is his timeline for the ultimate extinction to take place?
Of course, after that caveat, he concludes with the “annual loss is in the 10,000s”
To use his 10M figure of total species, if we know 15% of those 10,000 then that means there are 1500 known species that are part of this “annual loss”.
I suspect you will give him a pass for the “condemned” part of this, since without a bound on time the statement is correct. But of course, without a bound on time, all species are doomed to extinction is also correct.
In any case, I’ve learned a lot about how you interpret things as we’ve marched through the various quotes. Thanks for the exchange. I leave you with the last word, and I remain mostly convinced that Lomborg was exceedingly fair in his analysis, and that Lomborg was very much within the range of estimates, and that Wilson, Lovejoy and Gore were at the very, very high end of estimates (and that’s being kind).
(1) http://www.southbaymobilization.org/newsroom/earth/articles/02.0117.OnlyHumansCanHaltWaveOfExtinctions.htm
Martin Vermeer says
This is an often heard misconception. Yes, the energy gets added to the biosphere, and has to be radiated out again. But let’s compute the amount. Say, we have a global population of 10 billion, consuming 1 kW per capita (current value is 250W). This makes 1013 W total.
The total amount of energy coming in from the Sun is by comparison 340W/m2 of surface area, totalling over the whole Earth (510 million km2): 173×1015 W. With an albedo of 0.39, only 106×1015 W actually gets absorbed and has to be re-emitted as thermal infrared.
Do you see the ratio between the two? More than 1:10000! The temperature increase needed to take care of this extra heat would be less than 0.01K. And it remains constant (if we stick to the same population size and consumption level). The CO2 forcing is cumulative…
I believe space energy systems could be a technically valid solution, if the various challenges can be solved (e.g., the interference of the microwave transport beam with radio traffic and radio astronomy) and the price brought down enough. Also, what to think of a ring of huge geostationary satellites as a permanent fixture of our night skies?
Jim Eager says
Re 490 Matt: “Annual energy consumption grows 2.5 to 3% and has averaged at least that since Edison lit the first bulb. We can get some efficiency gains, of course, but even if we find an additional 10% efficiency improvement in everything, it takes just 5 years to erase that. And then what? You are back at the 2.5 to 3% figure.”
I’m not talking about finding “efficiencies,” or even about reducing the rate of growth in demand for energy, I’m talking about actually shrinkiing the demand for energy. It is exactly this perpetual growth in demand that is unsustainable. The cancerous ideology of growth for growth’s sake is hitting the wall of finite resources and finite carrying capacity of the biosphere. We need to come to grips with that fact.
Nick Gotts says
Re #494 (Matt) “Of course, Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace changed his mind about nuclear. But as you already proved with Lomborg, I suspect Moore only started Greenpeace and spent 30 years with the organization”
Matt, even when making a sarcastic aside, it’s worth bothering to get simple facts right. Moore was in Greenpeace 1971-1986. I make that 15 years.
Jim Eager says
Re 488 Matt: “China just built a massive hydro project for storing energy, and it came in at $42/kwh of storage. It was 16M m3 of water with a 600m height. It cost $1.1B. Presumably they looked at alternatives before spending $1B, and decided this was most cost effective.”
First, Three Gorges was not built to store energy as with a pump-storage-generation facility, but to harness the existing energy of water that was already falling the distance of the dam’s height, which is 187m, or 607 feet, not 600m. Second, it was not built for hydro electric generation alone, but also for flood control and as a reservoir against drought, so you’d have to apportion your cost figures among those purposes. As for comparing the costs of alternatives, you’d have to look at what alternative energy technologies were available in 1980s and early 1990s when the decision was made to proceed with the project, not with what technologies are available today at today’s costs. You’d also have to compare with alternative flood control measures. As usual, reality is no where near as simple as people like to portray it.