Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year?

• The media is widely reporting 2014 as the warmest year on record, yet the underlying data don't support that conclusion.
• The data actually lead to a different finding, of 2014 tied with 2010 and 2005 within the margin of error, reflecting little warming since 2005.

When I opened today's Washington Post and turned to the Opinion section, I found two op-eds that began almost identically: Eugene Robinson's column stated, "We now know that 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history," while Catherine Rampell announced, "Last year, government scientists tell us, was the hottest year on record." The President even repeated this in his State of the Union address. However, that is not really what the figures in question indicate.

I suppose it's understandable that the Post's editors and those of many other media reporting the same finding might rely on the expertise of the government agencies involved, rather than digging deeper. The Post's columnists apparently based their comments on information provided to the media by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The NASA press release, entitled, "NASA, NOAA Find 2014 Warmest Year in Modern Record," included links enabling one to scrutinize the raw data upon which this conclusion was based. I've reproduced the relevant portion below in picture form as of noon today, since this data is subject to periodic revisions.

NASA's dataset displays the differences between measured temperatures and the 14.0°C average from 1951-80. On this basis it confirms that the average recorded temperature in 2014 was 0.02°C higher than the average for the previous warmest year, 2010, which was in turn 0.01°C higher than 2005's. Unfortunately, neither that page nor the press release includes any information about the uncertainty inherent in these figures, which turns out to be larger than the increase from 2010-14.

All physical measurements, including those from the weather stations providing data to NASA, are plus-or-minus some error. Averaging them doesn't entirely negate that. Within the accuracy of these temperatures, it's not possible to distinguish among 2005, 2010 and 2014; they represent a statistical tie. That fact was explained more clearly than I have done in a report on January 14, 2015, from the team of scientists at Berkeley Earth. Hardly climate skeptics, this is the same group that made headlines a couple of years ago with a comprehensive study of existing climate data.

Why does this distinction matter? After all, measured temperatures have warmed nearly 2° Fahrenheit since the early 20th century, as shown in the graph above. Whether last year or 2010 was warmer might seem like more of an academic point than a practical one. However, the refrain of "record temperature" reports gives a false sense that the warming is accelerating. Instead, as the Berkeley Earth report found, "the Earth's average temperature for the last decade has changed very little." That's a very different impression than the one created by the stories I saw, with implications for how we respond to the risks of climate change.
 

How Would We Provide Enough Energy For 11 Billion People?

• Reconciling energy and environmental concerns was challenging enough when global population seemed headed for a plateau around 9 billion.
• A new forecast of up to 12 billion people by 2100 raises large questions about the capacity of current energy technologies to meet future global needs.

The combination of forecasted global economic weakness and growing non-OPEC production continues to weigh on oil prices.  Brent crude has fallen below $90 per barrel, and the US benchmark has been flirting with $80. But just when the rapid growth of energy supplies has undermined the mood of energy scarcity that prevailed for the last four decades, a group of demographers has thrown us a curve ball, though admittedly a very long one. 

In the 1970s many people were concerned about a "population explosion." Dystopian fiction--already a well-established sub-genre--featured visions of a grossly overcrowded future earth, along the lines of "Soylent Green." However, something happened on the way to such nightmares: birth rates in developed countries as well as large developing ones like China slowed in tandem with rising incomes. Instead of a world of 12 billion by 2100 or sooner, long-term population estimates in the last decade, including from the United Nations, began to focus on an eventual plateau around 9 billion.

Now it appears those lower forecasts might have been too optimistic, particularly with regard to birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis in a paper published in Science last month suggests that growth will continue beyond the end of the current century. The authors expect global population in 2100 to reach 9.6 to 12.3 billion. That could have significant implications for energy demand and climate change, among other environmental and development issues, while in turn being influenced by them.  Nick Butler, who writes on energy for the Financial Times, looked at this from the perspective of oil and other energy sources and concluded, "None of the current technologies...offer an adequate answer."

I would take Mr. Butler's observation a step farther.  It's extremely challenging to say anything confidently concerning how much energy the world of 2100 might need, or where it will come from. Forecasts are rarely accurate beyond a few years, and even scenario methods struggle to cope with the unknown-unknowns involved in such time frames.

Recall that in 1928--as far removed from today as 2100-- world oil production was less than 5 million barrels per day, and the first chain reaction making nuclear power possible was still 14 years in the future. Natural gas was mainly viewed as a low-value byproduct of oil production, while wind power was considered quaint. And with a global population of just over 2 billion at the time, meeting the energy needs of today's 7 billion might have seemed even more daunting than supplying 11 or 12 billion does to us.

It's also worth keeping in mind that more than three-fourths of today's oil is consumed by countries with just 60% of the world's population.  The curve drops off steeply from there, leaving roughly 2 billion without modern energy services. So the energy implications of an extra two billion people by the turn of the century depend heavily on whether their energy demand looks more like today's top 4 billion or bottom 2 billion energy consumers. The recent "Africa Energy Outlook" from  the International Energy Agency (IEA) examined how energy supply on that continent might develop, along with the necessity of shifting investment from exports to domestic consumption to bridge that gap.

For that matter, even if an expansion of global fossil fuel production on the scale required to meet the needs of billions of additional consumers were possible, due to the technology that is currently unlocking oil and gas from source rock rather than conventional reservoirs--a.k.a. the shale revolution--it would bypass any notions of a "carbon budget" that might constrain the projected global temperature increase to a manageable level. It's a reasonable bet that however many people are alive in 2100, they will use less fossil fuels per capita than we do.

Consider what some of today's mainstream forecasts indicate about the future energy mix. The main "New Policies" scenario of the IEA's 2013 World Energy Outlook sees renewable energy growing from 11% to 18% of total primary energy by 2035, while its more aggressive "450" scenario has these sources supplying 26%, with commensurate reductions in fossil fuels. Shell's current long-range scenarios envision divergent futures in which fossil fuels still supply 50-60% of nearly doubled energy demand by 2060, but shrink to around 20% or less by 2100.

One big trend that could help facilitate that kind of change is electrification, which will increasingly displace liquid fuels from illumination, cooking, and even transportation. That's important because while we have few practical large-scale alternatives to petroleum for liquid fuels, we have many ways to generate electricity and could accommodate more, including the long-awaited arrival of practical nuclear fusion--perhaps along the lines announced by Lockheed Martin earlier this month--or some other, currently unanticipated energy source. Eight decades would be more than sufficient for an entirely new generating technology to become significant. 

Reconciling the energy needs of a large, growing population with preventing dangerous global warming--referred to by some as the "energy dilemma"--thus appears to require a sustained, protracted transformation of the entire energy economy. That shouldn't be a surprising insight. The bigger question is whether such a transformation can be achieved through the gradual evolution of the energy technologies available today, or whether it will require revolutionary developments. That remains a matter of considerable debate in energy circles. 

A different version of this posting was previously published on the website of Pacific Energy Development Corporation.

The President's Climate Plan Hinges on Natural Gas

• President Obama's plan for addressing US greenhouse gas emissions depends heavily on expanded fracking of US shale gas resources.
• Reducing power sector emissions will be expensive, unless implemented with maximum flexibility.
• The President's endorsement of climate adaptation was helpful, if overdue.

President Obama's much-anticipated speech on climate change emphasized measures affecting our production and use of energy, which accounts for 86% of US emissions of the greenhouse gases implicated in global warming.  In its recognition of the ongoing importance of fossil fuels to the economy and inclusion of climate adaptation, it probably represents the most balanced approach on this subject from this White House.  However, many of the components of this plan could prove costlier than other solutions that have been debated in recent years.

Some context is necessary.  In 2009 the US Congress, controlled by the President's party, took up comprehensive climate legislation centered on "cap-and-trade." In principle, that would have limited emissions while enabling emitters with high abatement costs to purchase offsets from others who could cut emissions less expensively. Unfortunately, the Waxman-Markey Bill's version of cap-and-trade was so distorted by handouts to favored constituencies that its effectiveness at reducing future emissions was highly questionable.  By the time it died in the Senate, it looked more like a piñata of revenue allocation than a serious effort to address climate change.

So depending on your perspective, the President's new climate plan is either a punishment for Congressional failure to pass a climate bill, or the unavoidable sequel to legislative stalemate. Its prescriptive approach to parceling out emissions cuts to different sectors, with a heavy focus on electricity generation, might prove effective at reducing some emissions but will certainly be more expensive than a broad, market-based approach.

The hallmark of the speech was the President's instruction to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop carbon emissions standards for both new and existing power plants.  This feature had been leaked in advance, and it was hailed by many environmentalists.  How much it will cost us depends on how EPA constructs the regulations necessary to put it into effect. 

If they approach the power plant carbon standard in a manner similar to the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) rules applied to each automaker's new car fleet, then the resulting flexibility could moderate both its cost and adverse consequences. Conversely, if they cap emissions at each individual power plant--analogous to specifying the mpg of each new car--we should expect a wave of power plant closures, including at some gas-fired plants necessary to manage peak loads and back up wind and solar power.  The implications for utility bills and electric reliability are significant, so the details will matter enormously.

The President has a point when he says that past predictions of economic harm associated with previous environmental regulations largely failed to materialize, due to the ingenuity of American businesses. However, I believe his dismissal of concerns about EPA regulation of CO2 emissions is overly cavalier, because it ignores two fundamental facts. 

First and foremost, energy-related CO2 has little in common with the pollutants the EPA has regulated in the past.  It results neither from small impurities in fuel, such as sulfur or mercury, nor as a minor byproduct of combustion with air, such as NOx.  Along with water and heat, CO2 is a primary and unavoidable outcome of all hydrocarbon combustion. We can't clean it up cheaply by purifying the fuel or adding a catalytic converter or scrubber to an exhaust pipe or smokestack.  We must either send it to the atmosphere, as we've done since the invention of fire, or chemically separate it from the exhaust, and then compress it and bury it underground, or react it chemically to produce new fuel or some other product.  So far, both of the latter options are expensive and energy-intensive.   There's simply no free lunch to be had in dealing with emissions from the fossil fuels without which, as the President admitted, "Our economy wouldn't run very well."

The other problem, familiar to my long-time readers, is scale.  President Obama said that his new plan would "double again our energy from wind and sun", as it doubled in the last four years. Unfortunately, that further doubling would only yield enough electricity to displace 9.5% of the electricity generated from coal last year, saving less than 3% of total US emissions. New nuclear power plants require many years to build, and those now under construction only offset the announced and plausible retirements of existing nuclear units.  Thus, any shortfall in electricity supply due to the retirement of additional coal plants must be made up mainly by natural gas, which a new report from the Breakthrough Institute calls the "Coal Killer". 

For the first time in a generation, it appears we have enough gas to take on such a challenge. Replacing half of 2012's coal-fired power generation would require a 50% increase in the quantity of gas sold to US generating plants last year, supported by another 20% increase in US dry gas production, to nearly 29 trillion cubic feet per year. That level of output would be consistent with the Energy Information Administration's current forecast for US production by the mid-2020's.  Of course the power sector would have to compete with other sectors that are also seeking more gas, including manufacturing and transportation, so the future price of natural gas--even with abundant shale sources--is uncertain.  The bottom line is that President Obama's plan for reducing CO2 emissions from the power sector depends mainly on raising US natural gas production through expanded hydraulic fracturing of shale deposits.

I should also briefly mention a few other aspects of the speech. The President wants to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy by having the federal government lead in their adoption.  This sounds like motherhood and apple pie, and there's no question that efficiency measures have a role to play in reducing both energy consumption and emissions.  However, they shouldn't be divorced from a broader perspective encompassing financial and operational efficiency.  I would wager that the federal government could cut its energy consumption from buildings just as quickly, and perhaps less expensively, by reducing its vast inventory of owned and leased buildings.

Federal adoption of renewable energy should also be guided by financial and operational considerations.  For example, it is desirable for the military to ensure that as many of its aircraft, ships and vehicles as possible are capable of using alternative fuels, and to certify new systems on such fuels. However, it would be counterproductive verging on irresponsible to prioritize the purchase of uncompetitively priced alternative fuels, when budget cuts and sequestration are grounding fighter squadrons and otherwise impairing readiness.  Funds are fungible, as CFOs are wont to say, and every extra dollar spent on renewable vs. ordinary jet fuel is a dollar that can't be spent on training or maintenance.  And investments in high-cost renewables could achieve more if diverted into support for innovation on improved energy technologies capable of competing without endless subsidies.

The President's remarks on the Keystone XL pipeline were consistently vague. Some supporters of the project were encouraged, while opponents could still conclude a rejection was inevitable.  From my perspective the only new element was his apparent dismissal of any objections on the basis of potential leaks and other local concerns from the final decision.

Finally, there's the issue of adaptation.  President Obama effectively acknowledged that if the climate models that underlie his plan are correct, we face additional warming and other consequences, no matter how much we reduce emissions. He proposes to "protect critical sectors of our economy and prepare the United States for the impacts of climate change that we cannot avoid."  This is overdue and ought to attract bipartisan support, irrespective of whether our elected representatives are convinced that human activities are responsible for the changes we see in the climate.  Too many people and too many assets have been placed in the path of natural disasters that could become more frequent or severe, if the globe continues to warm. Adaptation offers "no regrets" opportunities, though building more resilient infrastructure is only part of the appropriate response.  Expect to hear more about this subject in the weeks and months ahead.

The Executive Branch actions outlined in the President's speech constitute a Plan B for climate change.  They may yield emissions reductions, though likely at a higher cost than broader, more even-handed measures that have become politically unpalatable. However, in a persistently weak economy the resulting higher energy prices are also likely to threaten an emerging source of US competitive advantage. Instead of solving the politics of climate change, the President's plan could deepen the polarization that already exists on this issue.

Engineering Carbon Out of Energy

• Because of the slow progress in displacing fossil fuels with renewables, carbon capture and sequestration should receive much more attention as a game-changing technology.
• The challenges that must be overcome for CCS to be deployed on a large scale remain significant.

Yesterday I ran across an excellent article in The Atlantic on the importance of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).  In light of last week's warning from the International Energy Agency that efforts to reduce the carbon intensity of global energy have yielded minimal results over the last two decades, the authors' chosen title, "Learning to Live with Fossil Fuels", seems particularly apt. Although neither they nor the IEA are suggesting we abandon renewable energy, they do effectively question the conventional wisdom that climate change can only be addressed by abandoning coal, oil and natural gas within the next decade or two. 

I'm predisposed to their argument, because it aligns with my own view--the result of long and careful analysis--that the transition to a low-carbon economy is going to take a lot longer than optimists hope.  A speaker at yesterday's policy briefing on renewable energy from the Worldwatch Institute and REN21, marking the annual release of the latter group's always-useful Renewables Global Status Report, stated that long-term energy scenarios in which renewables don't significantly increase their market penetration are no longer credible, and that only scenarios including medium-to-high penetration rates by mid-century are credible today.  I had to wonder whether he had been looking at the same data as the IEA, even though he cited their "2DS" scenario in support of his view.  Sarewitz and Pielke, Jr. appear to take quite the opposite view in The Atlantic: We cannot ignore the potential of CCS, because it is not self-evident that renewables will sweep away carbon-based energy any time soon, for reasons of economics, politics, and "complex social arrangements." 

In their brief article, they do a good job of summing up the major options for capturing CO2, including some of the major challenges to be overcome, as well as how the captured CO2 might be used or disposed.  Underground storage, enhanced oil recovery, and conversion back into fuels are all technically feasible, despite significant obstacles of public acceptance, logistics, and cost. However, I believe they seriously underestimate the challenges of capturing CO2 from the air, instead of power plant smoke stacks. 

The desirability of doing so is clear; the atmosphere is everywhere, convenient to whatever use to which me might put the captured CO2, while power plants aren't always located near the oil fields, saline aquifers, or fuel markets that offer the best potential for storage or reuse. The problem is that, while 397 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the air is high enough to cause great concerns about global warming, it is still quite low in engineering terms.  Expressing it as a percentage it's 0.04%, or about 1/1000th the typical concentration of CO2 in flue gas.

Before writing this post I literally dusted off one of my old chemical engineering texts to look up the equations of mass transfer.  I was reminded that the flux, or flow, of molecules from one fluid into another--from air into the capture medium, for example--is proportional to the difference in their concentration in the two fluids.  What that means in practical terms is that extracting the same quantity of CO2 from the air as from flue gas will entail larger and more complex hardware, more energy, and probably a much higher cost per ton, barring a breakthrough that emulates green plants, which use chlorophyll, sunlight, water and nutrients to do this cheaply on a vast scale every second of the day during the growing season.

In any case, have a look at the article and give some thought to how CCS might, as the authors suggest, "transform the political debate" around mitigating climate change.

The Post-Kyoto World

Saturday's conclusion of the Cancun climate talks yielded modest agreements that allowed the meeting to be described in positive terms by its hosts and organizers, but at least on the major question of a globally-binding treaty to extend or replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol, it merely kicked the can down the road to the late-2011 session in Durban, South Africa. As low as the expectations going into Cancun were, keeping the UN climate process on life support looks like a good result, compared to last year's fiasco in Copenhagen. However, in light of the objections raised by Japan, Russia, Canada and others, it's difficult to see how the Durban meeting could succeed where Cancun and Copenhagen failed. It looks increasingly likely that the replacement for Kyoto might appear face-savingly similar, but will lack that document's cohesiveness and global authority.

As I read the portion of the "Cancun Agreements" dealing with the extension of the Kyoto Protocol beyond its previously-set 2008-2012 term, the delegates mainly agreed to keep talking and to try to come up with a framework in time to avoid a "gap between the first and second commitment periods." Considering that last year's session in Copenhagen was widely viewed before its start as the last, best chance to accomplish that goal based on the timeline set in Bali two years prior, the end of 2011 looks pretty late in the game to deliver on that. Moreover, while Cancun was able to get by on low expectations, Durban will be unable to repeat that trick and avoid the kind of set-up that helped doom the Copenhagen talks.

The chasm that remains to be bridged doesn't seem to have changed much: the developing countries still insist on binding emissions reduction targets from the developed countries, to which the UN process attributes the majority of emissions under the "principle of historical responsibility, their emissions debt and addressing the needs of developing countries", but won't commit to binding targets themselves. (I've discussed this notion of "emissions debt" previously.) But while the US has signed up for voluntary emissions reductions under the Copenhagen Accord, it won't agree to binding cuts unless the world's largest emitter, China, also does. And all China appears willing to agree to, based on its Copenhagen commitments, is the sort of productivity-based reductions that the rest of the developed world rejected when the US advanced this idea for managing our emissions in the first term of the Bush administration. Even if China succeeds in cutting its emissions per GDP by 40-45% while its economy continues on its present growth trend, its overall emissions would still increase in absolute terms. Japan and some other Kyoto signatories are understandably reluctant to sign up for deeper cuts themselves, unless the world's two biggest emitters commit to sharing their pain.

And this is where the timing of any substantive Kyoto extension hits the wall of US politics. If the administration wasn't able to pass cap and trade legislation in the last Congressional session, when its party had an effective majority of 60 seats in the US Senate in 2009 and 59 in 2010, the prospect of ratifying a climate treaty with a majority of just 53 next year--including one who campaigned vocally against cap and trade--is nearly non-existent. The administration is struggling just to get the new strategic arms treaty with Russia ratified in the Lame Duck session--a treaty with solid bi-partisan endorsements from the foreign policy leadership of past administrations. The likely reception for a new climate treaty would be much less favorable than that until at least 2013 and probably beyond, in light of the ratio of seats up for reelection in 2012.

Unless I'm missing something major, without the US and China on board for binding cuts Japan and others won't agree to deeper reductions in the next round of Kyoto. That doesn't mean that the Durban Climate Conference won't cobble together an eleventh-hour agreement that looks like an extension of Kyoto, in order to avoid an irreparable rupture between the developed and developing world parties to the talks. The subtext for that is already in place in the Cancun outcome. However, it seems highly unlikely that such a document would actually do what Kyoto was intended to do. As a result, the UN process seems to be consigned to focusing on the secondary areas that progressed in Cancun, relating to funding for adaptation and technology transfer, and emissions reductions from sectors like land-use changes and forestry. With the economies of the developed world looking as weak as they do, and with domestic expenditure cuts in the EU having generated noisy and sometimes violent protests, coming up with the funding for those efforts looks more than challenging enough for now.

Cancun Climate Talks: Irrelevant?

The mood going into this week's global climate conference in Cancun, Mexico is decidedly different than that for last year's session in Copenhagen, which had been intended to culminate the process begun two years earlier in Bali. It's not just that expectations for a comprehensive and binding global climate treaty have been dramatically lowered; much of the debate since Copenhagen has moved away from the notion that it's even possible to reduce emissions sufficiently to avert many of the adverse consequences of a warming and less stable climate. It's no coincidence that the cover story of this week's Economist is dedicated to the increased need for adaptation to climate change, while the lead op-ed in the energy pull-out section in today's Wall St. Journal highlights an agenda for making clean energy the cheapest kind--not by subsidizing it even more than we already are, but by driving innovation.

After describing the magnitude of the challenge involved in decarbonizing the global economy by enough, soon enough, to limit the increase in global average temperatures in this century to 2° C, The Economist concludes, "The fight to limit global warming to easily tolerated levels is thus over." That doesn't mean that agreements to bend the trajectory of emissions growth below the status quo trendline aren't worth pursuing, but it suggests that we need to devote much greater attention and resources to adapting to a world that will likely include more droughts, floods, famines, and human migration than we've had to deal with thus far, and for which both the drivers and consequences are being amplified by economic development and population growth. The Economist sees climate adaptation focused on three main areas: infrastructure, migration and food, and their analysis is worth reading.

Another factor I believe the magazine should have highlighted is the difficulty of undertaking any of these efforts at a time when the developed world is hobbled by weak economic growth and related deficit and debt problems that threaten to render even the current level of subsidies for renewable energy sources unsustainable. As the EU grapples with the debts of Greece and Ireland, with Portugal and Spain waiting in the wings, it's no accident that Spain has just cut its feed-in tariff for solar power, which had already been reduced from previously lavish levels. The elephant in the room in Cancun, as it was in Copenhagen, is that binding agreements requiring severe emissions reductions by and large transfer payments from the developed countries might have looked attainable when the economy was booming, but they have become much less feasible in the wake of the worst recession and financial crisis since the Great Depression.

That same fundamental challenge makes the innovation arguments raised by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellengerger of the Breakthrough Institute more urgent than they would be otherwise. Because today's renewable energy technologies remain more expensive without subsidies than coal, oil and natural gas--even when the consumption subsidies the latter receive are stripped away--the cost of replacing our existing, high-emitting energy sources with entirely green ones looks unaffordable in today's world. I would add that reliance on experience curve effects--building out a subsidized green energy economy and depending on volume to drive down its cost to the point of competitiveness--is unlikely close that gap, and where it can, there is no guarantee that the country providing the incentives will receive the benefits it is entitled to expect. To cite the most obvious current example, Germany has invested tens of billions of Euros subsidizing solar energy and has indeed created a globally competitive solar industry--mainly in developing Asia.

What makes Nordhaus and Shellenberger's suggestion seem much more practical than global climate treaties and mountains of green subsidies is that the money currently being spent on renewable energy deployment incentives, which constitute a small fraction of the total annual investment in energy infrastructure, would go much farther buying R&D, rather than hardware. The US investment tax credit paid to a single 100 MW wind farm could fund an entire university energy innovation laboratory and graduate degree program.

Of course none of these strategies should be regarded as entirely either/or propositions. Adaptation doesn't let us off the hook for trying to address the causes of climate change, nor does shifting more of government's limited resources into clean energy R&D mean we don't need any of the real-world learnings that only come from deploying technology and seeing how it works under uncontrolled conditions. There's also a parallel role for research into geoengineering to provide a backstop--a potential Hail Mary pass--should all of these other efforts fall short and climate change move beyond a range we can live with. If nothing else, the COP 16 meeting in Cancun might shed more light on the degree to which the UN body is the right umbrella to cover all this work.

Tomorrow at 1:00 PM EST I'll be presenting in a webinar entitled, "Natural Gas: Sustainability Friend or Foe". To sign up follow this link.

Solar Warming and Our Sulfur Sunshield

Two unrelated stories concerning the science of climate change caught my attention yesterday. The first was the announcement of a new report on solar variability, published in Nature, which appeared to upend established thinking about the impact of solar cycles on the earth's climate. The other was a discussion on Shell's climate blog of the potential impact of regulations affecting the sulfur content of marine fuel oil on an effect that has been partly mitigating climate change for decades. Both are interesting in their own right, while together providing a useful reminder that climate change is much more complex than the soundbites we typically hear from the media and advocacy groups, especially after we've had a run of unusually hot or cold weather.

As a less-than-fully reformed science nerd, I loved the simple elegance of the first sentence of the abstract of the Haigh, et al paper in Nature: "The thermal structure and composition of the atmosphere is determined fundamentally by the incoming solar irradiance." Paragraphs of exposition boiled down to 16 words that neatly frame the importance of the researchers' finding that for the last several years, and contrary to what we'd have expected from being in the low part of the solar cycle, featuring few or no sunspots for several years, the earth has been receiving more energy from the sun where it really counts--in the lower part of the atmosphere, or troposphere. If their interpretation of the satellite data is correct, then it pretty well torpedoes the notion from two years ago that a weak sun was about to flip global warming into global cooling. Of course it would also defuse some of the determined attempts to attribute this year's record temperatures entirely to humanity's greenhouse gas emissions.

While this finding isn't expected to alter the decade-to-decade view of climate change, it certainly suggests that we should be paying attention to a lot more than just CO2 and its sibling GHGs over shorter intervals, and in that respect it's a nice lead-in to the discussion of atmospheric cooling due to sulfur emissions from ships. That also applies to its implication that we still have a lot more to learn about the earth's atmosphere--where climate lives--and its dynamic interaction with the solar system.

In his blog on Shell's corporate website, Shell climate advisor David Hone shared his observations from a recent meeting exploring the impact of sulfur emissions on climate change. This apparently led to discussions of sulfur-based strategies for geoengineering the climate, but even without going that far it seems clear that this issue deserves a lot more attention that it has received. I was aware that such emissions tend to offset at least part of our greenhouse gas emissions, and that previous reductions in sulfur for onshore fuels--necessary for local air quality and modern vehicle anti-pollution equipment--might have given an unintended boost to warming. However, I think this is the first time I've seen the estimated climate forcing associated with marine fuels of -0.6 W/m2, which as Mr. Hone notes is not small relative to the total greenhouse gas forcing of around 2 W/m2. This situation surely justifies a serious re-think of the International Maritime Organization's decision to slash the sulfur content of all marine fuel burned globally, particularly since it is hardly the only alternative available to address the negative effects of these emissions on most human populations. It's also a much more expensive option for shippers--and thus anyone who benefits from international trade--than confining the low-sulfur rules to coastal waters. According to the analysis cited by Mr. Hone, the latter scenario would preserve nearly 80% of our sulfur sunshade, while the global low-sulfur rule would more than halve it.

When I was involved in marine fuel supply and distribution on the West Coast early in my career, it was already clear that the emissions from burning high-sulfur bunker fuel were a major source of pollution in port cities and coastal areas, and that the importance of addressing them would grow once most onshore emission sources, from power plants, trains and other mobile sources had been dealt with. Some of the sulfur was eliminated as large marine diesel engines replaced the old steam turbines, and much of the rest was addressed with restrictions on the quality of fuel that could be burned in port and along the coast. For now, vessel owners can comply with these rules by carrying two different fuels: enough of the more expensive low-sulfur fuel for use in US and other regulated coastal waters, and the rest consisting of much cheaper high-sulfur fuel for use on the high seas. That approach, which would no longer be an option after 2020 under the IMO rules, cleans up the air where it matters most but still puts enough SO2 into the atmosphere to scatter some of the incoming solar energy and offset part of the warming from CO2.

Using one form of pollution to offset another is hardly a perfect solution, but just as many scientists and environmentalists urge caution about introducing new geoengineering measures before we understand their consequences well enough, we should think long and hard about tampering with this long-standing, if inadvertent geoengineering process until we have something better in mind to replace it, or until we no longer need it.

How Much Warmer?

If the present global temperature trend continues for the remainder of the year, we're bound to hear a growing chorus of reports about 2010 being the warmest year since records have been kept. The first six months of 2010 already appear to have been the warmest first half on record. Or was it? When you examine the numerical result from the National Climatic Data Center upon which this determination rests, it turns out that January-June of this year apparently topped the previous six-month record set in 1998 by just 0.03°F. Not only is that difference quite small, but there's a good chance it doesn't exist at all and is merely the result of average temperature data being tallied to more decimal places than the accuracy of the instruments recording them warrants. So when someone tells you this is the warmest year ever, you should at least ask for more detail on that assertion.

Before going any further let me clarify that this point doesn't affect the validity of climate change. When I look at the accumulating evidence, including the climate data that's publicly available, I see a decade-by-decade warming trend since the turn of the previous century, with a few time-outs. It's open to debate whether that trend is currently in abeyance; neither the incidence of a couple of relatively-cooler years recently--giving rise to claims of global cooling that at a minimum must be regarded as highly premature--nor a single hotter year this year necessarily alters that, at this point. However, there are good reasons why media-hyped claims about any one year being warmer or colder than another are pretty much irrelevant to the larger discussion concerning climate change. And in at least the current instance they likely rest on a foundation that simply can't bear their weight.

The global annual temperatures we see reported are really averages of the averages of numerous temperature readings from thousands of weather stations around the world. Such averaged data can only be as accurate as the least-accurate individual readings on which they are based. This reflects a principle called "significant figures" or "significant digits" that is drummed into students of college chemistry and physics. (If you're interested in the details, the USGS has a good overview here.) So if you take three temperatures, say 59.1°F, 56.3° and 58.7°, their average is not 58.03333° (as my calculator tells me), or even 58.03°, in the manner that most of the climate data centers report such figures, but simply 58.0°. Furthermore, if you take the difference of two such averages, that difference can't create greater accuracy than the individual readings. For example, if I subtract from the above figure the global average temperature of 57.2°F for the period 1951-1980 used by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the result is not 0.83333° or 0.83°, but 0.8°.

Applying this common-sense principle becomes even more important when you take into account the actual accuracy and precision (repeatability) of the underlying measurements. A quick Google search turned up a 2004 paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology on this subject. After analyzing several sources of measurement error in commonly-used air temperature sensors, the authors found that these devices were accurate to no more than +/-0.2°C over a typical range of temperatures, and less accurate beyond that. So not only are the temperature readings that go into the averages upon which comparisons of global annual temperatures are based only good to one decimal place, but they may not be quite that good. Even if some of this error averages out over the large number of observations recorded (assuming it is random error), we still shouldn't read more into these data than is there, and the second of the two digits in the "temperature anomalies" (differences vs. an agreed average) that are reported should probably only be used to ensure that rounding is done consistently.

What does all this mean in practice? Well, referring to the GISS data it appears the global average temperatures for 1998, 2002, 2005, 2007 and 2009 were all essentially indistinguishable from each other at 14.6°C or 58.3°F. 2010 might be on track to beat that by a full 0.1°C, though it could still easily end up in a tie with these other years. Whether this year sets a new record or not is of little consequence to the climate change discussion. Although not likely to compete with such a finding for headlines, it's much more relevant, important and accurate that the average of temperatures in the 2000s was apparently 0.2°C warmer than the average of the 1990s, which were already 0.1°C warmer than the 1980s, and so on.

Shaken Consensus?

Since the publication of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) last November, we've been inundated with news reports and opinion pieces questioning the scientific consensus behind climate change. An editorial in today's Wall St. Journal on "The Continuing Climate Meltdown" is just the latest example of this trend, following a weekend that saw the release of a remarkable BBC interview with the CRU's former director. The fact that all this coincides with a northern hemisphere winter that has deposited record snowfalls on regions that don't normally see much of the white stuff serves to reinforce the message that something is amiss with global warming theory. It has also had me wondering if I moved far enough south, as I cope with "ice dams", cabin fever, and other consequences of a pair of back-to-back blizzards in the D.C. area. While I agree that the recent revelations have given rise to an understandable wave of doubts regarding climate change, this may say more about the way that extreme climate predictions have been played up in the last several years than it does about actual climate change.

Even the most ardent adherents of the view that climate change is real, man-made to a significant extent, and extremely challenging for humanity must agree that the science supporting this perspective has had a rough couple of months--largely deserved. Whatever the "Climategate" emails said about the underlying analytical rigor of the dominant scientific interpretation of global warming, they revealed a worrying degree of defensive groupthink and gatekeeping among leading climate researchers. I'm pleased to see that an independent group has been set up to examine the practices at East Anglia-CRU, though the inquiry has already experienced controversies of its own.

Meanwhile the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), of Nobel Peace Prize fame, is under fire for incorporating unwarranted claims in its reports, including a shockingly sloppy assertion about the rate at which glaciers are disappearing. This has exposed a process that in some instances gave magazine articles and unpublished papers the same credence as peer-reviewed scientific papers in recognized journals. For all the vitriol I see directed against "climate skeptics", the climate change community should accept that these are mainly self-inflicted wounds, and that much of the current public doubt about climate change stems from the unraveling of exaggerated predictions that were expounded without a clear, accompanying explanation of the associated caveats and uncertainties, possibly to promote quicker action by governments.

In contrast, the BBC's interview with Dr. Jones is full of nuances and caveats--though hardly outright retractions, as some have characterized his remarks. I was particularly interested in his comments on the Medieval Warm Period. Although he appears not to have "told the BBC that the world may well have been warmer during medieval times than it is now," he did seem to suggest that we simply don't have sufficient data to determine whether the warming that led to the settlement of Greenland by the Vikings and the cultivation of wine grapes in England was confined to the northern hemisphere or global in extent. Instead of prompting an assumption it wasn't global, this gap in our knowledge ought to galvanize the urgent gathering and correlation of paleoclimate data--samples of the kinds of proxies used to assess temperatures before instruments to measure them (or people to read the instruments) existed. That's because this isn't a quibble over some esoteric bit of history, but a crucial gauge of just how unprecedented the warming of the past several decades has been.

Then there's the temperature data itself. Although Dr. Jones concurred that global warming since 1995 has just missed being statistically significant, the data from the CRU and similar data from NASA do show that on average the last decade was warmer than the 1990s, which were in turn warmer than the 1980s. Despite all the talk of global cooling, the last two years still easily make the top 10 list for warmest years of the last century, and global temperatures currently average about 0.8 °F warmer than in the 1970s. But that doesn't mean that there aren't problems here, as well. Dr. Jones referred the BBC to a map of the weather stations providing the global temperature data compiled by the UK's Met Office (the national weather service) and processed by the CRU. It reveals such measurements to be very dense in the developed countries of the temperate zones and quite thin on the ground--or sea--in the tropics and the high latitudes that account for much of the earth's surface. And even the historical temperature data for the US are still subject to significant revisions, as I noticed yesterday when I rechecked the comparison between 1998 and 1934 than I wrote about several years ago.

So where does this leave us? From my perspective it requires us to think about the definition of a successful scientific theory as one that provides the best explanation for the evidence we see--even if that evidence is incomplete, as seems to be the case here. The fact that some scientists seem to have behaved badly or that others--mostly non-scientists--have promoted alarming-but-uncertain predictions as proven and now have egg on their faces doesn't alter the fact that "anthropogenic global warming" (AGW) based on greenhouse gas emissions still seems to explain more of what we observe going on than any other theory at this point. Hypotheses such as the one attributing warming to the influence of cosmic rays on cloud formation must go through a great deal more vetting before supplanting AGW.

While considerable progress has been made in the last decade solidifying the evidence supporting the AGW theory, significant uncertainty still remains about the future consequences it suggests, particularly as relates to regional impacts and changes in precipitation. A lot more also needs to be done to clarify the relationship between proxy data and instrumental temperature data, and to ensure that the latter are consistent and truly representative. However, I don't see these deficiencies as justifying complete policy paralysis, particularly when it comes to those actions that can be accomplished relatively cheaply, such as improved energy efficiency, or that offer substantial benefits for other concerns such as energy security, including expanding nuclear power, low-cost renewable energy, and R&D to bring down the cost of other renewables. As for whether the time is right to pursue more comprehensive measures, there's a legitimate debate to be had, but it shouldn't start from the false assumption that anthropogenic global warming has been disproved.

Climategate: Mountain or Molehill?

While the Copenhagen delegates, which now include many heads of state, wrangle about transparency and the size and funding of the pot of money that will be required to assist the developing world in mitigating its emissions and adapting to further climate change, another debate over transparency is brewing. Its range of potential outcomes is wide. At one end it entails a collision between science and the law--two less compatible spheres would be hard to imagine--over the issues raised by the emails and data leaked from the University of East Anglia. At the other extreme concerns about "Climategate" will gradually fade from our consciousness in the manner of Tiger Woods's fall from grace, but perhaps not without raising some interesting questions along the way.

To appreciate how matters might unfold, check out an op-ed in today's Wall St. Journal from Dr. Patrick J. Michaels, a climate scientist on the receiving end of some of those barbed emails revealed by the leak. In addition to calling into question the neutrality of the peer review process that underpins the science upon which the Copenhagen talks and any agreement that comes out of them are based, he provides a hint at the form that future legal challenges to the enforcement of such an agreement, or of rules arising from the EPA's recent endangerment finding, might take. These allegations are serious, particularly when you consider that Dr. Philip D. Jones, until this month the head of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, was also one of two Coordinating Lead Authors of Chapter 3 of the Fourth Assessment Review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC.) That chapter (very large file) deals with actual observations of "surface and atmospheric climate change", including the temperature data. That makes him a key gatekeeper of the consensus.

I only ran across that connection, because I've been following a side debate concerning how actual temperature measurements at thousands of locations around the world over the last century have been tabulated. The barely civil online point-counterpoint between an anonymous blogger at The Economist and the proprietor of a well-known climate skeptic website gives a flavor for this complex topic. Along the way I was surprised to learn how frequently the actual temperature readings are adjusted, interpolated, and in some cases discarded. This involves many assumptions that I'm not qualified to question, though I am left with the conclusion that recent temperature trends fall into much the same category as the pre-measurement historical temperatures reconstructed from proxies such as tree rings. In other words, the familiar temperature trend graphs reflect mainly analysis, not primary data. That puts us all in the position of having to trust that this analysis was done properly and neutrally, and unfortunately that is precisely the trust that the leaked emails have undermined.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Stewart Brand, an iconic figure and an acquaintance from my former work with Global Business Network when I was at Texaco, proposed a useful taxonomy for our reactions to climate change. He suggested four categories into which those with an opinion on the subject fall: Denialists, Skeptics, Warners, and Calamatists. The views of those in the first and last categories aren't likely to alter much, no matter what science and further evidence reveal about the climate. What they see reinforces pre-existing mindsets. The Skeptics and the Warners, on the other hand, are part of a legitimate scientific debate and are both amenable to adapting their views to new evidence.

I consider myself mainly a Warner in Stewart's terms, having consistently expounded the risks of climate change both in this blog and elsewhere, but I am still willing to give both sides of the argument a fair hearing. I want to see Climategate addressed openly and objectively. If the science turns out to be flawed because of bias and improper manipulation, we need to know that and correct the flaws. If the actual science is unaffected, but the means by which it has been conducted requires reform, then we need to address that as well, because if we don't the public's confidence in its findings won't be high enough to act on them. And I'd rather see this hashed out in an open scientific forum held by a body such as the AAAS and involving many disciplines outside climate science as a true jury of peers, than to see it resolved by litigation, which is where this all could be headed if scientists respond by shrugging it off or circling their wagons.

Do Leaked Emails Undermine the Scientific Consensus?

For the last couple of days I've been ruminating about what to say concerning the emails and other data apparently leaked by hackers who penetrated the computer systems at the University of East Anglia's Hadley Centre Climate Research Unit, one of the major global sources of climate change data and analysis. It's clearly premature to attempt to draw sweeping conclusions about the implications for climate science and policy from the few tidbits that have been leaked to the press or published on the websites of leading climate skeptics, some of whom have already characterized the story as "Climategate." At the same time, it strikes me as naive--and perhaps ultimately counterproductive--of those in the "true believer" community who imagine that the publication of such interactions would not naturally lead to serious questions about the scientific basis of some very expensive proposed policy actions to address global warming.

Start with the official statement from the University of East Anglia. While I'm naturally sympathetic to their concerns about the breach itself and the resulting release of sensitive personal information of university employees, it is also worth recalling that the institution in question is funded by UK taxpayers and is not exactly covered by the Official Secrets Act. If laws have been broken, the perpetrators should be pursued and prosecuted. However, if university officials believe they can confine their response to the theft of data and easily dismiss the content of the material that was revealed, they are getting poor advice. I'm sure that the items that have been published so far have indeed been taken out of context, as they contend, but is that not the standard claim by nearly everyone who has suffered a similarly embarrassing exposure in the last couple of decades? The response of the University of East Anglia to date is simply inadequate in the modern era of information, and if I were in their shoes I'd at least announce a full and immediate academic inquiry into whether the emails have unearthed practices that were contrary to university policies and the normal standards of data integrity and peer review. They'd be much better off tackling this proactively than waiting for it to be forced upon them, or taken out of their hands as a result of a Question asked in Parliament--however unlikely that might be in the current political climate.

Next, consider email as a medium of discussion. In my career I have seen many emails that their senders would have subsequently preferred to see deleted from all systems, and I have probably written one or two myself. But that's not the reality of a world in which anything you write on a networked system can be divulged later as part of the discovery phase of a lawsuit or in a government investigation. The best advice I've heard on the subject is the lesson some of the authors of the Hadley emails have just learned the hard way: "Don't write anything you'd be embarrassed to see printed on the front page of the New York (or in this case the London) Times."

That doesn't mean I'm naive about how people--even scientists--interact with each other. Anyone who has spent five minutes peering behind the veil of academic politics wouldn't be terribly surprised at some of the caustic, small-minded, and downright vindictive comments that pepper the Hadley emails that have turned up around the Internet. Nevertheless, most of us aren't involved in work that is integral to a global effort to understand and avert the worst outcomes of something on the scale of climate change. These folks are expected to hold themselves to a higher standard, and if they don't, it jeopardizes not just their own reputations but the public's perception of the findings of the larger body of climate science. When I read an email in which one noted climate researcher asks another not to refer to a particular subject in his reply, but just say yes or no, or another indicating the author would delete some data points from a graph showing a recent change in the trend, I'm reminded of some precautionary advice I received at the very beginning of my oil trading career: "Avoid even the appearance of evil."

The basic issue here that many of those responding from the climate change community seem unable or unwilling to grasp is that their real problem is not how particular individuals or groups might exploit this information, but how the information itself could undermine the faith of the public in the integrity of climate science. I use the word faith deliberately, because for most of us it boils down to that. The number of people actually equipped to read the scientific papers in question and ascertain whether the manipulation of charts and data implicated in some of the leaked emails is serious or not is vanishingly small, compared to the much larger number of us who must simply take it on faith that the scientists studying the climate and reporting on alarming changes in it are behaving in a fair, transparent, and unself-interested way, to the greatest extent humanly possible. It would be hard for most of us to read the emails in question objectively and not have that faith shaken, at least a bit.

Now, it's possible this entire episode could blow over in a news cycle or two and have no impact on the impending negotiations in Copenhagen or on the Congressional debate on climate legislation. I wouldn't bet on that, because what little has come out so far fits neatly into the preexisting view by some of climate science as a conspiracy, or at least a process that has been politicized by the funding and bureaucratic power that large sums devoted to climate research have bestowed. If the climate science community wants to put this episode behind it without derailing the public's trust in the scientific consensus on global warming, then the researchers and institutions that are leading this effort should be calling loudly for a full airing of Hadley's linen, and an assessment of the center's practices by an unbiased panel, preferably one well-staffed with scientists from other disciplines. Any perception of a cover-up will only reinforce suspicions that conduct at Hadley wasn't what it should have been, and that at least one pillar of the climate change argument looks shakier than it did just a week ago.

Cooler Is Relative

Well, it's official; the average global temperature for 2008 was 14.44° C (57.99° F.) That's 0.13° C (0.23° F) cooler than 2007's 14.57° (58.23° F.) In fact, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), 2008 was the coolest year since 2000. However, it was also the 9th warmest year since at least 1880, and warmer than any year on record prior to the mid-1990s. The average temperature for the current decade is running 0.2° C warmer than the decade of the 1990s, and 0.3° C warmer than the 1980s. Being as objective as possible, I have a hard time interpreting last year's slight dip as providing much support for the notions of "global cooling" that I began noticing on the Internet a year ago. That's a pity, considering last week's sobering report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on the likely duration of the effects of global warming on the climate, even after we eventually get greenhouse gas emissions under control.

As I noted in my posting on the subject last February, the global cooling hypothesis rests not just on the observed slight decline of average temperatures since the peak year of 2005--including a sharp monthly drop last January, compared to January 2007--but also on concerns about tardy sunspots and the recent decline in solar output. NASA's graph of "solar irradiance", the energy in sunlight reaching the earth's orbit, confirms that the sun's activity is at a periodic low point within the approximately 11-year sunspot cycle. It also indicates that this cyclical low is somewhat lower than recent lows, and that it seems a bit overdue for a cyclical uptick. (To put this in perspective, we are currently receiving about 0.02% less solar energy than average.) However, unless the scientists at a recent conference on solar activity were wrong in concluding that were are not headed into a sustained solar minimum of the kind associated with the Little Ice Age, then the implications of this graph and of GISS's commentary on solar irradiance look ominous in the other direction: We could be in for some sharply warmer temperatures in the next decade, a few years after sunspot cycle #24 reaches its peak, when the "non-negligible effect on global temperature" of variability in solar irradiance would reinforce, rather than partially canceling out the effects of greenhouse warming and the Southern Oscillation (El Nino/La Nina.) As a result, my money is still on warming, not cooling.

That makes the NOAA findings worrisome, even if one doesn't expect to be around to see whether their assessment that the adverse consequences of global warming could persist for as long as 1,000 years after our emissions have completely ceased proves correct. On a more personally-relevant timescale, however, it suggests that we shouldn't expect the climate to return smoothly to the previous "normal" after we stop nudging it, whenever that might be. That kind of systemic irreversibility is distinct from the idea that plant and animal species that become extinct along the way won't be retrievable; it speaks to the basic hospitableness of the earth to the levels of human population we're asking it to carry. (If you think that sounds extreme, you should read James Lovelock's recent thoughts on the subject.)

If the aim of policy makers is to create a sufficiently robust public consensus to support a cap on carbon emissions and a big investment in low-carbon energy over the span of time necessary for them to have the desired results, then their explanation of the problem must encompass the variability inherent in the interaction between greenhouse gas emissions and the complex cycles and systems that governed the climate long before the first factory began burning coal, or the first Model T was built. "Global warming" implies a steadier process than we are likely to experience. Some years will be cooler than others, as we've just seen, but the decade-by-decade trend still points higher. Our growing understanding of the consequences of that ought to make this harder to shrug off, even if we assign it a probability lower than 100%. I don't know if we'll end up burying biomass-derived charcoal as Mr. Lovelock suggests, in order to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, but the longer we delay action, the more dramatic the options we may be forced to consider.

Unlimited Clean Fossil Fuel?

If I told you that there was a potentially limitless source of fossil fuel, you would naturally want to know what the catch was. In the case of methane hydrates, a form of natural gas that has been bound up in ice crystals in the Arctic and deep ocean beds, that catch has been so large that I seem never even to have mentioned the subject in nearly five years of blogging. Hydrates are in the news this week in a very significant way, however, though the quantity in question is still quite small, compared to their ultimate potential. The US Geological Survey released a report estimating that 85 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of technically recoverable gas hydrates are accessible on the Alaskan North Slope. If produced over 20 years and combined with the conventional gas supply from the North Slope, which has been waiting for a pipeline south for many years, this deposit could supply up to a third of total US natural gas consumption. But that barely scratches the surface of the overall potential of gas hydrates.

The reason this announcement is so significant lies in the words "technically recoverable." Geologists have known about gas hydrates for a long time, and estimates of global hydrate deposits have been refined to a range of between 100,000 and a million TCF, with the best estimate of US hydrate deposits currently at 200,000 TCF. To put that in perspective, one TCF of natural gas represents about 1% of US annual total energy consumption and contains the same energy as 180 million barrels of oil or 10 billion gallons of ethanol. In other words, that 200,000 TCF estimate is the equivalent of a 2,000-year energy supply for the US, at current consumption levels, of a fuel with half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal. If we could learn enough from tapping the identified deposit on the North Slope, we might be able to exploit the much larger, less accessible deposits elsewhere--and it should tell you something that the North Slope of Alaska looks easy in this regard.

A natural gas source of that magnitude would align nicely with an energy strategy such as the Pickens Plan, employing natural gas for transportation fuel and generating electricity from wind and other renewables. It is one possible path towards much greater energy self-reliance and much lower emissions. For that matter, hydrates and other unconventional gas could ultimately provide enough fuel to displace all coal from power generation, until it can be replaced by enhanced geothermal systems, nuclear fusion, space solar power, or some other reliable and essentially limitless source of emissions-free electric power.

To put this in its proper perspective, if it were easy, we'd already be doing it. Nor are hydrates free of risks, the biggest of which could make our climate problems much worse, very quickly. That's because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, 21 times more than CO2, and methane hydrates are only stable under certain conditions of temperature and pressure. A sudden release of a large quantity of methane from hydrates could accelerate the greenhouse effect, as may have happened in the geological past. But while any plan to mine hydrates must include rigorous safeguards against such an outcome, that risk must also be weighed against the risk that gas hydrates will naturally begin to vent their methane, if we remain on the current global emissions trend line and polar and ocean temperatures continue to increase.

There are no energy panaceas, and methane hydrates don't constitute one, either, because of their technical challenges and possible drawbacks. However, as a long-term hydrocarbon supply for energy and petrochemicals, they offer significant advantages over many forms of unconventional oil, and they could be extremely useful in a post-Peak Oil, low-emissions energy economy, as conventional oil & gas supplies deplete. I'm encouraged that the USGS sees the North Slope hydrate deposit as falling within our current technical capabilities, potentially unlocking the equivalent of 15 billion barrels of oil or roughly 900 billion gallons of ethanol.

Allergic to Climate Change

An item on the ABC World News the other night linking allergies and climate change caught my attention. It referred to a paper in the current issue of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology describing a connection between climate change and increased levels of pollen production, and thus higher expected incidences of asthma and other allergic maladies. Although the focus of the article was mainly on the future consequences of continued global warming and other environmental impacts, it also looked at changes that are already evident today. That's the angle ABC picked up on, tying the study's findings to a particularly bad allergy season that millions of Americans are experiencing. The key message: if you suffer from pollen allergies, climate change will very likely make them worse--perhaps a lot worse.

Compared with more dramatic outcomes such as droughts, heat waves, rising sea levels, and increased numbers of highly-destructive hurricanes, a bit of hay fever doesn't sound so bad. Having been plagued by allergies for my entire life, I'm not sure I'd agree with that assessment. For many of the one in five Americans who suffer seasonal allergies, it's an important quality of life issue, and for the 20 million afflicted with asthma, this is potentially life-threatening. It's also an anticipated consequence of climate change that could affect people who live far from any coastline or hurricane-affected areas and might otherwise only notice that it's getting a bit warmer. And although hay fever remedies have improved, the good ones are not cheap and still have side effects, while the permanent cure, immunotherapy, requires a significant commitment of time and can trigger some unpleasant allergic reactions along the way.

The mechanisms underlying the study's finding of increased seasonal allergies are pretty simple. Higher atmospheric CO2 levels cause vegetation to grow faster and larger--though apparently not to the degree previously thought. Unfortunately, that also seems to apply to plants like ragweed, resulting in bigger weeds emitting more pollen. Now throw in warming average temperatures, bringing earlier spring-like conditions and longer growing seasons. Whatever that combination might do for crop productivity, we should also expect to apply to less desirable plants and their pollen counts.

While that prospect merits concern, it's also important to understand the limitations of this study. A glance at its contents reveals that it was not a clinical report on allergy patients over time, but rather a literature search on the mechanisms of climate change, plant biology, and allergic and asthmatic responses to various allergens. It draws many of its assumptions about the expected course of climate change from the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of Nobel Peace Prize-sharing fame. That won't satisfy all critics, but we ought to be relieved that the four MDs who authored the paper didn't attempt to reinvent climate theory for themselves.

I'm well aware from the comments I receive that my readers are not uniformly worried about climate change. Some remain skeptical of the evidence for human responsibility, and a few doubt we are even warming in any discernible way, or think the globe might now be cooling. But whether you buy the whole enchilada, or only part of it, it's worth considering that climate change is beginning to alter our world in ways large and small, predictable and surprising, and that even if it doesn't drown all our coastal cities and dry up our crops, it could still make the earth into a much less hospitable place than the environment that enabled our ancestors to move beyond hunting & gathering, build cities and civilizations, and expand our population a thousandfold. More severe allergies aren't the worst alteration we can imagine, but this looks like yet another factor to which we and our descendants must adapt, if we don't get our emissions under control.

Half Full

Senator McCain's remarks on climate change yesterday are drawing predictable responses from both sides of the issue. While environmentalists may see it as a collection of half-measures, climate skeptics, including the editors of the Wall Street Journal, regard it as a sellout to those same environmentalists. I'll leave it to others to analyze the Senator's remarks line by line, but I think it's worth a couple of observations that might otherwise be screened out by the partisan filters and instinctive discounting to which any presidential campaign speech is subjected. In particular, the Senator's proposals deserve to be scrutinized for how they align with the key criteria of a risk-based, cost-minimizing approach to addressing climate change. This should not, however, be construed as a political endorsement.

Start with some basic principles. If you accept that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the key driver of long-term climate change--and this is the basic conclusion of the vast body of peer-reviewed science analyzed and summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--then any plan to address this problem must tackle those emissions head-on. With atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases well above pre-industrial levels and continuing to climb, it is no longer adequate to call for an eventual freeze in emissions. We must begin to roll them back and make deep cuts as soon as possible and practical. However, arguing at this point over whether US emissions in 2050 should be 60%, 70% or 80% below today's is a red herring. Any of these figures should be viewed as a placeholder, until we've actually begun and can see how the necessary technology is developing and being taken up. How well could we have determined our 2008 emissions in 1966?

The debate about the economic consequences of reducing emissions has barely begun, and it is already polarized. At one extreme are those who see these cuts as potentially crippling--a dead loss to the economy--particularly if the large developing countries do not follow the lead of the EU and US in this regard. Others suggest that cutting emissions will produce a veritable cornucopia of industry-seeding and job-creation, yielding high returns on our investment. While I hope the latter view proves correct, we can't bet the country on it. That means making sure that our approach to emissions puts a high priority on eliciting the most cost-effective reductions, and by definition those will come from outside the industrial sector, excluding energy-efficiency gains that will largely be self-financing. So we need to cast a wide net that includes reductions from agriculture and consumers, not just big companies. The cheaper the reductions, the more of them we can afford, and the sooner we will meet our targets. In my view, economy-wide cap and trade is the best way to make the necessary cuts at the lowest cost.

The third key aspect of a successful climate policy is that it must integrate internationally. The US is a big emitter, and we need to regain the leadership position we held on this issue when the original UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. That means negotiating in good faith on the successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, and opening our doors to emissions offsets from other countries, provided they are truly additional and not incidental or illusory. But it also means ensuring that US businesses are not placed at a competitive disadvantage to companies in countries not subject to these requirements. We need to reduce emissions, not merely shift them offshore.

Senator McCain's speech matches up well on these three principles, as do the climate proposals of his Democratic opponents. They have another six months in which to debate the particulars and win over the American people on this critical issue. However, while his opponents are in the mainstream of their party on this issue, Senator McCain deserves some acknowledgement for going against the grain within his, dating back at least to his co-sponsorship in 2003 of a cap and trade bill with Senator Lieberman. This stance looks even riskier today, when the skeptics have gone beyond arguing against global warming to promote the notion of global cooling. His supporters must now reconcile that political courage with the apparent contradiction of his support for a summer gas-tax holiday that undermines the notion of taxing energy more, not less, to bring down emissions.

As I've noted previously, it is remarkable that out of two original fields of candidates that included such a broad spectrum of views on global warming, the three finalists--and thus the two parties' ultimate nominees--are not just expressing concern in the abstract, but have issued calls for concrete action to deal with climate change. This is a necessary precondition for a meaningful national debate on a set of measures that would permanently alter our economy, with implications for the entire world.