James Hansen visited MIT on April 15 and April 16 and gave two public talks. One was for Fossil Free MIT (http://www.fossilfreemit.org), a new student group concerned with divestment, on the politics of climate change, “Combatting the Climate Crisis: the Path from Science to Action,” and the other was for the climate science community on “Ice Sheet Melt, Sea Level and Storms,” the subject of a paper he is now working on.
The good news is that, according to Hansen, we do not have to worry about catastrophic methane releases from the tundra or ocean clathrates as the paleoclimate record shows there were no such releases in higher temperature periods.
The bad news is that, according to a paper Hansen is now working on, we do have to worry about the effects of ice sheet melt on ocean currents and thermoclines as well as the possibility of dramatic wind intensity increases in storms. Again, based upon the paleoclimate and geologic record.
Hansen would have preferred to title the political talk “Challenge for young people: how to make the unfolding climate crisis an opportunity” as he believes that confronting the climate issue can be beneficial, that the prospect is not all doom and gloom. However, he also said, “We have almost as much warming in the pipeline as has already occurred” (0.8º C which means at least 1.6º C cumulative even if we stop now).
Climate impacts we are already seeing include ice sheet disintegration, sea level rise, species extinction, weather extremes. Comparing the present climate to the paleoclimate record can help us predict some of the impacts. During the Eemian, the interglacial period 130,000 years ago, temperature was 2º C warmer than now and sea level was 5-9 meters higher; during the Pliocene, 5.332 million to 2.588 million years ago, the temperature was 3-4º C higher and sea level was up to 66 feet (20 meters) higher than today.
As long-time gardeners know, climate zones have been consistently shifting Northwards. Previously, this shift is now happening at the rate of a few kilometer per year, making it very difficult for many species to react. Hansen used the Monarch butterfly as his example of species extinction pressure, talking about his personal experience over the years with Monarchs on his small PA farmstead. The pressures on Monarch butterflies are not only climate but the elimination of one of their primary food sources, milkweed, although climate change is certainly one of the reasons for the diminishment of their habitat, both here in the US and Canada as well as Mexico.
One of the steps people can take to reverse the collapse of the Monarch butterfly population is to plant milkweeds seed and remove black swallow wort, an invasive plant Monarchs can mistake for milkweed which is poisonous to them (http://www.cctvcambridge.org/BlackSwallow-Wort). More information on Monarch preservation is available through these resources:
http://monarchwatch.org
http://www.monarchbutterflyfund.org
http://www.monarch-butterfly.com/monarch-conservation.html
http://www.flightofthebutterflies.com/conservation-preservation/
https://www.livemonarch.com/free-milkweed-seeds.htm
He also mentioned the coral reefs which are habitat for a million or more species and vanishing at the rate of 1% per year through ocean acidification and other mechanisms. In addition, precipitation is happening in more violent events, more snow and rain per hour, a reality that the weather data supports conclusively.
“We can’t burn all our fossil fuels… The limit should be 500 gigatons of carbon and we’ve already burned 390 gigatons.” (I’m not sure that I got these figures correctly in my note taking.)
Hansen believes that 2ºC is no longer a reasonable target, especially since there is such a strong correlation between sea level rise and temperature. He calls for a quick coal phase-out, no unconventional fossil fuels like shale oil or fracking, and a price on carbon. His preference is not cap and trade but fee and dividend which covers all fossil fuels and distributes all the dividends directly to the people, an equal amount to all legal residents without one dime going to government. The only US national legislation that is even close to that is the Boxer/Sanders Climate Protection Act of 2013 which Hansen does not completely support as it retains 40% of the carbon fees for the government and does not pass through 100% of the fees to the people. We need to reduce fossil fuel consumption by 30% by 2024 or 2025. If US and China decide to adopt fee and dividend, it would change everything. (The US is not likely to pass any climate legislation in the near future and China has embarked on a pilot program of municipal cap and trade over the last year or so.) More information is available from http://www.citizensclimatelobby.org , which supports fee and dividend.
“Basically, what we have to do is decarbonize our energy.” Sweden is closest to this decarbonization process and they made the transition in about a decade.
Hansen supports new nuclear technologies, fast reactors and thorium reactors with safe shutdown and automatic or no cooling. He believes that renewables are not enough. That, contra Amory Lovins, efficiency is not enough. I was happy to see him display one of my favorite graphs from Lovins’ original Foreign Affairs article back in 1974. This graph compares the hard energy and soft energy paths with projections of US energy usage going out to the mid-21st century. According to the estimates of the usual sources, International Energy Agency, US Energy Information Agency, and others, we should be using 200-300 quadrillion btu’s of energy per year about now. However, in reality, the US has peaked at about 100 quads and been at or below that annual energy budget for about 20 years now while still raising GDP and growing the economy, (despite the best efforts of the banksters).
Hansen believes that climate change is a matter of “intergenerational injustice,” that there is a legal case to be made for children to sue for the harm they will have to endure if their elders continue on the path we’ve presently laid out. There is, in fact, a Federal lawsuit on this issue to be heard in the DC district on May 2. Further information may be available from http://www.ourchildrenstrust.org
During the Q and A, Hansen had to deal with a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party who told us that capitalism is the problem (and Bob Avakian has all the answers) and someone very worried about chem-trails in the sky.
The next day, April 16, Hansen spoke on “Ice Sheet Melt, Sea Level and Storms” to MIT’s climate scientists. In contrast to his political speech which was confident and self-assured, his scientific speech was diffident and halting as he hadn’t completed the paper or finalized his work. He told the audience that one of the reasons why he accepted the invitation to speak was as a spur to finish his paper. I suspect that his political work has interfered with his scientific pursuits and hope that he gets back to the science soon.
He told us that anthropogenic carbon forcing dwarfs anything else affecting climate, that there is a possibility of rapid ice melt, that the paleoclimate record shows rapid changes in ocean currents at temperatures like those today, that such changes can happen again.
Such cooling of the North Atlantic can increase wind speeds to dangerous levels during storms. If Greenland gets warm enough, all bets are off. Greenland ice melt may be much more dangerous than we currently consider. The loss of one meter of ice sheet melt begins to set some of these effects into motion.
Hansen is extremely approachable and was willing to talk to almost anybody. He seems to be a gentle man and a gentleman and certainly is a committed and knowledgeable scientist concerned with the future of his children and grandchildren and all the children of the world.
Some experts support nuclear, others oppose. Some support shale as a transition, others oppose. Some think efficiency is all we need, others think it’s not even close.
Here’s what we do know:
1. Coal has twice the carbon emissions of natural gas.
2. It’s far easier to decarbonize electricity than it is motor vehicle fuels or heating fuels.
3. Much electric policy is set at the state level, and different parts of the country have both different natural resources and different cultural preferences with respect to energy production.
If we focus on those three realities, we get to a few places quickly:
(a) Retire coal. Now. As much as possible. There are loads of coal fired power plants that are in excess of 50 years old — they’ve lived their useful lives. Shut them down.
(b) Energy efficiency is the most cost effective, most carbon-reduction effective resources. Let’s do as much of it as we can. This includes both increasing minimum performance standards for buildings and autos, as well as programs to help building owners improve their envelopes.
(c) Where renewable energy is cheapest — let’s do lots of it. Build wires to get it to urban areas.
(d) PV is expensive, but it can go anywhere. Keep at it.
(e) Not enough? Fine. Now let’s talk about how different regions are going to make up the capacity and/or energy they need because (a) exceeds (b) + (c) + (d) in your neck of the woods. Want nuclear? Go for it. It’s expensive, but it can be done. Want combined cycle natural gas? It’s got more flexibility, less cost, and less risk than nuclear, but it does have carbon emissions. Want storage? For sure — it gets you capacity, but you’ve got to build even more (c) or (d) to create the energy for it. Want to let folks figure out the most economically efficient way to remove carbon? Put a price on it — all of it. Gasoline, home heating oil, natural gas, coal, bunker fuel, the works. Folks will figure out that switching from fuel oil to an electric air source heat pump will save them oodles, and you get less emissions to boot. MPG will continue to go up.
Instead of worrying about what specific solution the giant ecosystem of 300 million Americans, 1000s of large companies, 10,000s of small companies, and 1000s of governments should pursue, just eliminate the problem. Make it harder to emit carbon, and folks will figure it out. Not everybody will get it right the first time through, and there’ll be lots of competing ideas. S’OK. That’s how we do here in America.
Hansen’s uncritical support for nuclear is in some ways puzzling. As though he knew nothing of the political and economic framework that frames energy policy.
I mean, we have an energy source that looks good on paper and consistently disappoints. The real-world experience is nothing like the promise on the label. And at this point we have a surfeit of real-world experience.
Why insist that the fate of the earth depends on a technology that is inherently buggy, that in the real world would take a generation to deploy in any meaningful way? Not to mention the cost.
Climate change is not a technical or scientific problem so much as it is a political and economic one. As stomv says above, we have the tools we need to get out of this mess. Enthusiasm for nukes seems to me to come from those who are blind to the economic and political factors.
It is an almost Hegelian form of idealism: Nuclear power should work in a perfect world run by perfect people, so let’s make it so by force of will.
BTW not sure it is fair to say that Lovins believes efficiency is “enough.” He certainly believes, with some justification, that it is ripe low-hanginig fruit we have barely begun to pick.
Lovins does not believe that, as one can find out by reading Reinventing Fire (free online at rmi.org). I don’t know anyone who believes that. Hansen was constructing a straw man argument in response to a question I asked about the fact that the US energy budget has been at or below 100 quadrillion btu’s for about 20 years now and that about 60% of the energy we produce is “rejected” or wasted, does no useful work (exergy, exergy, exergy). I asked, specifically, whether we have an energy problem or an efficiency problem and he responded with the straw man “efficiency is enough” argument and a bit of Jevons paradox as related to LEDs and lighting.
I don’t hold it against him.
I’m not sure I agree that nuclear power “disappoints” at all, and I know I don’t share your contention that it “consistently disappoints.” In terms of safety, I am aware of no benchmark where nuclear (in the US) hasn’t delivered a compellingly better record than its fossil-fuel alternatives. Deaths, injuries, diseases, industrial accidents, damage from natural disasters — I think there have NO disappointments.
It seems to me that the question of how to dispose of nuclear waste is the most serious safety issue regarding nuclear power. Even that one, in my view, has solutions if we are willing to invest in them. I also don’t share your contention that nuclear technology is “inherently buggy”. I don’t even know what you mean by “inherently buggy”. America has, for a variety of reasons, essentially NO experience with current nuclear technology (not including military applications). Even with the technology we have, I’m not sure its “bugs” are any more “inherent” than any of the fossil fuel alternatives, and our current technology manages those bugs to produce a safety record that far surpasses the fossil-fuel alternatives.
I don’t minimize the grave catastrophe in Japan. I also don’t find it particularly relevant to the question of whether or not we should build new nuclear plants. If we enumerate all the known risks, address all the known risks (at great expense, BTW), and still conclude that nuclear is “too dangerous”, then I don’t know how distinguish that response from plain old everyday fear of the unknown. People once feared that exceeding a speed of 20MPH would cause death.
I do think there is a serious expense question, and a serious return on investment problem. I think nuclear should pass or fail based on its economic and political factors.
to its performance as a source of energy.
I don’t mind bandying about health and safety, which is certainly linked to economic performance (though I would say, not linked enough). But as you say,
And, it has. Totally.
Amputating a healthy arm or leg is never an option one would normally choose. If the hand or foot is trapped in a jammed door and the bomb explodes in fifteen minutes, then amputation is preferable to death.
I understand the economic issues that nuclear power has had until now. A great many of those are a result of a positive feedback cycle with poor decisions we’ve made about waste.
The cost of unmitigated climate change is astronomical. So large that it makes a number of otherwise untenable investments look attractive in comparison. Spending a few billion on nuclear may look awful in comparison to, for example, a few more millions on fossil fuel (during a “transition phase”, of course). On the other hand, that same few billion for nuclear looks much more attractive than the trillions or thousands of trillions that runaway climate change will cost.
I’ve felt, for awhile, that the solution to the nuclear waste issue is to rocket it into deep space. While it’s true that there are major risks involved during the launch process, those are at least quantifiable, solvable by known technology, and fall within the envelope of current science and engineering.
Storing that same waste — waste that remains highly toxic for longer than humanity has known how to make concrete or glass — falls far outside that envelope. We don’t know what happens to the material, we don’t know what happens to the geology, we don’t know what happens to the containment. The current waste storage options have more risks, are NOT solvable by known technology, and fall well outside the envelope of current science and engineering.
That’s why nuclear waste is expensive, and that in turn has a great deal to do with why nuclear power is expensive.
Having said all that, current nuclear waste management approaches have a reasonable margin of safety for something like a thousand years. Unmitigated climate change will pretty much destroy humanity well before then.
I think we should keep ALL our options on the table.