Oil barons really know how to dig holes in the ground. And they need a better place to put their money than trying to confuse the public about how serious global fever has become. I think they are missing a old-fashioned business opportunity, and a giant one at that.
This aphorism by Yogi Berra, the Baseball Hall of Fame philosopher, used to be a funny example of a tangled arrow of time. But now it means that, thanks to global warming and ocean acidification, our kids and grandkids cannot have the kind of future that we had; they can count on a future of high risk, both directly from climate change and from the regional collapse of civilization.
People take sensible precautions when the risk is high. Ask a roomful of people if they have fire insurance. Almost all will raise a hand. Ask how many have had a fire in the last ten years, and almost none will respond. Yet people pay for insurance because, should a fire happen, they could lose everything—and still have to pay off the mortgage.
But uncertainty is another matter. Those with money to loan will worry about ever getting it back, and so loan rates will soar.
All sensible species avoid living on the edge. But as the world’s temperature goes up a few degrees in the course of the present century, many will be pushed over.
We humans, if I am to judge from the thermostat settings, prefer room temperatures up in the mid-70s [24°C]. All species have an environmental temperature that they prefer–but it is always less than the optimal temperature for making a living and raising offspring. Why is “cool it” so important?
I recently stood next to an electrical generator, big enough to power a city the size of Seattle (about 1,000 megawatts, known as a gigawatt). It was surprisingly small, no larger than a classroom with a tall ceiling.
The generator’s spinning shaft could be seen where it connected to the steam turbine, next in line. And backing it up were three more turbines, helping to keep that long shaft spinning at 1,800 revolutions every minute.
The generator doesn’t spin freely because every electrical light and appliance in that gigawatt-sized city is resisting it. It takes a lot of push from the four steam turbines to keep it up to speed. Some power plants create the steam in a boiler heated by burning coal, others by using nuclear fission of uranium-235 to generate the requisite heat. The cleanest method of all is harvesting steam from water sprayed on hot granite a few miles [5 km] underground.
But standing in the electricity half of the power plant, you cannot tell what the heat source is. All you see are the big steam pipes coming in at the far end of the giant hall from an adjacent building. Looking out the big open doors, however, two giant cooling towers are immediately visible. Read the rest of this entry »
Thanks to upsetting our climate with a series of low-tech practices such as cutting down forests, tilling the soil, and—worst of all—burning fossil fuels, we are now facing a use-it-or-lose-it intelligence test.
The outlook is for a higher fever, with droughts that just won’t quit. Extreme weather will keep trashing the place. Tipping points may lead to demolition derbies, as when the Amazon rain forest burns or major cities are inundated.
Absent effective treatment of climate disease, the students of today will face an unpleasant, chaotic future—not merely hotter summers. Unless we get our act together very quickly—the next ten years—and on a global scale, our legacy could be genocidal downsizing.
Yet all we hear about is a low-carbon energy diet over the long haul: conserve energy, emphasize renewable energy, fill the car’s tank less often, and substitute clean solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal for the fossil fuels.
Are such measures quick enough? No. Reliable enough? No. Can they head off the developing world from repeating our mistakes? No. Read the rest of this entry »
My father ran a medium-sized insurance company in Kansas City in my youth and, when we were driving around town, he would point out accidents waiting to happen—say, leaving one’s bicycle sprawled across a path for someone to trip over in the dark. A more subtle form of foresight is playing the percentages—and some improving percentages lead to my suggestion, “Don’t Sleep Alone!”
Young adults mostly die, or become permanently disabled, from accidents. Later in life, heart attacks, cancer, and stroke become more common than accidents. Cancers are insidious but the three others strike without warning. They often require fast treatment to prevent permanent disability or death. How fast is fast? Read the rest of this entry »
David Houle at EvolutionShift.com: In this fourth installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview William H. Calvin, PhD.< I had the good fortune to meet Bill at the Future of Energy conference hosted by the Foundation for the Future several months ago. I have also had the pleasure to read excerpts of his upcoming book “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change”, a book that could well become a classic as it frames the conversation and offers up a strategy and vision to effectively deal with Climate Change. He is the author of a dozen books, mostly for general readers, about brains and evolution. The latest is A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond .
1. Evolutionshift.com: Bill, thank you for sending me a chapter of your new book: “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change”. When will it be published?
I’ll put that comparing-solutions chapter up on the web at Global-Fever.org. The book itself will be out in February by the University of Chicago Press. They did my other climate book (A Brain for All Seasons) which won several book awards.. What prompted you to write this book?The urgency of the situation. I figured that, as a newly emeritus medical school professor who has been following climate science since 1984, I could afford taking the three years to write it. Better that than taking a real climate scientist away from research and teaching time. And I felt that I had the right skill set. A Ph.D. in biophysics makes it easy for me to dig into both the physics and the biology involved. And thanks to talking shop with the neurosurgeons every day for twenty years, I do know something about when you can afford to wait and when decisive action is needed.
The timetable is really 2020? That means that we must truly accelerate efforts on all fronts. What can we do as individuals?
You can’t enjoy the long run unless you do the right things in the short run. We’ve only got a decade to make a big dent in fossil fuel use or deploy new carbon sinks in equivalent numbers. Anything slower means a disaster for today’s students.I don’t think we can advance on all fronts, given our 2020 emergency; we’d be better off spending our money on plug-in hybrids than on new rapid transit, for example. Reforming drivers worldwide takes too long.
A major makeover in a decade requires a lot of people working together, not separately. Individuals cannot do very much, in time for 2020, but they can–and must–persuade politicians to either get moving or retire. Read the rest of this entry »
Please talk about Geothermal or, as you call it Hot Rock Energy.
I find it fascinating and, quite frankly, have not heard much about this source of energy.
It’s because “geothermal” has an image problem rather like electric cars once had. It took the success of a 1997 gasoline-electric hybrid called the Prius to help people think ahead to an all-electric car without defaulting to an image of a golf cart of limited utility, not suitable for the freeways. Hearing geothermal, we often pop up a mental image of a sulfurous hot spring and wrinkle our nose. Too many people think that geothermal is just piping near-surface hot water around to heat some buildings—say, Idaho’s State Capitol buildings in Boise. This in turn makes you think that geothermal electrical power is a special case, nice for Iceland but not more generally. That, however, is your grandfather’s notion of geothermal, badly out of date. See the report put out by a panel of eighteen experts that MIT assembled in 2006 to evaluate Hot Rock Energy as an industrial-strength solution for C-free electricity. The experts said it could yield a thousand times more than our present overall energy use. How polluting? Close to zero. Read the rest of this entry »
11. What do you think about nuclear energy? Is it safe? How can it be utilized to reach your timeline goals?
Nuclear power generation is currently the major C-free energy source. It is over fifty years old, with an excellent safety record. It’s hundreds of times safer than hydro (dams fail) and thousands of times safer than fossil fuels. Unlike the other expandable C-free sources, most of the beginner’s mistakes have already been made. It took three decades before the efficiency doubled.
France has switched to nuclear for 78 percent of its electricity. Hydro gives France another 13 percent. So France is 91 percent clean, 9 percent dirty—and Texas is the exact opposite. Texans now get 91 percent of their electricity from fossil fuels, almost twice the national average. Switzerland is 1 percent dirty and the U.S. is at 60 percent (electricity only; about 85 percent dirty counting transportation energy needs too).
If France and Switzerland switched their vehicles over to electrical power, they would serve as even better C-free energy models for the world. Much as I admire Denmark’s style of distributed cogeneration and the move to renewable wind and solar energy, there simply isn’t time to scale that up around the world before 2020, given how many coal trains and oil tankers need to be retired. Read the rest of this entry »
The 1955 Spooklight Expedition was over a long November weekend; no adults, just 16-year-old guys out to solve a mystery. This 1997 Associated Press story explains the continuing attraction of the place:
HORNET, Mo. (AP) – On those moonless Missouri nights when it gets darker than dark – darker, some would say, than the inside of a cow – things can get pretty spooky along a rugged stretch of road. That’s when the Spooklight is likely to make its appearance. On some nights it might rise slowly out of nowhere to illuminate a broad swatch of farmland. On others it might simply waltz up East Highway 50 from Oklahoma, dancing across the gravel road that doubles as the state line.
Or it could just run straight at you, vanishing at the last second, then reappearing a heartbeat later, as it sneaks up from behind to levitate around your shoulders.
Whatever it is, just about everyone along this stretch of rolling hills and farms has a Spooklight story to tell.
What the AP reporter fails to mention is that this road is also the local lover’s lane. Teenaged boys love to take teenaged girls to scary movies (they cling, wonderfully), and we suspected the spooklight might have been conveniently exaggerated for such reasons. We were the ghost busters, a noble calling.
Mention global warming at a social gathering and see what happens, now that skepticism and glib comebacks have turned into concern and sorrow. People will, of course, assume that you’re a pessimist about our prospects.
“Not really,” I protest. That earns me a quizzical look.
“Wait a minute,” she says. “If you’re an optimist, why do you look so worried?”
Dramatic pause.
“So you think it’s easy, being an optimist?”
Many scientists look worried these days. We’ve had a steady diet of bad news coming from climate scientists and biologists. To become even a guarded optimist, you have to think hard.
First, I reflected, the history of science and medicine shows that, once you mechanistically understand what’s what, you can approach all sorts of seemingly unsolvable problems. I’m optimistic that we will learn how to stabilize climate.
When pessimism tempts me, I usually remember the progress that I’ve seen. When I was born in 1939, antibiotics were just a rumor, there were few vaccines, and your chances of dying from an infection were three times higher than they are now.
I’ve seen an enormous increase in our knowledge about how bodies work, from molecules to mind. The average lifespan has been extended by decades in many countries, just in the time that I’ve been personally observing the scene as a medical school professor. And in the first half of the 20th century, deaths from infections dropped by an order of magnitude even before antibiotics and vaccinations came to dominate the scene . Just the basic knowledge about how diseases spread was what did most of the job, not a needle. Once this new knowledge was incorporated into everyday practices, eight out of ten fatal infections were prevented. We’re used to thinking of science discoveries leading to technological innovation. But here you see how knowledge, pure knowledge, pays off all by itself.
The reason I’m not so pessimistic about climate is that, once you understand what’s what, you can approach all sorts of seemingly unsolvable problems. It is reasonable to hope that we will learn how to intervene and stabilize things in the decades ahead, much as we earlier did in medicine. (To be continued.)
That’s the subtitle for my book, GLOBAL FEVER, out in February 2008 from U of Chicago Press. I’m more optimistic than most for the long run, say 2100, provided that science and technological creativity stays high and unincumbered. But we’ve got to manage the short run – to 2020 – on a more urgent basis to avoid inflicting catastrophes on today’s students, going with what we’ve got rather than pie in the sky. Just to illustrate, here is a three-part solution using existing technology, mostly with known economics
1. Hybrids with a 33 mile daily range on electric – the average commute – could eliminate foreign oil imports which have grown to be 2/3 of our oil supply, for which we’ve fought two wars in the mideast.
2. We could clone the most modern nuclear reactors to reduce coal use. France gets 78% of its electricity from nuclear, NJ 52%.
3. But developing countries will burn their own coal to modernize, so the developed world has to undercut that with subsidies, running low-loss power transmission lines across half a continent from one of the 31 countries that already has nuclear power.
Yes, I have neglected the blog — and for a six month period that has seen public opinion on fixing climate change evolve quite a lot in the U.S.
It’s a period when I’ve started giving climate talks to any civic group that will listen. What’s Happening for 15 minutes, What To Do for 15 minutes. And between them, as time permits, 15 minute segments on Sea Level Rise and on Abrupt Climate Changes such as El Nino and droughts. I’ll be posting the powerpoint slides soon.
These illustrations from my book (out in early 2008 from University of Chicago Press)
GLOBAL FEVER: How to Treat Climate Change
may be freely copied with attribution. All have been remade in black-and-white to make handouts inexpensive.
William H. Calvin University of Washington
Each handout corresponds to a 15-minute segment of the talk that I have been giving to civic groups. Each includes a reading list on its last page. If you would like a scientist to come speak to a group about climate change, just ask. At the University of Washington in Seattle, the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, the Climate Impacts Group, and the Program on Climate Change are all good at arranging for speakers. For the latter
Miriam Bertram, Coordinator
Program on Climate Change
University of Washington
Seattle WA 98195-5351
206-543-6521 UWPCC@U.Washington.edu
The insurance industry is one of the few major economic sectors that has fully realized the perils of inaction in combating climate change. Reinsurers, especially Swiss Re and Munich Re, employ staffs of scientists full time to analyze the problems and find solutions. However, the industry can’t do it alone. If Stern’s report is dismissed as a Cassandra like prophecy of doom, and no action is taken, not only will the industry be hard pressed to survive, but also the entire planet. Cite.
Now if only the WSJ had the brains of UK’s Financial Times.
Climate change is one of the most serious issues facing the planet. Scientific evidence shows that temperature changes are likely to have profoundly negative consequences for human society, the global economy and the world’s natural systems. This poses risks and opportunities to which investors and companies must respond.
The level in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, stood at 280 parts per million by volume (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution, in about 1780. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere today stands at 382ppm
£200bn, or 1 per cent of global GDP, must be spent every year to get carbon dioxide levels to “stabilise” at 550ppm.
This figure will rise as world GDP increases, and could be three to four times as large by 2050
40 per cent of the world’s species would face extinction if temperatures rose by 2C
200 million people are at risk of being driven from their homes by flood or drought by 2050
6C is a “plausible” estimate of how much world temperatures could rise by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions are unchecked
60 million more Africans could be exposed to malaria if world temperatures rise by 2C
35 per cent drop in crop yields across Africa and the Middle East is expected if temperatures rise by 3C
200 million more people could be exposed to hunger if world temperatures rise by 2C
550 million more people could be at risk of hunger if world temperatures rise by 3C
4 million square kilometres of land, home to one-twentieth of the world’s population, is threatened by floods from melting glaciers
35,000 Europeans died in the 2003 heatwave, an event likely to become “commonplace”
4 billion people could suffer from water shortage if temperatures rise by 2C
This from Sir Nick Stern, formerly chief economist at the World Bank and current advisor to Tony Blair:
The science tells us that GHG emissions are an externality; in other words, our emissions affect the lives of others. When people do not pay for the consequences of their actions we have market failure. This is the greatest market failure the world has seen.
followed by
[Business as usual] involves very high risks; it is likely to imply a rise of 4-5°C or more above pre-industrial levels within the next 100 or 150 years. This is way outside human experience. At high levels of warming, less is known about how the climate will respond – very large events might happen….
What are the costs and benefits of taking action? The costs of removing most of that risk, getting to 550 or below, are around 1% of [global] GDP per year. The cost could be above or below 1% depending on policies, technological progress and ambitions but would be in this region. This is equivalent to paying on average 1% more for what we buy - the price rise for carbon intensive goods would be higher and for low carbon intensive goods would be lower – it is like a one-off increase by 1% in the price level. That is manageable; we can grow and be green.
and UK politicians listen. This from Tony Blair
The consequences for our planet are literally disastrous. This disaster is not set to happen in some science-fiction future, many years ahead, but in our lifetime. What is more, unless we act now, not some time distant but now, these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible.
The question is not whether we can afford to act, but whether we can afford not to act [on climate change]. To be sure, there are uncertainties, but [it is clear] that the downside uncertainties—aggravated by the complex dynamics of long delays, complex interactions, and strong non-linearities—make a compelling case for action.
To be credible, the handful of “skeptics” about human causation of current global climate change would need both to explain what alternative mechanism could account for the pattern of changes that is being observed and to explain how it could be that the known human-caused buildup in GHG is not having the effects predicted for it by the sum of current climate-science knowledge (since, by assumption, something else is having these effects). No skeptic has met either test.
John Holdren, “The energy innovation imperative.” Innovation, p.11 (Spring 2006).
