Guest post by Richard S. Courtney
There is need for a new policy on climate change to replace the rush to reduce emissions. The attempts at emissions reduction have failed but there is a ‘Climate Change Policy’ that would work.
Climate change is a serious problem. All governments need to address it, and most do.
In the Bronze Age Joseph (with the Technicolour Dreamcoat) told Pharaoh that climate has always changed everywhere and always will. He told Pharaoh to prepare for bad times when in good times, and all sensible governments have adopted that policy since.
But now it is feared that emissions from industry could cause additional climate change by warming the globe. This threatens more sea level rise, droughts, floods, heat waves and much else. So, governments have attempted to reduce the emissions of the warming gases, notably carbon dioxide.
The UN established the Kyoto Protocol which limits the emissions from developed countries until year 2012. But the Kyoto Protocol failed. It has had no detectable effect on the emissions which continue to rise. Now the pressure is on to get a successor to that Protocol for after 2012, and negotiations are being held around the world to decide the new treaty at a conference in Copenhagen in December (CoP15).
But the negotiations have stalled. All industrial activity releases the emissions. Developing countries say they will not limit their emissions, and industrialised countries have problems reducing theirs. China releases more of the emissions than any other country, is industrialising, and says it is entitled to the same emissions per head of population as the US. So, China says it intends to increase its emissions more than four fold. India says the same. The US is having problems adopting a ‘Cap & Trade’ policy that would harm American industries and force industries from America to China. The EU adopted a ‘Cap & Trade’ policy that collapsed and has not affected the EU’s rising emissions. The Australian Parliament has recently rejected a similar policy.
Politicians have been responding to the failure of the Kyoto Protocol by showing they are ‘doing something’. They have adopted pointless and expensive impositions on energy industries, energy supplies and transportation. And the public is paying the large costs of this in their energy bills.
The Copenhagen Conference will provide a decision because it has to, but that decision will have no more effect than the Kyoto Protocol. And this will put more pressure on the politicians to be seen to be ‘doing something’ with further cost and harm to peoples and to industry.
There is as yet no clear evidence that the additional climate change is happening. But environmental groups are pressing the politicians to act “before it is too late”. And politicians are responding because of the fear of dire consequences from the additional climate change.
Politicians have decided how much additional climate change is acceptable, because they have decided that global temperature must not be allowed to rise to 2 degrees Celsius higher than it was at the start of the last century. But they need a method to overcome the urgency which is forcing them to do things and to agree things which do not work.
There is an available solution to the problem. The urgency is because of fear that the effects of the emissions may be irreversible. However, the additional climate change can be reversed, quickly, simply and cheaply. This provides a complete solution to the problems.
There is no need for the Copenhagen Conference to reach a forced, inadequate, and premature agreement on emissions. The Conference needs to decide funding to perfect the methods to reverse the additional climate change if and when that becomes necessary. This decision would give politicians decades of time to conduct their negotiations about what to do to limit the emissions. So, the politicians can agree actions that work instead of adopting things everybody knows do not work.
The solution addresses the cause of the fear of the additional climate change. Every sunbather has noticed it cools when a cloud covers the Sun, and this is because clouds reflect sunlight to cause negative radiative forcing. The fear of the additional climate change is based on an assumption that global temperature is determined by net radiative forcing, and the emissions induce additional positive radiative forcing.
The forcing can be altered in many ways. An increase to cloud cover of a single percent would more than compensate for the warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the air. There are several ways to increase cloud cover, for example small amounts of sulphates, dust, salt or water released from scheduled aircraft would trigger additional cloud formation. And the carbon dioxide in the air is very unlikely to increase so much that it doubles.
And there are many other ways to reflect sunlight so it is not absorbed by the ground. Crops could be chosen for reflectivity, roofs could be covered with reflective materials, and tethered balloons could be covered in reflective material.
Each of these options would be very much cheaper than constraining the emissions by 20 per cent for a single year. So, any delay to implementation of emission constraints by use of these options would save a lot of money.
Global temperature has not again reached the high it did in 1998 and has been stable since. But it could start to rise again. If it does then use of one or more of these options could be adopted when global temperature nears 2 degrees Celsius higher than it was at the start of the last century. This would be a cheap and effective counter measure while the needed emission constraints are imposed. Indeed, it would be much cheaper than the emission constraints. It could be started and stopped rapidly, and its effect would be instantaneous (as sunbathers have noticed when a cloud passes in front of the Sun).
Until then there would be no need for expensive ‘seen to be doing something’ actions such as capturing and storing carbon dioxide. Energy and financial policies would not need to be distorted, and developing countries could be allowed to develop unhindered.
Indeed, there would be no need to deploy the counter measures unless and until global temperature rises to near the trigger of 2 degrees C rise.
The various methods for reflecting sunlight need to be developed and perfected. They each have potential benefits and problems which need to be assessed. But if the problems are detectable they need not be significant. For example, the additional cloud cover could be induced over oceans distant from land. This requires much research.
Politicians know they need to be seen to be ‘doing something’ and they would be seen to be doing something worthwhile. Each counter measure experiment and demonstration provides opportunity for media coverage.
Richard S. Courtney
Energy and Environment Consultant
Richard S. Courtney is an independent consultant on matters concerning
energy and the environment. He is a technical advisor to several UK MPs
and mostly-UK MEPs. He has been called as an expert witness by the UK
Parliament’s House of Commons Select Committee on Energy and also House
of Lords Select Committee on the Environment. He is an expert peer
reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in
November 1997 chaired the Plenary Session of the Climate Conference in
Bonn. In June 2000 he was one of 15 scientists invited from around the
world to give a briefing on climate change at the US Congress in
Washington DC, and he then chaired one of the three briefing sessions.
His achievements have been recognized by The UK’s Royal Society for Arts
and Commerce, PZZK (the management association of Poland’s mining
industry), and The British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Having been the contributing technical editor of CoalTrans
International, he is now on the editorial board of Energy & Environment.
He is a founding member of the European Science and Environment Forum
(ESEF).
h/t to Barry Hearn
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Richard, your essay is interesting, but there are additional elements in the process of the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol that you should consider. The principal one is international trade and competitiveness. Understand that the KP is not an environmental treaty; it is a trade treaty intended to create two supposedly beneficial effects, the first being a binding agreement on CO2 emissions and the second being increased North-South cash flows. This isn’t new; it flows straight from Agenda 21 and the Rio Conference, and the Brundtland Commission before it.
A significant driver in the KP negotiations is industrial and trade competitiveness. Both of these have been declining in the EU relative to the US and China for more than 20 years. An overt part of the EU trade policy was to use restrictions imposed by the Protocol as a way of restraining this relative trade advantage. Delegation members openly discussed it during the COP meetings in the early 2000s leading up to COP 5.
Over the years, since 1997, the EU has continued to lose ground, and its industrial base has continued to atrophy. There is just as much pressure today to secure a binding deal as there was 10 years ago. In short, Kyoto is not just about carbon dioxide, it’s about trade and competitiveness, and unless you consider these aspects, nothing done or said during the UNFCCC conferences or the G-8 makes any sense. The principal difference between then and now is that the EU is no longer governed by a series of Red-Green coalition governments. The US is.
Badger,
Frankly, from a scientific point-of-view, your whole post is nonsense. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 may not be very high, but the path length through the atmosphere is long. In fact, many “skeptics” actually argue the opposite point that you make…i.e., they claim the absorption bands for CO2 are already saturated and hence additional CO2 doesn’t have more effect. This argument is also wrong, although for somewhat subtler reasons than yours is wrong. (Their argument does basically explain why the dependence of radiative forcing on CO2 concentration is approximately logarithmic rather than linear.)
As for all your calculations of CO2 emissions from breathing: There are large exchanges of CO2 between the atmosphere, biosphere, and oceans. However, these exchanges are very different than taking a source of carbon that has been locked away from the atmosphere for millions of years and rapidly liberating it. And, this is why the CO2 levels have shot up to 385ppm since the industrial revolution whereas they hadn’t been above ~300ppm over the last 750,000 years (over which we have ice core data) and likely many millions of years, despite the fact that there were plenty of animals living and breathing during that entire time period.
Finally, I have no clue how you calculated your 36 W number…and you are wrong if you mean to imply that the CO2 greenhouse effect violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Gerlich and Tscheuschner, the two who have claimed this in one of the most embarrassing papers ever to see the light of day in a (3rd-rate) physics journal, are either clueless or intentionally deceptive in making such a claim. One can demonstrate that all the heat flows in the atmosphere are from hotter to colder and that, nonetheless, the Earth is warmer than it would be in the absence of an IR-active atmosphere. (The basic point is that in the absence of such an atmosphere, all the heat radiated by the earth would escape to space, so the fact that any of it finds its way back to the Earth when the atmosphere absorbs such radiation means the earth is then warmer than it would be otherwise. However, there is still more heat transferred from the Earth to the atmosphere than vice versa.)
Colin:
Thankyou very much and most sincerely. I was starting to despair that anybody would address the issues raised by my essay. You have.
You make good points, and – as you say – my essay does not address them.
The AGW-scare is not about science. It would have gone in the trash can long ago if it were a scientific issue.
The AGW-scare is about money. Nationally it is about tax, and internationally it is about trade.
In my opinion, if national governments can be given the means to back-off from the AGW-scare then the trade issues will cease to exist. Of course, my opinion could be wrong but I see no method to prove the matter either way.
At present, all the problems are being manifested nationally; e.g. distorted energy, economic, financial, industrial, and aid policies. Some of the distortions are severe, expensive and harmful. Imposition of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), and immense subsidies to windfarms are obvious effects.
So, I am arguing that at this stage we need to address national politicians. And that is the substance of my essay. But your message implies that the international politics need to be engaged first. Of course, you could be right although I can see no method to do that. If you have suggestions for how to directly address the international issues then I would like to hear them.
Anyway, I am grateful for your challenge of my argument. You seem to not agree with my argument but you have demonstrated that you have considered it. And I thank you for that because few others here seem to have considered it.
Richard
Alan the Brit:
Thankyou. I think it must be obvious why I appreciate that.
Richard
to Joel Shore and others who would like a demonstration of the effect of clouds and humidity: Southern California this weekend (August 21 – 23) is having an influx of humid air from the south, which is anticipated to bring some rain but also 5 degrees increase in daytime maximum temperatures and night-time minimum temperatures.
It is anticipated that the CO2 concentration will remain roughly the same, however.
It is not the CO2. Focus on the target: water vapor.
“Climate change is a serious problem. ….But now it is feared that emissions from industry could cause additional climate change ”
so it is a serious problem because it is feared?
so fear is the problem that needs to be addressed?
and the hysteria from the faux climate science cabal helps this how?
“Politicians know they need to be seen to be ‘doing something’ and they would be seen to be doing something worthwhile…”
problem is, no matter what they do it will not satisfy the deep Green zealots
Jeff L says:
The base assumption in this paper is wrong – that the goal is to control the climate. What has been seen & proven over the last several years is the REAL goal is increased government control over people.
Joel Shore says (19:41:26) :
So, are you saying this is the united goal of most of the climate science community, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences & analogous bodies in all the other G8+5 nations, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the councils of most major scientific societies like the AGU, the AMS, and the APS? How exactly did they all get together to agree on this strategy?
Will says:
There are many motives in this saga and fraud.
There is ego and vanity.
There are carpetbaggers after money.
There is a left wing meme that sees the developed world enjoying prosperity and the third world in “poverty” caused by “unfair trade’ and ‘globisation’.
It is a ‘social justice’ strategy behind a lot of activism to rip money from the first world and give it to the third. AGW is a perfect excuse.
The reality that doing this will just make the poverty worse, and contribute to corruption and the highly unequal distribution of wealth in third world societies, is beyond their belief structure.
It is all about hate and punishment.
will (15:40:01) :
Totally correct.
As I have said before. Socialism is a philosophy of envy.
All socialism does is bring all but the richest down to the same abysmal level, never raising the poor.
DaveE.