climateboom

LONDON – The decision by Shell to launch a ‘thousand year’ campaign of paramilitary resistance against renewable energy received a cautious welcome from shareholders at the company’s annual AGM, Wednesday.

With the climate deal agreed in Copenhagen jeopardising Shell’s fossil-fuel reliant business model, the corporation announced it has abandoned PR-led methods of securing profits in a post-carbon world in favour of low-intensity warfare and spectacular terrorist outrages against wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable energy ‘targets’.

“We’ve tried literally everything to stop regulation to control greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve funded disinformation campaigns, we’ve paid for scientists to produce reports saying that global warming will make the world a nicer place, we’ve set up front NGOs, and we’ve even claimed that we barely produce oil any more. It’s all failed. War without end is the only remaining option,” said Shell CEO Chet Wilmington, as he cautiously eased another bullet into the battered clip of his AK47. “It’s time to take to the hills and rain down fire on our clean energy future.”

“I’m confident that this is the best way to maximise shareholder value.”

Analysts greeted the move as ‘unconventional’ but agreed that a guerrilla campaign of asymmetric warfare probably represented the only move left for the troubled company.

“Despite the hundreds of millions the oil companies have spent lobbying against the Copenhagen agreement and funding public disinformation campaigns to obscure the need for climate action, they have had no success in preventing a strong and binding global agreement,” said Geoffrey Malne, senior analyst at Goldman Sachs. “They chose wrong and missed their chance to invest in a low carbon future. Using explosives concocted from readily-available materials to topple each and every wind turbine really is their only remaining course of action.”

This move has been described by industry insiders as the culmination of a $500 million rebranding exercise for the company. This morning, in apparent recognition that increasingly slick advertising had failed to deliver, the company’s website had been replaced by a grainy youtube video in which columns of middle-aged men in business suits and balaclavas parade up and down the deserted corridors of Shell’s central London headquarters.

Robert Cooke, a senior communications manager with the oil giant, spoke with us from his home in Surrey this morning, shortly before slipping off-grid to plan a daring campaign of resistance against Swedish combined heat and power plants: “I’m looking forward to bringing the killer management style I forged during the expansion of the North sea fields in the 1970s to the task of razing the clean energy infrastructure of this continent to the ground,” he said, as he kissed his wife and children goodbye for what was probably the last time, and climbed into an armoured hummer.

The idea had arisen over a wine-fuelled lunch, he added: “My boss and I were saying we needed a modern-day Quixote with a rocket launcher instead of a lance. And we kind of looked at each other, and he said, ‘Do we know anyone who can get us a rocket launcher?’ So we dropped a line to our Nigerian office, and a few days later we were good to go.”

Unconfirmed reports this lunchtime suggested that the Shell senior management team were somewhere in the North sea, headed towards Denmark.

There’s lots of good thinking material buried in the comments on the Realclimate thread about the hacked emails. This, for example (via Only in it for the Gold).

You don’t have to ignore anything. And there are surely enough adversarial-minded lawyers on the planet to make sure that every e-mail that can be selectively mined to incriminate whoever they want, and the ham sandwich they rode in on. So nothing is going to get ignored. I actually have a lot of sympathy, having spent the bulk of my career in a field where serious government regulation and critical trade secrecy were around every corner. We were trained (annually, as it turns out) to consider how would we feel if every e-mail, instant message, phone call, post card, cocktail party napkin, or gum wrapper off the street that stuck to our shoe, were published on the front page of the New York Times the next morning.

When I went to graduate school, coincidentally in a climate science group (although I am not actually a climate scientist) there was no such training. It was all about doing good science. So I don’t think climate scientists will look like heros when their scientific correspondence gets published. Some might have to deal with very unpleasant consquences if in fact they have violated any of several considerations of scientific integrity, however I expect that will be a small minority. Still, everyone has to answer for what they have to answer for.

However, I will be utterly astonished if it turns out that anthropogenic global warming is actually a scientific fraud perpertrated by a small cabal. In the first place, it would have to be a really big cabal spanning some widely spread fields. If you know anything about scientists, they don’t really travel in packs big enough, and they tend to have friction across field boundaries as opposed to conspiracy. Coincidentally, my wife studied some climate science in graduate school, this was about ten years after I had gone on to my work in other fields, she was exposed more to atmospheric chemistry. Well none of the climate scientists she knows are people that my group knew, and vice versa. They didn’t really know each others’ work much at all and weren’t that interested.

Many years later, I was involved in a company seminar intended to try and keep house scientists apprised of science in the “rest of the world”. We had Gavin Schmidt as one of our speakers. I think I surprised him by recognizing an ENSO signature in one of his slides, and later we talked about my background. He did not explicitly say so, but he gave me the distinct impression that he was not very impressed by who I did my Ph. D thesis with (although he is a high profile climate scientist). Not everything my adviser believed about climate change was orthodox – I would bet it still isn’t; although this seemed well within the normal course of scientific disagreement. So I would be really surprised if he is in a “conspiracy” with Gavin Schmidt.

However just about everyone I know in climate science (despite these different bits of climate science not really being any kind of single tightly knit community let alone anything that could countenance overt misconduct) is convinced that anthropogenic global warming is an important fact. What tipped the scales for some people wasn’t the same as for others, but over the past few decades there has been a lot more convergence than divergence.

So is there likely to be malfeasance somewhere in the work on global warming? Well, it’s enough people doing it that I’d be surprised if nobody every stepped over any line. Fine, we don’t want to ignore misconduct.

But the chances that there is enough misconduct to “explain away” even most of the case for AGW? Impossible. Professional conspirators with fancy lawyers to help them conspire couldn’t do it – it would require far too many players.

The deniers really are going to have to content themselves with the model of evolution denial – instead of really getting people to agree with them, the best they can hope for is to muddy the water – to trap enough people in uncertainty to avoid action. Here, the hacked files probably play a much bigger role – they are GREAT fodder for people as interested in controversy as they are in truth. I think some of the professional “deniers” realize this – they can keep getting paid if they can keep the uncertainty alive. I wonder what those e-mails look like?

The original comment (by Andrew) is here.

Twenty years ago this piece of text appeared as the first two paragraphs of the final declaration of the Small States Conference on Sea Level Rise, held in the Maldives.

Twenty years on, the Maldives government may have got a little more media-savvy, as their recent cabinet meeting held underwater shows, but the rest of the world is still managing to do a remarkable impressive job of obfuscating, ignoring and misrepresenting the “broad scientific consensus” on climate change – which is as straightforward now as it was 20 years ago. If climate scientists had a signature film, it’d have to be ‘He’s just not that into you‘.

This makes the most recent meme going around with relation to Copenhagen all the more confusing. The story goes that getting a politically binding agreement on reducing global greenhouse gas emissions this year in Copenhagen is too ambitious, because we ‘haven’t had enough time to come to agreement’.

Don’t think about it too closely, and it kind of sounds plausible. After all, in talking about deep emissions cuts, we’re talking about changing the way that the global economy runs. Sure – it’s going to be difficult to pin down. Politically,  it inutitively makes sense that it’s going to take Obama some time to win over recalcient republicans in the USA. Maybe Copenhagen has just come a year too soon? Maybe it’s all about Mexico City?

For all it’s narrow plausibility, the eagerness with which the media have picked up the ‘year too soon’ meme is slightly dispiriting when you pull back and look at the 20 year-old perspective from the Maldives conference.

Failure to get binding agreement at Copenhagen won’t be because we need an extra year. It’s not an inadequate amount of time spent discussing and wrangling over the problem which is stalling progress. We’ve done a serious amount of discussing and wrangling. Rather, what’s stalled progress has been the reluctance of politicians and economists to engage with the problem substantively.

This has some unfortunate side effects. Because ‘engaging substantively’ goes hand-in-hand with ‘taking the science seriously’, something’s had to give. Between the rock of the climate science and the hard place of inappropriate levels of political ambition, you can be pretty sure what it’s been. And so, the certainty that exists around the science of climate change – indeed, that existed 20 years ago – is eroded by the lack of action consummate with it.

One, tiny example. Commenting on the Copenhagen non-deal, the IPCC representative on the Today programme this morning replied to John Humphrys with this flat statement:

“The science is very concrete… it’s indicating that humans are rewponsible for the climate change, and that we need to do really deep cuts…[in emissions]”

But what was the question she was replying to from Humphrys?

“What you are losing is public support for your views… I mean… for the science…”

Discourses can be started by obvious mismatches – in this case between the science and the response – but that’s how they grow.

So, back to Copenhagen. Maybe it is going to take longer before we get a strong agreement. But that’s a dangerous assumption – because we shouldn’t assume that just chucking more time at this is going to solve it. Because up until now, we haven’t got agreement because we haven’t yet faced up to what agreement would mean.

Cleo Paskal from Chatham house discusses the impacts climate change will have on our ability to produce energy reliably.

Of the precipitation patterns which provide hydroelectricity with it’s predictability she says:

“Those constants have now become variables.”

Hydro, nuclear, coal plants – all need large amounts of water. In particular, she highlights that nuclear installations are often built on the cpoast – leaving them vuilnerable to sea level rise – or on rivers, which makes them even more vulnerable. France had to shut down a load of it’s nuclear reactors in 2003 because of water shortages – and the kind of conditions that gave rise to that? By 2040 she says we’ll see those kind of temperatures every two years.

“In many different sectors that we rely on you’re going to very likely see increasing instability in the ability to extract, refine, distribute, generate…”

Via the excellent New Security Beat blog.

On Left Foot Forward, here.

The culmination of quite a long, hot workshop…

Thermokarst lakes in Siberia, formed when ice-rich permafrost melts. Thawing permafrost could inject enough carbon into the atmosphere to cook the planet. But nobody’s quite sure how fast it’s going to happen.

Permafrost is a giant cold-storage compost heap, stuffed full of frozen carbon. Just like you chucked out last night’s potato peelings, the planet has chucked out billions of tonnes of dead plants, trees, mammoths and, yes, polar bears, which is now happily interred under the Arctic wastes.

The difference is that while your compost heap ticks over at a nice warm temperature, breaking down the potato peelings into compost, the frozen ground which makes up permafrost stops that organic stew of Arctic flora and fauna from decomposing, safely locking up the carbon stored in it.

I say ’safely locking up’ because from the point of view of creating human civilisation, permafrost has been pretty handy. While the permafrost has been, er, permanently frozen, we’ve been busy ekeing out human life, discovering fire, developing agriculture, growing our population. While we’ve been busy nurturing the capabilities that ultimately allow the lucky few to participate in Britain’s Got Talent, the planet’s been watching our backs by keeping this massive store of carbon locked up under the frozen parts of the planet’s surface.

Of course, in these exciting climatic times, permafrost is a crap name. Because as the planet warms up, the permafrost is no longer permanent – it’s taking on less of the character of a crisp winter’s day, and more of the character of a damp boggy field. Normally, every Arctic summer the top layer of permafrost melts before refreezing in the winter. But as the planet warms, (and it’s warming faster in the Arctic than anywhere else), the melt is getting deeper and more widespread, and in some places the permafrost isn’t refreezing completely in winter.

When permafrost melts, it releases either carbon dioxide or methane into the atmosphere. Both are important greenhouse gases. Both will speed up the rate at which the planet warms. And there’s a hell of a lot of carbon stored in permafrost. Maybe twice the amount that’s currently in the atmosphere. Unlock that frozen store, the worry is, and we’re dabbling with the possibility of adding enough carbon to the atmosphere to change the atmospheric era we’re in, to something even more exciting than the Anthropocene, and by implication, seriously jeapordising our ability to watch Susan Boyle on youtube.

That kinds of suggests a bit of a doomsday scenario, or at least it does to environment journalists. But permafrost is a great example of the difficulties there are in restraining our desire for clear cut statements about how the climate’s going to behave as the planet warms (and to a certain extent, the media’s desire for screaming headlines about the end of the world), with the cautious nature of the scientific field.

Talk to climate scientists who work on permafrost and they’re pretty tentative about the conclusions of their work. It’s a challenging field to make predictions in at the moment, because there don’t yet exist good, widely accepted models of permafrost melt (we’re probably at least a few years away from that), and scientists rely on a pretty small number of field researchers who arduously travel around Siberia and Alaska taking point-by-point site measurements of gas emissions, which is a pretty crude way to predict emissions on such a huge scale.

Only very recently are we beginning to get predictions about how much permafrost melt might contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Edward Schurr, a good name to look out for if you’re interested in reading more, wrote a paper this month in Nature broadly suggesting that permafrost emissions might be in the order of a gigatonne a year – and over a few decades permafrost could be a ‘large’ carbon source in a warmer world.  But these are still early results.

What can we say confidently? We can certainly say that permafrost represents a source of carbon emissions that are additional to what the IPCC has considered up to this point. The IPCC’s latest treatment of permafrost didn’t attempt to include any assessment of permafrost as a carbon source – they were only interested in talking about the effect large parts of the Arctic land surface collapsing might have on stuff that had been built there – houses, gas pipelines, nuclear reactors, that kind of thing. Not unimportant, and in one way you want to cut them some slack for not considering it, because they’re not really cut out for appraising rapidly changing recent science.

In another way, though, it makes you want to bang your head against a table – because in emissions terms we’re already doing worse the IPCC’s worst case emissions scenarios from the stuff they did consider, even without the possibility of the north of the planet outgassing carbon dioxide and methane like a compost heap having a psychotic breakdown.

There is one way in which permafrost is really interesting. There’s a lot of rubbish talked about environmentalists loving the ‘precautionary principle’, which says we should do more rather than less to tackle climate change, just in case. (Actually, I reckon many environmental organisations are pretty conservative in what they advocate, despite the sometimes doom-laden rhetoric they employ.) But the current level of knowledge we have about permafrost is a pretty clear-cut example of why the precautionary principle is actually a perfectly reasonable way to go about things.

Because we can definately say permafrost emissions are additional to the IPCC scenarios, and we can definately say that they’ve got the potential to be huge, but we can’t (yet) say how much CO2 and methane is actually going up into the atmosphere, and we can’t (yet) say how quickly emissions are going to increase. What do you do in that situation? Ignore it, as the IPCC were forced to?  Or maybe add a bit of a safety margin to the system by being ambitious? Our understanding of the science of permafrost thaw is a great advert for the precautionary principle.

Permafrost is not a clear-cut situation. It’s also one we don’t understand particularly well. So are we fucked? The most defensible answer is: maybe. Well, what did you expect?

Hey! Check us out: We, the global society of interested parties in climate change. Here we are, the community of climate scientists, policy makers, campaigners, citizens, bloggers, cranks, PR companies, business leaders. What are we doing? We are playing a game. It’s called the “Targets game”, it’s about how to respond to climate change, and I’m going to suggest that, no matter how useful it feels, it’s a wildly inappropriate way to be spending our time.

To play the targets game, (it’s very popular) you discuss what a ‘safe’ level of carbon emissions is. All you need is what we have – a reasonable picture of the effects climate change is having on our planet. Over the past decade, there’s been a concerted effort on the part of many of us to work out, based on this picture, what the ‘safe’ level of emissions is. And this discussion, because it starts from the very reasonable and understandable place of working out where we are now, is framed in the language of ‘targets’ for cutting our current emissions, usually pegged against 1990 levels of emissions.

So, you’ll hear about a range of values, usually from 50% to 80%, depending on how ambitious people are feeling, (ranging from 50% being discussed in the US Senate, to 80% for the mainstream UK NGOs.) The targets will also have dates attached, so you’ll get, for example, 60% cuts on 1990 levels by 2050.

Now, where I work we enjoy playing the targets game. What’s our game playing strategy? Over the past couple of years we have spent a lot of time arguing for higher and faster emissions cuts. In particular, we have laid out the case for, and the pathway to, 100% emissions cuts by 2027 in the UK. And we’ve been doing a lot of thinking for how this target relates to other targets that are out there. Why do we go for the higher target? Why 100%? Are we radicals? Are we overly ambitious? Are we naive? What kind of players are we?

This kind of debate we’ve been having got a bit of a boost a few days ago when an article appeared in the Washington post, declaring that a number of different groups of scientists had come to the conclusion that “The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.” So now, more people are calling for 100% emissions cuts. What does this new statement tell us about the targets game?

In order to understand, let’s get a quick appraisal of the climate science, as it stood in 2006. In a paper that the IPPR put together a few years ago , they came to the conclusion that even with very ambitious cuts in global emissions we could still expect up to a 43% chance of having more than 2 degrees of global warming – 2 degrees being widely regarded as the cut off point above which everything gets very bad. And they were talking about ambitious cuts – cuts which ended up looking like 88% cuts on 1990 levels by 2050 for the UK.

Wow, that’s quite a lot. And there are some further complications to that. While we do have a reasonable picture of what climate change is doing to our planet, it’s a long, long way from perfect. Every month there’s a new development from some climate scientist or another, telling us (overwhelmingly) that the problem is more serious, that we have less time, that even more radical action is needed. Through some recent work, it’s become increasingly clear to me that with the impacts of climate change we are currently seeing, 2 degrees isn’t (gulp) going to cut it anymore. (I’m not going to try and justify this pretty bold statement here, but that is the direction climate scientists are heading.) We need to aim for temperature rises lower than that. We need to hold on to summer sea ice in the Arctic. We need to (gulp!) end up with atmospheric concentrations of CO2 lower than we have at the moment.

What’s the target that gives us that? Is it, shorthand here, 90%? 95%? 100%, cuts in our society’s emissions? If it is, we are squeezing what we’re aiming for into the extreme end of the targets game spectrum. How much wriggle room do we have?

It’s a difficult question to answer. Part of the problem is that targets are concepts that operate at a really high level of abstraction from the thing we’re really interested in – the impacts of climate change. Let’s think about it. The impacts – whether physical or social, ice caps melting, massive migration, etc. – are basically a result of temperature rise, but there’s a lot of scientific uncertainty about what temperature rise causes what impacts. Said temperature rise is a product of the extra heat entering the planet’s system as a result of increased radiative forcing (imbalances in the amount of heat energy entering and leaving the system) which is itself a product of all sorts of wildly complicated processes – including the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, cloud formation, surface albedo of the planet, and (most commonly known and very significantly) the concentration of different greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere. The concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere is a product of our historical emissions, our current emissions, our future emissions patterns, and the carbon cycling capacity of the planet, which is also changing as a result of climate change (as well as any carbon cycling we try and do ourselves – planting forests, for instance, or capturing carbon.) When we talk about targets, we add another level of abstraction onto discussing our current emissions – in the UK, for instance, we currently, conveniently, ignore international aviation and shipping when we talk about emissions targets.

What does the last, long and slightly tortuous paragraph mean? It means it’s very, very difficult to move seamlessly from a discussion of targets to an understanding of what actual real-world impacts they’re going to lead to. And the situation is made even worse – because we’re constantly scrambling to update targets, which exist at one end of the abstraction process, based on our rapidly changing understanding of climate science, which is giving us a whole variety of piecemeal but generally worrying information about the opposite end.

So what’s the attraction of dealing with these rather unwieldy concepts? I think the reason that the targets game make sense to us, intuitively, is because it’s rooted in our conceptual comfort zone – in an understanding of the situation we’re in which suggests there’s still wriggle room in our climate predicament, that in order to avert ‘disaster’, we can change how we live by 50%, say, or maybe even 80%. When we suggest targets, it feels to us like we’re trying to find the sweet spot between ensuring our safety, and the inevitable social and economic costs of cutting emissions. We look at the science, we do the maths, and we get a number we can tweak, one way or another. Tweak it higher, and we get a bit safer. Tweak it lower, and we get a solution more acceptable to business, politicians, and all those other vested interests, (including, perhaps, ourselves). That’s the beauty of the game – it lets us discuss where the sweet spot is.

I think there’s a problem here, and I’m just going to say it. The problem with the above way of thinking is that in reality, there is no sweet spot between 0% and 100%. I’ll write that again, because it seems to me to be really important: There is no sweet spot.

Why not? Because we’re not playing the game we think we are. We still think that we’re playing the old game of trade-off, zero-sum, you win I lose, push and pull between safety and reasonableness – ‘us vs. them’ – us being the greenies, ‘them’ being BP et al. We’re not. If we were playing that game, we’d need a total pot of winnings to divide between us at the end – crazy radicals and vested interests. But that’s not how the winnings are going to be doled out. We are playing a game that is not zero-sum, it is either total sum (i.e. we survive as a species with some level of comfort and equity), or no sum at all (i.e. it is game over). There is no reasonable on the spectrum, not when we’re playing a game for every stake possible.

In other words, friends, whatever game you thought we were playing, we are actually in a game of let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-carbon. And the thing about let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-carbon is that when it comes to what I used to think of as ‘targets’ there’s only one rule: As low as possible, as soon as possible. (My colleague refers to this, terribly, as ALAPASAP).