Category: Climate

Thorium Dreams

The NY Times nails it in In Search of Energy Miracles:

Yet not even the speedy Chinese are likely to get a sizable reactor built before the 2020s, and that is true for the other nuclear projects as well. So even if these technologies prove to work, it would not be surprising to see the timeline for widespread deployment slip to the 2030s or the 2040s. The scientists studying climate change tell us it would be folly to wait that long to start tackling the emissions problem.

Two approaches to the issue — spending money on the technologies we have now, or investing in future breakthroughs — are sometimes portrayed as conflicting with one another. In reality, that is a false dichotomy. The smartest experts say we have to pursue both tracks at once, and much more aggressively than we have been doing.

An ambitious national climate policy, anchored by a stiff price on carbon dioxide emissions, would serve both goals at once. In the short run, it would hasten a trend of supplanting coal-burning power plants with natural gas plants, which emit less carbon dioxide. It would drive some investment into low-carbon technologies like wind and solar power that, while not efficient enough, are steadily improving.

And it would also raise the economic rewards for developing new technologies that could disrupt and displace the ones of today. These might be new-age nuclear reactors, vastly improved solar cells, or something entirely unforeseen.

In effect, our national policy now is to sit on our hands hoping for energy miracles, without doing much to call them forth.

Yep.

h/t Travis Franck

Equation Soup

Most climate skepticism I encounter these days has transparently crappy technical content, if it has any at all. It’s become boring to read.

But every once in a while a paper comes along that is sufficiently complex and free of immediately obvious errors that it becomes difficult to evaluate. One recent example that came across my desk is,

Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming Continue reading “Equation Soup”

Climate incentives

Richard Lindzen and many others have long maintained that climate science promotes alarm in order to secure funding. For example:

Regarding Professor Nordhaus’s fifth point that there is no evidence that money is at issue, we simply note that funding for climate science has expanded by a factor of 15 since the early 1990s, and that most of this funding would disappear with the absence of alarm. Climate alarmism has expanded into a hundred-billion-dollar industry far broader than just research. Economists are usually sensitive to the incentive structure, so it is curious that the overwhelming incentives to promote climate alarm are not a consideration to Professor Nordhaus. There are no remotely comparable incentives to the contrary position provided by the industries that he claims would be harmed by the policies he advocates.

I’ve always found this idea completely absurd, but to prep for an upcoming talk I decided to collect some rough numbers. A picture says it all:

Data

Notice that it’s completely impractical to make the scale large enough to see any detail in climate science funding or NGOs. I didn’t even bother to include the climate-specific NGOs, like 350.org and USCAN, because they are too tiny to show up (under $10m/yr). Yet, if anything, my tally of the climate-related activity is inflated. For example, a big slice of US Global Change Research is remote sensing (56% of the budget is NASA), which is not strictly climate-related. The cleantech sector is highly fragmented and diverse, and driven by many incentives other than climate. Over 2/3 of the NGO revenue stream consists of Ducks Unlimited and the Nature Conservancy, which are not primarily climate advocates.

Nordhaus, hardly a tree hugger himself, sensibly responds,

As a fifth point, they defend their argument that standard climate science is corrupted by the need to exaggerate warming to obtain research funds. They elaborate this argument by stating, “There are no remotely comparable incentives to the contrary position provided by the industries that he claims would be harmed by the policies he advocates.”

This is a ludicrous comparison. To get some facts on the ground, I will compare two specific cases: that of my university and that of Dr. Cohen’s former employer, ExxonMobil. Federal climate-related research grants to Yale University, for which I work, averaged $1.4 million per year over the last decade. This represents 0.5 percent of last year’s total revenues.

By contrast, the sales of ExxonMobil, for which Dr. Cohen worked as manager of strategic planning and programs, were $467 billion last year. ExxonMobil produces and sells primarily fossil fuels, which lead to large quantities of CO2 emissions. A substantial charge for emitting CO2 would raise the prices and reduce the sales of its oil, gas, and coal products. ExxonMobil has, according to several reports, pursued its economic self-interest by working to undermine mainstream climate science. A report of the Union of Concerned Scientists stated that ExxonMobil “has funneled about $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of ideological and advocacy organizations that manufacture uncertainty” on global warming. So ExxonMobil has spent more covertly undermining climate-change science than all of Yale University’s federal climate-related grants in this area.

Money isn’t the whole story. Science is self-correcting, at least if you believe in empiricism and some kind of shared underlying physical reality. If funding pressures could somehow overcome the gigantic asymmetry of resources to favor alarmism, the opportunity for a researcher to have a Galileo moment would grow as the mainstream accumulated unsolved puzzles. Sooner or later, better theories would become irresistible. But that has not been the history of climate science; alternative hypotheses have been more risible than irresistible.

Given the scale of the numbers, each of the big 3 oil companies could run a climate science program as big as the US government’s, for 1% of revenues. Surely the NPV of their potential costs, if faced with a real climate policy, would justify that. But they don’t. Why? Perhaps they know that they wouldn’t get a different answer, or that it’s far cheaper to hire shills to make stuff up than to do real science?

Beggaring ourselves through coal mining

Old joke: How do you make a small fortune breeding horses? Start with a large fortune ….

It appears that the same logic applies to coal mining here in the Northern Rockies.

With US coal use in slight decline, exports are the growth market. Metallurgical and steam coal currently export for about $140 and $80 per short ton, respectively. But the public will see almost none of that, because unmanaged quantity and “competitive” auctions that are uncompetitive (just like Montana trust land oil & gas), plus low royalty, rent and bonus rates, result in a tiny slice of revenue accruing to the people (via federal and state governments) who actually own the resource.

For the Powder River Basin, here’s how it pencils out in rough terms:

Item $/ton
Minemouth price $10
Royalty, rents & bonus $2
Social Cost of Carbon (@ $21/tonCo2 medium value) -$55
US domestic SCC (at 15% of global, average of 7% damage share and 23% GDP share) -$8
Net US public benefit < -$6

In other words, the US public loses at least $3 for every $1 of coal revenue earned. The reality is probably worse, because the social cost of carbon estimate is extremely conservative, and other coal externalities are omitted. And of course the global harm is much greater than the US’ narrow interest.

Even if you think of coal mining as a jobs program, at Wyoming productivity, the climate subsidy alone is almost half a million dollars per worker.

This makes it hard to get enthusiastic about the planned expansion of exports.

Global lukewarming

Fred Krupp, President of EDF, has an opinion on climate policy in the WSJ. I have to give him credit for breaking into a venue that is staunchly ignorant the realities of climate change. An excerpt:

If both sides can now begin to agree on some basic propositions, maybe we can restart the discussion. Here are two:

The first will be uncomfortable for skeptics, but it is unfortunately true: Dramatic alterations to the climate are here and likely to get worse—with profound damage to the economy—unless sustained action is taken. As the Economist recently editorialized about the melting Arctic: “It is a stunning illustration of global warming, the cause of the melt. It also contains grave warnings of its dangers. The world would be mad to ignore them.”

The second proposition will be uncomfortable for supporters of climate action, but it is also true: Some proposed climate solutions, if not well designed or thoughtfully implemented, could damage the economy and stifle short-term growth. As much as environmentalists feel a justifiable urgency to solve this problem, we cannot ignore the economic impact of any proposed action, especially on those at the bottom of the pyramid. For any policy to succeed, it must work with the market, not against it.

If enough members of the two warring climate camps can acknowledge these basic truths, we can get on with the hard work of forging a bipartisan, multi-stakeholder plan of action to safeguard the natural systems on which our economic future depends.

I wonder, though, if the price of admission was too high. Krupp equates two risks: climate impacts, and policy side effects. But this is a form of false balance – these risks are not in the same league.

Policy side effects are certainly real – I’ve warned against inefficient policies multiple times (e.g., overuse of standards). But the effects of a policy are readily visible to well-defined constituencies, mostly short term, and diverse across jurisdictions with different implementations. This makes it easy to learn what’s working and to stop doing what’s not working (and there’s never a shortage of advocates for the latter), without suffering large cumulative effects. Most of the inefficient approaches (like banning the bulb) are economically miniscule.

Climate risk, on the other hand, accrues largely to people in far away places, who aren’t even born yet. It’s subject to reinforcing feedbacks (like civil unrest) and big uncertainties, known and unknown, that lend it a heavy tail of bad outcomes, which are not economically marginal.

The net balance of these different problem characteristics is that there’s little chance of catastrophic harm from climate policy, but a substantial chance from failure to have a climate policy. There’s also almost no chance that we’ll implement a too-stringent climate policy, or that it would stick if we did.

The ultimate irony is that EDF’s preferred policy is cap & trade, which trades illusory environmental certainty for considerable economic inefficiency.

Does this kind of argument reach a wavering middle ground? Or does it fail to convince skeptics, while weakening the position of climate policy proponents by conceding strawdog growth arguments?

Minds are like parachutes, or are they dumpsters?

Open Minds has yet another post in a long series demolishing bizarre views of climate skeptics, particularly those from WattsUpWithThat. Several of the targets are nice violations of conservation laws and bathtub dynamics. For example, how can you believe that the ocean is the source of rising atmospheric CO2, when atmospheric CO2 increases by less than human emissions and ocean CO2 is also rising?

The alarming thing about this is that, if I squint and forget that I know anything about dynamics, some of the rubbish sounds like science. For example,

The prevailing paradigm simply does not make sense from a stochastic systems point of view – it is essentially self-refuting. A very low bandwidth system, such as it demands, would not be able to have maintained CO2 levels in a tight band during the pre-industrial era and then suddenly started accumulating our inputs. It would have been driven by random events into a random walk with dispersion increasing as the square root of time. I have been aware of this disconnect for some time. When I found the glaringly evident temperature to CO2 derivative relationship, I knew I had found proof. It just does not make any sense otherwise. Temperature drives atmospheric CO2, and human inputs are negligible. Case closed.

I suspect that a lot of people would have trouble distinguishing this foolishness from sense. In fact, it’s tough to precisely articulate what’s wrong with this statement, because it falls so far short of a runnable model specification. I also suspect that I would have trouble distinguishing similar foolishness from sense in some other field, say biochemistry, if I were unfamiliar with the content and jargon.

This reinforces my conviction that words are inadequate for discussing complex, quantitative problems. Verbal descriptions of dynamic mental models hide all kinds of inconsistencies and are generally impossible to reliably test and refute. If you don’t have a formal model, you’ve brought a knife, or maybe a banana, to a gunfight.

There are two remedies for this. We need more formal mathematical model literacy, and more humility about mental models and verbal arguments.

Reading between the lines

… on another incoherent Breakthrough editorial:

The Creative Destruction of Climate Economics

In the 70 years that have passed since Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction,” economists have struggled awkwardly with how to think about growth and innovation. Born of the low-growth agricultural economies of 18th Century Europe, the dismal science to this day remains focused on the question of how to most efficiently distribute scarce resources, not on how to create new ones — this despite two centuries of rapid economic growth driven by disruptive technologies, from the steam engine to electricity to the Internet.

Perhaps the authors should consult the two million references on Google scholar to endogenous growth and endogenous technology, or read some Marx. Continue reading “Reading between the lines”

Unskeptical skepticism

Atmospheric CO2 doesn’t drive temperature, and temperature doesn’t drive CO2. They drive each other, in a feedback loop. Each relationship involves integration – CO2 accumulates temperature changes through mechanisms like forest growth and ocean uptake, and temperature is the accumulation of heat flux controlled by the radiative effects of CO2.

This has been obvious for at least decades, yet it still eludes many. A favorite counter-argument for an influence of CO2 on temperature has long been the observation that temperature appears to lead CO2 at turning points in the ice core record. Naively, this violates the requirement for establishing causality, that cause must precede effect. But climate is not a simple system with binary states and events, discrete time and single causes. In a feedback system, the fact that X lags Y by some discernible amount doesn’t rule out an influence of Y on X; in fact such bidirectional causality is essential for simple oscillators.

A newish paper by Shakun et al. sheds some light on the issue of ice age turning points. It turns out that much of the issue is a matter of data – that ice core records are not representative of global temperatures. But it still appears that CO2 is not the triggering mechanism for deglaciation. The authors speculate that the trigger is northern hemisphere temperatures, presumably driven by orbital insolation changes, followed by changes in ocean circulation. Then CO2 kicks in as amplifier. Simulation backs this up, though it appears to me from figure 3 that models capture the qualitative dynamics, but underpredict the total variance in temperature over the period. To me, this is an interesting step toward a more complete understanding of ice age terminations, but I’ll wait for a few more papers before accepting declarations of victory on the topic.

Predictably, climate skeptics hate this paper. For example, consider Master Tricksed Us! at WattsUpWithThat. Commenters positively drool over the implication that Shakun et al. “hid the incline” by declining to show the last 6000 years for proxy temperature/CO2 relationship.

I leave the readers to consider the fact that for most of the Holocene, eight millennia or so, half a dozen different ice core records say that CO2 levels were rising pretty fast by geological standards … and despite that, the temperatures have been dropping over the last eight millennia …

But not so fast. First, there’s no skepticism about the data. Perhaps Shakun et al. omitted the last 6k years for a good reason, like homogeneity. A spot check indicates that there might be issues – series MD95-2037 ends in the year 6838 BP, for example. So, perhaps the WUWT graph merely shows spatial selection bias in the dataset. Second, the implication that rising CO2 and falling temperatures somehow disproves a CO2->temperature link is yet another failure to appreciate bathtub dynamics and multivariate causality.

This credulous fawning over the slightest hint of a crack in mainstream theory strikes me as the opposite of skepticism. The essence of a skeptical attitude, I think, is to avoid early lock-in to any one pet theory or data stream. Winning theories emerge from testing lots of theories against lots of constraints. That requires continual questioning of models and data, but also questioning of the questions. Objections that violate physics like accumulation, or heaps of mutually exclusive objections, have to be discarded like any other failed theory. The process should involve more than fools asking more questions than a wise man can answer. At the end of the day, “no theory is possible” is itself a theory that implies null predictions that can be falsified like any other, if it’s been stated explicitly enough.