Cooling on Warming

This is sure to annoy the radical greenies. A key passage:

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.

Environmental "Truth" in a Nutshell

Yesterday my family visited the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland. Pretty cool; definitely recommended. It's on a hilltop overlooking the bay, in a beautiful state park, and has many nice exhibits for ages 4-12 or so.

On the downside, a big chunk of the museum is given over to Bill Nye the Climate Guy. One attraction was a bicycle kids could ride while watching a video of Bill biking in front, and confronting a boy and his father for driving to the gym. "Why don't you bike or walk to the gym, or better yet, give up those gym memberships altogether?" says Bill. "Why don't you mind your own *&^# business?" I wanted them to respond.

But the worst one, and this really sums up something essential about the environmentalists, was a wind turbine demonstration. You were supposed to pull a handle, which started a flow of air going, that turned the wind turbines and made a light go on. Simple. Only, when I tried it, because of the angle of the turbine blades, the wind didn't make them turn. They just juddered and rocked back and forth, never actually making more than a few degrees of rotation in either direction.

But the light came on anyway. Obviously, the demo had been rigged: when you pulled the handle, it made the light go on. The turbine had nothing to do with it. I get why a museum would do this, of course: you want the demos to work and not frustrate the kids. But the irony is thick: environmentalists constantly try to rig the numbers to make it look like converting to a more expensive, less efficient form of energy production will create jobs, or to make it look like wind plants produce more energy than they do, or what have you. Are here they are rigging a museum demo about one of their pet technologies. Priceless.

Clean Energy: Pro and Con

If you have a couple of hours, watch this. It's the video of a debate on the proposition: "Clean energy can drive America’s economic recovery." Or if you can't watch the video, you can read the transcript or listen to the debate.

On Nuclear Accidents

Just read an interesting article by Ed Grabianowski on io9 about nuclear accidents and near-disasters. Couple of quotes:

We spent the Cold War in perpetual fear that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would start an intentional nuclear conflict. The truth is, we came far closer to blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons than we ever came to WWIII.... The Russians either lost a nuclear sub, lost a sub with nuclear weapons on board, had a nuclear sub's reactor melt down, or all three roughly every other week.... The sad lesson is that we have less to fear from naked aggression than we do from incompetence and bad engineering.

I don't mean to diminish the danger of nuclear accidents, and certainly there was a learning curve involved here - a very dangerous learning curve (it's notable that all the incidents listed occurred between 1950 and 1979, and all the ones in which radiation was released occurred before 1966). But Grabianowski betrays his own politics with some of these claims. How can he know we came "closer to blowing ourselves up than to WWIII"? There were several incidents that came close to sparking WWIII, too - which was "closer"?

It's tempting to think that, as close as some of these engineering mishaps were, they actually weren't as close as the author thinks. Grabianowski himself points out that the Russians had accidents all the time that never had the dire consequences he imagines (other than Chernobyl). That strikes me as evidence that nuclear engineering is not as prone to actual disaster scenarios as the author thinks.

Grabianowski's closing quote, that we have less to fear from aggression than from incompetence, is utter nonsense. Even restricting our historical view just to nuclear weaponry, it's hard to ignore the fact that far more people have been killed by atomic weapons than by atomic accidents. In fact, it's possible that more people were killed on 9/11 than by Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history. (Wikipedia says: "It is estimated that there will ultimately be a total of 4,000 deaths attributable to the accident, due to increased cancer risk." But these estimates are notoriously unreliable, and impossible to prove. In any case, the numbers are comparable.) The twentieth century witnessed hundreds of millions die as a result of naked aggression, and two or three orders of magnitude less due to engineering mishaps.

The numerical comparison demonstrates the absurdity of the claim. But the philosophy behind it is also wrongheaded. Does Grabianowski believe that our military is more dangerous in peacetime than it is valuable in wartime? Having a nuclear-armed military runs the risk of accident. Building and operating nuclear power plants runs similar risks. But in both cases, there is significant return on this investment. In the field of nuclear technology, it is much easier to imagine disaster scenarios than to actually find them.

We should be cautious, but not allow our caution to stop us moving at all. Doing nothing, or worse, doing the wrong things, also runs risks. Suppose the Global Warming people are right. Then we should be building nuclear plants at breakneck speed. The risk of accident should be overwhelmed by the risk (according to the most dire claims of the Warmingists) of warming. But in many cases those very environmentalists block nuclear power, preferring pie-in-the-sky plans involving solar or wind power. The result is what no one wants: ever greater dependency on fossil fuels.

Grabianowski probably was not thinking all of these things when he wrote the article. I have no reason to believe that he is a nuclear-power-protesting environmentalist. Nonetheless, his article feeds a nucleophobia that we as a society must learn to get over.

Enviro-Fascists Show Their Colors

This is a real ad promoting an environmentalist carbon-control program. It's "voluntary", but as you can see from the ad, they'd prefer that it wasn't.

The most telling point, I think, comes at the end, when the voice-over actress gets the button treatment. Just goes to show that no matter how much you do, it isn't enough. You have to be 100% committed to environmentalism, all the time, or they want you dead (or, at least, out of the way - let's give them the benefit of the doubt).

It all reflects a very Tom Friedman-esque viewpoint: if only we had more fascism and not so much democracy, we could really get some things done!

Remember the Oil Spill?

That unprecedented environmental disaster seems to have faded a bit.

Just goes to show what Calvin Coolidge once said: if you see ten problems coming down the road, nine of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you.

The Spill in Perspective

In round figures, let's say 12 million gallons of oil have spilled since the Deepwater Horizon platform sank on April 24 (that assumes 200,000 gallons a day for 60 days).

The Gulf of Mexico contains 660 quadrillion gallons of water.

Imagine that the Gulf were the size of an Olympic-sized swimming pool (which contains about 660,000 gallons of water). On that scale, how much oil do you think has been spilled so far? About a bucket? Nope. Maybe a cup? Not even close. Perhaps a thimble? Much less even than that.

The correct figure is a volume equal to 1/14 of a single M&M candy. You can do the math yourself and verify this.

Of course, the effect will be magnified as the oil arrives on the beaches - it will be concentrated from a diffuse cloud in the ocean to the surf line. But we're still talking about an incredibly small amount of oil here. Something to bear in mind.

Gas Taxes and BP

BP could, legally, just pay the $75 million cap on liability due to an oil spill and call it done. They won't do that, of course, because they know there'd be hell to pay in the future. Maybe they could get away with paying only the maximum this time, but the U.S. could just revoke their licenses to drill in U.S. territory, and that would have a serious impact on their bottom line. So for basically political reasons, BP is caving to the White House's escrow demand, even though it isn't technically "legal." (As an aside: I seem to remember some Presidential candidate in the last election who made a big deal about the law being the law, and that we shouldn't make exceptions when it was convenient. Who was that? Hmmm.)

All that aside, what interests me here is the question of who pays for what? We're being urged, from some directions, to create a gas tax that would cover some of the externalities of using oil. One of those externalities is oil spills. OK, then the gas tax should go to paying for them; an economically efficient gas tax would raise an amount exactly equal to the cost of the externalities.

But if we had that, then BP would be off the hook, because the government would be in charge of cleanup. That would only be fair, since after all, we would have prepaid the cleanup costs. This creates a moral hazard, though, doesn't it? If BP, via its shareholders, isn't liable for the cleanup cost, then what incentive does it have to be careful? It still has some, of course: if it's caught violating the rules, then it would owe fines and might lose licenses. But the incentives would be reduced. Certainly in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill, oil company shareholders should be requiring a thorough review of the safety and emergency response measures of the companies they own. The same reviews would not be a matter of fiduciary duty if the government were cleaning up the mess and paying for it instead of BP.

With reduced safety precautions, the expected result of a gas tax, then, would be that there would be more accidents, resulting in more cleanup costs (requiring higher taxes to pay for them), and more environmental damage. It could perversely worsen the situation.

Green Rockers

NPR has a story on how modern rock-and-rollers are obsessed about their green footprints, contrasting this with their traditional reputations as cocaine-snorting hotel-room-trashers.

I suppose this could be interpreted in either of two ways: either rockers have elevated themselves to a higher moral plane, or the modern environmental movement provides them with the same self-indulgent narcissism they've always craved. You decide.

Whole Earth Discipline Previewed

One of the environmental movement's founding fathers, Stewart Brand, has a new book out: Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. In it he lays out the case why environmentalists should embrace nuclear power, genetically modified organisms, and mega-cities. The book grew out of an earlier article Brand wrote for the MIT Technology Review in 2005.

This is remarkable. Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, and preached the merits of "back-to-the-land" life, seemingly the opposite positions of those presented in his new book. But he has not given up his environmentalism; rather, he has come to the realization that modern civilization requires high technology, and that such a civilization is more likely to be environmentally friendly than is barbarism.

I have heard Brand interviewed on NPR, but have not read the book yet. When I do, I will post a complete review. This is a welcome sign that the stultified dogma of the environmental movement may finally be cracking.

No Laughing Matter

Typically incomplete piece on NPR today about nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas.

Nitrous oxide has always been a normal part of our atmosphere, "but since industrialization, its concentration has been going up," says A.R. Ravishankara at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo.

Now that synthetic chemicals are waning in the atmosphere, he wondered if other gases posed any environmental threat. As he reports in the online edition of Science magazine, nitrous oxide, a byproduct of agriculture, is a serious problem for our planet.

"There's so much being emitted, that right now, nitrous oxide emissions would be the largest ozone depleting gas emissions today, and it will continue to be in the future," Ravishankara says.

Unmentioned is the fact that there will always be some chemical that is the largest ozone depleting gas in the atmosphere. The real question is how big a problem this might be.

Ravishankara estimates that by the end of the century, we will have 4 percent less ozone in the stratosphere than we would have had before the Industrial Age, as a result of nitrous oxide.

Note the careful language: 4% less than before the Industrial Age, not less than we have right now. Total ozone depletion right now is about 3% compared to pre-1980 values. So the effect of nitrous oxide is no more than 1% over the next 90 years.

At this point the correct response, it seems to me, is sufficient interest among atmospheric scientists to keep an eye on things, and yawns and a return to our normal lives for pretty much everyone else. Looks like there's no disaster on the way. NPR doesn't take this approach, of course:

"I think that limiting nitrous oxide is going to be more difficult than, for example, limiting carbon dioxide emissions. And we know how difficult that is," she says.

That's because we need nitrogen - it's an essential part of protein. Carbon dioxide comes mostly from smokestacks and tailpipes.

"You can get your energy from other sources than carbon, but you really can't get your food from sources other than nitrogen."

We can't phase out nitrogen fertilizers, Nevison says. And studies show we could make only a modest difference if we used them more carefully.

And it's not just the ozone layer that's at issue here. Nitrous oxide also contributes to global warming - so there's another important reason to pay attention to this often neglected gas.

The implicit assumption here is that since some harm is measurably taking place, therefore we must pursue any means to mitigate it. But should we even bother trying to limit nitrous oxide emissions at the present time? This really should be an open-and-shut case: the effect is very small, the cost is very large. The faithful in the religion of environmentalism will try to persuade us that it doesn't matter, of course: Sin is being committed, therefore it must be stamped out, regardless of cost. That last sentence is particularly telling. If your case for environmental danger isn't strong enough otherwise, then by all means bring in the big gun: global warming.

The biggest problem with environmentalism (as a movement) today is that costs and benefits are never netted out. Bjorn Lomborg attempted to apply this kind of economic analysis and was summarily excommunicated for it. The IPCC does this kind of analysis on global climate change, but the results are so mild that they get no media coverage and environmentalists pretend they don't exist (or argue that the IPCC has been bought, or some such conspiracy). We should certainly take some steps to protect the environment, but people have other needs, wants, and values as well.