Tag Archives: climate change

Powering Up Britain?

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This week the UK Government launched its Powering Up Britain plan to deliver both energy security and the transition to Net Zero. The plan is wrapped in political rhetoric about sticking it to Putin by not using his gas, and backed up by more detailed supplementary documents.

My high-level assessment: if we could wind back the clock 30 years,this might be a good time to talk about developing new technologies such as Small Modular Reactors Carbon Capture and Storage, pumping the CO2 captured from fossil fuel powered electricity generation into the caverns beneath the North Sea whence those (Great British) fossil fuels came.

Why if we could wind the clock back 30 years? Because these “exciting” new technologies DO NOT EXIST at the scale required and it might easily take this long to develop them to that point. If we keep on with business as usual while we wait for the (Great British) boffins to save us from impending doom we will be, quite simply, in a world of pain. The climate is collapsing before our very eyes and we are reaching tipping points in this collapse that we did not expect to see for decades.

Quite simply, we cannot afford to wait. We need to act now with the resources that we do have at our disposal today. Fortunately, they are prodigous.

Before we worry about Powering Up Britain, we need to Power Down Britain . Quite simply, the less energy we use, the less we have to generate from renewable sources. Then we can Power Up by using currently available technologies such as wind and solar, supported by investment in developing better storage and a smarter grid to move the energy from where it is generated to where it is needed, including cooperation with our windy and sunny European neighbours.

By all means let’s invet in developing technologies such as CCUS and Direct Air Capture of CO2, but let’s not wait until they are ready to get started. We simply DON’T HAVE THE TIME.

Fruitcakes, Loonies and Climate Change Deniers

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The UK Independence Party and its guffawing figurehead Nigel Farage are predicted to make substantial electoral gains in both the Local and European elections that are being held on 22nd May.

While much attention has been focussed on the pontifications of some of its more unreconstructed members on immigrants, women and same-sex marriage, UKIP’s environmental and energy policies show all the hallmarks of having been jotted down on the back of a beer mat as the minutes of a late night meeting in the back room of a Home Counties pub of a focus group consisting of Daily Mail readers and assorted other swivel-eyed loons.

The assertion by Oxfordshire-based UKIP councillor David Silvester that last winter’s devastating floods were divine retribution for the legalisation of marriage for gay couples [1] turns out to be not much less well founded in science than many of the party’s other policies.

The UKIP 2014 Energy Policy is subtitled “Keeping the Lights On” [2]. Having read the document, many will come to the conclusion that “The Lights are on but No-one’s Home” might be a more apt description.

The paper starts with a dig at wind farms, quoting the fact that one particular day in 2010 the contribution of wind to the UK’s energy consumption was 0.04%. Whether that figure is true or not, it is seriously out of date give that there was a 35% increase in installed generation during 2013. If one-off figures for the situation on a single day are to be quoted, then on 21st December 2013, wind generation accounted for 17% of the nation’s total electricity demand [3].

The document then goes on to repeat the myth that wind energy requires 100% conventional generation backup so we are paying twice for every megawatt-hour of wind generation. In reality, all the power stations on the grid – conventional or renewable – provide backup to one another and no new plants have to be built to backup wind power.
By page 2 the focus group had got another round in and were really getting into their stride. “There are increasing doubts about the theory of man-made climate change” they opined. Such doubts may emanate from the lobbyists employed by oil companies and the likes of Lord Lawson’s avowedly sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation but the scientists of the IPCC feel that they can be 95% confident that human activity is affecting the climate [4] (up from 90% in their previous report). The proportion of articles in peer-reviewed journals that take the contrary view is something like 1 in 9,000 [5]. So, if there are increasing doubts, they are not to be found among those who understood the question.

The party also gives a nod to the idea that more CO2 is a good thing as it stimulates plant growth before launching into some purple prose extolling the benefits of fracking for shale gas – under the heading “safe and clean fracking” – the clincher for UKIP voters of course being that this is good British gas and not the nasty foreign stuff.

The policy concludes with a summary of “What We Should Do”. The list, which would be laughable if it were not for the terrifying thought that many people will believe this stuff, having fallen for Farage and UKIP’s “good old fashioned British Common Sense” shtick, consists of cancelling all subsidies for renewable energy, stopping wind power development, keeping coal-fired power stations, repealing the 2008 Climate Change Act, urgently assessing shale gas potential, urgently building gas-fired generation capacity and basing energy strategy on coal, gas and nuclear.

A better recipe for disaster it is hard to imagine.

References:
1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-25793358
2. http://www.ukipmeps.org/uploads/file/energy-policy-2014-f-20-09-2013.pdf
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom
4. http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf
5. http://desmogblog.com/2012/11/15/why-climate-deniers-have-no-credibility-science-one-pie-chart

The IPCC Report

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In a blaze of media coverage the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been released. Well, almost. Someone in the IPCC’s PR team knows what they are about as the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ (realistically about as much as most people are going to get anywhere near reading) was released last Friday to give the editors of the Sunday papers time to organise thorough coverage and the meat of the report itself is out today.

One of the key headlines of the report is an increase in the level of confidence the human activity is affecting the world’s climate from 90 to 95% (about as much certainty as scientists are ever going to commit themselves to).

Other chilling (surely the wrong word in this context) highlights include:

1. Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.

2. Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent

3. The rate of sea level rise since the mid-19th century has been larger than the mean rate during the previous two millennia.

4. The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. CO2 concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions. The ocean has absorbed about 30% of the emitted anthropogenic carbon dioxide, causing ocean acidification.

Those are just some snippets from the first seven pages of the summary and they paint a picture of a planet whose systems have been stressed almost to breaking point by human activity. However, the IPCC scientists cannot be accused of hysteria or doom-mongering and, whilst the situation is undeniably serious, there is still time for concerted action to allow us to avoid the worst-case scenarios.

All in all, a balanced and thorough piece of science that paints an objective, if bleak, picture of the current and likely future situation and leaves no room for doubt that urgent action is required.

The response of the UK Government’s Secretary of State for the Environment? I paraphrase here but essentially: “Look on the bright side – at least you won’t have to put the heating on so often”

Climate Change – Who Do You Believe?

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in January 2013

It’s a tough call. On the one hand, there was an editorial in the Observer last Sunday that proclaimed “Now No One Can Deny that the World is Getting Warmer”

On the other hand, the Mail on Sunday, admittedly not a publication that has ever been accused of harbouring tree hugging tendencies in its newsroom, declared on the same day: “Global Warming Stopped 16 Years Ago, Met Office Report Reveals: Mail on Sunday Got it Right About Warming… So Who Are the ‘Deniers’ Now?”

That two UK newspapers published on the same day can carry such contradictory stories on the same subject of such global importance illustrates the problems faced by those who seek to communicate the facts about climate change to both political leaders and the general public and expect them to take rational decisions based on those facts.

The Observer editorial concerns the publication, in draft form at present, of the US Government’s National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee’s Climate Assessment Report.
The introduction to the report is presented in the form of a ‘Letter to the American People’ and the first sentences leave the reader in no doubt about what is to come:

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present. This report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee concludes that the evidence for a changing climate has strengthened considerably since the last National Climate Assessment report, written in 2009. Many more impacts of human-caused climate change have now been observed.”

The report extends to 1,146 pages of assessment compiled by a team of 240 scientists and will be subject to a review by the US National Academy of Sciences alongside the public consultation process before the final version is published later this year. There is no doubt that the content of the report is deeply disturbing but one thing that is really striking is the uncompromising, unequivocal way in which the report’s authors – representing some of the leading thinking in the field with access to the widest and deepest sets of data in existence – spell out their message: man-made climate change is real and it is affecting real people in the real world now. It is hard to believe that this report has originated in the same country that recently held a Presidential election in which the issues that 240 leading scientists describe as presenting “a major challenge for society” barely received a mention from either of the candidates, including the one who is now responsible for leading the world’s largest economy’s response.

On the other hand, the Mail on Sunday appears to have reverted to the belief that climate change is a leftwing conspiracy designed to undermine Western capitalist society, or at least house prices in the Home Counties. More particularly, the paper has seized on the fact that a report by the UK Met Office appears to suggest that there has been a slowdown in the rate of increase in global average temperatures. The facts, inevitably, are not so clear cut: the Met Office’s new projections, generated by a new computer model that the agency itself heavily caveats, are that temperatures over the period 2012-16 will be 0.43 degrees C above the average for the period 1971-2000 as opposed to the previous prediction of 0.54 degrees. Hardly dramatic or conclusive, especially when one considers that the confidence ranges for the new and old predictions are 0.28-0.59 and 0.36-0.72 degrees respectively. In addition to the fact that an increase in temperatures above the previously forecast level is well within these parameters, the model compares future temperatures to a 30-year average that itself shows a significant warming trend compared to previous decades.
An overwhelming majority of respected scientific thinking agrees that anthropogenic (man-made) climate change is a reality and has done for quite some time but, to read the popular press, one could be forgiven for thinking that the issue is still in doubt and that there is no need for politicians to take difficult decisions or for people to make changes to their lifestyles.
One of the coalition government’s new, and much applauded, initiatives on taking office was to establish an independent Office for Budget Responsibility to ensure that economic forecasting and the collation and publishing of data regarding key economic indicators are kept separate from policy-making. Perhaps it is time for an independent Office for Climate Responsibility.

2012: Weird Weather or Changing Climate?

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in March 2013

There have been a number of sets of weather and climate-related data published in the last couple of weeks that illustrate just how extreme the weather was in the UK in 2012 and how this fits into a picture of a global climate that appears to be warming at a faster rate than was previously thought.
A report on the drought and flooding experience in the UK in 2012 by the Environment Agency and reported in The Observer on 2nd March shows that flooding was recorded on 20% of days last year and drought on 25%, often in the same parts of the country with some rivers experiencing both their lowest and highest recorded levels within the space of a few months.

Following hot on the heels of this report comes the news that levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii have showed the second largest annual increase on record. Data just released show that the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere rose 2.67 parts per million to 395ppm.

News that global efforts to reduce emissions have not only so far failed to lower the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere but that these levels are actually increasing at a record rate will, or certainly should, make sobering reading for governments and policy makers around the world.
The 2007 Bali Climate Change Declaration formally set out the consensus view of the world’s leading climate scientists that, in order to avert potentially disastrous consequences, the increase in global temperatures should be limited to no more than 2 Degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In order to limit the rise in temperatures to 2 Degrees, the scientists’ view was that atmospheric CO2 levels should be “stabilised at a level well below 450ppm” and that, in order to achieve this, emissions would need to peak and then decline in the 10-15 years following 2007. The fact that, 6 years into this timeframe, CO2 levels are continuing to rise at an increasing rate, casts doubt on the ability of the global community to achieve the 2 Degrees cap on warming. This limit of 2 Degrees has been adopted by many of the world’s developed economies, including the European Union, and the fact that its achievement is now in doubt will come as a major blow to governments and campaigners alike.

The fact is that even a 2 Degrees rise in global temperatures is predicted by many to have dramatic consequences so the prospect of an even greater increase is a grim one indeed.

You would think that an impending global calamity of this nature would be front page news and would galvanise governments into action, spurred on by the demands of their electorates and constant media scrutiny of the progress they were making towards averting disaster. In fact, research published earlier this year by Media Matters in the United States shows that, while 2012 was the warmest year on record, this was not reflected in the coverage the issue received in the mainstream media.

With very little effective pressure from the popular press, politicians are able to continue to dismiss climate change, and environmental concerns in general, as being fringe issues that must not be allowed to thwart efforts to get the economy back on track. In the UK, the widely-reported remarks in a speech by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne that “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business, so let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe” seems to encapsulate the Government’s approach: do what we absolutely have to but be in no rush to adopt a leadership position on the issue.

Also in the papers is the news that the country’s two largest heritage organisations, English Heritage and The National Trust, have won a high court battle to stop a windfarm being built in Northamptonshire in a location that would adversely impact views of and from the Trust’s property at Lyveden New Bield, which is an Elizabethan ruin. Now I used to live very close to Lyveden and it is indeed a remarkable monument and there are many very good arguments for not building a windfarm in its vicinity, not least the fact that Northamptonshire is one of the least windy counties in England. However, I do wonder what could be achieved if the country’s largest heritage charity and a government quango could join forces to demand positive action to respond to the challenge of climate change as well as going to court to challenge misguided efforts to tackle the issues. It is right that these bodies should be vigilant in guarding our national heritage from despoliation but who is taking the same care over our national, and indeed global, future?