Defusing the methane bomb

Environmentalists and some of the more eccentric members of the scientific community like to allude to the possibility that the Arctic permafrost will melt, releasing a methane time bomb into the atmosphere which will inevitably end in runaway global warming and an apocalypse. There is even an Artic Methane Emergency Group featuring our old friend Peter Wadhams, among others, and with headlines along the lines of "The Arctic is rapidly heading for meltdown".

It's a good story, and no doubt good for business too, but unfortunately somebody has gone and spoiled it all:

[N]ew research led by Princeton University researchers and published in The ISME Journal in August suggests that, thanks to methane-hungry bacteria, the majority of Arctic soil might actually be able to absorb methane from the atmosphere rather than release it. Furthermore, that ability seems to become greater as temperatures rise.

The wit and wisdom of Dr Glikson

A few days ago, there was a rather good article in the Conversation about fossil fuels and development. Written by Jonathan Symons, it covered themes that are favourites at BH, most notably that there is a trade-off between expanding access to electricity in the developing world and emissions targets:

...if the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation were allowed to invest in natural gas projects (not just renewables) it could roughly triple the number of people who gained electricity access from a US$10 billion investment. Whereas a renewables-only portfolio could supply 30 million people, natural gas could reach 90 million and generate around ten times as much electricity.

The comments thread featured a series of critical responses from Andrew Glikson, an Australian geologist who has caught the eye before, most notably when he protested the willingness of an Australian theatre to put on a performance of Richard Bean's The Heretic. This earlier thread also bears looking at. The thrust of his comments can be summarised as "But climate", but they are worth looking at in more detail because Dr Glikson has some truly astonishing views:

A very large part of the poor populations referred to in the article live in low river valleys and delta prone to flooding extreme rainfall, torrents originating from mountain regions and sea level rise, as is the case of mega-floods in Pakistan, Bangladesh and low-lying islands, associated with climate change. The “option” of developing higher standards of living based on fossil fuels is therefore short sighted and no more than a Faustian bargain....

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Gary Yohe's fictional citation

Updated on Aug 14, 2015 by Bishop Hill

It is...irresponsible to ignore the preponderance of evidence on floods, extreme precipitation events (and if it is winter, these are snow storms), wildfires, etc. These were anticipated to occur as the climate changes. They have occurred around the world (U.S., Russia, Indonesia, Japan, Argentina, etc..), and they are getting worse and more frequent^[2].

The quote is from famous environmental economist Gary Yohe, writing at Climate Feedback, a site where climate scientists rate media articles on their scientific content. Yohe was writing about a Bjorn Lomborg piece.

Yohe's citation is to the detection and attribution chapter of AR5, which is, on the face of it, a bizarre thing given that there are whole chapters in the IPCC about observations of the climate. Intrigued, I looked at the chapter cited.

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The FCO misleads

Sir David King, the Foreign Office's adviser on climate change, has commissioned a report into the effects of climate change on food security. There's a monster team of authors featuring among others Tim Benton, a population ecologist and the "UK Champion for Global Food Security", and Rob Bailey, a former executive at Oxfam who now works at Chatham House.

The underlying study is a mega-hypothesis of course - it's computer models all the way down, you might say - so it's of no practical use, but with the project led by someone like Sir David, one can be reasonably sure that it will at least provide some entertainment.

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The night remains dark

As the latest paper to try to explain the pause appears, it's hard not to smile. Reason follows explanation follows rationale follows excuse, and the interested layman is left with the abiding impression that the night remains very very dark indeed.

This is not to say that these are not valiant efforts to get to the bottom of things, but let us not kid ourselves, a la Guardian, that anyone really has much of a clue about what is going on yet. Claims that climate models are even more accurate than previously thought are the scientific equivalent of a fart joke and deserve the same response.

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Is there a backstory to the EPA pollution incident?

Further to the story that the EPA was responsible for a major pollution incident in Colarado a few days ago, Ivo Vegter posted a scan of a letter that was published in the local newspaper a few days before EPA started work. It's a bit hard to read, but well worth it if you can decipher sufficiently.

Fracking planning

I haven't a lot of time to write this morning, but here is a thread to discuss the government's announcement that it is going to try to expedite the planning process for shale gas developments.

This year's walrus articles

So I wake this morning to find two stories about walruses in my Twitter feed. Why the sudden interest. There doesn't appear to be any news as such, but the Associated Press are telling readers that there is a steep decline in the walrus harvest in Alaska:

Hunters and scientists say walrus migration patterns are veering from historical hunting grounds as temperatures warm and the ocean ice used by the animals to dive and rest recedes farther north. Village elders also tell biologists the wind is blowing in new directions. In 2013, a late-season icepack clustered around St. Lawrence Island, blocking hunters from the sea.

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Cameron's great white elephant

Nuclear power is in the news at the moment. The Japanese have switched on a nuclear power plant for the first time since Fukishima, as the authorities realise the full cost of their knee-jerk reaction to the tsunami. Here in the UK, there is a growing concern over the cost of Hinkley Point, a project that increasingly resembles a fiscal black hole.

However, less commented upon have been a few apparently small developments in the nuclear market that may make for a better future for the industry.

Firstly, a US developer of small modular nuclear reactors has given regulators the heads-up that it will submit its first designs next year, ahead of possible deployment in 2023. An array of competitors are working on similar timescales and, encouragingly, regulators seem to be responding constructively too, aiming to have the new rulebook in place in time to keep the commercial operators moving forward.

Meanwhile (if somewhat less credibly), Revkin is looking at a claim that we could have nuclear fusion on stream in a decade.

If all goes to plan it is quite conceivable that Hinkley C could be a white elephant before it is even completed.

In Poland, workers and windfarms sit idle

It's hot in parts of Eastern Europe at the moment - this happens in summertime I believe - and so people are switching on the airconditioning in droves.

In Poland this has produced some pretty major problems because the electricity grid can't supply sufficient electricity to meet demand. It's a familiar story: Poland relies on coal for the bulk of its electricity, but nobody wants to invest in new coal-fired power plants because the market is being rigged in favour of renewables and the EU is going to shut them all down anyway. Meanwhile there is hardly a puff of wind to be found anywhere in Europe so Poland's wind fleet is not helping either.

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"A Disgrace to the Profession" by Mark Steyn - now available

In the US you can order Mark Steyn's book here and orders can be shipped to the UK, if not from Amazon then try Mark's own bookstore.

It has cartoons by me and was a fun project to be involved in. It is also a hugely entertaining and informative read and, although I might be slightly biased, I think this is going to be this summer's must-read climate tome!

Posted by Josh

Update on Aug 11, 2015 by Josh

Kindle edition available

The first five years of the RCPs

Further to yesterday's post on butterflies and RCPs, I wondered just how things were panning out for the RCPs since they were issued five years ago. I wasn't really expecting very much from this analysis since five years is not very long, but it turned out that there is more of a difference than might be expected.

The RCP data is for the mid-year carbon dioxide concentration and it turns out that the June figure from Mauna Loa has just tipped the 400ppm mark. RCP8.5 predicted that 2015 would be the first year in which the 400ppm mark was breached at the mid-year point, so at first glance we are indeed on the RCP8.5 pathway.

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In which Nature Climate validates my predictive models

In order for a predictive model to be useful it needs to be validated in some way. Here are two predictive models that I suggest might be useful in interpreting scientific papers.

• If the paper is published in a Nature journal it's probably nonsense. Particularly if it's in (a) Nature itself or (b) Nature Climate Change
• If it calls RCP8.5 "business as usual" it is political drivel.

With these predictions in mind, readers may be interested in this new paper from Nature Climate Change:

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of some climatic extremes^{1, 2}. These may have drastic impacts on biodiversity^{3, 4}, particularly if meteorological thresholds are crossed, leading to population collapses. Should this occur repeatedly, populations may be unable to recover, resulting in local extinctions. Comprehensive time series data on butterflies in Great Britain provide a rare opportunity to quantify population responses to both past severe drought and the interaction with habitat area and fragmentation. Here, we combine this knowledge with future projections from multiple climate models, for different Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), and for simultaneous modelled responses to different landscape characteristics. Under RCP8.5, which is associated with ‘business as usual’ emissions, widespread drought-sensitive butterfly population extinctions could occur as early as 2050. However, by managing landscapes and particularly reducing habitat fragmentation, the probability of persistence until mid-century improves from around zero to between 6 and 42% (95% confidence interval). Achieving persistence with a greater than 50% chance and right through to 2100 is possible only under both low climate change (RCP2.6) and semi-natural habitat restoration. Our data show that, for these drought-sensitive butterflies, persistence is achieved more effectively by restoring semi-natural landscapes to reduce fragmentation, rather than simply focusing on increasing habitat area, but this will only be successful in combination with substantial emission reductions.

My predictive models appears to be working splendidly.

Environmental regulators trashing the environment

My concern over a massive discharge of polluted water into a river in Colorado is lightened at least slightly by the discovery that the culprit was the Environmental Protection Agency.

The city of Durango and La Plata County, Colorado, have declared a state of emergency after a federal cleanup crew accidentally released mine waste into the water.

An estimated 1 million gallons of waste water spilled out of an abandoned mine area in the southern part of the state last week, turning the Animas River orange and prompting the Environmental Protection Agency to tell locals to avoid it.

A deserving case, I would say.

Social licences

A few weeks ago I chanced across an oil company executive who was expounding earnestly on his company's "social licence to operate". I raised an eyebrow at the time because it struck me as a case of big oil adopting the language of the environmentalists.

Interestingly though, it turns out that the whole concept of a social licence was introduced by a mining company executive:

[Jim] Cooney was racking his brain for a concept to describe why projects from Peru to Angola were getting delayed and shut down by protests. The companies lacked “social license,” he told the audience.

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