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Where sea-level rise isn’t what it seems

Published April 27, 2012 Climate Change Closed

A very nice lesson from Mark Lynas on how tricky it is to interpret sea level data correctly; an excellent example of the challenge of finding reliable signal amongst the noise. This is similar to the media urge to trumpet extreme weather events as evidence of climate change.

Whilst working for the Maldives government I was always aware of the need to resist the temptation of making sweeping statements about the impacts of climate change and sea-level rise in the service of wider political ends. I saw part of my role as advisor to push back against the simplistic view that given that we know that the planet is warming, and the seas are rising, surely the impacts – in terms of erosion, flooding events and disasters – should increasingly be visible now, right?

A new paper published in the AGU’s house journal Eos Transactions shows why caution is often justified. Here (via a screengrab, as the entire thing is behind a password) is the 1993-2011 sea level trend data from Tarawa atoll, part of Kiribati in the central Pacific:

Whoa! No sea-level rise there, then. And yet of course climate campaigners – and even the Kiribati government – understandably anxious to highlight the future existential threat to the islands, have used storm surges, flooding events and suchlike as evidence of current sea-level rise impacts. Which they are almost certainly not, at least not in Tarawa atoll anyway.

To me the graph is interesting for two reasons. The first is the absence of any trend over the last 20 years towards increased sea levels in that part of the Pacific. This should be expected, because sea level rise as a computed average means that the oceans are rising in more places than they are falling, but they are falling in some places nonetheless. (Just as a few areas of the globe have got colder over recent years.) The second is the sheer up-and-down massive variability in actual sea levels, which is linked to the El Niño cycle. The author (Simon Donner, a geographer from the University of British Columbia, Canada) points out in the Eos paper that the monthly mean sea level dropped by nearly half a metre (45cm) between March 1997 and February 1998 because of switch from El Niño to La Niña conditions, and peaks of 15cm were seen in each of the recent El Niño events – which as the author points out is “equivalent to 50 years of global sea level rise at the rate observed since 2000 of 3 mm per year”.

So the problem with attributing sea-level rise impacts is the same as with attributing heat-waves, droughts, floods or other extreme events to climate change – you have to try to figure out what would have happened absent the global warming trend (in order to distinguish genuine impacts from noise), and also distinguish background changes from more direct anthropogenic interference which might confuse the picture. In a heatwave, for instance, were the extreme temperatures caused by the urban heat island effect in a more built-up area?

Read the whole thing »

Good work Mark, and thanks for the quotations from the fire walled and overpriced academic journals.

Why We Should Act to Stop Global Warming—and Why We Won’t

Published March 6, 2012 Climate Change , Energy Policy Closed

We liked Megan McArdle’s recent essay Why We Should Act to Stop Global Warming—and Why We Won’t. It is a smart article by a writer who is not an energy policy wonk, explaining concisely why so few people can make the personal investment to learn and understand the climate and energy policy tradeoffs.

If you can invest only an hour and like your education in movie format, then check out this post on Energy policy: Near Zero.

If you can invest three hours in some very efficient reading check out this post on Stanford University nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate Burton Richter’s 2010 book: Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century.

Back to Megan – why does she support action on climate? Her central reason is the same as ours:

(…) Well, because we’ve only go the one climate. I don’t like running large one-way experiments on vital systems we don’t know how to fix. The risk of a catastrophic outcome may be small, but it would be pretty darn terrible to find out that hey, we hit the jackpot!

How Mark Lynas riled the green movement

Published March 4, 2012 Climate Change , Energy Policy , Nuclear Power 6 Comments
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“They believe in what they’re doing, but these people are nuts,” says Lynas. “And they’re doing real harm by spreading fear.”

What we know from Chernobyl is that the psychological impacts of fear of radiation are worse — in terms of health outcomes — than the actual damage of the radiation itself. We need to learn the lessons of this and that nothing is without consequences, nuclear scare-mongering included

Mark Lynas, author of  The God Species, was recently interviewed by Yale Environment 360 contributor Keith Kloor. Don’t miss this interview:

(…) Lynas talked about his change of heart, his embrace of genetically modified crops as a key solution to possible food shortages, and his disgust at seeing some environmentalists largely ignore the devastation from the recent Japanese tsunami while over-hyping the dangers of radiation from the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant.

(…) Yale Environment 360: The main thesis of your new book is that humans have to take an active role in managing the planet if we want to keep it from being “irreparably damaged.” But much of what you prescribe, such as wider deployment of nuclear power and genetically engineered agriculture, is anathema to many greens. This also flies in the face of your own history as an environmental activist, in which you were anti-nuclear and anti-GMO until just a few years ago. What’s caused you to do an about-face?

Mark Lynas: Well, life is nothing if not a learning process. As you get older you tend to realize just how complicated the world is and how simplistic solutions don’t really work … There was no “Road to Damascus” conversion, where there’s a sudden blinding flash and you go, “Oh, my God, I’ve got this wrong.” There are processes of gradually opening one’s mind and beginning to take seriously alternative viewpoints, and then looking more closely at the weight of the evidence. It was a few years ago now that I first started reassessing the nuclear thing. But I didn’t want to go public then. I knew that would be the end of my reputation as an environmentalist, and to some extent, it has been.

e360: Really?

Lynas: I mean, I’ve lost friends over this. And I’ve made some new ones. It’s an issue that divides almost like no other.

Hansen: paleoclimate record indicates”strong amplifying feedbacks” to additional GHG

Published December 13, 2011 Climate Change , Energy Policy , Nuclear Power Closed
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“We don’t have a substantial cushion between today’s climate and dangerous warming,” Hansen said. “Earth is poised to experience strong amplifying feedbacks in response to moderate additional global warming. – James Hansen

This is definitely not good: the latest bulletin from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies offers evidence that earth’s climate sensitivity is actually higher than we thought. I.e., more sensitive to increasing atmospheric GHG levels. As best I can tell Dr. Hansen discussed this research at the AGU Fall Meeting 2011. I’m reading the 8 Dec, 2011 NASA Paleoclimate Record Points Toward Potential Rapid Climate Changes:

(…) In recent research, Hansen and co-author Makiko Sato, also of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, compared the climate of today, the Holocene, with previous similar “interglacial” epochs – periods when polar ice caps existed but the world was not dominated by glaciers. In studying cores drilled from both ice sheets and deep ocean sediments, Hansen found that global mean temperatures during the Eemian period, which began about 130,000 years ago and lasted about 15,000 years, were less than 1 degree Celsius warmer than today. If temperatures were to rise 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, global mean temperature would far exceed that of the Eemian, when sea level was four to six meters higher than today, Hansen said.

“The paleoclimate record reveals a more sensitive climate than thought, even as of a few years ago. Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient,” Hansen said. “It would be a prescription for disaster.”

Hansen focused much of his new work on how the polar regions and in particular the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland will react to a warming world.

Two degrees Celsius of warming would make Earth much warmer than during the Eemian, and would move Earth closer to Pliocene-like conditions, when sea level was in the range of 25 meters higher than today, Hansen said. In using Earth’s climate history to learn more about the level of sensitivity that governs our planet’s response to warming today, Hansen said the paleoclimate record suggests that every degree Celsius of global temperature rise will ultimately equate to 20 meters of sea level rise. However, that sea level increase due to ice sheet loss would be expected to occur over centuries, and large uncertainties remain in predicting how that ice loss would unfold.

(…)

It is very definitely time to get serious about a rapid global deployment of nuclear reactors. We need to average the equivalent of at least one 1GWe power plant every day through 2060 — a challenge that becomes more difficult every year we delay launching the effort.

Read the whole thing »

James Hansen on the Kool-Aid, Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy

Published August 2, 2011 Climate Change , Energy Policy , Nuclear Power Closed
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Don’t miss the latest dispatch from James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. You will learn that Jim has no patience with the Easter Bunny fable whereby carbon emissions can be eliminated entirely by “renewable” energy sources. Here are a few excerpts (emphasis mine):

(…) people who accept the reality of climate change are not proposing actions that would work. This is important, because as Mother Nature makes climate change more obvious, we need to be moving in directions within a framework that will minimize the impacts and provide young people a fighting chance of stabilizing the situation.

The Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy

The insightful cynic will note: “Now I understand all the fossil fuel ads with windmills and solar panels – fossil fuel moguls know that renewables are no threat to the fossil fuel business.” The tragedy is that many environmentalists line up on the side of the fossil fuel industry, advocating renewables as if they, plus energy efficiency, would solve the global climate change matter.

Can renewable energies provide all of society’s energy needs in the foreseeable future? It is conceivable in a few places, such as New Zealand and Norway. But suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.

This Easter Bunny fable is the basis of ‘policy’ thinking of many liberal politicians. Yet when such people are elected to the executive branch and must make real world decisions, they end up approving expanded off-shore drilling and allowing continued mountaintop removal, long-wall coal mining, hydro-fracking, etc. – maybe even a tar sands pipeline. Why the inconsistency?

Because they realize that renewable energies are grossly inadequate for our energy needs now and in the foreseeable future and they have no real plan. They pay homage to the Easter Bunny fantasy, because it is the easy thing to do in politics. They are reluctant to explain what is actually needed to phase out our need for fossil fuels.

(…) Amory Lovins is the most popular person that I know and has received uncountable awards. He deserves them. But I believe his popularity is in part because he says everything people want to hear. He even says there is no need to have a tax on carbon. Thus even fossil fuel companies love him. Fossil fuel companies are happy to support energy efficiency, which places the onus on the public and guarantees fossil fuel dominance far into the future.

(…) Recently I received a mailing on the climate crisis from a large environmental organization. Their request, letters and e-mails to Congress and the President, mentioned only renewable energies (specifically wind and solar power). Such a request offends nobody, and it is worthless.

Jim included comments on nuclear energy in five footnotes – where he concisely dispatches the common anti-nuclear activist talking points. Note that Jim is quite up to speed on the 4th generation IFR (Integral Fast Reactor), including the 1994 cancellation:

Pushker Kharecha and I will write a paper with an objective post-Fukushima assessment of the role of nuclear power, but first we must complete papers 2 and 3 (Energy Imbalance and Case for Young People). However, a few comments on safety5, technology status6, nuclear waste7, fuel supply8,and cost9 are warranted to balance the opportunistic barrage of misinformation from dedicated ‘anti-nukes’ and an undiscerning sensation-minded media.

5 Safety: The lobbying organization Union of Concerned Scientists on 25 July broadcast a request to all citizens to write their governors and congress-people to demand improved nuclear power safety. Huh? The number of people who have died from nuclear power in the U.S. is zero. How to improve on that? The safety record of the nuclear industry is the best of all major industries in the U.S.

The National Academy of Sciences estimates that the Pennsylvania population exposed to radiation by the Three Mile Island accident may experience one or two resulting cancer deaths; that population will experience about 40,000 cancer deaths due to other causes. However, the estimate of 1-2 deaths is from the “linear no threshold” (LNT) approximation, i.e., an assumption that known radiation effects for large doses continue proportionally for small doses. That assumption is uncertain – there is at least as much anecdotal evidence suggesting that small radiation doses are beneficial to health (some mentioned here: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=42347) as the contrary. However, no adequate scientific study with proper controls has been made.

Curiously, people seem to ignore the far greater dangers of fossil fuels. Mountain-top removal for coal alone has been linked to 60,000 cancer cases. The United Nations has estimated global deaths due to fossil fuel air and water pollution to be of the order of one million annually.

6 Technology: Fukushima nuclear power plants are a 50-year-old technology. They withstood a powerful earthquake, but were washed over by a 10-meter tsunami that wiped out the power sources used to cool the reactors. Modern 3rd generation light-water reactors can use passive cooling systems that require no power source.

No people died at Fukushima because of the nuclear technology. Four people died from other causes (one fell from a crane, one died of a heart attack, and two were drowned by the tsunami). When a plane crashes and kills 100 people do we choose to terminate the airline industry? No, we take steps to make planes safer. Already nuclear power has the best safety record of any energy technology, and the newest nuclear plants have great improvements.

7 Nuclear “waste”: it is not waste, it is fuel for 4th generation reactors! Current (‘slow’) nuclear reactors are light- water reactors that ‘burn’ less than 1% of the energy in the original uranium ore, leaving a waste pile that is radioactive for more than 10,000 years. The 4th generation reactors can ‘burn’ this waste, as well as excess nuclear weapons material, leaving a much smaller waste pile with radioactive half-life measured in decades rather than millennia, thus minimizing the nuclear waste problem. The economic value of current nuclear waste, if used as a fuel for 4th generation reactors, is trillions of dollars.

Nuclear reactors deployed in the next 1-2 decades would be primarily improved light-water reactors, with passive cooling capability and other safety improvements, because these are ready for commercial use. However, it is important to also deploy the first 4th generation reactors to demonstrate that the nuclear waste problem can be solved and to optimize the 4th generation technology.

8 Fuel supply: anti-nuke environmentalists argue that it takes energy to mine and process uranium, and that the uranium supply is limited. In fact, 4th generation nuclear technology, by using more than 99% of the energy in the fuel, expands the fuel supply by a factor of the order of 100.

China has just announced its first 4th generation nuclear reactor, thus increasing the expected lifespan of their proven uranium reserves from 50 years to more than 3000 years.

The United States was the first country to develop 4th generation nuclear technology. But, when General Electric and Argonne National Laboratory disclosed that they were ready to build a commercial scale reactor in 1994, anti- nuke people persuaded the Clinton administration to terminate the program. The U.S. still has top brainpower in this technology, but, unless there is a change of policy, China will soon leave the United States behind.

9 Cost: the ‘real solution’ to the climate/energy problem allows the market to determine winning technologies. Westinghouse AP-1000 advanced 3rd-generation nuclear power plants are being built in China Although anti-nukes may do everything they can to make nuclear power as expensive as possible in the United States, they are not likely to affect nuclear power development in China.

I was also pleased that Jim referenced Bill Gates’ recent interview with Chris Anderson.

Bill Gates is so distressed by the irrational pusillanimous U.S. energy policy that he is investing a piece of his personal fortune to help develop a specific 4th generation nuclear technology.

Read the whole thing »

Germany, Italy, Greens, nukes and climate change

Published June 19, 2011 Climate Change , Nuclear Power Closed
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Mark Lynas continues to place his arrows in the energy policy bullseye. Unlike 99.99% of the media, Mark is doing his homework, then translating the facts and figures to language that most readers can grasp. This Guardian piece sums up the mess:

(…) As a lifelong environmentalist, and author of a 2009 book which laid out the terrifying prospects of uncontrolled global warming, I cannot help but feel that the decisions of the German and Swiss governments rank among the worst climate-related policies of recent years. Carbon emissions cannot do anything other than rise as a result of phasing out the continent’s largest source of zero-carbon power – and doing this just a week after the International Energy Agency reported that 2010 carbon emissions rose to the highest levels ever is little short of criminal.

There is perhaps a certain discomfort about the fact that one of the best options for tackling global warming just so happens to be a technology that greens had spent decades opposing before climate change even hit the agenda. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard green groups insisting that climate change is the “greatest challenge ever to face humanity”. Yet their refusal to reassess their inherited positions against nuclear power suggest that none of them actually believe what they are saying – or that most environmentalists are prepared to take refuge in ideologically motivated wishful thinking even when the future of the planet is at stake.

If the German greens really took climate change seriously, they would instead be pushing for a phase-out of coal – which generates by far the largest proportion of the country’s power and consequent carbon emissions – from Germany’s electricity grid. Instead, the new nuclear phase-out plan will see a hefty 11GW of new coal plants built in years to come, with an additional 5GW of new gas. (Update: Chancellor Merkel is now talking about 20GW of new fossil fuel plant that will be needed.) The only way emissions from these plants could be controlled would be through “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) – yet Greenpeace in Germany has already mounted a successful scaremongering campaign against this new technology, helping to ensure that future fossil emissions will go into the atmosphere unabated.

(…) The silliness does not stop there. Much of Germany’s renewables investment has been in solar photovoltaics in recent years, thanks to extraordinarily generous feed-in-tariffs. Yet these solar roofs are so expensive that they cost more than €700 per tonne (PDF) of carbon abated, compared to a carbon price in Europe of €15 or less. One expert study suggests that the whole solar experiment up until this year has already landed German energy consumers with a €120bn liability for the next two decades – this in order to generate a mere 2% of the country’s electricity, or less than a single large nuclear plant.

Read the whole thing »

More on Germany’s energy incoherence

Published June 4, 2011 Climate Change , Energy Policy Closed

Clive Crook on Roger Pielke Jr.:

Roger Pielke Jnr, author of The Climate Fix, the best book I’ve read on the politics of climate change, offers some comments on the new German energy policy.

Given Merkel’s penchant for blowing with the political winds and the German public’s Wutbürger politics, we should expect German energy policies to continue to be anything but stable. Germany’s energy policies have gone from potentially world-leading to incoherent in the blink of an eye. But perhaps part of the problem here is the tendency for analysts, me included, to see short-term change without fully appreciating the larger context. German democracy may presently be incapable of implementing a sensible energy policy. Regardless of Germany’s domestic politics, its efforts to rapidly ramp up renewables — if they actually stick as policies — will nonetheless provide a worthwhile laboratory for what is technologically possible, and thus bears close watching.

Looking at the big picture, the question now I suppose is how long must we wait until the next German energy policy U-turn?

Umm… did I mention that there is a Kindle edition of The Climate Fix? This is the first book downloaded to our new iPad.

1999 UNFCC report: “Adventures At Climate Change Central”

Published May 31, 2011 Climate Change , Energy Policy Closed

Paul Rosenberg recounts his experience attending the 1999 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 5 in Bonn). It was just as bad as you suspected, first-class travel, hotels, meals, booze and hookers, all paid for by your tax dollars.

In 1999 … Henry offered to get me in to the Kyoto accord meetings in Bonn, through his organization Sovereignty International.

(…) The meetings were held in a magnificent hotel, surrounded by hundreds of soldiers and policemen. Everything was absolutely first class. To this day, I don’t think I’ve seen its equal in terms of high-end, well-run meetings. Everything was pristine; every need had been considered and addressed in advanced.

There were several days of meetings scheduled, some in smaller meeting rooms and others in the big auditorium, complete with language-specific headphones and a bank of professional translators. Again, absolutely first class.

On the second floor of the facility was a huge computer room. There must have been fifty terminals available to whomever sat in front of them. The connections were excellent (especially for 1999) and there were always open machines. This was a courtesy, not only for the participants, but especially for the press.

The attendees, as you might suspect, were all well dressed, and all appeared to be feeling special about being invited to such impressive, elite meetings. I, on the other hand, had a bit of a Groucho Marx moment: “I can’t believe they let me into this place.”

(…) The meetings, however, were a different story. While all the externals of this event were spectacular, the content of the meetings was less than pedestrian. The presenters certainly dressed well and tried to use impressive words; the Powerpoint slides were perfect; but the actual content was… lame. A local VFW or Women’s Auxiliary could have done as well.

I heard one speech – in the impressive ‘headphone’ amphitheater – where the speaker said that vast areas of her home country (Togo, as I recall) would be entirely under water in ten years (which would have been 2009), and that every soul living there would be dead. As evidence, she referred to impressive names and organizations, who had “said so.”

And that was the way the whole conference went. The ‘science’ of one group referred to the ‘science’ of another, then another, and then still another, who referred back to the first! Intellectually, the entire show was a sham. I kept thinking that there had to be someone there who was competent, that perhaps they were having the real meetings in some back room somewhere. If so, I never found them, and I had what appeared to be free run of the place.

(…) There’s a little test that I run in my mind in cases like this. I ask myself: If I owned a convenience store, would I feel good about having this person to manage it for me when I was out of town for a week?“

(…)

Don’t despair. A low GHG emissions planet is possible – just not on the old Kyoto UN path. Take a couple of deep breaths, then focus your energy on how to achieve a low carbon prosperous planet by reading Roger Pielke’s The Climate Fix and The Hartwell Paper.

Why is nuclear power the core climate change solution?

Published May 23, 2011 Climate Change , Energy Policy , Favorites , Nuclear Power 5 Comments
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[For accessibility, I've bumped the time-stamp on this post from Jan 2010 to May 2011. Ed.]

A critical-thinker friend emailed this:

Trying to get my head around nuclear power issues. I would describe myself as a nuclear “agnostic.” But the more I read the more I can see the merits of Barry Brooks’ (and your) point of view, and realizing we’ve lost a lot of time bringing nuclear power online.

I replied:

I too was “agnostic”, but leaning against more nuclear generation. I was concerned about all that long-lived “waste”. Why do we need nuclear power — my optimistic-self wanted to believe Ray Kurzweil that “nanotechnology” would somehow enable solar to become the answer for clean, affordable energy. Or geothermal, wind, tidal, or bio-something.

As I studied energy policy it became clear that a necessary condition that must be satisfied by carbon-free energy is that it must be “cheaper than coal“. Otherwise, the dominant future polluters, the developing world, will continue building coal power stations. After 25 years of government subsidies, the results for “renewables” just don’t add up — not even close. Yes, there are geographic niches where the free market will adopt wind or solar, but on a global basis, pushing for such “renewables” just prolongs the dominance of coal (and gas).

As you say “we’ve lost a lot of time bringing nuclear power online”. Instead of being coal-dependent, both America and Australia could easily have adopted the French model, which with almost entirely nuclear-based electricity generation, makes France the standard for other developed countries to achieve (the challenge for the rest of the planet is to catch up to where France is today!). Sigh… The good news is that China does not seem to be that stupid.

China already has 9 GWe operating, with 61 GWe new reactors planned, including some of the world’s most advanced. Their goal is least 60 GWe (total) by 2020, and 120-160 GWe by 2030. China demands aggressive technology transfer in their contracts — e.g., in return for the large commitment to Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, China will be building and supplying most of the components after the first two plants are completed.

India expects to have 20 GWe nuclear capacity on line by 2020 and 63 GWe by 2032. It aims to supply 25% of electricity from nuclear power by 2050 [I think this goal is much less than India is likely to achieve]. India is a leader in Thorium Fast Breeder (FBR) technology and could turn out to be a major global supplier of new nuclear plants.

(…) India has uniquely been developing a nuclear fuel cycle to exploit its reserves of thorium.

Now, foreign technology and fuel are expected to boost India’s nuclear power plans considerably. All plants will have high indigenous engineering content.

India has a vision of becoming a world leader in nuclear technology due to its expertise in fast reactors and thorium fuel cycle.

Russia is producing some 22 GWe in 31 plants, including the BN-600, one of the longest operating fast breeder reactors in the world. Russia has another 37 GWe of new capacity under construction, planned, or proposed.

Brazil has about 2GWe power by two Siemens plants at Angra, and 8GWe more planned for 2030 and 60GWe total by 2060.

The bad news is that there will be many megatons of coal burned before this turns around.

So — what solid information can we offer that is useful to friends who have not yet made the journey from nuclear agnostic to nuclear activist? For foundation reading I recommend David MacKay’s famous energy policy book “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air” . Dr. Mackay is now Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. You can follow some of David’s efforts here, and you can find Seekerblog posts on MacKay’s work with this search.

Next, I recommend Australian environmental scientist Prof. Barry Brook (Adelaide University). Barry and colleagues have created a remarkable resource — the BraveNewClimate.com blog, where Barry has been applying his considerable critical-thinking skills to the energy policy issue. His September 2009 post “A necessary interlude” is a concise summary of why Barry has shifted his focus to concentrate on the nuclear solution. I highly recommend a careful read of the short essay. In briefy, Barry wants the conversation focused on energy policy that will work in the real world. Near the end of the post Barry succinctly summarizes his view of the energy options — this is so good I have reproduced that segment here. The emphasis below is mine, because my perception is Barry has worked his way through the same study that I have, with the same conclusions:

(…) It is my conclusion, from all of this, that nuclear power IS the only viable FF alternative.

I am vitally interested in supporting real solutions that permit a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, especially coal (oil will, at least in part, take care of itself). If the conclusion is that wind/solar cannot meaningfully facilitate this transition, why bother to promote them? Now, I should make one thing quite clear. I am not AGAINST renewable energy. If folks want to build them, go for it! If they can find investors, great! Indeed, I’m no NIMBY, and would be happy to have a conga line of huge turbines gracing the hills behind my home, just as I’d be happy to have a brand spanking new nuclear power station in my suburb. But why should I promote something I have come to consider — on a scientific and economic basis — to be a non-solution to the energy and climate crisis? That doesn’t make sense to me.

To your questions:

1. Coal with CCS — doomed to failure. Why? Because the only thing that is going to be embraced with sufficient vigour, on a global scale, is an energy technology that has the favourable characteristics of coal, but is cheaper than coal. CCS, by virtue of the fact that it is coal + extra costs (capture, compressions, sequestration) axiomatically fails this litmus test. It is therefore of no interest and those who promote it can only do so on the basis of simultaneously promoting such a large carbon price that (a) the developing world is highly unlikely to ever impose it, and (b) if they do, CCS won’t be competitive with nuclear. CCS is a non-solution to the climate and energy crises.

2. Natural gas has no role in baseload generation. It is a high-carbon fossil fuel that releases 500 to 700 kg of CO2 per MWh. If it is used in peaking power only (say at 10% capacity factor), then it is only a tiny piece in the puzzle, because we must displace the coal. It it is used to displace the coal baseload, then it is a counterproductive ’solution’ because it is still high carbon (despite what the Romms of this world will have you believe) and is in shorter supply than coal anyway. Gas is a non-solution to the climate and energy crises.

3. The developing world lives in Trainer’s power-down society already, and they are going to do everything possible to get the hell out of it. The developed world will fight tooth and nail, and will burn the planet to a soot-laden crisp, rather than embrace Trainer’s simpler way. Power down is a non-solution to the climate and energy crises.

4. It is nice to imagine that renewables will have a niche role in the future. But actually, will they? They don’t have any meaningful role now, when pitted in competition with fossil fuels, so why will that be different when pitted fairly against a nuclear-powered world? I don’t know the answer, and I don’t frankly care, because even if renewable energy can manage to maintain various niche energy supply roles in the future, it won’t meet most of the current or future power demand. So niche applications or not, renewables are peripheral to the big picture because they are a non-solution to the climate and energy crises.

5. Smart grids will provide better energy supply and demand management. Fine, great, that will help irrespective of what source the energy comes from (nuclear, gas, coal, renewables, whatever). Smarter grids are inevitable and welcome. But they are not some white knight that will miraculously allow renewable energy to achieve any significant penetration into meeting world energy demand in the future. Smart grids are sensible, but they are not a solution to the climate and energy crises.

To some, the above may sound rather dogmatic. To me, it’s the emergent property of trying my damnedest to be ruthlessly pragmatic about the energy problem. I have no barrow to push, I don’t get anything out of it — other than I want this problem fixed. I don’t earn a red cent if nuclear turns out be the primary solution. I don’t win by renewables failing. The bottom line is this — if this website is looking more and more like a nuclear advocacy site, then you ought to consider why. It might just be because I’ve come to the conclusion that nuclear power is the only realistic solution to this problem, and that’s why I’m ever more stridently advocating it. This is a ‘game’ we cannot afford to lose, and the longer we dither about with ultimately worthless solutions, the closer we come to endgame, with no pawn left to move to the back row and Queen.

So what can you expect from BNC in the future? Much more on nuclear power (both Gen III and Gen IV), obviously, since I now consider this technology to be the core climate change solution — whilst openly acknowledging the yawning gulf between the scientific understanding of nuclear power and the public’s perception. This must change, and I hope, in my modest way, I can be an agent for that attitudinal shift. I also plan to launch an extended series on renewable energy, with an aim to break down the often complex and multifaceted critiques being made, into simpler, single-issue chunks, which can be more readily pinned down and understood. I will also profile some of the less well-developed low-carbon technologies, such as tidal, wave, microalgae, and geothermal, and speculate on their possible future roles. I hope in this way that I’ll be able to reinforce people’s understanding of why I no longer hold renewable energy to be a primary solution — and yet, by the same yardstick of maintaining intellectual honesty, I’ll also try my very best to keep an open mind to unconsidered possibilities and caveats that are raised by commenters (be these against nuclear energy, and/or for renewables). As I said, healthy thought should never cease to evolve.

When you see anti-nuclear propoganda, always ask yourself “who benefits?” And yes, the following is exactly our objective — to kill all coal fired generation (except for CCS plants, if they can make it work).

David MacKay: Sustainable energy without the hot air

Published May 23, 2011 Climate Change , Energy Policy , Nuclear Power 5 Comments
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[For accessibility, I've bumped the time-stamp on this post from 2010 to 2011. Ed.]

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear. I’m just pro-arithmetic. — David MacKay

This is the book I wish I had written. MacKay is a Cambridge physicist who approaches the climate change/energy policy issues with the same critical-thinking, level-headed approach that we have applauded in the work of University of Adelaide prof. Barry Brook. A very positive sign for UK energy policy is that MacKay was recently appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change responsible for the Low Carbon Transition Plan [DECC]

Regular readers know that to evaluate energy policy options we need full life-cycle-assessment (LCA) projections of each option with respect to:

1. Energy intensity

2. Carbon intensity

3. Cost per ton of CO2 avoided

4. Full life-cycle cost per unit of electric power generated including capital, operating & maintenance and decommissioning costs. (pick your units, I prefer GWhe {billion watt hours-electric})

A recent objective study of values {1, 2} for energy/GHG intensity is the 2006 study by the Integrated Sustainability Analysis (ISA) unit at the University of Sydney. The ISA unit is a valuable resource as they specialize in input-output-based life-cycle assessment (IO-LCA). For {4} please see The Economics of Nuclear Power. Another recent source is the 2011 UK report “The Renewable Energy Review” [PDF] by the Committee on Climate Change which is the primary body guiding UK GHG targets.

We also require reliable projections of energy demand and supply. In particular, for supply we need a grasp of how much supply from each nominated energy source is feasible, ignoring costs, political, and environmental considerations. This is the area where Dr. MacKay’s new book shines. It is easy to get lost in the weeds of engineering, technology and economics in any serious attempt to assess how the planet might meet future energy demand. MacKay’s book makes the first step approachable by readers who haven’t an engineering background nor years of experience in the energy industry.

D. Bull (Wellington, New Zealand), contributed this very to-the-point review for the book page at Amazon.com:

I work for an environmental watchdog in New Zealand. I flicked through the first few pages of “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air” as it sat on a colleague’s desk, took it back to my own desk and read it for two hours straight, got online and bought my own copy. It’s that good.

For a start, this is how environmental science should be communicated; crystal clear text and honest graphs, with simplified theory and ballpark calculations that anyone can follow, backed up by empirical data as a check on results, real examples, frequent references, and explanations of limitations.

But the thinking behind it is every bit as good. MacKay is entirely pragmatic about energy supply and demand, never preachy, and he is game enough to admit when his results surprise even himself. If he is cautiously optimistic in his conclusions, it is because he has laid out a number of justifiable options. Buy it. Better still, buy it and read it.

The book is about the physical limits of power production. MacKay achieves clarity by focusing upon the physics while ignoring the economics and politics.

Let me close this chapter with a few more warnings to the reader. Not only will we make a habit of approximating the numbers we calculate; we’ll also neglect all sorts of details that investors, managers, and economists have to attend to, poor folks. If you’re trying to launch a renewable technology, just a 5% increase in costs may make all the difference between success and failure, so in business every detail must be tracked. But 5% is too small for this book’s radar. This is a book about factors of 2 and factors of 10. It’s about physical limits to sustainable energy, not current economic feasibility. While economics is always changing, the fundamental limits won’t ever go away. We need to understand these limits.

(…) Whether the sustainable energy sources that we put in the right-hand stack are economically feasible is an important question, but let’s leave that question to one side, and just add up the two stacks first. Sometimes people focus too much on economic feasibility and they miss the big picture. For example, people discuss “is wind cheaper than nuclear?” and forget to ask “how much wind is available?” or “how much uranium is left?”.

Like Barry Brook, MacKay insists throughout that the numbers must add up. That means that policy proposals must demonstrate how they will provide the carbon-free energy that the developing world will be consuming. We know for certain that they will be consuming coal unless we show them a practical carbon-free “cheaper than coal” strategy.

You’ll want to read and reflect on the hardcopy of the book — and keep a copy handy for reference. While you are awaiting delivery you can read the book online, including a PDF download.

Lastly, I will excerpt three paragraphs that exemplify MacKay’s treatment of the numbers:

I heard that nuclear power can’t be built at a sufficient rate to make a useful contribution.

The difficulty of building nuclear power fast has been exaggerated with the help of a misleading presentation technique I call “the magic playing field.” In this technique, two things appear to be compared, but the basis of the comparison is switched halfway through. The Guardian’s environment editor, summarizing a report from the Oxford Research Group, wrote “For nuclear power to make any significant contribution to a reduction in global carbon emissions in the next two generations, the industry would have to construct nearly 3000 new reactors – or about one a week for 60 years. A civil nuclear construction and supply programme on this scale is a pipe dream, and completely unfeasible. The highest historic rate is 3.4 new reactors a year.” 3000 sounds much bigger than 3.4, doesn’t it! In this application of the “magic playing field” technique, there is a switch not only of timescale but also of region. While the first figure (3000 new reactors over 60 years) is the number required for the whole planet, the second figure (3.4 new reactors per year) is the maximum rate of building by a single country (France)!

A more honest presentation would have kept the comparison on a per- planet basis. France has 59 of the world’s 429 operating nuclear reactors, so it’s plausible that the highest rate of reactor building for the whole planet was something like ten times France’s, that is, 34 new reactors per year. And the required rate (3000 new reactors over 60 years) is 50 new reactors per year. So the assertion that “civil nuclear construction on this scale is a pipe dream, and completely unfeasible” is poppycock. Yes, it’s a big construction rate, but it’s in the same ballpark as historical construction rates.

How reasonable is my assertion that the world’s maximum historical construction rate must have been about 34 new nuclear reactors per year? Let’s look at the data. Figure 24.14 [see figure at upper left of this post] shows the power of the world’s nuclear fleet as a function of time, showing only the power stations still operational in 2007. The rate of new build was biggest in 1984, and had a value of (drum-roll please…) about 30 GW per year – about 30 1-GW reactors. So there!

– Updated 1/6/10 1:00 PM: I just wanted to add this glowing review by Cory Doctorow:

David JC MacKay’s “Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air” may be the best technical book about the environment that I’ve ever read. In fact, if I have any complaint about this book, it’s in how it’s presented, with its austere cover and spartan title, I assumed it would be a somewhat dry look at energy, climate, conservation and so on.

It’s not. This is to energy and climate what Freakonomics is to economics: an accessible, meaty, by-the-numbers look at the physics and practicalities of energy. MacKay, a Cambridge Physics prof, approaches the subject of carbon and sustainability with a scientific, numeric eye. First, in a section called “Numbers, not adjectives,” he looks at all the energy and carbon inputs and outputs in Britain and the rest of the world: this is how many kWh of energy are needed to power all of Britain’s vehicles. This is how many kWh you would get if you covered the entire British shore with windmills, or wave-farms. This is Britain’s geothermal potential. Here’s how much carbon vegetarianism offsets. Here’s how much carbon unplugging your idle appliances saves (0.25%, making the campaign to switch off energy vampires into a largely pointless exercise — as MacKay says, “If everyone does a little bit, we’ll get a little bit done”). This is the carbon-footprint of all of Britain’s imports, gadgets, office towers, and so on.

Using a charming, educational style that teaches how to think about this kind of number, how to estimate with it, and what it means, MacKay explains these concepts beautifully, with accompanying charts that make them vivid and clear, and with exhaustive endnotes that are as interesting as the text they refer to (probably the best use of end-notes I’ve encountered in technical writing — they act like hyperlinks, giving good background on the subjects that the reader wants to find out more about while allowing the main text to move forward without getting bogged down by details).

(…)

This reminded me of nothing so much as Saul Griffith’s wonderful talk on climate change as an engineering problem. Add up all the energy we can make if we harness every erg, every photon. Subtract all the energy we want to use. Examine this difference and come up with strategies for bringing the two into balance. Once you get this approach, it becomes a lot simpler to figure out what is and isn’t worth doing.

UPDATE: more on MacKay’s appointment as chief scientific advisor to DECC.

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