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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.

Economic and population growth not need be a zero sum game

Published April 27, 2012 Development Closed

I’m surprised that the Royal Society got it so wrong – this reads like a Paul Erlich/Limits to Growth product (Prof. Erlich did give testimony to the committee). But Mark Lynas and Leo Hickman have the science right. Here’s a taster:

The Royal Society – Britain’s premier scientific institution – has just released a major report called People and the Planet, arguing that per capital resource consumption in the richest parts of the world needs to come down dramatically if the poorest 1.3 billion are to be lifted out of extreme poverty whilst protecting the Earth’s environment from irreparable harm. (Do join Leo Hickman’s debate on the Guardian site here, and my thanks to him for prompting this piece.)

I wouldn’t argue with most of the data underpinning this report, but I do have problems with some of the assumptions. The first is that population growth is necessarily a bad thing, and that there is therefore a pressing need to reduce the rate of growth in developing countries. The report states early on:

“At a time when so many people remain impoverished and natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce, continued population growth is cause for concern.”

What it fails to acknowledge however is that population growth is correlated with economic growth – and therefore if developing countries are to continue to escape from poverty then reducing their rate of population growth should not be the initial priority. In a recent blogpost the World Bank’s Wolfgang Fengler starts by reminding us:

Africa’s population is rising rapidly and will most likely double its population by 2050. Depending on the source of data, Africa will soon pass 1 billion people (and it may already have) and could reach up to 2 billion people by 2050 [ I am using the UN’s 2009 World Population Prospects, which projects Africa to exceed 1.7 billion by 2050 based on sharply declining fertility rates]. This makes it the fastest growing continent and Africa’s rapid growth will also shift the global population balance.

Sounds scary. But what no-one mentions is that in terms of population density Western Europe is far more over-populated than Africa:

If we look at Western Europe – where I come from – there are on average 170 people living on each square km. In Sub-Saharan Africa there are only 70 today. This gap will narrow in the next decades but even by 2050, Western Europe is expected to be more densely populated than Africa.

He then concludes:

…population growth and urbanization go together, and economic development is closely correlated with urbanization. Rich countries are urban countries. No country has ever reached high income levels with low urbanization. And this is critical for achieving sustained growth because large urban centers allow for innovation and increase economies of scale. Companies can produce goods in larger numbers and more cheaply, serving a larger number of low-income customers.

Population growth may therefore put us on the edge of a “golden age of development” for Africa – hardly the message from the gloomy Royal Society report. As the excellent book Emerging Africa, by Steven Radelet, shows, seventeen sub-Saharan African countries have seen sustained economic growth since 1995, vastly improving their prospects and – I suspect – further reducing fertility rates in the process.

Whilst using a lot of dark language about increasing numbers of humans globally, the report nowhere acknowledges that the current median level of total worldwide fertility has fallen dramatically from 5.6 in the 1970s to only 2.4 today. In other words we are already close to natural replacement levels in terms of total fertility – the reason that the absolute population will continue to grow to 9 billion or more is that more children are living long enough have their own children. To my mind a reduction in infant mortality and an increase in life expectancy are self-evidently good and desirable – and their impact on world population levels should be celebrated, not bemoaned.

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Read the whole thing »

The DRM free movement for eBooks expands

Published April 26, 2012 Media Closed
Tags: eBooks

Joshua Gans notes that the JK Rowling initiative is gathering momentum. Now publisher TOR is going DRM free. Prof. Gans sees the revolution in music proves that DRM free works for the content owners as well as consumers:

The same thing happened in music. DRM was the thing that got music publishers interested in digital downloads (like iTunes) and then something we couldn’t have predicted in 2003 happened; DRM was abandoned and nobody really noticed. What is more DRM was abandoned with a coincidental 30% (!) price increase to consumers as compensation for the extra value provided by portability. My feeling (based on no real evidence) is that overall the consumers won out of that deal (they are paying a little more to save on paying lots more later). It will be interesting to see how TOR’s pricing changes as it goes DRM free.

Read the whole thing »

When Companies Become Countries

Published April 24, 2012 Democracy , Economics 1 Comment

Scott Adams writes so many provocative and thoughtful posts that it is very challenging to highlight just one. Try this one, and this one, and this one. If you like those, then you know what to do (subscribe):

I wonder when the first multinational company will form its own country to avoid wars, government red tape, and corporate taxes. It feels inevitable. I assume it will involve seasteading.

The current notion of seasteading involves floating cities that are outside the control of existing nations. That concept has its appeal, especially as a way to test new forms of government. But existing corporations already have their own form of government called management, and despite its warts, it generally works.

Imagine, for example, that one of the world’s beloved companies such as Apple or Facebook someday decides to start its own country on the sea. The company’s existing management structure would need to add several functions, such as education, healthcare, and police. The corporate government would look a lot like the Chinese government. In other words, it would be efficient in terms of profit, while giving up freedoms that employees are already accustomed to giving up. For example, company employees don’t have freedom of speech when it comes to criticizing management. Somehow we live with that restriction and it doesn’t seem too onerous.

There would be no taxes for permanent residents of the company country. Public services would be funded from corporate profits. Every paid service in the country, from banking, to insurance, to groceries, would be company-run. The accounting would be transparent and the profits would flow to public services.

The big worry with this model is the “company store” abuse that was common during the early days of the United States. In some cases, an employer would take advantage of its monopoly on goods and services to gouge its employees, turning them into virtual slaves. But I think that risk can be addressed by accounting transparency, and by capping the compensation of top management to a multiple of the average employee pay. It also helps if employees can choose to leave whenever they want. That keeps management in line.

Wages in the company country would be low while still attracting top talent, so long as the cost of living islow, taxes are non-existent, and the lifestyle is awesome. Employees could earn less while saving far more, especially if they own equity in the company.

This prediction assumes that traditional governments continue to bankrupt themselves and strangle their own industries with red tape. That feels like a safe bet. But the main reason a company might want to form its own country is to attract the best minds, and the lowest cost of labor, from all over the world without any immigration issues.

Do company countries seem inevitable or unlikely to you? [From When Companies Become Countries]

Aspirin, by this logic

Published April 22, 2012 Nuclear Risk Assessment 1 Comment

There is a promising new science-based blog titled “things worse than nuclear power“, which is “the take from a couple of MIT engineers”. The first few posts show promise, such as this one explaining the illogic of the LNT hypothesis in terms of the deadly aspirin tablet:

In small doses, aspirin and other NSAIDs are helpful painkillers. In fact, small doses of aspirin therapy prevents lethal heart attacks and strokes and saves thousands, possibly millions of lives annually.

If aspirin were evaluated like radiation exposure, the estimated number of deaths due to taking the recommended dose, which is 1/10 the lethal dose*, would be 1 in 10 people.
If 1 in 10 people taking aspirin died, this would be up to hundreds of millions of people annually worldwide, which is clearly not the case. Aspirin is the most widely taken painkiller worldwide, and has been for hundreds of years.

Can you imagine if every product were regulated like radiation exposure? There simply would not be any pharmaceuticals, and millions of lives would be lost or have a lower quality of life.

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Read the whole thing, and be sure to add this new education effort to your RSS feeds.

Using too much land to produce energy

Published April 22, 2012 Energy Policy 1 Comment

Caroline posted our “chart of the week” which demonstrates succinctly why Bill Gates refers to the politically correct “renewables” as energy farming. Energy density really does matter.

The below chart from Rutgers University Professor Clinton Andrews sums it up. Clearly, the more land used, the more disruptive to ecosystems an energy source is, to the point that electricity from biomass would eclipse all current human use of land and use 60% of the earth’s total land area in order to produce 100% of global demand. Wind land use to produce 100% of global demand would be par with all worldwide land area currently used for crops.

Percent of Earth’s land area taken for energy production for different energy sources. Taken from: Alternative Energy and Land Use paper from Clinton Andrews et al. Land intensiveness data from McDonald et al (2009), land area data from Melillo et al (2009), global energy demand data from EIA.

Expropriating its way to poverty

Published April 20, 2012 Economics Closed
Tags: Argentina

Australia is often called “the lucky country”. In contrast, I think Argentina deserves to be called “the unlucky country”. The destructive populist Peronist policies of Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner (standing in for her predecessor former-president husband Néstor Kirchner) are “doing a Venezuela to Argentina”. Argentina is a rich country, so she and her party can continue to pillage for a while. What we don’t understand is why do the people still support her? Here is an update on the latest grab at Economist Free Exchange:

ONE couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the thesis of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s new book “Why Nations Fail” than the decision taken by Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández, to seize a majority share in the country’s largest oil company, YPF. Our America’s view blog provides analysis:

Taking over YPF offers Ms Fernández both financial and political benefits. She can now use it to conduct the government’s money-losing energy imports and have its minority shareholders suffer 49% of the losses. At a time of high oil prices, she could also use the company’s profits to finance public spending, since Argentina cannot borrow money because it faces punitively high interest rates and legal threats from holders of its defaulted debt. Politically, after failing to convince the rest of the countries at the Summit of the Americas last weekend to support Argentina’s claim to the British-controlled Falkland Islands, the decision provides her a new foreign scapegoat to distract attention from a slowing economy. On the day of the announcement, posters went up around Buenos Aires reading “True sovereignty means taking back what is ours” above the YPF logo.

The medium-term economic costs of the decision could be grim. It eliminates any possibility of securing private investment to develop Argentina’s shale fields, which are extremely expensive to exploit. And it will probably lead to an exodus of experts in the oil industry, accelerating the decline in domestic production.

A country with strong, pluralistic institutions can restrain the grabby hands of the government, reassuring private investors that the fruits of their efforts won’t simply be stolen from them. That, in turn, encourages investment and growth. A country with poor institutions, however, can’t stay the hand of the greedy elite. The government will therefore be inclined to take decisions that enrich or protect its leaders, in the process poisoning the well of future growth.

China estimate of the day

Published April 18, 2012 China Closed

Here’s a useful perspective on China’s infrastructure spend-up from GK Dragonomics via Tyler Cowen:

Another study, by Andrew Batson and Janet Zhang at GK Dragonomics, a Beijing-based research firm, finds that China still has less than one-quarter as much capital per person as America had achieved in 1930, when it was at roughly the same level of development as China today.

Here is more, and I thank David Levey for the pointer. The post as a whole considers whether China is overinvesting and concludes maybe not. Here are further debates on how China is doing.

[From China estimate of the day]

The peculiar case of higher education

Published April 18, 2012 Economics , Education 1 Comment
Tags: Education

The Steve Randy Waldman (Interfluidity) post that Tyler Cowen links in this piece deserves his accolade:

Via a request from Ezra for topic coverage, here are some very good remarks from Ryan Avent. Excerpt:

A sector dominated by the state—state-run in some cases, merely subsidised and regulated in others—is, I think most Americans would agree, both a major contributor to American prosperity and one of America’s most competitive industries on foreign markets, despite its glaring inefficiencies. What ought we to conclude based on this example?

Certainly, one could reasonably argue that the sector would be even better if state control were relaxed, monopolies broken up, subsidies curtailed, and market controls (like those on immigration) eliminated. But one also has to wrestle with how different the American economy would look if the state had never muscled public universities (including a broad network of technology-driven, extension-oriented schools) into existence.

This stuff is harder than we often pretend.

A few observations:

1. Postwar higher education has proven one of America’s most effective subsidies, and it has paid for itself many times over. It is also one of the more significant successes of federalism.

2. We are fortunate that U.S. state universities are more or less autonomous, compared to the Continental model where professors and administrators are treated as part of the state civil service bureaucracy. The latter system does not work well, and those countries have struggled to move closer to American models.

3. To refer back to a distinction from the David Brooks column, we should not be trying to squeeze the entire economy into the shoebox of the dynamic but risky “Economy I.” For public choice reasons, as well understood by Karl Polanyi (an underrated public choice theorist if there ever was one), the polity requires some respite from Economy I, whether we like that or not. Read also this analysis by Interfluidity, which is one of my favorite blog posts of all time.

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Definitely, read the whole thing »

Laurent Franckx: Review of “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air”

Published April 9, 2012 Energy Policy Closed
Tags: David-MacKay

In March 2011 Laurent published an in-depth review of David MacKay’s essential reference. He brought to my attention in his comments on my little review David MacKay: Sustainable energy without the hot air. I recommend Laurent’s review to you. Here’s my comments:

(…) I’ve read your review twice, and am working my way through your other posted reviews. I agree in general with your review of Mackay’s book, which is a remarkable contribution to the literature on energy policy.

You make several good points on the economic realities of energy policy, such as

MacKay barely touches upon the energy and non-energy resource cost of creating the infrastructure that will provide all this renewable energy. This is not a trivial matter.

I have just one quibble with the way you characterize the book as concluding that “yes, it is physically possible to fulfil a country’s energy needs with renewable energy”.

Adding to MacKay’s physics analysis a view of political economy and economic efficiency, my conclusion was rather the inverse. Specifically, that “renewables” as popularly defined could make a useful but small contribution to a zero carbon 2060 future. There are a number of special cases, such as availability of buffering hydropower, that allow wind and solar to compete. But Kholsa’s “Chindi test” of “cheaper than coal” and nearly-zero-carbon is only satisfied by nuclear power.

MacKay was very careful to avoid “picking winners” in his text. But I think you can see his mind in the quote I chose to head this post:

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

Of course I cannot speak to what Dr. MacKay actually thinks. In his own words, his Q&A site includes the following:

You say I am pro-nuclear; I don’t quite agree; the way I would put it is “I am in favour of any plan that adds up”; and I think we should push for a plan that adds up, not half measures and figleafs. I would be perfectly content with a renewable-only plan. I don’t think we should allow religious dogmatism about any one option to prevent us making a plan that adds up. All technologies have risks, and many human activities make toxic waste. I discuss nuclear waste in the book. It’s not infinitely dangerous. It is dangerous. Where to put it? Well, there’s lots of choice, but here’s one idea for the UK – we already have armed guards and security fences around Balmoral, and the public aren’t allowed in there. So we could kill two birds with one stone. The entire UK’s high-level nuclear waste for 50 years could easily be stored in a very small area (one square km is more than enough). The high level waste remains intensely nasty for roughly 1000 years. It’s definitely nasty, but as I say in the book, I think it’s a relatively small problem, compared with the much greater bulk of other wastes, and compared with the challenge of making an honest plan that adds up. In Britain today, there are anti-wind people, anti-tidal-barrage, anti-nuclear, and anti-coal campaigns. We can’t be anti-everything. We need a plan that adds up. Not wishful thinking. Honest numbers.

In his comments he avoids any discussion of next-generation nuclear technology — which consumes as valuable feedstock what is today called “nuclear waste”. I think that exclusion is entirely appropriate to the purpose of his book. But IFR is a real technology. In 2060 it will not even be controversial.

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