The clean energy imperative

I’m increasingly convinced that the reason for so much opposition to climate change science is not because of some flaw in the science but because there’s fear of the collapse of industrial society if we stop using fossil fuels. This is not an irrational fear but it leads to irrational behaviour like attacking scientists personally, and pay good money to attend vaudeville shows where deniers reassure audiences with rubbish.

The best response is to study clean energy alternatives.

I recently gave a talk at a Transition Towns meeting in Kenmore, Qld. I’ve published a PDF of the slides at scribd, and will add commentary here as time permits. Meanwhile the Kenmore TT people have posted a TED talk on how to roll out the electric car. Interesting.

Of Drama Queens and Climate Science

Yet another bunch of anti-science letters in The Australia, this time in response to an article reporting the UK's chief scientist as saying climate scientists are prone to dramatise claims.


It suits the tabloid press (including those who disguise this tendency with a broadsheet layout) to frame issues in absolutes and set up crazy debates. Anything any scientist says that sounds the vaguest bit extreme or contrary to known science gets blown out of proportion, and the 99.9% of scientific work that doesn't fit this model is ignored.

Try reading the scientific literature using Google Scholar instead of regular Google as your search engine. You'll be amazed to find the vast majority of accusations against climate scientists (here for example the claim that they underplay uncertainties) are totally unfounded. Try however to get an article into a newspaper that tells it the way it is rather than setting it up as a screaming match between drama queens and you will get nowhere.

I stopped buying newspapers that do this and only read them where I can find them for free (online, in coffee shops etc.). If more people did this they would get the message.

It's hard to get a real debate going in the online comments so I will repeat some of my points here.

Peter: your claim that the raw data is "destroyed and manipulated" is rubbish. Most of the raw data is freely available. The drama queen argument here is that if a tiny fraction of the data used by one research group isn't available then all of it isn't. NASA for example makes ALL their climate data and their computer code available (see here for theirs among others). Enough data has been available for years for any serious scientist wanting to undo the mainstream theory to do so. Instead, we get vicious personal attacks, theft of email and political arguments.

SW1: your claim that further flaws will come to light is not only plausible but almost certain, but so what? Published science is riddled with errors. A researcher develops a new theoretically superior instrument, and in the rush to get published, makes mistakes in calibration. A research group finds a new angle on a problem and in their enthusiasm at finding something exciting, miss an obvious error. Peer review is a filter but not a perfect one, and this kind of thing can slip through. Sometimes the reviewers are lazy, or have a predisposition to accept the paper's findings. That's why scientists check on each other. Let's take as an example the 2009 paper by Lindzen and Choi that purported to show a much lower climate sensitivity to CO₂ increases than the accepted range of 1.5-4.5°C. This paper was trumpeted over the blogosphere as yet another nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming. Now various analyses of their paper are showing that their approach was flawed, including one by Roy Spencer, who generally disagrees with the mainstream figure on climate sensitivity. There is at least one published response that shows the paper to contain serious errors. The drama queen version of events: Lindzen once again strikes a fatal blow against science, and the "corrections" can safely be ignored.

Another example is the claim that the oceans are cooling. NASA has an interesting story on their web site of how the science in that case unfolded. One of their researchers, Josh Willis, published results using a new technology, Argo floats, that showed the oceans were cooling. While he described this as a "speed bump" rather than a slowdown in warming, the blogosphere went gaga and many people still quote this result. What actually happened was some of the floats were under-reporting temperature, while the older technology used for older measurements was over-reporting temperature, and these two effects combined to create an appearance of cooling. Any cooling would contradict a range of other kinds of evidence, so had these results held up, it would have been a major challenge to the science. Instead, the problem turned out to be in the data. Again, nothing too unusual. But the drama queen interpretation is Willis overthrew the entire theory, and the conspirators worked hard in the background to reinstate it.

My focus here has been on attacks on the mainstream but of course there are people out there who make extreme claims about the risks of climate change. These people do not represent the scientific community, who as a whole are pretty loath to make extreme claims without strong evidence. But these stories too get the headlines.

The bottom line? Google Scholar is your friend. Whenever something implausibly extreme or contrary to accepted knowledge appears, go to the scientific literature. Preferably after waiting 6 months for the dust to settle.

The Australian and Postmodern Science

Saturday 18 April 2009 represented a new high or low point (depending on your perspective, which turns out to be significant) in The Australian’s project to develop a new postmodern science, in which “objective truth” depends totally on the observer, and deconstruction replaces evidence-based evaluation.

First, there was an article “Revealed: Antarctic ice growing, not shrinking”, which selectively quotes Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison to create the impression that there is no warming in the Antarctic. In fact one of the major investigations in which the AAD is involved is into sea ice thickness, which they propose could be a more significant indicator of future ice loss than ice extent (the ice can thin for many years before it disappears, as happened with Arctic sea ice). The same author had another article, “Change is a cold certainty”, which despite spinning the position as the Antarctic is not warming, was reasonably balanced when you got to the detail.

Then, there were two opinion pieces about a new book, The climate of disastrous consensus, by geologist Ian Plimer. I will focus on the article that deals more directly with the content of the book, rather than the opinion piece by Christopher Pearson (there’s just so much one person with a day job can do). Here are some quotes from the article, which quotes the book directly, so I assume it is not misrepresented:

• CO₂ is not a pollutant but a necessity of life. For a start, it is food for plants. "Global warming and a high CO₂ content bring prosperity and lengthen your life ... without CO₂ there would be no complex life on Earth" – a silly statement. You can say the same about water, but not only can you drown in the stuff, but you can actually die from drinking too much water. Extra CO₂ makes plants grow faster, but not without limit, and there’s no guarantee that the plants of human interest will gain the most. What’s more, other effects of climate change like change in temperature and rainfall patterns are more significant to agriculture.
  
• While an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide theoretically may contribute to temperature rise, Plimer says there is no evidence to show this and plenty of proof, if you choose to look for it, to the contrary – the evidence for this is very strong and is based on science that’s been known since the 19th century. To assert this in a newspaper article without providing Plimer’s evidence makes him look a fool.
  
• To reduce climate change to the single variable of carbon emissions abandons "all we know about planet Earth, the sun and the cosmos", Plimer says, and that is a leap of faith no self-respecting scientist should take – unmitigated drivel. No serious climate scientist models the entire system based on one variable. To see how absurd this claim is, you only need to do a google search on two keywords: “IPCC attribution”. I've included a graph typical of the approaches used (note the multiple influences included).
  
• When he peers back in time, there were periods when atmospheric CO₂ was much higher than it is now yet produced no disastrous shift in the climate – perhaps he’d care to point out what fraction of life on the planet dates from that era. More than 90% of species from eras when CO₂ was substantially higher than it is today are extinct. Four out of five mass extinction events are associated with rapid climate change.
  

The article goes on to an interview. Here are a few excerpts:

• He reviewed five computer predictions of climate made in 2000, underpinning IPCC findings, and found there was no relationship between predicted future temperature and actual measured temperature even during a short period – why would he expect the models and measurement to line up over a short period? To make such a supposition is to misunderstand the nature of climate science. There are very big day-to-day fluctuations in weather. Over a month, averages smooth these fluctuations out. Over a year, more so. Climate is about stepping back and looking at the long-term average. The current trend is for warming at a rate of 2°C per century, an average of 0.02°C per year. This small a change is not discernible over natural variation unless you look at a long enough stretch – which is why climate is generally looked at as an average over 30 years.
  
• There was alarm in the 1970s that the decreasing temperature was heralding another ice age, he says – this is standard propaganda from his side of politics. A 2008 paper has found that contrary to this often-repeated claim, papers published from 1965 to 1979 on climate change totalled 7 predicting cooling, 44 predicting warming and 20 that were neutral. That’s what we mean about “evidence” in the mainstream scientific community. We don’t take things as given because people we like are saying them: we check the facts.
  
• The ice caps are geologically unusual; people were growing barley and wheat in Greenland 1000 years ago. – Are we supposed to infer from that that Greenland’s ice cap is less than 1,000 years old? I can only suspect that the journalist has things garbled here. Plimer can’t be that ignorant. Ice core studies of Greenland go back over 100,000 years. It is very likely that Greenland and much of Europe was warmer 1,000 years ago, but there is no evidence that this warmth extended worldwide. If you check the temperature records of any location, there is a good chance you will find an unusually warm period. Do all such periods around the world line up at the same period? No, not over the last 1500 years, the era when the “Medieval Warm Period” and Little Ice Age occurred in Europe. Some places were warmer 1,500 years ago, others 1,000 years ago.

To accuse others of ignoring evidence creates an onus on you to examine evidence with extra care. Repeating often-debunked talking points does not qualify. Possibly The Australian has been very selective in its reading and picked out its favourite talking points. If they have misrepresented Plimer’s book, I hope to see a rebuttal from him. Failing which, I’m not going to read the book. I am from the old school of science, where the evidence is based on measurement, not on your political preconceptions.

Call me old fashioned, but I, unlike The Australian, don’t see a role for post-modernism in science. The old model of examining the evidence, developing hypotheses, testing them against new evidence until they look solid, then promoting them to theories works for me – as it has done for the creation of a robust industrial society. What a pity the same intellectual rigour does not apply to other areas of society – like running a newspaper.

Forget Climate Change: A Fossil Fuel Future’s a Fantasy

on Jenkins in his article “The warmaholics’ fantasy” (The Australian 06/01/2009) ends by asking this: “The real question is in acknowledging the end of fossil fuels within the next 200 years or so: how do we spend our research time and dollars?”

Unfortunately, Jenkins has made the common error of not factoring in growth in demand. The latest annual figures available from BP’s authoritative Statistical Review of World Energy 2008 show that energy use grew 2.4% from 2006 to 2007. If we use this number as escalation against 200 years at current usage, we actually only have 75 years of fossil fuels left. Allow a more aggressive growth rate of 5% to factor in industrialisation of currently less developed countries, and fossil fuels will be gone in 50 years.

I’ve graphed the trend with 200 years’ worth of fossil fuel as the starting point to make it easy to see how the various growth rates pan out. As you can see, constant use takes us to zero after 200 years (off the scale of the graph). As you should be able to see from the graph, when constant demand would have used less than 40% of all carbon fuels, 2.4% growth will have used them all up. 5% growth would hit zero when only about 25% of reserves would have been consumed at fixed demand.

While it’s conceivable that 200 years is an under-estimate, any excess on that amount would include fuels from increasingly inaccessible and environmentally fragile sources. In fact, even to reach that level would require exploiting resources like tar sands and oil shale that are not only environmentally problematic but also expensive to process. What’s more, coal and oil are complex mixes of chemicals that have many uses; it’s silly to burn valuable, irreplaceable chemicals.

Long before we reach an era of real shortage, markets will be subject to massive swings as speculators ride fears of shortage – as we saw recently with oil prices. As demand from developing countries increases, we can expect prices to escalate for the simple reason that supply is unlikely to keep up with demand. We’ve already mined out much of the coal that’s really easy to dig up (Britain had massive reserves in the nineteenth century), and oil is increasingly being sought in expensive locations like the deep sea and Arctic.

Even without disputing Jenkins on climate change (I can’t see how he advances the debate with ad hominem attacks – and am pleased to see he has subsequently apologised for this in a letter in The Australian), there is a clear case for exploring alternative energy now, and doing so aggressively.

It’s clear that we will need to find alternatives to fossil fuels and sooner than most think. Will this necessarily result in massive pain? Luckily, Cambridge physics professor David MacKay has already provided a good start at understanding the problem in a new book, Sustainable Energy — without the hot air (not yet published in Australia; you can download a free copy from his web site). To cut to the chase, he calculates that Britain will battle to achieve a sustainable-energy economy because it has too high a population density and not enough sun. Much of Europe likewise will have to look to sunny low-population countries like Libya to import solar electricity. Australia gets little coverage in the book since the focus is on solutions for the UK. MacKay has reduced his calculations to simple examples that can easily be reworked for other parts of the world, or different solution mixes. Comparing us with the UK and its need to import solar electricity from Libya for example illustrates that we really do not have much of a problem here. Our population density is less than Libya’s, and we have plenty of sunshine.

What of the problems often raised about intermittency of wind and solar power? There are many creative solutions out there of which MacKay provides a good sampling. He reminds us that electricity providers have to be geared to handle massive changes in demand; much of the same techniques can be used to manage changes in supply. For example, electric cars, while charging overnight, could be equipped with smart meters that draw power when it’s cheap, and put some back when it’s expensive. Heavy users whose usage is not time-dependent could be scheduled to draw power when it’s plentiful. And of course existing techniques for load management such as pumped storage (sending water uphill when electricity is plentiful; using a downhill flow later to drive a generator) can be scaled up.

There’s too much detail in the book to cover in a short article like this. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in energy alternatives read it. Since he has neatly compartmentalised his solutions, it is relatively easy if you disagree with one to pull it out and replace it by another option. I’ve seen many attempts at covering small parts of the problem. Only a comprehensive approach such as this is really any good. Not only that, MacKay has a fine sense of humour.

I propose we stop worrying about who is right and wrong in the climate change debate (see other articles on this site for some answers to Jenkins’s points), and move as fast as we can to sustainable energy. To do so requires some hard political will, not wishy-washy strategies like charging for pollution permits then giving most of the money back to the big polluters. If we get this right, we will be insulated from damaging swings in energy commodity prices. Should the worst predictions of climate change turn out to be true, we will be well on the way towards a clean energy economy. If not, we will be a bit ahead of where we need to be when fossil fuels start to run out and become really expensive. All three ways, we win.

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Also published at Online Opinion.

Australia’s shameful response to climate change

When Kevin Rudd announced a 5% target for emissions reductions for 2020, you could almost hear John Howard laughing from the political grave. It's small comfort to me that in discussing climate matters since then, a Labor supporter called Rudd “Howard” by mistake. Freudian?

The science the government has in front of it says you have to reduce emissions by 25% by 2020 to save the Great Barrier Reef. Of course Australia cannot achieve this on its own because it accounts for a relatively small fraction of worldwide emissions – even if you account for its role as the world’s biggest exporter of coal (about a third of worldwide exports).

Another thing not widely talked about is that carbon emissions accumulate. Around half are absorbed by the environment; the rest dissipates very slowly over centuries. That means that if we have not achieved a target by 2020 that stops CO₂ accumulating to 550 parts per million or more, we can’t just turn off the tap and expect the atmospheric CO₂ level to drop.

How soon will the rest of the world regard carbon emissions as a serious, urgent problem? That Europe has committed to a 20% cut by 2020 is some indication.

Why should Europe care more? Partially, it’s because Europe has a stronger tradition than English-speaking countries of taking science seriously. But another factor is Europe’s proximity to the Arctic. A growing number of scientists is predicting an ice-free Arctic summer by 2015. It was a big enough shock when it was reported in 2007 that the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by 2030.

So in a sense the self-styled sceptics are right. The science has enough uncertainties that we have to be cautious about accepting predictions without a wide allowance for error. The problem is, the majority of cases that are breaking out of the modelled predictions are on the worse rather than the better side. How is this possible? With the vast bulk of “sceptics” accusing scientists who predict anything remotely bad of being “alarmist”, the natural tendency of scientists to avoid alarming claims without overwhelming evidence is accentuated. So work predicting rapid ice cap loss for example is not getting the attention it should. Another example: concerns about the possibility of the urban heat island effect (UHI) skewing the temperature trend has resulted in NASA compensating for this effect. While it is true that a temperature sensor put next to an isolated hot spot would be bad for once-off measurement, if that hot spot is not constantly being hotter, it would not add a trend to the stats.

NASA eliminates local anomalies by a process called homogenizing, where temperatures of each station are in effect corrected for excessive variation beyond others in similar terrain.

Let’s look at how over-estimating the effect of UHI could have on the temperature trend. If NASA weights down temperatures from urban area, they could be underestimating the general increase in temperatures, because some of these areas could naturally be heating faster than their surroundings.

In conclusion, here’s an ad GetUp is running.

Nothing Like the Sun?

A popular affectation among climate inactivists is to insist that all climate change is driven by the sun. Let's look first at figures for total solar irradiance or TSI, a value giving the energy from the sun incident on the earth. This number has been available from satellite data since 1978. It has been estimated in the past by indirect means ("proxies") but let's stick with the modern data the accuracy of which is easier to determine. Also, there is a long-term record of suns spots but in the period when satellite TSI data is available, they are also an approximation – so let's stay with the more accurate data.

How does that data compare with the temperature trend over the same period? The HadCRUT3 data from the UK's Hadley centre is one of several that are widely used. This one is sufficient to illustrate the point. Look at the two graphs closely, and what do you see? Probably not that much: they look pretty different.

In both graphs, the points joined by the broken line are the actual measurements, averaged over each year, and the points joined by the unbroken line are the 5-year mean, which smooths out short-term irregularities. I also use these 5-year means (for each year, found by averaging the two years before and after plus the current year) for comparing the two trends, to eliminate short-term variations.

Note also the trend lines. In each, the number before the "x" is effectively the trend per year. The "R²" value is a measure of how well the trend line represents the main graph (in this case, the 5-year mean). An R² near 1 means there is a strong relationship; near 0 means the trend line is a poor approximation to the original data. Note that the temperature trend is going up at 1.83 degrees per century, with R² = 0.92, a very strong relationship, well outside chance. The sun trend, on the other hand, is -0.74 degrees per century, a slow downward trend, with R² = 0.0143. If you plotted a series of random numbers, you would get a "trend" about this strong.

In other words, the temperature trend is strongly up; the sun is down, but not convincingly.

So the trend lines are different; how come some people then are saying that the sun is the best explanation of climate variation? Let's look at another measure: correlation. Correlation tells you how well two different data sets track each other. A strong positive correlation, near 1, tells you they are following the same trend. A strong negative correlation, near -1 tells you they are heading the opposite way. Anything closer to 0 tells you they are (relatively, depending how close to 0) unrelated.

Let's look then at the correlation of the temperature trend for the given years with the TSI data. It comes out as 0.37 – a reasonably strong positive correlation. What is interesting though is to look at the correlation since 1990, when the warming trend has strengthened. The correlation is -0.11 – negative but no longer a strong relationship. Look at the correlation for the period 1978-1989, and it's 0.17. Positive, but not very strong.

How could this have happened?

Answer: the sun does indeed drive climate, but something superimposed on that trend from 1990-2007 disguises that relationship. In other words, a good explanation of what's going on is that the sun is responsible for the irregular dips and peaks in the temperature graph, but when you try to make the sun explain an upward trend, it doesn't work anymore.

For some reason, at this point, I'm reminded of a line from one of Shakespeare's sonnets:

My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun

Peak Oil and Climate Change

Peak oil is increasingly on people's minds as they refuel, watch air travel costs escalate, and wonder why no one warned them it would happen. Possibly, just possibly, this is the wake-up call that will liberate us from shorty-term politics, and focus everyone on long-term solutions.

But should this have been such a surprise?


For starters, let's look at where the oil price is. As I write this, it's already gone off this chart (source: WikiPedia; sorry about the caption with the error in the start year: that was how it was on WikiPedia) to over $140 a barrel. Some of course are saying this is just a bubble, that speculators are driving the price up. This seems unlikely since the last time we had these conditions in a bad way (instability in the Middle East encouraging speculators), around the end of 1979, the price spiked to $39, about $100 in today's money, and we've already exceeded that level by 40%.

There are two new factors since 1979: new demand from developing economies, especially China, and the threat of a decline in production as we hit peak oil. With BP chief executive Tony Hayward declaring an end to the era of cheap energy, we have to sit up and take notice. No energy company would talk up the long-term price if they weren't sure, because doing so increases the push for alternatives.

So what is peak oil theory? In 1956, Shell oil geoscientist M. King Hubbert made the observation that since oil extraction lagged discovery by a specific period of years, oil production in the USA would peak somewhere around 1971. This picture (source: WikiPedia) illustrates his model (blue line) and reality (black dots). He was ridiculed in 1956; by the mid-1970s, we should have been basing future planning on his model.

What about the worldwide peak? That's more difficult. In the USA, once cheap sources of oil were depleted, there was the option to move to the rest of the world. Once oil extraction has gone worldwide, we don't have another planet to move to, so depletion of cheaper resources leads to a switch to more expensive resources.The picture therefore in recent times (source: WikiPedia) is blurred, with predictions ranging roughly around 2008-2016, but some putting the peak way out into the future.

Wherever the exact peak, we've had warning of this for decades. Aside from the very obvious risks or relying heavily on one commodity, the source of which may not always be politically stable, the threat of a sudden price spike as we are experiencing today is nothing new. So why aren't we throwing out politicians who have failed to work on long-term solutions? In some parts of the world, notably Europe and Japan, there are alternatives to cars, trucks and planes in the form of high-speed intercity rail and good urban public transport networks. Countries like the USA and Australia, on the other hand, are terribly positioned for expensive oil. Many of their cities have developed unplanned urban sprawl, and their inter-city rail networks are decrepit.

For further thoughts on what Australian politicians deserve, see my views at the Australian ABC's QandA web site.

But back to the main topic.

What, you may ask, are some of these more expensive forms of oil extraction? Some are obvious, like deep sea wells. Others include tar sands and oil shale. Pushing these to the limit some claim is available starts to touch on an aspect of practicality: net energy. Some of the more extreme claims of available oil do not take into account that the energy cost of processing some of the less viable forms of oil exceeds the energy you could extract.

The "more expensive to extract" option that I find most fascinating though is the notion that it is now becoming possible to drill for oil in the Arctic. Could it be something to do with this I wonder? Look at NASA's temperature trend since 1880 (source: NASA GISS) – not that different to graphs published by others. It shows a distinct upwards trend.

Now, there are people out there claiming that climate change is a hoax. A fair number (though I will not argue all or even a majority) are funded by oil interests. Could those taking oil dollars please tell us how, if climate change is a hoax, it has suddenly become possible to drill for oil in the Arctic?

For the more visual, I also talk about this at YouTube; go there to rate the video or post a comment on it (or if lazy, just view it here).

Death by a thousand blogs

The fact that anyone who has an internet connection to the outside world can publish anything they like doesn't mean that everything published on the net is good. On the contrary, it's likely that as the fraction of the world's population with internet connectivity grows, more drivel will be published -- unless there's a mechanism to edit or select content. For example, although anyone can edit most material on WikiPedia (material subject to malicious edits, or wars over content does get locked down), the fact that the information is in one place on the whole makes it possible to arrive at some sort of reasonable standard.

When it comes to blogs, though, there is nothing to stop anyone from posting whatever they like (aside from laws on libel, copyright, and anything that applies if you live in a police state).

So if you try to find out something, it's possible that you will find a slew of drivel -- especially if there's a campaign going to push a point of view.

Let's try a few experimental searches.

First, the claim that Einstein said humanity would die out if bees disappeared... Search for the words Einstein bees. What do you see? Of course the internet is a moving feast so the hits you will get will not be the same as mine. What I found was a fair number of articles putting the case that this quote was a myth, as well as a few that treat the quote as fact. In this case, it's not hard to determine that the quote should at best be treated with suspicion.

Next, try this one: bumble bees can't fly. Again, there's a fair mix of articles, and it's not hard to arrive at the conclusion that the original story may (possibly) not have been a myth, but certainly has become a bit garbled. A bumble bee's wing area is insufficient to generate lift (taking into account its weight) but that calculation is based on the theory of fixed-wing aircraft. A bumble bee's wings aren't stationary, so the mathematics doesn't apply.

Here's another: HIV causes AIDS. This time the majority of the hits on the first page (when I did this on 24 June 2008) were articles supporting the conventional theory, with a small number opposing – the group who for whatever reason claim that HIV does not cause AIDS.

So it seems we have a general pattern: while there is a fair amount of garbage or controversial material, you get a good balance and can find the most plausible position fairly easily. Relatively few authoritative-looking sources are making strong claims that are hard to dismiss, against the "correct science" position.

How about this one? Search for passive smoking harm. This time, while the majority of articles agreed with the conventional position, I found some surprisingly vehement articles in mainstream media, not just amateur blogs, pushing the line that the science has to be wrong.

Next, let's go to a more current issue, climate change. A couple of searches will illustrate the point. Try climate models fail to predict. Now this one is admittedly a bit different from the others by addition of the words "fail to". But the result is startling. Almost the entire first page of hits is articles claiming that climate models are not able to predict future climate change. Take out the word "fail" and you do get a very different result. With that in mind, I tried adding "less" onto the end of the smoking search: passive smoking harmless. The result? A slew of articles claiming that environmental tobacco smoke was harmless, research to the contrary was fraudulent, etc.

There are two questions that arise out of this experiment. How is the ordinary person with no training in searching to arrive at a reasonable mix of articles? How is someone without a research background to tease apart the mythology from the worthwhile content?

Taking the climate change one again, I spend a good fraction of my blogging time debunking climate change myths. The claim that models have no predictive power is only one of these (in fact, the IPCC validates the models in their previous reports by comparing them against subsequent measurement). Another is the claim that solar variations (search for sun explains all climate change) are sufficient to explain all climate change. Again there is a mix of articles, including some that clearly overturn the claim. This time around, bizarrely, if you change the search to the negative, sun does not explain all climate change, you get a higher fraction of hits pushing the case that climate change is purely down to the sun.

So what's the take-home point from this?

Blogging is not science. Neither, for that matter, is journalism. Blogging seldom is even as good as amateur journalism; very occasionally a whole lot better. Whatever the case, beware of following the line of least resistance, and only reading the material that comes up in the first page of searches. It's not that hard for a small number of people (possibly with an agenda; now who could care so much, I wonder, about confusing people about how harmful tobacco is?) to generate a lot of material, aided and abetted by the gullible who copy their line.

Information on the net is free, but so too is junk. Making life-and-death decisions based on a web search without digging deeper to understand the underlying science, whether it's how to tackle the HIV pandemic, how to deal with the health threats of tobacco or what to do about climate change is silly. Yet many people seem to do exactly this. South Africa delayed its response to HIV by almost a decade. Progress worldwide against public smoking was delayed even more. And the rate of progress on climate change, it appears, is more in the hands of the blogosphere than of informed decision-makers.

Darwin?

Sound Science and Climate Change or What are the Denialists Smoking?

George Monbiot, in his book Heat, reveals the link between organized tobacco and organized climate change denial. I followed up his references and the documents he found make for interesting reading: memos from APCO, a PR firm, to Philip Morris on how to fake a grassroots movement (what we'd call astroturfing today). I strongly recommend reading Heat but in the meantime here are some examples, in which APCO is discussing the strategy for setting up The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC).

In proposing a European version of TASSC, the following are suggested, in a document dated March 25, 1994:

• Preempt unilateral action against industry.
  
• Associate anti-industry "scientific" studies with broader questions about government research and regulations.
  
• Link the tobacco issue with other more "politically correct" products.
  
• Have non-industry messengers provide reasons for legislators, business executives and media to view policies drawn from unreliable scientific studies with extreme caution.
  

And what were those "broader questions"? Here's a list from the same document:

• Global warming
  
• Nuclear waste disposal
  
• Diseases and pests in agricultural products for transborder trade
  
• Biotechnology
  
• Eco-labeling for EC products
  
• Food processing and packaging
  

So the agenda was this: confuse the public on the merits of science in the tobacco arena, but create a smokescreen (how appropriate) by having similar debates in other areas and – here's the critical point – ensure that the same people were involved so it would be harder to see the whole thing for what it was, a front for tobacco. Here's another snippet (document dated September 30, 1993):

APCO recommends that we steer away from launching TASSC in Washington, D.C. or the top media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a series of aggressive, decentralized launches in several targeted local and regional markets across the country. This approach:

• Maximizes recruitment efforts. Stresses that TASSC is a grassroots effort that will fight unsound science on both the local and national levels.
  
• Avoids cynical reporters from major media. Less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages; increases likelihood of pick up by media.
  
• Limits potential for counterattack. The likely opponents of TASSC tend to concentrate their efforts in the top markets while skipping the secondary markets. Our approach sends TASSC's messages initially into these more receptive markets - and enables us to build upon early successes.
  
• Allows for a national coordinating effort. Publicize, in each market, a national 800 number, the supporters of TASSC and the existence of the TASSC Public Information Bureau.
  

Now, of course, it is unlikely that the majority of people who have taken a pro-industry stance on these matters are in the pay of organized tobacco or their successor in the climate change debate, Exxon, but the planting of these seeds is all that's necessary. As uninformed members of the public pick up a perception that there's a vast groundswell of scientists who disagree with the position they see from the mainstream media, they are conned into thinking the debate is real. It's even possible that some genuine scientists were sucked in (I've noticed how most of those are retired or late-career scientists, playing on their standing, but likely to be out of touch with the latest science). Sadly, some of the mainstream media consequently pick up the spin as real, the approach of seeding it in less critical media having done the job of giving the position legs. Reporters in publications like The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The Australian, seeing the story coming at them from many sources, mistakenly believe what they are seeing represents a genuine grassroots movement of concerned scientists. So why, now that this whole thing has been exposed, do some of these publications continue to take the inactivist position so seriously? Because no one likes to admit to being a dupe. Or maybe because no one likes to admit that they need to make major lifestyle changes to eliminate a social harm – in other words, that they are part of the problem. This is why climate change persists as a misreported issue. And why the original "junk science" myth, tobacco is not that harmful, persisted so long, in smokey editorial offices. So, what's to be done? We must recognize that in the Internet age, knowledge is not created centrally, but by networks of potentially disorganized individuals. APCO tapped into this concept in an era when the Internet was not as universal as it is today, so they needed significant funding to set up their astroturf operation. The good news is that, today, you do not need major funding to set up a genuine grassroots movement. All you need to do is to recruit friends who recruit friends, via personal networking sites like FaceBook. So, now you know what to do: take the message out there. The climate inactivist movement is an outgrowth of the tobacco denial movement, and just as bogus. Equip yourself with the facts by reading sites with real science (to which you will find pointers on this site: I do not claim to be a great primary source; for example, the RealClimate site is run by real climate scientists). This article is another take on APCO's role in creating TASSC.

Addendum

I add new links here as I discover new data sources:

• There are some good links to bolster the case in this RealClimate discussion (and the next page). Could this be a smoking gun?
• A report in New York Times on how the fossil fuels industry knew as far back as 1995 that “contrarian” theories did not seriously challenge mainstream climate science – but suppressed an internal report to that effect.
• The Union of Concerned Scientists in January 2007 reported that ExxonMobil had at that time spent $16-million on supporting anti-science lobbying groups, in a tobacco-style campaign to discredit  the science by propaganda rather than sound scientific investigation
• John Mashey has written an extensive study of the anti-science tactics of the fossil fuel industry including the lessons they learnt from tobacco
• Tobacco companies in Australia are at it again: they created a fake retailers association to protest plain wrapping in the lead-up to the 2010 federal election
• Graham Readfearn in the Guardian summarizes where the main anti-science lobbyists are today (2015)
• Union of Concerned Scientists reports internal fossil fuel memos and emails show that climate change was being factored into their plans as early as 1981 – much as organized tobacco knew of the health risks of their product decades before the issue became public, forewarning them of the need to launch a denial campaign (2015)

Finally, a really good authoritative book by Naomi Oreskes, published in 2010, details the whole denial industry right back to its roots:

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

Peak Oil, Poverty, Moore's Law and Manure

Peak Oil

As oil and with it products we use to fuel our cars and trucks gets more expensive, there is growing anguish about the effects on the cost of living. China alone is adding millions of cars a year to the total, and peak oil theory says we should be hitting limits soon on production growth.

In reality, as prices go up, there will be options of exploiting kinds of oil previously too expensive: under the deep sea, in the arctic (conveniently being freed of ice; what's doing that, I wonder, if there's no climate change?), tar sands, shale oil… so production may not drop off as fast as predicted by peak oil theory. But should we want to squeeze every last drop of oil (and coal and gas) out of the ground?

Not only do we have climate change to worry about, but the economics of fossil fuel has a lot to do with the gap between rich and poor nations.

The Poverty Gap

In the twentieth century, the cost of communication increasingly split rich from poor. By communication, I mean movement of people, goods and information. Part of this was energy; another part telecommunications. The common thing was the distinction between countries with a comprehensive network of roads, rail, electricity and telephone connections, and those without.

Addressing this gap became increasingly hard, as the cost of new infrastructure has to compete with infrastructure created in an era of lower costs (e.g., coal was cheaper because demand was lower). It is this gap which for example makes fruit in a third world country absurdly cheap in tradable currency terms, while making a local phone call is ridiculously expensive. There's a kind of arbitrage, but one where the places where the price differences occur are too hard to connect, to correct the pricing anomaly (as would happen for example if the US$ to euro exchange rate was out of synch with the US$ to pound sterling exchange rate).

Somehow, despite all this, we have arguments from climate change inactivists that addressing poverty is an alternative to addressing climate change. Yet if you accept that poverty is largely structured into communication infrastructure (or lack thereof in poorer countries), new technologies that reduce the need for infrastructure can go a long way to closing the poverty gap.

An example is the cell phone. In many poor countries, cell phone roll-out has been many times faster than predicted, because of communication starvation. People in Nigeria didn't have phones not because they were poor, but because there was no infrastructure. Cell infrastructure is relatively cheap to put in: as long as you have electrical power, you can virtually parachute base stations in. By contrast, a nation-wide wired phone network needs wiring to the home, with extensive local wiring, even if trunk lines are wireless.

This example generalizes to other cases like electricity. If you can generate power locally without a grid, you can make energy accessible a lot faster in countries without infrastructure. Eliminate the cost of consumables, and you also eliminate another huge problem: rapid price increases as supply fails to keep up with demand. If you think this is bad for wealthier countries, what will doubling the fuel price to to someone who can barely afford a car?

Moore's Law

The nice thing about renewables is that technology changes reduce prices. It doesn't matter if coal supply runs low, oil runs out or gas slows to a trickle. The wind will still blow, the sun will still shine. Just as Moore's Law has pulled computer prices down dramatically over decades, photovoltaics and wind are getting cheaper. Eliminate the consumables and you have a real revolution in energy economics, far bigger than Henry Ford's revolution in personal transport.

This is an exciting time once we forget doom and gloom and think of what could actually be done.

Instead of living in terror at consequences of change, how about accepting that we are looking at a change as big as the move from horse and buggy to cars?

Think of it this way: the cost of renewable energy sources only depends on the technology, not consumables. Once we get this right, we can make energy cheaper with every new development. As long as we are stuck with fossil fuels, prices can only go up as demand overtakes supply.

Why are we so scared of this great new concept? Once we solve the energy storage problem (there are already good ideas like compressed air) poorer countries will benefit too. What's the downside? Unless you own a coal mine ... the horse industry lost big time when the Model-T appeared, but think of the advantages to society as a whole: personal mobility on a level never experienced before.

Now we have the next level: energy with radically lower constraints on supply and infrastructure. If you can do local microgeneration with efficient storage, you no longer need a grid. In rural Africa, for example, you could almost parachute in (where have we heard that before?) a solar or wind microgenerator.

Manure

Back in the nineteenth century, it's alleged that someone predicted that London would be metres deep in horse manure in a few decades. It's a nice story, even if it's improbable that it's true (I have yet to find a direct source for it, and there are several variants – the hallmarks of a myth or urban legend). It is certainly true that getting rid of horse manure in the streets of major cities was a growing headache – just as cutting carbon emissions is today.

So why, today, are we staring down the problem of curbing carbon emissions when there are far superior alternatives – alternatives that only need a little development to be viable?

The only alternative is to consume fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow, then it's back to the stone age. Why are we even debating this?

Exxon-Mobil to abandon climate change obfuscation

I stumbled on this, probably not meant to be in a publicly accessible place. I hope ExxonMobil will not be too outraged if it appeared early on my blog.

-----EMBARGOED UNTIL April 1st, 2008-----

SPRINGFIELD--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 1, 2008--Speaking today at City Hall, Springfield, C M Burns, President Corporate Affairs of Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM), announced a major change in ExxonMobil's approach to climate change.

Burns was speaking as part of Springfield's new Business Leaders Who Pay To Speak Program.

He described the actions ExxonMobil has taken in the past to obfuscate climate change science as "consistent with maximizing the corporation's profits. The modest cost of piggybacking onto tobacco and ozone hole denial has been an excellent investment. Excellent..."

Reaffirming ExxonMobil's commitment to being a constructive and active participant in dialogues concerning proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Burns outlined the de facto change in policy. "This time, we actually mean it. We came to the sudden realization that pretending the science was wrong would not save us if everyone is burned to a crisp. Bad for profits. Very bad."

He highlighted ExxonMobil's actions to increase confusion about climate science. These included giving financial support to groups claiming to represent "sound science". "Sound science," he explained, "is that which increases ExxonMobil's profits, no matter how tenuous or where published." These same groups, he continued, were paid to portray peer reviewed science as "junk science", no matter how well-founded, if it was contrary to ExxonMobil's interests.

In describing ExxonMobil's work with partners, Burns reported that the company is now planning on entering a new phase of supporting climate science that is accurate and not influenced by short-term concerns for profit. To facilitate this change, a blind trust to disburse research funds is being set up, to be headed by fabled jazz saxophonist, B.G. Murphy. Said Burns, "No one could imagine Murphy as advocating causes dangerous to the common good."

Steepling his fingers for emphasis, Burns concluded, "We must care enough to treat the risks of global warming seriously. We need to manage the risks of companies distorting the science effectively if we are to maximize the economic and environmental benefits available to future generations."

Full text of the speech is available on the ExxonMobil website. Some text copyright L Simpson.

###

NOTES TO EDITORS

* The Business Leaders Who Pay To Speak Program aims to encourage debate amongst senior business figures on issues where they are prepared to pay to be heard. The inaugural event took place in November 2007 and C Montgomery Burns was the second speaker in this Program. The first speaker was less gullible and merely bribed the press without bothering to show up.

* The International Energy Agency estimates that, by 2030, it is likely world energy demand will increase by 45 percent. This growth equates to about 100 million barrels of oil equivalent a day, which is in addition to the 240 million barrels oil equivalent a day currently consumed.

* No one with any sense actually believes that this amount of oil can continue to be extracted without running into limits, sometimes referred to as "peak oil".

CONTACT: ExxonMobil
Media Relations: Dallas (US) office, +1 972 444 1107
or
Leatherhead (UK) office, +44 1372 222261/74

SOURCE: Exxon Mobil Corporation