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Britain.s cold snap does not prove climate change wrong

Here’s what Martyn Brown says in today’s Express:

As one of the worst winters in 100 years grips the country, climate experts are still trying to claim the world is growing warmer.

There’s a clue as to where he might have gone wrong in that sentence: “country” has a slightly different meaning to “world”. Buried at the bottom of the same article is the admission that ” … other areas including Alaska, Canada and the Mediterranean were warmer than usual.” But that didn’t stop Brown from using the occasion to note that “critics of the global warming lobby said the public were no longer prepared to be conned into believing that man-made emissions were adding to the problem.”

The ability to distinguish trends from complex random events is one of the traits that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. It is also the basis of all science; detecting patterns, distinguishing between signal and noise, and the means by which the laws of physics, chemistry and biology are determined. Now we are being asked to commit ourselves to the wilful stupidity of extrapolating a long-term trend from a single event.

The Express would have us return to the days in which the future course of human affairs could be predicted by solar eclipses and the appearance of comets. It has clearly made a calculated decision in recent months that climate scepticism plays to its readership – and therefore shifts papers – just as the daily drip-feed of conspiracy theories about Princess Diana and Madeleine McCann has done in the past.

Brown is by no means alone in his idiocy. On Sunday, the Telegraph and the Mail published almost identical articles; one by Christopher Booker, the other by his long-term collaborator, Richard North. Both claimed that the Met Office had predicted a mild winter, and that it had made this prediction because it has been “hijacked” by a group of fanatics – led first by its former chief executive Sir John Houghton, now by the current boss Robert Napier – who stand accused of seeking to to corrupt forecasts to make them conform to their theories on climate change.

If this story were true, it would be huge: the UK’s official weather forecasting service is deliberately changing its forecasts to make them fit a political agenda. It would also be fantastically stupid, as forecasts can always be checked against delivery. Booker and North offer no evidence to support this humongous conspiracy theory, just a load of unrelated facts cobbled together in the usual fashion.

Even their premise – that the Met Office “confidently predicted a warmer than average winter for Britain” – is wrong. Here’s what it actually said:

Early indications are that it’s looking like temperatures will be near or above average. But there’s still a one in seven chance of a cold winter – with temperatures below average.

No confidence there, no certainty, and no single prediction. But Booker and North use the presumed contrast between the forecast (which was, of course, for the whole winter) and the current event to imply not only that climate change is a giant conspiracy coordinated by the Met Office, but that long-term temperatures are not rising. North suggests that the regional cold snap derails the global temperature prediction for the whole of 2010.

Echoing each other’s fantasies, extracting sweeping conclusions from single events, these two are like the Old Man and Ross in Macbeth.

John Redwood, the Tory MP for Wokingham, was at it in the Commons yesterday, too, when putting a question to Ed Miliband, after the secretary of state for climate change and energy had made a statement about the Copenhagen climate change conference.

Redwood: Why are we in the northern hemisphere having such a very cold winter this year? Which climate model predicted that?

Miliband: I can hardly believe that question, Mr Deputy Speaker. The weather fluctuates, as anyone knows, and the notion that a cold spell in Britain disproves the science of climate change is something that I believe not even the Right Hon. Gentleman believes.

Redwood was evidently not happy with the “weather fluctuates” response and returned to the issue this morning on his blog:

I was expecting some answer that told me you can have severe winters within a pattern of global warming, with reference to some climate change model analysis which allowed for adverse variations within the assumed pattern of warming. How wrong I was. Instead Mr M threw his toys out of the pram, declined to offer a civil answer to a civil question, and told me the science of global warming was settled! Some other MP from a sedentary position offered the profound advice that I needed to understand climate was different from weather.

It’s a pity really that he didn’t listen to the profoundly obvious advice being offered by the MP in the sedentary position, but that would have undermined his climate scepticism that oh-so-conveniently chimes with his free-market, anti-EU, rightwing views. But isn’t that the story with so much of the climate scepticism on offer these days? It seems to be far less about genuine scientific scepticism and more about confirmation bias of a politicised world view.

One wonders, too, how Australia’s legion of climate sceptics are currently spinning today’s news from the country’s Bureau of Meteorology which states that the past 10 years were officially the hottest decade since records began.

Yes, it is colder than usual in some parts of the northern hemisphere, and warmer than usual in others. Alaska and northern Canada are 5-10C warmer than the average for this time of year, so are North Africa and the Mediterranean. The cold and the warmth could be related: the contrasting temperatures appear to be connected to blocks of high pressure preventing air flow between the land and the sea.

This is called weather, and, believe it or not, it is not always predictable and it changes quite often. It is not the same as climate, and single events are not the same as trends. Is this really so hard to understand?

Posted by Leo Hickman and George Monbiot Wednesday 6 January 2010 13.44 GMT guardian.co.uk

The resurgence of el nino means that 2010 could be the hottest year on record

“If that keeps up for the next few months, it will result in a great deal of heat being pumped into the atmosphere,” added Smith. “The signs are that it will. If so, our computer models indicate that this year is more likely than not to be the hottest on record. Even if it isn’t, I am quite sure a record breaker will still occur in the next few years.”

The headlines then will look very different from the “Britain in deep freeze” variety that have appeared over the past few days, though we should note a key caveat here. Soaring global temperatures do not guarantee hot weather for Britain. We may still get a poor summer, but that does not mean the world is not continuing to heat up, a point ignored by most climate-change deniers.

In fact, there is a world of difference between the British weather at any given time and the inexorable shift that is taking place in the climate of the planet, as Peter Inness, a Reading University meteorologist, makes clear. “Britain covers only a very small part of the globe. It takes up less than one thousandth of the world’s surface. The temperature here is almost irrelevant when considering the issue of global climate change.”

It is a point that should be kept in mind as councils struggle to grit roads, cars and vans slither on the ice, exams are disrupted, and farmers battle to get food to their animals. Yes, we are feeling the cold but many other parts of the world are having no such problem, as Richard Betts, head of climate impact at the Met Office, argues.

“It is true that Britain is having a spell of extremely cold weather, as is much of northern Europe and the United States. But at the same time, Canada and the Mediterranean region are having unusually warm weather for the time of year. We shouldn’t get so absorbed with what is going on in our backyard.”

This argument is also made by Inness – though rather more forcibly. “I think it is really stupid to say that the current cold weather proves that climate change is not happening. Climate refers to changes in the weather patterns over a 20- to 40-year period. What is happening in Britain at present represents little more than a point on a graph.”

This takes us to the heart of the matter. Meteorologists may make errors with specific long-range forecasts. (This winter was more likely to be mild than severe, they thought.) There is no doubt about the overall trend. Each year, humanity pumps billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The inevitable result will be global warming and major, catastrophic climate change.

It is a bit like playing Pooh sticks, says Betts. “When you throw sticks off a bridge, you know they will all be swept downstream. You just don’t know which one will move the fastest. It is the same with climate and the weather. We know the world is warming inexorably but we cannot say specifically which year is going to be the warmest. We can only indicate what are the general prospects of getting a record-breaking year. And despite the horrible weather at present, it is quite possible that we will get one this year.”

The proliferation of nuclear panic is poltitics at its most ghoulish

Radiation, says Allison, is nothing like as dangerous as the anti-nuclear lobby and its paranoid regulators claim. The permitted radiation level in the waste storage hall at Sellafield is so low (1 mSv per hour) as to be negligible, a figure achieved at vast cost in construction and inspection. This compares with the 100 mSv threshold for even remote cancer risk and 5,500 for radiation sickness. According to Allison, someone would have to live for a million hours in Sellafield to absorb the same radiation as is administered in a hospital radiotherapy suite. Higher doses are permitted in food processing and even in medicinal resorts, with supposed beneficial or at least harmless effects. Only yesterday research suggested that mobile phone radiation may relieve Alzheimer’s.

Allison analyses successive studies into the only serious nuclear accident since Hiroshima, the Chernobyl fire, which killed no more than 60 people, all in close contact with the fire. Other than some thyroid cancers caused chiefly by a failure to distribute iodine tablets, long-term cancers in survivors were below the regional average. The truth is that low-dose radiation effects wear off quickly. In some parts of India and Brazil people live happily with ambient radiation of 200-300 mSv.

Yet the mere word, Chernobyl, induces such terror in regulators as to lead to the unnecessary sterilisation of thousands of acres (with now thriving wildlife) and the continued slaughter of Cumbrian sheep, despite the risk to lamb-eaters being negligible. The trouble is that nobody makes money by downplaying risk. Nuclear inspectors need work, and contractors can claim astronomical safety costs, assuming that governments will pay. The losers are the public and life on earth.

Meanwhile, over in Ohio, Mueller describes the same terror infecting reaction to nuclear weapons. He points out that nuclear bombs are extremely hard to make, let alone deploy, and their destructive power and radiological aftermath are grossly overstated. The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was largely the result of the buildings bombed being made of wood. Numbers killed were similar to those dying in conventional bomb attacks at the time. Yet we memorialise Hiroshima but not Tokyo, where 100,000 were killed in March 1945. Subsequent diseases from exposure to low-level radiation were harder to detect. Modern nuclear weapons are obviously more powerful, but again their blast areas would remain limited and their likely contamination, says Mueller, much exaggerated.

I used to believe that, for all their horror, atom bombs brought an end to the war in Japan – which other bombs had failed to do. After that war, they stabilised the nervous confrontation between east and west, deterring Soviets and Americans from going jointly berserk at such flashpoints as Berlin, Hungary or Cuba. Deterrence sort of worked.

History may be moot on those points, but what is surely clear is that nuclear weapons are now virtually useless. Like Allison, Mueller goes beyond the two iconic incidents of Hiroshima and Chernobyl to show how special interests have hijacked the nuclear mystique to exploit public fear.

The risk of anyone exploding a nuclear weapon, even in politically charged regions such as the Middle East, is infinitesimally small. Whoever did so would be too mad to be deterred by an enemy possessing nuclear weapons, any more than Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, Argentina’s Galtieri or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein were deterred by America and Britain. Nor, says Mueller, would the consequence of even a serious bomb attack be as horrible as is claimed. Cities recover with remarkable alacrity, as even Hiroshima did from contamination. The second world war and many American bombing campaigns since have shown that human settlements are resilient to aerial bombardment.

As for the much-vaunted risk of a terrorist getting a nuclear weapon – the “1% chance” that kept poor Dick Cheney awake at night – Mueller points out that the chance must be not one in a hundred but one in millions. Cheney would have done better worrying about the proliferation of AK47s. Even were a “dirty” bomb somehow to be assembled and deployed, its radiological contamination is exaggerated by defence contractors and lobbyists frantic for contracts.

The billions of dollars being devoted to countering “cataclysmic” terrorism, in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Yemen, and to confronting such proto-nuclear states as Iran or North Korea, is not just disproportionate to the risk. The money would be better spent on other ways of reducing terrorism. In a futile pursuit of nuclear non-proliferation, America and Britain are combing the world accusing states of threatening somehow to destroy their civilisations when the risk of this happening is near meaningless.

As Mueller notes, it is not only ghoulish science and ghoulish journalism that sells, ghoulish politics does too. He has nothing against negotiating nuclear non-proliferation, but pleads “to avoid policies that can lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people under the obsessive sway of worst-case scenario fantasies”, as is the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is these fantasies that line the streets of Wootton Bassett each week.

It is a monumental irony that rightwing politicians who rearm against the tiny risk to humanity from nuclear weapons are often the same as deny the risk to humanity from global warming. Both are risks. Both may be improbable, but the risk from radiation is minimal and containable, while the worst-case scenario from global warming is truly cataclysmic. Nor is such hypocrisy confined to the right. Many of those who claim global warming as the “greatest threat to the planet” tend also to be those who oppose nuclear energy as “too risky”, or even too expensive.

This is all a massive failure of science to pierce the carapace of public ignorance. As Allison and Mueller argue, nothing is as potent as the politics of fear, and there is no fear as blind as that which comes from a bomb and a death ray. So what is science doing? The world is in the grip of a prejudice from which nothing seems able to free it. At least these books try.

Coral reefs crucial to origin of new marine species, finds study

Wolfgang Kiessling of the Humboldt University of Berlin, who led the study, said: “We found that coral reefs are very active at generating biodiversity in the oceans, and that they export biodiversity to other ecosystems. This was a surprise because many people had assumed that reefs were ecological attracters – that species go there from other places.”

He and colleagues in Germany and the US studied a database of fossil organisms that lived on the sea floor from the Cambrian period, about 500m years ago. They compared the number of new genera that first appeared in coral reefs with those in other shallow-water environments and found the reefs were responsible for about 50% more. The results are published tomorrow in the journal Science.

The team looked at fossils of so-called benthic organisms, such as starfish, clams and corals that live on the seabed. They ignored fossils of fish, which do not offer clues to where they evolve, because after they die their remains can float elsewhere.

Kiessling said the study offered extra incentive to protect coral reefs. “If we lose the coral reefs we lose the ability for marine ecosystems to generate new species in the future. I suspect that new species evolve every single day, but unfortunately not as fast as they go extinct.”

Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere damages coral as seas become warmer, which causes the coral to bleach, and become more acidic, which makes it hard for the tiny animals to repair their exoskeletons.

Experts say the world has already passed the safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for coral reefs, and even the most ambitious carbon cuts planned for coming decades will fail to save them

Oil Production Waste Stream: A Soutce of Electrical Power

Two formations at NPR-3, the Pennsylvanian Tensleep and Mississippian Madison formations, produce sufficient hot water to generate low-temperature geothermal energy. The current flowing water resource from these formations is 45,000 barrels of water per day (BWPD). The present and potential areas for Tensleep and Madison production are shown in Figure 2 (below). The average production temperature for the Tensleep is 195°F to 200°F and for the Madison is 200°F to 210°F. Currently, hot water in the oil field is a waste stream and is treated through a series of treatment ponds and then discharged into an adjacent stream. Projections suggest that with minor work on existing wells, the rate for the combined Tensleep and Madison produced water would be between 126,000 and 210,000 BWPD.

NPR-3 is not located in an area of known high surface heat flow (Figure 3, below), so the produced water temperatures seen from the relatively moderate depths of 5,500 feet are anomalous for the area. Based on the temperatures observed from Tensleep and Madison production, the local geothermal gradient is 3.0°F per 100 feet of depth (55 C per km). This compares with an average thermal gradient for the southern Powder River Basin of 2.2°F per 100 feet. As the figure suggests, the heat flow at Teapot Dome is more similar to the “Battle Mountain High” of northern Nevada.

The water resource in both the Tensleep and Madison formations is continuously recharged from mountains to the west (Figure 4, below) and the Tensleep reservoir has a strong water drive, resulting in no loss of reservoir pressure (2,350 PSI) over 30 years of production. The hydrologic system in the area must have the groundwater heated by proximity to deep basement rocks prior to entering the Teapot Dome anticline.

The Demonstration Project

In January 2007, Reno, Nev.-based Ormat Nevada Inc., which develops and operates geothermal power plants in Nevada, California and Hawaii, entered into a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with DOE at RMOTC to perform a validation of an Ormat organic Rankine cycle (ORC) power system to generate commercial electricity from hot water produced at a typical oil field. The project is designed to validate the premise that a binary geothermal power generation system that uses the hot water produced by an oil field can reliably generate commercial electricity. For the demonstration, Ormat supplied the ORC power unit while RMOTC installed and is operating the facility for a 12-month period.

Prior to this test, hot water in the oil field was considered a waste stream and treated through a series of treatment ponds and discharged into an adjacent stream. The ORC power unit was connected into the field electrical system and the produced energy is metered and monitored for reliability and quality. The produced electricity from the Tensleep wells is presently being used to power field production equipment.

The 250 kW unit arrived in the field as three skids with associated parts. The three main components were an 8 ft by 40 ft vaporizer skid–which also contained the turbine, generator and instrumentation cabinet–and two 8 ft by 40 ft finned-tube condensers. The assembly was completed in about one month using an oil field roustabout crew and contract welders (Figure 5, below). The unit was wired directly into a 480-volt leg of the field power distribution system. Power from the unit is metered and monitored for reliability and quality. For field safety purposes, the Ormat unit was installed such that the unit will shut down if the main field power is interrupted.

The power generation system was installed in August 2008. The unit’s design was based on a relatively low produced water temperature of 170°F and an average ambient temperature of 50°F, as shown in Table 1 (below). At design conditions, the nominal 250 kW unit would produce a gross power of 180 kW (net 132 kW). However, between initial design and installation, two major changes were made. On the equipment design, the pump for the working fluid–isopentane–was incorporated into the turbine-generator package. By incorporating this feature, the unit’s parasitic electrical load was decreased. On the field side, the Tensleep production facility was upgraded and an insulated, produced water storage tank installed. This upgrade kept the produced water temperature in the 195°F to 198°F range.

The higher inlet water temperature allows the system to operate nearer the maximum net power output of 225 kW. Since the system was put into full-time service in September 2008, the net power output has ranged from 80 kW to 280 kW. The output power fluctuates with the average daily ambient temperature when a constant hot water inlet volume is used (Figure 6, below). Through Feb. 9, 2009, the unit had produced over 586,000 kWh of power from 3 million barrels of hot water.

Until last February, the generation system was online 90 percent of the time. If the downtime caused by shutting down the system as a result of field power loss is removed, then the online percentage is 98 percent. System-related downtime was largely the result of the operator’s learning curve.

In February, the unit was shut down because of operational problems. It was determined that changes in the control system and repairs to the generator/turbine system were needed. The existing control system could not prevent higher than desired heat loads caused by daily ambient temperature fluctuations and a constant setting of hot-water flow rate. The high heat loads damaged the generator’s rear bearing. The unit was removed, repaired and reinstalled with a new control system. Repairs consisted of replacing the generator bearings and the mechanical seal between the turbine and generator. The new control system included installing a hot-water flow control valve, a turbine vibrator sensor and temperature probes on both generator bearings. The startup control for the unit was also changed providing for a smoother, trouble-free startup. The unit was restarted on May 7, 2009.

Evaluation of changes to the system for better control of the inlet hot water to reduce fluctuating output power and the ability to generate power above 250 kW are being made. A newly formed collaborative initiative with the DOE’s Geothermal Technologies Program will continue to operate the existing 250 kW unit (Ormat) for three more years and install a second 250 kW unit at an additional site in the north of the field (this one to be water cooled with associated cooling tower) and operate it for three years. In addition, RMOTC will develop a geothermal testing facility for testing small scale prototype power production systems requiring either air or water cooling.

Copenhagen blame game is obstacle to 2010 climate deal

Then it was China’s turn. Writing in The Guardian, UK energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband condemned China for vetoing emission targets supported by “a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries” and suggested the country had “hijacked” the negotiations. He was supported by the writer and journalist Mark Lynas, who had been at the heart of the bargaining as an adviser to the Maldives. Lynas took to The Guardian’s pages with a detailed, first-hand account of how the emerging superpower had “wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an ‘awful’ deal so that western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.”

China, predictably, hit back, calling Miliband’s comments “unfair and irresponsible” and accusing him of “trying to shirk the obligations of developed countries.” China had “performed no worse than any others,” its officials insisted.

Then the European Union weighed in, saying it was “obvious” that both China and the United States “did not want more than we achieved in Copenhagen.” It, in turn, was heavily criticized for joining U.S. opposition to the continuance of the Kyoto Protocol and for failing to rally other countries to ambitious emissions targets. Just about everybody blasted the Danes for their how they chaired the conference, while many identified widespread failures in the UN negotiating system, which British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called “at best flawed, at worst chaotic.”

If success has many fathers, as the saying goes, failure breeds a host of unpleasant, caught-out children, all trying to shift the blame to a sibling. And there is plenty to go around.

For what it is worth, China deserves most of it. It led the disruption in plenaries that made it impossible for the conference to get down to serious negotiating, took the targets out of the “accord” that finally resulted and has expressed more pleasure at the emasculated outcome than any other country.

The United States certainly made mistakes, particularly in its approach to China. But in the weeks preceding Copenhagen, the Americans moved quite far (despite political pressures from a wary Congress), and President Obama worked hard to rescue some sort of a deal at the actual gathering. The environmentalists’ failure to recognize this suggests that deep-seated anti-Americanism continues even after the departure of the much-loathed Bush administration. And though the EU should have taken more of a lead and was foolish to join in attempts to undermine the Kyoto Protocol, its leaders led the last-minute rescue missions in Copenhagen.

The Danes were undoubtedly not up to the job of charing the gathering. Indeed, the accord only won arms-length acceptance from the plenary after the Danish prime minister, Lars Løkke Ramussen, was quietly ejected from the chair. This type of situation probably won’t be a problem next December in Mexico, not least because a developing country will be presiding. And the shambolic failure of the UN system, not just in Copenhagen but over the whole of the last year (leading even one of its stalwarts, Malta’s Michael Zammit Cutajar, to confess “its tough to keep the belief in it”) is leading to an unprecedented drive for reform.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced he was setting up a “high-level panel” to see “how to streamline the negotiations process,” adding that he wanted to discuss “how we can do better” with governments and civil society. And that was just one sign of the most remarkable development of the last ten days. For even as the blame flew around, the key participants—far from taking refuge in it, and scaling down their commitments—were actually underlining their determination to do more.

Obama reemphasized his resolve to get a cap-and trade bill through Congress, insisting that clean energy will “drive economic growth for decades to come.” Gordon Brown said he would be stepping up efforts to get a climate treaty. And France’s Nicolas Sarkozy offered to host a summit this spring of the leaders that signed the Copenhagen accord, while Angela Merkel’s Germany will host a ministerial meeting in June.

Mexico pledged to press for the most controversial international commitment of all—a 50 percent global emissions cut by 2050—as part of “a binding international agreement” under its chairmanship. Brazil announced it would stick to its own ambitious targets. India—whose celebration of the Copenhagen’s failure was second only to China’s—launched a plan for special “green economic zones.” And China announced new regulations to increase the use of renewable energy.

Welding all this into a new treaty remains a formidable task, probably more so than before the Copenhagen summit opened. But there is still much to work with, if only governments can start working together.

The first step is to move beyond the finger-pointing. As Yvo de Boer, the UN official in charge of the negotiations, pointed out last week: “These countries will have to sit down together next year, so blaming each other for what happened will not help.”