Is 85 the new 35?

When it comes to setting targets, is 85 years the new 35? I'm not talking about some strange fitness plan for keeping elders as sprightly as youth, but instead looking far (?) into the future at climate targets for the years 2050 and 2100.

Those of us who follow the climate debate are well aware of targets - often expressed as a percentage of 1990 emissions. Now it would be nice to believe that they choose 1990 as being the year that I started work in the sector, but it's really just a convenient baseline, roughly matching the break up of the Soviet empire and a couple of years before the seminal Earth Summit in Rio. So we have ended up with an abacus of number - 20% improvements in energy efficiency by 2020, 30% cuts in CO₂, the main gas causing climate change, by 2030 and 80% cuts by 2050. So just when you are wondering whether we will meet any of those targets, here's a new one: full decarbonisation by 2100. Suddenly the goalposts have moved from 35 years to 85. Is 85 the new 35 - and does it matter?

It's worth asking where these numbers have come from. Are they carefully though out by scientists, or are they a cynical attempt by climate change deniers to push the time horizon so far out that no-one has to take any action. Or are they a realistic long-term goal to overlay onto the other targets that we know (and perhaps love)? Well they are from an impeachable if not impeccable source: Chancellor Merkel of Germany and President Hollande of France.

"The benchmark is the two-degree ceiling on global warming. The impacts of climate change will only be controllable to any degree if we manage to keep global temperature rise down to no more than 2° Celsius as compared to the pre-industrial period"

Merkel explained. French President François Hollande, who will be hosting the Paris conference marking 20 years from Kyoto on climate change this autumn, stressed that the national emission reduction targets announced so far fall well short of what is needed to keep global warming under the two-degree ceiling and noted that so far only 40 of the 194 countries planned to attend have published targets.

Merkel and Hollande jointly called on the international community to completely renounce the use of oil, gas and coal over by 2100.

"All energy needs should be met using renewable sources. We must decarbonise our economies in the 21st century,"

added the German Chancellor.

So will it happen, or will the cynics be proved right? I am hopeful that it can, and believe that it is quite helpful to have a very long term goal - not least to give us a point against which to recalibrate if we slip, as I fear we inevitably will, on some of the intermediate ones. And is it achievable? With political will - which must include the USA, China, Russia and key developing countries as well as Britain and other EU countries - yes. 85 years is still a long way away, although young children alive today in developed countries will probably live to see it.

If we reflect back 85 years, it takes us to 1930 - and the energy systems then were even more depdendent on fossil fuels than today, with coal the principal source. The age of oil was only just beginning, with fewer than 10% of the number of cars on the roads globally than we have today, and natural gas was just a nuisance to be flared off beside oil. Nuclear power was a remote theoretical possibility, with solar electricity also in the realms of science fiction. True there was some hydro (and biomass), but diesel was seen as a new and innovative fuel - at least in Europe with the Americans wedded to gasoline for their burgeoning vehicle fleet. (That's a 1930 map of Belgium showing the latest in petrol station design!) So I don't think we should look at energy sources today and say that it's not possible to decarbonise fully in the next 85 years - and that's even without moderating demand through improving energy efficiency.

200 years of data shows climate changes accelerating

The Radcliffe Meteorological Station in Oxford has just celebrated 200 years of daily weather observations, possibly the longest run of daily records for any single location in the world. Now located in the garden of Green College beside the old observatory building, adjacent to the new Mathematical Institute, it has temperature and rainfall records continuous from January 1815, as well as irregular observations of rainfall, cloud and temperature from 1767 to 1814.

"Green Templeton College in Snow 2009". Note the weather station's Stevenson screen visble on the right of the photo.
Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikipedia.

These records show some worrying statistics, indicating that Britain's weather is becoming more extreme as it becomes warmer (a phenomenon due to in part to warmer air being able to carry more energy and moisture). 2014 was Oxford’s warmest year since records began in 1815, and part of a very warm trend since 1990. The average annual temperature for 2014 was 11.5°C (53°F), 1.8 degrees Celsius (over 3 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 200-year average of 9.7°C (49½°F), a significant difference in weather terms. This was accompanied by extremes of wet or dryness. September 2014 was the second driest on record and yet the winter rainfall total for December 2013 to February 2014 was the wettest winter quarter again since 1815. As a single month January 2014 was the wettest of all winter months with rainfall of 146.9mm (almost 6 inches) was nearly three times the month’s long-term average in Oxford of 52.9mm.

Although these figures may sound quite unexceptional,they are a clear indication that weather is changing, and much more rapidly over the past couple of decades than for most of the previous 180 years.

Who dunnit? How to attribute CO2 emissions between nations

In my last blog, I referred to the relative simplicity of calculating an (approximate) carbon footprint.  Of course there's a lot of mystique around it (and an increasing number of relatively well-paid experts), but the fundamentals are not exactly rocket science.  Maybe some of the solutions should be kept equally simple and not made overly complex.  So if we can calculate our footprint here and now, perhaps we can also travel back in time and find out how much we have been responsible for historically?  This is not just a matter of academic interest, as developing nations contend that those that have been industrialised for longer periods have been greater contributors to the problem, and so should bear more of the burden in reducing future emissions and mitigating damage caused by past emissions.

There have been a number of attempts to do just this, and work out the share of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions attributable to each country.  It's far from being an exact science, as there are inevitably gaps in data and some pretty broad assumptions need to be made, but it's still - in my view - a worthwhile exercise.

The latest estimates can be found in Environmental Research Letters, an open access academic journal published by IOPscience.  As with personal or corporate footprinting, the key decisions are around boundaries and scope.  The boundaries are quite simple - nation states - but have a time factor as well: in this case going back to 1800 as being roughly the start of the industrial revolution, when coal began to display wood (and to a lesser extent wind or water power) as the main source of energy.  Pre-1800 use of coal was globally so low as to be lost in the rounding errors of carbon calculations.

This choice is however controversial, as early industrialised nations, such as the UK, were using fossil fuels in complete ignorance of any potential risks to the climate. It contrasts sharply with (say) the Sandbag Report on Sovereign Emissions (direct link to PDF report) which starts measurement at 1990, when the first IPCC report was published assessing the dangers of climate change.  Prior to that, most governments and citizens were unaware of the real risks from using fossil fuels (although the science had been understood for a while).

The Environmental Research Letters Report differs from most other estimates in a second important respect; as well as looking at emissions of the main greenhouse gases, it takes into account land use change and the effect of aerosols (not the ones used for deodorant, but a form of air pollution arising from sulphates emitted in burning fuels such as coal and that have a generally cooling effect on the climate.  These factors are quite significant and lead to some surprising countries having a net global cooling effect - including Chile and Kazakhstan.

The Report also converts cumulative tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (that snappy measuring units that geeks like myself love, but is hardly user friendly) into a contribution towards global temperature rises.  As you would expect, the top three contributors are the usual suspects: the USA, China and Russia, but Brazil slips in at number 4 and the European nations are headed by Germany, the UK and France at 6, 7 and 8.  On this metric, the USA is responsible for 0.151°C of global climate change, with China less than half that at 0.063°C.  Britain's 0.032°C  is actually double that of France, just one position below it in the league table.  And of the positive nations, Chile and Kazakhstan's reduction is less than 0.005°C:

Of course this is quite largely about population so the Environmental Research Letters Report goes one better, and relates to changes per billion inhabitants.  (It could do it per person, but that would give teeny numbers.)  This can be seen graphically below and has a surprising (to me) nation heading the table - the UK:

On this measure, red is bad (major contributor to global temperature change).  The UK has 0.54°C temperature rise per billion inhabitants, the USA 0.51°C, with Canada, Russia and Germany filling out the top five places.  China and India are near the bottom with around 0.04°C.  It should be added, that the report's authors only consider the top 20 emitters in this table, so although India is listed 20th on a per capita basis, it would be a lot lower if other countries were included.  It's also likely that the UK would lose its top spot in this "naughty league" to a smaller energy intensive user, such as Luxembourg or even Qatar or United Arab Emirates, which although they have only become large users of energy in relatively recent periods, are among the very largest users today.

So is this a fair measure?  I'm inclined to say "no", for several reasons.  Firstly, it's a little unfair to blame us for actions taken in complete scientific ignorance - I might not start the clock as late as Sandbag's 1990 baseline (as I personally was well aware of the likely problem in the late 1980s, and indeed so was Mrs Thatcher).  Maybe we should look at a weighted emissions, with 1800-1980 ones less culpable than more recent ones.  Secondly, the method looks only at direct origins of emissions, and ignores the fact that many of China's emissions (for example) may be attributed to Western demand for cheap goods, sometimes manufactured to less environmentally exacting standards.  Thirdly, there is always a problem of blaming children for the sins of their fathers; we should be judged on our current efforts to minimise emissions more than on what has gone before.  And at a national level, should recent immigrants be penalised for what long-standing residents have done?  (Even someone as apparently English as I am can point to a great-grandfather who immigrated from Ireland around a century ago, although at the time Ireland was part of the UK, too...)

But, even if it's not quite fair, it is still a useful exercise to help us think about long term responsibility.  And this doesn't just mean looking backwards at what our parents did, but also the responsibility that we have to future generations not to trash the world that they will be inheriting.

Mrs Thatcher and Global Warming

I didn't vote for Mrs Thatcher. This is not just the slogan that launched a million tee-shirts but, in my case, absolutely true, even though I was old enough to vote for her Conservative Party. But this short blog entry, written the day after she died, is neither an attempt to hurl abuse at her nor a recognition that some – but not all – of the things that she did (and which I may have opposed at the time) were probably necessary to move the UK out of its stupor in the 1970s. Instead this will focus on one facet that has gone almost unremarked in the obituaries today: Mrs Thatcher was the first major Western leader to "get" Climate Change.

Trained as a research chemist at Oxford, Mrs Thatcher was proud to undertake a dispassionate analysis of the facts placed before her; this sometimes led her to intellectually appealing but socially divisive (and ultimately foolish) policies. But when presented with the relatively immature findings on the science behind climate change (still then known as global warming) she understood that this was an existential threat – more dangerous for the UK, even, than the European Union!

As far back as September 1988 she said in a speech to the Royal Society:

For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.

This was later emphasised when she told the party conference:

The core of Tory philosophy and for the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease. This Government intends to meet the terms of that lease in full.

And by 1990 she was confident enough to say:

The danger of global warming is as yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations. … The need for more research should not be an excuse for delaying much needed action now.

This led to an early lead by the UK Government in taking measures to combat climate change and a broadly bipartisan attitude to the subject. Sadly the early lead has gone, and the UK is not doing much better than most of its peers in the move towards a lower carbon economy, and certainly behind that other great nation led by a right of centre female chemist – Germany under Angela Merkel. And many of Mrs Thatcher's successors in the Conservative Party would do well to heed those early words spoken almost 25 years ago – especially the UK's current Prime Minister who should note that her words were supported by action as national and international levels.

Climate Change can be mentioned again!

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That's what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

Well it probably doesn't need me to tell you that the quote comes from President Obama's second inauguration address, delivered in front of 800,000 people yesterday. Strip away the rhetoric though and two things shine through: a recognition that the effects of climate change are visible and damaging, and a commitment to lead the transition on the path towards sustainable energy sources. This is to be welcomed, although it's not perfect.

Sustainable energy sources are but one half of the solution; arguably managing energy demand is even more important, and can often be achieved quicker and at lower cost. And hidden behind this is often a need for stronger economic signals - of which carbon taxes in one form or another are often most efficient. How refreshing it would have been if President Obama had spoken of being able to revamp America's tax code by not adding taxes to the (not so) broad shoulders of a rising middle class, but instead taxing profligate energy use through a broad carbon tax. But maybe that will come; at least Climate Change is back in the lexicon of the president and I don't have to hide behind the euphemism of "weird weather" when speaking to my US colleagues.

(Oh and as everyone else seems to have been counting words, that's 159 out of 2,137 in the entire address or about 7% devoted to climate change.)

Which is scarier: Obesity or Climate Change?

The question posed may seem trivial, weird even. But clearly not to the new British Government - Dawn Primarolo was shown on the news last night keeping a perfectly straight face as she announced that Obesity is a greater risk to the UK than Global Warming. Apparently she was only echoing the words of her boss, Alan Johnson, but it does raise another interesting question about perceptions of risk - just after we have heard how the public perceive the risk from terrorism vs. Climate Change.

Of course, I suspect that in truth we have a little bit of jumping on the bandwagon here. You can almost see the frustrated health minister listening to all the positive coverage on Friday about Al Gore and Climate Change, and thinking "Why can't we have some of that?". So some bright young intern no doubt comes up with comparing obesity risk to climate risk and - hey presto! - you get an excellent soundbite that makes climate freaks like myself spluttering into my cocoa¹.

So how do we compare the risks? Well, in one sense, Ms Primarolo may be right. If we look at premature deaths among UK citizens, then there may be more attributable to obesity than to climate change, and will almost certainly be so over the next 25 years. Longer term, it's harder to hazard a guess - indeed if some of the predictions about the loss of agricultural land (and lower yields) due to rising sea levels (and weather instability) are true, the obesity issue may dissipate as food prices rise. I doubt that we'll starve in Britain, but the days of cheap meat (and hence cheap burgers) and vegetable oils may be over sooner than we expect. But if we fast forward past 2050, and don't take action against climate change in the near future, I suspect that even in the UK climate related deaths (including ones from illnesses associated with shifting climate patterns) will outnumber obesity ones.

Perhaps I can square this circle with a suggestion for something that can simultaneously tackle obesity AND climate change. Cycling. Yes, using the humble push-bike to commute to your work or school will address both issues at ones, at a very low cost. And there's some evidence that healthy people feel happier, too, and so worry less about Government pronouncements on obesity, climate change, or whatever...

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¹ Of course, we environmentalists too can be guilty of jumping onto bandwagons to try and elevate our message. I fondly recall an advert I saw in 1992 in Northern Ireland that carried the message in block capitals "ENERGY INEFFICIENCY IS AS ANTI-SOCIAL AS DRINKING AND DRIVING". Maybe...or maybe not...

Which is scarier: Terrorism or Climate Change?

Are the British public becoming scared of Climate Change? A recent Yougov survey¹ indicated that one couple in seven were reluctant to have children because they were concerned about the future of the world. Apparently, of this group who were polled online, 70% cited terrorism, 58% immigration, and 38% Climate Change as a contributory reason.

Quite apart from the fact that it's always wise to take this sort of survey result with a pinch of salt, I find the results a little perplexing. As a former mathematician, I find perceptions of risk interesting, as I can tell you precisely the chance of rolling 10 sixes on a dice in a row (1 in 60,466,176), which is roughly the same chance as being the next person in the UK to be struck by lightning. But how can we balance these highly unlikely events in any meaningful way? The chance of being directly involved in a terrorist incident is actually very low in most Western countries². Just compare the number of deaths in the tragic event of 9/11 with the number of homicides or road accidents in the USA in the same year, and you'll wonder why the US President didn't start bombing the gun makers or General Motors. Nonetheless, the fear of random - and at times inexplicable - events can be very real.

To give the survey its due, Yougov's client, the Mental Health Foundation, were using the results to demonstrate how rising anxiety and general feeling of helplessness was leading to possibly irrational decision-making. Clinical psychologist Dr Michael Reddy was quoted as saying "As social animals, we are sensitive to dangers from other humans that are intentional, such as terrorism. Accidental dangers, such as natural disasters, fail to motivate us in the same way."

I am not sure whether Dr Reddy would place Climate Change into the natural disaster category or not. Hopefully it is not intentional (although I might point an accusing finger at some politicians for behaving as if they didn't really care whether it is happening or not), but equally, it is generally accepted to be humanly induced. So are the reluctant parents behaving rationally by choosing not to bring children into a world that maybe severely affected by Climate Change?

Here the answer is less clear cut. There is a very small chance that we may reach a tipping point that leads to unchecked and major climate changes - a 5-10°C temperature rise (with massive sea level rises) or the "switching off" of the North Atlantic conveyor system (the Gulf Stream rendering parts of Northern Europe uninhabitable). But based on IPCC predictions and fairly firm science, a 2-3°C temperature rise over the forthcoming century is manageable, at least for those of us lucky enough to live in fully developed countries such as Britain. Yes, there may be famines and floods, but they will largely affect developing nations, and not the middle class web users being polled by Yougov. So are people over-estimating the risk of the big events, or basing their choice on a less rational fear of a smaller shift in climate?

But is there a second, almost hidden, moral issue: is it right to bring more people into a world that cannot really meet adequately the material needs of its current 6 billion inhabitants without creating major environmental problems, such as Climate Change? Or to put it in more biological and less social terms, by holding back from starting a family, are couples already instinctively starting a mechanism that is common in nature of reducing population sizes when times look tough? Big questions, and perhaps ones that I will return to in another blog.

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¹Poll of 2,012 adults online by Yougov, for the Mental Health Foundation, as reported by BBC News on Monday, 8 October 2007.

²Terrorism (and its reporting in an era of 24 hour news) tends to have a much wider impact than those directly affected. For example, we can almost all remember where we were when we first saw a news report of the 9/11 atrocity, and I, for one, was forced to cancel a planned meeting in London due to the suspension of public transport on the day of the 7/7 London terrorist attacks.

Too much to blog about

There's too much to blog about in today's papers...

• At the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth Gordon Brown promises Britain will "lead in carbon-free vehicles, carbon-free homes and carbon-free industry", although he supplemented this by adding that Britain will be a "world leader in energy...from nuclear to renewables". But not energy efficiency?
• Up in London, the Carbon Trust announced more funding for research into marine energy. It's only £3.5million, but this is helpful, especially in the light of the concerns I expressed about funding for offshore technologies in yesterday's blog.
• At the United Nations in New York, General Secretary Ban-ki Moon noted that "10 years since Kyoto...most industrialised country emissions are still rising and their per capita emissions remain unacceptably high".
• Ex-President Bill Clinton has also been focusing this week on combatting climate change in his Clinton Global Initiative, and in an interview with the Financial Times¹ suggested that countries such as Britain and Denmark have had faster economic growth than the USA since 2000 precisely because of the development of new green industries. However he was taken to task by the FT's leader column for under-estimating the costs of some of the climate mitigation measures; certainly his own estimates of paybacks on low energy lights and a highly efficient window he had recently installed in his barn were far too optimistic.
• However in Montreal, all is less optimistic. The International Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO) is set to reject the European Union's plan to permit the inclusion of international aviation into its cap and trading scheme (the ETS).
• And if all this action gives the impression that global climate change may yet be averted, the string of mini tornados unleashed by a cold weather front running from Farnborough in Hampshire to Scunthorpe via Luton and Northampton has been blamed by some on climate change. Britain is apparently likely to become more vulnerable to tornados because of its location on the edge of the Atlantic with prevailing Westerly winds picking up energy from the warming seas and creating increasingly violent storms.

So if I am not to simply report things, what am I to say in this blog?

The one common factor is a lack of local action, leading directly to real savings. Neat triplets about carbon-free Britain may lead to action eventually, but when the Government is backtracking on local authority initiatives to raise standards above the minimum (for example through discouraging the so-called "Merton Rule", where councils can require 10% of renewables on most new developments), it's hard to take some of these positive announcements at face value.

Of course, some action is being taken; this evening I was asked by my local radio station to explain just how my local council's policy of carbon-neutral homes would work. I was clearly either too lucid or opaque, as the next question ignored my carefully constructed answer and went for the jugular: "Why is it worth it, with the Chinese opening a coal fired station a week?" I should have quoted Ban-ki Moon back at the interviewer, but rather chickened out, referring to the Chinese only building power stations to meet Western demand for consumer goods. True, but in a week where "Moral Hazard" has become a buzz phrase in connection with Northern Rock, perhaps I too could have pointed out that we have a moral responsibility to take action on Climate Change. Or is that just too po-faced for drive-time radio?

¹Full Transcript on www.ft.com, 24-9-2007, editorial comment 25-9-2007

Welcome to the Energy Don's Blog

Energy and Climate Change are issues that affect us all - and this blog is a first attempt by someone, who ought to know better, to put his or her thoughts about energy into a blog.

I should start by saying which axes I am grinding. I am passionately in favour of sustainable energy, and greatly concerned by global climate change. Indeed, I am so passionately concerned that I gave up a well paid job somewhere else to come and work in the sector. But...(and there will always be a but), there's a lot of hype around and, to be quite honest, a lot of misinformation, from all sides of the debate. So I will be trying to take a unbiased view of the argument: not dispassionate, just straightforward. That's why I chose the name "Energy Don"; in best academic tradition I will seek to expose the truth, without fear or favour. (But not without plagiarism, occasionally: it wouldn't be a blog otherwise!) I'm not a don of course, but in the blogosphere who is quite what they say they are?

Most of the time I will be "on message" with my employer (which I shall be keeping anonymous; any lawsuits will need to head in er... my direction, not theirs). But at times I will be most certainly "off message".

At all times I will try and keep this lively, and try and point out some of the real issues behind combating climate change, as well as some of the strange side effects. I hope that with over 20 years' experience of the subject I can bring the occasional insight. If not, then someone must tell me and I will stop.

Maybe...
For while you have been reading this another 7,000¹ tonnes of carbon have been emitted in Europe alone, quite apart from what's been happening in China, USA...

The Energy Don

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¹ Source: Eurostat, based on 1 minute reading time, and EU-25 2002 data of 3,750MtC annual emissions.