Is India's 100 GW solar road map feasible?

Ever since the new government was sworn in, India has been making all the right noises about its ambitions for solar power. Both Prime Minister Modi, and the Minister for New and Renewable Energy, Mr. Goyal, seem determined to achieve an ambitious target of 100 GW by 2020.

After the headline items have been absorbed and expectations have risen, it is now time for delivery. They have their work cut out for them. It cannot be a straightforward process as the goal is so ambitious, the market environment is complex and the technologies changing. However, it needs to be much more thought through than it is at present

Last week, in a run-up to the RE Invest India conference to be held in Delhi in February, a tweet from the official RE-Invest 2015 handle for the first time published a year-by-year road map on how the government intends to ramp up solar capacity.

This plan shows a very quick initial ramp up from the current 1 GW per year market size. In the upcoming financial year, the government wants to install 7 GW, of which 3 GW is to be of rooftop solar. That is a 100-fold increase from the current total rooftop capacity. In the year after that, India is to be a 18 GW solar market. No country has ever added 18 GW of solar in a year.

According to the BRIDGE TO INDIA analysis, an un-incentivized rooftop solar market would add 1.5 GW by 2018. In the road map, the government is planning to add around 20 GW by the same time. Achieving this will need a substantial policy push. As of now, we have little idea about what that might be. The only substantial announcement so far has been a plan to provide an interest rate subsidy by using around EUR 1 bn of funds from the German KfW. However, even this has not yet been formalised and it would take at least a year to become operational. The government has also been tinkering with the subsidy mechanism (refer) but that too doesn't seem to be adding up to any larger plan.

The most active market segment at present is utility scale capacity addition through the solar parks model. Yet this, too, is not without roadblocks. There is still some confusion on what parks are ready for the first 3,000 MW of allocations to be auctioned by March 2015. The guidelines for allocations have been changed multiple times in the past weeks, as the situation changed on the ground due to land, infrastructure and funding challenges (refer). International developmental banks have been asked to finance these parks, but there is still not enough clarity on the business models and on how this could work from a lender’s (and investor’s) perspective. Under the current conditions, many investors might just decide to give this opportunity a pass.

BRIDGE TO INDIA continues to believe that India can achieve its ambitious solar targets, but it will need to rapidly step up its policy planning and implementation. What India actually wants to do, is to significantly shift its future energy mix towards renewables. That is strategically sound, but definitely not business as usual. It requires an expanded and improved institutional infrastructure to support a complex, new policy process: an excellently staffed "Central New Energy Command". That should be the starting point.

Even with this in place, a build-up as rapid as anticipated will be a stretch. It just takes time to fine-tune the details of a successful policy. Long delays have plagued Indian policy making in solar and other areas in the past. Given the strong economic fundamentals behind solar market growth in India, the goal could more easily be reached with a slower initial ramp up and larger additions towards 2020.

In the current policy environment, and given the time pressures created by this road map, we see the danger of a knee-jerk reaction: if the market is not quick enough to react, then the government will simply push large projects through directly, using a select group of public and private companies, whose decision-making calculus includes factors not related to the solar opportunity at hand. This will undermine competition and slow down the fall of solar costs. It might lead to a faster capacity addition in the short term, but carries the risk of the market stalling. For solar to be the big success in India that it can, it needs a wide spectrum of innovative players (including start-ups and international companies), a predictable policy framework and a large range of financing options. More

 

 

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That Was Easy: In Just 60 Years, Neoliberal Capitalism Has Nearly Broken Planet Earth

A pair of new studies show how various forms of human activity, driven by a flawed economic system and vast consumption, is laying waste to Earth's natural systems

The conclusion that the world's dominant economic model—a globalized form of neoliberal capitalism, largely based on international trade and fueled by extracting and consuming natural resources—is the driving force behind planetary destruction will not come as a shock, but the model's detailed description of how this has worked since the middle of the 20th century makes a more substantial case than many previous attempts. (Photo: NASA)

Humanity's rapacious growth and accelerated energy needs over the last generation—particularly fed by an economic system that demands increasing levels of consumption and inputs of natural resources—are fast driving planetary systems towards their breaking point, according to a new pair of related studies.

"It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In a single lifetime humanity has become a geological force at the planetary-scale." —Prof. Will Steffen

Prepared by researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the first study looks specifically at how "four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed as a result of human activity." Published in the journal Nature on Thursday, the 18 researchers involved with compiling evidence for the report—titled 'Planetary Boundaries 2.0'—found that when it comes to climate change, species extinction and biodiversity loss, deforestation and other land-system changes, and altered biogeochemical cycles (such as changes to how key organic compounds like phosphorus and nitrogen are operating in the environment), the degradation that has already take place is driving the Earth System, as a whole, into a new state of imbalance.

"Transgressing a boundary increases the risk that human activities could inadvertently drive the Earth System into a much less hospitable state, damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of human well-being in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries," said Professor Will Steffen, a researcher at the Centre and the Australian National University, Canberra, who was lead author for both studies.

In addition to the four boundaries that have already been crossed, the study looked five other ways in which the planetary systems are under assault by human activity. They include: stratospheric ozone depletion; ocean acidification; freshwater use; atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms); and the introduction of novel entities into ecosystems (e.g. organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).

"I don't think we've broken the planet but we are creating a much more difficult world," Sarah Cornell, another report author, told Reuters.

In this interview with Wired last year, Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, described the idea about planetary boundaries in details:

Related to the findings of the first study, the second report examines what it calls the "Great Acceleration" and is an assessment of the speed and influence that specific factors have had in damaging the planetary systems described in Planetary Boundaries 2.0. Using a series of indicators, the study compares the relationship, over time, between 12 'socio-economic factors'—including economic growth (GDP); population; foreign direct investment; energy consumption; and water use—on one side with 12 'Earth system trends'—like the carbon cycle; the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity—on the other.

Using what it calls a "planetary dashboard," the research charts the spread and speed of human activity from the start of the industrial revolution in 1750 to 2010, and the subsequent changes in the Earth System – e.g. greenhouse gas levels, ocean acidification, deforestation and biodiversity deterioration. The analysis found that increased human activity—and "predominantly the global economic system"—has unseated all other factors as the primary driver of change in the Earth System, which the report describes as "the sum of our planet's interacting physical, chemical, biological and human processes." The most striking, i.e. "accelerated," changes to that system have occurred in the last sixty years.

"It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive. History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today." —Prof. Will Steffen"It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In a single lifetime humanity has become a geological force at the planetary-scale," said Steffen, who also led the Acceleration study.

The conclusion that the world's dominant economic model—a globalized form of neoliberal capitalism, largely based on international trade and fueled by extracting and consuming natural resources—is the driving force behind planetary destruction will not come as a shock, but the model's detailed description of how this has worked since the middle of the 20th century makes a more substantial case than many previous attempts.

"When we first aggregated these datasets, we expected to see major changes but what surprised us was the timing. Almost all graphs show the same pattern. The most dramatic shifts have occurred since 1950. We can say that around 1950 was the start of the Great Acceleration," says Steffen. "After 1950 we can see that major Earth System changes became directly linked to changes largely related to the global economic system. This is a new phenomenon and indicates that humanity has a new responsibility at a global level for the planet."

The paper makes a point to acknowledge that consumption patterns and the rise of what has become known as the Anthropocene Era does not fall equally on the human population and its examination of the economic system which is underpinning planetary destruction is one rife with inequality, in which certain populations consume at vastly higher levels than others.

According to the report, "The new study also concludes that the bulk of economic activity, and so too, for now, the lion's share of consumption, remain largely within the OECD countries, which in 2010 accounted for about 74% of global GDP but only 18% of the global population. This points to the profound scale of global inequality, which distorts the distribution of the benefits of the Great Acceleration and confounds international efforts, for example climate agreements, to deal with its impacts on the Earth System."

A worrying trend, notes the paper, is how a growing global middle class—exemplified by those in the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—is an increasing threat to the planet as the consumer mindset established in the OECD nations, particularly the U.S., spreads.

In an interview with the Guardian, Steffen spoke clearly about the overall impacts of the two new studies as he sounded the alarm over humanity's trajectory. "People say the world is robust and that’s true, there will be life on Earth, but the Earth won’t be robust for us," he said. "Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system, it’s not based on fact. There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37C, will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s a problem."

"It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive. History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today."

What increasing amounts of strong evidence shows, he said, is that that there "tipping points" that the human race should simply not "want to cross." More

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

 

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Smart Dedicated Eleven-Year-Old Takes Vow of Silence Demanding Climate Action

Eleven-year-old Itzcuauhtli Roske-Martinez is proving to the world that sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is absolutely nothing.

Today marks Day 22 of the indigenous eco-rapper’s silent strike demanding science-based climate action. His T-shirt explains, “I am taking a vow of silence until world leaders take action on climate change.” After classmates suggested that one sixth grader in Colorado couldn’t influence leaders, Itzcuauhtli added, “When I say world leaders, I’m talking about us.”

Accusing “so-called ‘leaders’” of failing, Itzcuauhtli (pronounced “eat-squat-lee”) asks why his generation should “go to school and learn all this stuff if there is not going to be a world worth living in? Maybe it’s up to youth. Maybe each one of us has to be a world leader.”

Judging by the hundreds of thousands of hits his site is getting, kids worldwide agree. Several classmates even tried to join his campaign, only to be forbidden by parents certain it wouldn’t change anything.

“He was so disappointed,” his mother, Tamara Roske, said. “He cried silent tears. It was heartbreaking.” Itzcuauhtli, who will begin homeschooling after Thanksgiving, is bolstered by “overwhelming” international support, especially since actor and father-of-three Mark Ruffalo called the boy’s campaign “brave and thoughtful.”

Itzcuauhtli’s greatest champion, however, is 14-year-old brother Xiuhtezcatl, director of Earth Guardians and a co-plaintiff in a youth climate lawsuit, the Supreme Court will consider Dec. 5. The brothers, raised in the Earth-honoring ceremonies of their father’s Aztec culture, perform a passionate eco-rap and count Trevor Hall, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Michael Franti among their fans. They rocked Brazil’s 2012 climate summit and, more recently, were part of the 400,000-strong at the People’s Climate March in New York City.

After the march, though, Itzcuauhtli despaired when people insisted it was too late to avoid an apocalyptic future. On the white board he now communicates with, he writes, “I felt desperate. I had to do something drastic to change the outcome of our future. I decided I wasn’t going to speak again until there was concrete action on climate change.”

He looks hopefully toward the 2015 Paris UN conference, where leaders could agree on meaningful—and binding—recovery plans.

When asked why last week’s historic U.S.-China climate deal didn’t prompt him to resume the boisterous jokes his family misses, Itzcuauhtli responds, “It’s not strong enough. [Former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute] James Hansen says we have to cap carbon in the next year. If we wait another 15 years, which is when China said they would cap carbon, it’s going to be too late.

Itzcuauhtli will resume speaking when he sees “we’re moving together in the right direction.” That means applying a planetary “prescription” written by 18 top climate experts, who outlined a recovery plan based on science, not politics—the same remedy demanded in his brother Xiuhtezcatl’s lawsuits against state and federal governments. To achieve the six percent global carbon cuts necessary for a livable planet, Itzcuauhtli invites children and adults to “join me in this vow until world leaders:

• Agree on and implement a Global Climate Recovery Plan to get us back to a safe zone of 350 ppm
• Massively reforest the planet to help absorb our excess carbon
• Support renewable energy solutions to replace the dirty fossil fuel industry”

Roske wonders when she’ll hear her “little comedian” talk again. “Next month’s climate gathering in Peru on Dec. 10 would be first day he’d break his silence. As a mom, I prefer he start talking before that.” But, she acknowledges, she may have to wait more than a year. “That 2015 Paris climate summit will determine these guys’ future on some level.”

Itzcuauhtli vows to continue as long as he must, despite calling his strike “the hardest thing I have ever done.” While he still laughs and finds ways to communicate with peers, he expresses special gratitude for friends old and new who support him or, better yet, join his campaign to “amplify the voices of children everywhere.”

“One person alone can start the revolution. It takes all of us to be the revolution.”

Visit ClimateSilenceNow to join Itzcuauhtli’s silence “even for an hour!” More

 

© 2014

Iowa Roots: Speaking Truth to Power

James Hansen writes: I was lucky to be born in Iowa. The nature of my childhood and later education at the State University of Iowa, odd as it seems, have relevance to fundamental political matters that I hope Iowans will think about. I will argue that Iowa could alter our nation’s course on energy and climate, matters of monumental importance to our children and indeed to all life on Earth.

James Hansen

I was born in 1941 in a small farmhouse in western Iowa, the fifth of seven children. My father was an itinerant tenant farmer, moving from one farm to another, sharing crops with the owner.

By 1945 small farms were disappearing. My father took a job as bartender and we moved a small house to a lot in Denison Iowa. Our life then seems hard by today’s standards. There were three bedrooms for nine of us. Even after we got a septic system the toilet was in the cellar, which required going outdoors. The only sink was in the kitchen, which was also the dining room. Washing up was done in turn, quickly. Our parents quarreled vehemently when our mother took a job as a waitress. I shrank in fear from our father’s angry voice.

Yet it was a good life to grow up in small town Iowa in a time of rising expectations. Today’s young people face a harder situation, with diminishing opportunities. That hurts deeply because, as I will explain, it is unnecessary, a result of tragic political machinations for which we adults must accept responsibility.

Politics back then was simpler. My father shouted “give ‘em Hell, Harry!” and slapped the table while listening to President Truman on the radio. My father called the Republican Party “the rich man’s party.” But shortly before my parents divorced he took me to listen to General Eisenhower speaking from the back of a train, as he came through Denison on a whistle-stop campaign trip in 1952. My father decided that he “liked Ike”, so he voted Republican.

Politicians were more honest regarding fundamental situations. Truman was blunt, with courage to remove war-hero MacArthur, thus maintaining civilian control of policy. Eisenhower warned us about the rising military-industrial complex. Below I contrast this with today’s situation.

It was easier in those days for young people to get ahead. I had a paper route from 3rd grade and by high school was the distributor of the Omaha World Herald for Denison (competing with the Des Moines Register for customers). From such a job I could save enough for college, where costs were within reach of all. Costs today have exploded. With our federal government in cahoots with banks, many college students look forward to decades of debt, not a better life.

My good fortune was to go to the University of Iowa. Professor James Van Allen was building instruments in the basement of the physics building, including the one on the first U.S. satellite, which discovered Earth’s radiation belts. In an exciting research environment Prof. Van Allen taught us how science works. The only “authority” was the rigorous objectivity of science.

Prof. Van Allen did not shirk from speaking truth to power and the public. When microwave ovens were introduced and fear of microwave radiation began to spread, Prof. Van Allen offered to sit on a microwave oven while it cooked his dinner. He helped quell irrational fear.

Prof. Van Allen told me about new data on the planet Venus. It led me to study why Venus was so hot and to propose an instrument for a mission to Venus after I joined NASA. The extreme heat on Venus turned out to be caused by the large amount of CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere.

CO2 was known to be increasing rapidly on Earth, because of our burning of fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas. What would it mean for life on our planet? I formed a small team at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies to study the problem.

We showed that Earth was warming by the amount expected due to the CO2 increase. Later we showed that Earth was out of energy balance: Earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat. This confirms the most fundamental physics, as it is the added CO2 that reduces heat radiation to space. The conclusion is based on data, not models.

One implication: more warming is “in the pipeline”, without additional increase of atmospheric CO2. In turn, it follows that CO2 emissions must be reduced rapidly or young people in coming decades will face unacceptable consequences: continually retreating shorelines, shifting climate zones with extermination of many species, increasing occurrence of climate extremes with widespread disruption to food and water supplies, more severe droughts and heat waves, more damaging forest fires, stronger storms, and greater flooding.

Implications for energy policy are crystal clear. Most remaining fossil fuels must be left in the ground, unless the CO2 is captured and buried. There is no serious scientific debate about this.

Remarkably, scientific analysis also shows that the policies needed to achieve fossil fuel phasedown would also address problems such as underemployment and growing income disparities. Why are such policies not pursued, if they are in the best interests of the public?

I learned why when I worked for the government. I was repeatedly warned not to connect the dots in the climate problem all the way to policy implications. End steps must be left to “policy-makers” and, it turns out, to special interests. NASA did not want to annoy the powers that be.

Scientists are trained to analyze complex problems and connect all the dots. If we fail to tell the whole story clearly, if we shirk speaking truth to power, we fail our children and grandchildren.

The truth is that present energy and climate policies of the United States and the United Nations are dishonest and tragic.

Out of one side of their mouths our leaders profess to understand that we have a planet in peril and that we must rapidly phase down CO2 emissions. At the same time they encourage pursuit of almost every fossil fuel that can be found, while knowing that such policies make achievement of climate goals impossible.

The fundamental reason that fossil fuel emissions continue to increase is that they appear to the consumer to provide the cheapest energy. This apparent cheapness is a mirage. Why? (1) We subsidize fossil fuels directly, and indirectly by protecting supply lines. (2) Impacts of air and water pollution are borne by the public; e.g., if your child gets asthma, you pay the costs, not the fossil fuel company. (3) Costs of climate catastrophes are borne by the victims and taxpayers.

We should make the price of fossil fuels honest by collecting a gradually rising carbon fee from fossil fuel companies. It is easy to collect, at domestic mines and ports of entry. 100% of the collected money should be given to the public, an equal amount to each legal resident, distributed electronically to bank accounts or debit cards. Not one dime to the government.

The person doing better than average in limiting his “carbon footprint” will make money. He will have an incentive to reduce fossil fuel use via future purchases. Entrepreneurs will have an incentive to develop no-carbon products. Businesses will be able to plan energy investments.

Detailed economic studies show that a carbon fee of $10 per ton of CO2, increasing $10 each year, will reduce U.S. CO2 emissions 33% in 10 years. That is 12 times more than the amount of carbon in the oil that would be carried by the Keystone XL pipeline.

While a tax would depress the economy, a fee with 100% of the money distributed to the public spurs the economy. After 10 years national employment increases 2.1 million jobs! The simple explanation is that honest pricing of energy makes the economy more efficient.

I should explain why I say that our governments’ policies are “dishonest and tragic.” They are dishonest because they pretend that policies that try to “cap” emissions could actually phase down emissions rapidly, for example the “cap-and-trade” of the Kyoto Protocol or Democratic bills in Congress. These amount to tax increases, they depress the economy, and they reduce emissions very little. And what “cap” would India accept – three times that of the U.S.? This is why governments allow all fossil fuel development, fracking, deep-ocean and Arctic drilling, mountaintop removal – because they know that their carbon policies are ineffectual.

Why tragic? Because policies that would actually work, fee-and-dividend in particular, do not cost the economy anything. They would spur the economy, create jobs, and modernize our infrastructure as we move to clean energies and energy efficiency.

Is it possible that Iowa, perhaps in cooperation with one or more neighboring states, such as Nebraska, Minnesota or Wisconsin, could help avert the tragedy? I believe it is conceivable that Midwest common sense could affect national and international policies by providing an example. A regional carbon fee cannot rise too high without disadvantaging local industry, because states do not have the practical ability to impose border tax adjustments. However, up to a reasonable level the net effect of a carbon fee would be beneficial, if the proceeds went to the public.

There is a conservative tendency in the Midwest. But conservatives are not the enemy of the planet. Historically conservatives have been the environments best friend. Conservation and creation care should be in the blood of conservatives.

A political divide has developed because conservatives fear that liberals will use the climate issue to increase taxes and government intrusion into their lives. These concerns provide fertile ground for anti-science nut-cases (global warming is a hoax!) to flourish.

Most conservatives I know are thoughtful. They do not want to go down in history as being responsible for blocking effective action to stabilize climate. Gaining their support for a rising revenue-neutral carbon fee, which is in fact a conservative approach, is possible.

A rigorously nonpartisan organization, Citizens Climate Lobby, has grown rapidly in the past several years. Their objective is to promote fee-and-dividend. They are unfailingly polite and respectful, but also knowledgeable and determined. They have met with legislators in almost all states. They could be a valuable resource in helping to organize a Midwest climate initiative.

Finally, I point out that, although a gradually rising carbon fee is the essential foundation for a successful policy to rapidly phase down our fossil fuel addiction, there are other requirements. The crucial technical need is abundant affordable carbon-free electricity generation.

Today, except for limited hydroelectric and biomass power plants, there are two options for baseload electricity: fossil fuels and nuclear power. We will not be able to phase out fossil fuel power plants without major contributions from nuclear power.

Most nuclear power plants in operation today are of a 40-50 year-old technology, yet they have saved millions of lives by displacing fossil fuel power plants. Fossil fuel air pollution kills more than 3.7 million people per year globally. Pollution is much less in the U.S. than in China or India, yet thousands of people are killed by it every year in the U.S. In contrast the one major nuclear accident in the U.S., at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, may result in the death of 1-2 people, which is undetectable among the 40,000 cancer deaths that will occur from other causes among the Pennsylvania residents exposed to radiation.

Modern nuclear technology has major improvements including passive shutdown in case of emergency and an ability to cool the nuclear fuel without external power. It is also possible to include reactors in the nuclear fleet that “burn” nuclear waste and utilize 99% of the energy in the nuclear fuel, compared with less than 1% in the older technology. Thus the nuclear waste problem can be solved and, if we choose, we can stop mining uranium because we have shown that an inexhaustible amount of nuclear fuel can be sieved from the ocean.

There is an analogy between the nuclear and aircraft industries. At the time of the earliest airplanes, who would have imagined that we would fly huge aircraft with more than 100 people at altitudes of 10 miles without parachutes! If a window broke at that altitude, everyone could die! So we worked on the technology. Now the chance you will lose your life by flying from New York to LA is much smaller than if you drove your car. Yes, there is still danger, especially due to human error, and we must be vigilant and develop control systems to minimize danger.

President Clinton in his State-of-the-Union message in 1993 made the chilling announcement that he was eliminating unnecessary programs such as nuclear power research and development. However, nuclear technology is not disappearing from Earth, on the contrary, and if the U.S. drifts further toward technical mediocrity, leaving nuclear leadership to nations such as Russia, the world will be a more dangerous place. If the United States chooses to focus on being a petro-state, the economic well-being of our children eventually will decline further.

Fortunately, all clean energy technologies would be spurred by the carbon fee-and-dividend approach, providing a broad revival of our technology leadership in many areas, especially clean energies which should all be free to compete rather than specified by politicians. The result would be greatly improved economic well-being for future generations.

It is not always easy to speak truth to power, but all citizens have the opportunity if they choose. I have one minor, easy suggestion for you to consider, and another requiring more effort. More

 

© 2014

The Climate War Room

Climate War Room - Sunday 3rd. August 2014

I have today changed the name of the Cayman Institute's climate change blog to the Climate War Room.

Having collaborated with Sir Richard Branson's Carbon War Room on their Ten Island Challenge, which is a major initiative to mitigate climate change through cutting down the global carbon output, I have realized that a similar initiative is needed to to raise awareness of the necessity for a global war on climate change rather than just carbon output.

For more input on the reality of the situation a good place to start would be Makiko Sato & James Hansen's website where they ask 'What Path is the Real World Following'? Jim Hansen was the former director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies who resigned because the United States Government would not let him speak out on climate change. 'Assessing Dangerous Climate Change' makes worrying reading.

The world needs to take climate change, or as James Lovelock prefers to call it 'global heating' very seriously. Dr. Lovelock is the founder of the Gaia theory and on of the great thinkers of this century, his Cirriculum Vitae is very interesting and worth reading. Mary Midgley wrote on James Lovelock, published in the New Statesman on 14 July 2003."Lovelock is an independent scientist. Though fanatically accurate over details, he never isolates those details from a wider, more demanding vision of their background. He thinks big. Preferring, as Darwin did, to work outside the tramlines of an institution, he has supported himself since 1963 through inventions and consultancies."

 

We need to take the issue very seriously as a rapidly warming climate will change life as we know it. As Jim Hansen has tried to make us aware our children and grandchildren will effectively living on a different and not very nice planet.

I implore you to research and read up on this subject. Speak out to your friends and neighbors and contact your political representatives and make your views known to them.

Nicholas Robson - Grand Cayman - Cayman Islands

 

© 2014

Summer is Coming

"Studies such as these help us gaze into the uncertain future and ask if that is what we want for our children. Most of us don’t. A few of us actually try to do something to change it. For the rest, the lag time is comforting. The complexity of non-linear feedback systems gives us an excuse to procrastinate."

Why are zombies so ubiquitous in contemporary popular culture? The HBO mini-series, Game of Thrones, supplies one theory. Unlike in the AMC series, Walking Dead, or in the film, World War Z, the undead are not coming on like a Blitzkrieg hoard. Rather, the White Walkers are building slowly, as a rumor, sometimes killing the messenger and leaving the message undelivered. “Winter is coming” is an expression that hangs in the air, deepening the sense of foreboding.

One reviewer (for The New York Times) observed that “bringing in the White Walkers might be a way to ultimately point up the pettiness of politics — which is to say, no one cares who sits on what throne once zombies start eating people.”Thrones’ first four seasons of “people slicing, stabbing, axing, poisoning, eating, crushing and moon-dooring one another in every possible context,” underscore the point — that the pettiness of politics still rules the day.

Game of Thrones resonates because outside the window is the drama of NATO expansion bumping up against retired Red Army vets in the Ukraine, the unmasking of shadow banks in the U.K. by the Financial Times and shadowing governments by Edward Snowden, or the sniper battle on the U.S. Republican right that is so entertaining to MSNBC and CNN. It is all much ado about nothing. Just North of our popular culture Wall is a climate juggernaut, building momentum.

Both scenarios — business as usual and drastic curtailment — produce a temperature and climate regime that would likely be lethal for modern civilization, if not the human race. In the Cancun round of the Committee of Parties in 2010, United Nations high level negotiators produced a general agreement — over the opposition of the USA, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Israel and other obstructionists — that "recognizing that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet,” 2°C was the “line in the sand” beyond which global temperatures should not be allowed to climb. In the latest three rounds— Durban, Doha and Warsaw — there has been a strong push from the science and civil sectors to reduce the target to 1.5°C to avert potentially unmanageable risks of tipping points from which no recovery would be possible. Since Warsaw last December some of these points — the inexorable slippage of ice in Antarctica and the release of methane from permafrost to name two — have tipped.

The NCA3 study is saying, essentially, we are in dangerous territory whether we stop emissions tomorrow or not. Summer temperatures in the U.S. have been rising on average 0.4 degrees F per decade since 1970, or about 0.2 C. Average summertime temperature increase has been 1°C overall, but the Southwest and West regions have borne the brunt of those increases, and temperatures have risen an average of 0.4°C, with a few localized areas warming as much as 0.6°C per decade. This is 5 times faster than the Earth as a whole warmed in the 20thcentury. North America, which lags other parts of the planet, is now in an exponential curve of accelerating change

“There are a number of findings in this report that sound an alarm bell signaling the need for action to combat the threats from climate change. For instance, the amount of rain coming down in heavy downpours and deluges across the U.S. is increasing; there’s an increase that’s already occurring in heat waves across the middle of the U.S.; and there are serious observed impacts of sea-level rise occurring in low-lying cities such as Miami, where, during high tides, certain parts of the city flood and seawater seeps up through storm drains. These are phenomena that are already having direct adverse impacts on human well-being in different parts of this country.”

Studies such as these help us gaze into the uncertain future and ask if it is really what we want for our children. Most of us don’t. A few of us actually try to do something to change it. For the rest, the lag time is comforting. The complexity of non-linear feedback systems gives us an excuse to procrastinate. More

© 2014

James Lovelock: 'enjoy life while you can: in 20 years global warming will hit the fan'

In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff".

James Lovelock

When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business," he said.

"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."

Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.

For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren't a million miles away from his.

As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."

Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point in causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.

"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."

This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."

Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: "People who say that about me haven't reached my age," he says laughing.

But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality."

There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?

"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas."

But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. "Oh no! In fact, I'm writing another book now, I'm about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead."

Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want." More

 

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Next 15 years is 'crunch time' for climate change

Time is running out to avert severe global damage from climate change, says Don Fullerton, a finance professor and co-author of a chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fifth assessment report.

Time is running out to employ a mitigation strategy that would avert severe global damage from climate change, a University of Illinois energy policy expert says.

Although we still have time to stabilize future temperature levels and neutralize other potential negative outcomes created by climate change, that time is rapidly dwindling, says Don Fullerton, a finance professor and former deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department.

"We really have to get serious over the next decade. Otherwise, it's going to be unstoppable," said Fullerton, the associate director of the U. of I. Institute of Government and Public Affairs and a faculty associate in the Center for Business and Public Policy in the College of Business.

"People may not realize that observed increases in temperature and sea level are nothing compared to what will happen with the existing increases in carbon dioxide concentrations already in the atmosphere," he said.

One of the biggest risks is that we don't know exactly what will happen, and when it will happen, Fullerton says.

"We can look all we want at expected sea levels, expected temperature changes, and expected storm severity. Yes, those are all going to be costly. But the real problem is just the great unknowable nature of it all – and the possibility that something much more drastic could occur," he said.

According to Fullerton, who co-wrote a chapter on the social, ethical and economic concepts of climate change for the recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fifth assessment report, the next 15 years are "crunch time," but the global community really has to get moving within the next 10 years.

"International negotiations are continuing, but the problem is that they are especially difficult," he said. "Imagine trying to get more than 200 nations with differing views to signoff on anything."

The main sticking point in international negotiations is the divide between rich, industrialized nations such as the U.S. and rapidly growing and industrializing nations such as China and India.

"Even if most of the current emissions are coming from the rapidly growing nations, the major source of greenhouse gases for the past 200 years has been the rich, industrialized nations," Fullerton said. "So where does the responsibility lie? China and India have high emissions, but they cry foul because they haven't shared in the wealth that the U.S. and other industrialized nations achieved over the past 200 years."

An isolationist position for the U.S. wouldn't work very well, either.

"If the polar ice caps melt faster and sea levels submerge half of Bangladesh – a populous, low-lying country that is very poor – then that would create tens of millions of refugees," Fullerton said. "So it's just not accurate for people to think that's not going to affect us. Sure, we have a rich country and if we wanted to, we could put up higher levees around New Orleans. But it's not true that flooding in poor countries such as Bangladesh wouldn't affect us. When we see 100 million refugees with nowhere to go and nobody to help them, the U.S. is not going to sit idly by and watch all of those displaced people starve to death. It's going to be a lot cheaper if we do something now than if our hand is forced in the future."

From an ethical standpoint, another question is what our responsibility is to future generations, Fullerton said.

"On the one hand, we don't want to leave future generations with all of our pollution," he said. "On the other, economic welfare around the world is improving. So you could argue that they're going to be better off already."

But if the current projections hold, and it's thought that future generations are going to better off, then a different moral calculus might say they could bear the cost more easily than we could, Fullerton said.

"But that doesn't suggest waiting," he said. "It suggests doing something now but maybe going partially into debt to do it. We can't wait and have future generations do it all later, because it could be too late. If starting now is necessary, that doesn't mean we need to bear all of the costs now, especially if most of the benefits are going to future generations. But there is an ethical argument for taking on some debt to do it now, in order to do it more effectively than what could be done years from now."

Even if the U.S. government does nothing, new technology is moving in the right direction, Fullerton said.

"The biggest initial step is moving from coal-fired power plants to natural gas power plants," he said. "Ironically, that's happening already, because of all the advances in fracking technology – it's a major improvement for climate change, but we could be endangering our water supply. That is a good argument against doing things too fast. It's possible that we get better at fracking. We just don't want to build any new coal-fired plants. The new power plants we build should be natural gas plants. But at the same time, we need to continue to work on the technology for wind and solar power."

If we were to have an energy efficiency crash-program – the equivalent of this generation's Apollo program, as some critics have advocated – that could be very costly in its own right, Fullerton says.

"Reducing emissions quickly would mean shutting down coal-fired power plants, which is wasteful because billions of dollars are already invested in those plants," he said. "For better or worse, coal-fired plants produce nearly half of the electricity produced in Illinois. So you can't just shut them down – although that would certainly be the fastest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Or we could undertake extremely expensive carbon capture and sequestration, which is an untested technology. So doing it quickly makes it more expensive than, say, continuing to work on technologies and phasing in changes more slowly.

"It doesn't have to be zero emissions – solar, wind and nuclear, all of which are expensive. We would get way more than halfway there simply by switching from coal to natural gas, on the basis of carbon per kilowatt hour."

Fullerton also notes that substantial efforts are already underway to switch to low-carbon fuels and to embrace high-efficiency technology.

"We see plenty of efforts, both policy- and technology-based, to develop low-carbon fuels, biofuels, make cars more efficient, make houses and appliances more efficient," he said. "Those efforts are all having an impact and should not be discounted."

But it's not enough.

"It's necessary but it's certainly not sufficient, which is why we need a price on carbon, via a tax or cap-and-trade," Fullerton said. "Either option would provide an incentive to firms to make more energy-efficient technologies, to produce energy more efficiently and to use less carbon. And once electricity and gasoline become more expensive, that would also provide incentives for households to use less of it."

Such a price has two different effects: Reduce the carbon per unit of output, and raise the cost of those carbon-intensive products, Fullerton said.

"And both of those effects would reduce carbon emissions," he said. "But the current policymakers in the U.S. and other countries do not want to raise the cost of carbon-intensive output like electricity and gasoline; instead they prefer to hand out subsidies for energy-efficiency incentives. But we need both – to become more efficient, and to use less."

But above all else, we need a wake-up call, Fullerton said.

"Because it's only with a rude wake-up call that we'll change our habits, and that's what the IPCC's report hopes to accomplish," he said. More

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Climate Denial Crock of the Week

 

© 2014

New NASA Study Warns Of Climate Change’s Pace

CAPE CANAVERAL (CBSMiami) – NASA jumped back into the discussion of global climate change Tuesday with a new study that showed Earth’s climate will experience roughly 20 percent more warming than estimates originally stated, despite a recent slowdown.

NASA said the new predictions were based on more detailed calculations of the sensitivity of Earth’s climate to factors like greenhouse gas emissions, which help warm the planet.

Global temperatures have risen at a rate of 0.22 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1951. But according to NASA, since 1998 the rate slowed to 0.09 per decade, despite an increase in some greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

Some studies have since suggested greenhouse gases may not impact Earth as much as previously thought. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed and slightly lowered the range of Earth’s potential warming.

The new research focused on what’s called Earth’s “transient climate response.” This measurement looks at how temperatures will change as carbon dioxide increases until the total amount of carbon dioxide has doubled.

Previous estimates put the transient climate response at anywhere from 1.8 degrees to 2.52 degrees Fahrenheit. According to NASA’s new study, the transient climate response is approximately 3.06 degrees and not likely to fall below 2.34 degrees Fahrenheit.

The study focused on looking at how aerosols from natural sources like volcanoes and wildfire combined with manufacturing activities, cars, and energy production interacted. NASA said depending on the make-up of the aerosols, some cause warming and some cause cooling.

According to the study, the Northern Hemisphere will likely see more of an impact from aerosols as most man-made aerosols are released from industrial zones north of the equator and most of Earth’s landmasses are in the Northern Hemisphere.

“I kept thinking, we know the Northern Hemisphere has a disproportionate effect, and some pollutants are unevenly distributed,” the study’s author, climatologist Drew Shindell said. “But we don’t take that into account. I wanted to quantify how much the location mattered.”

Shindell said that based on his calculations, industrialized countries must reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the higher end of proposed restrictions to avoid the most damaging consequences of climate change. More

 

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