Graphs of words show Climate Change is still increasing, while Global Warming has stabilised

According to this graph from Google Ngram, Climate change is still increasing. Ngram measures how often words are used in our language by counting occurrences in a huge swath of publications that have been digitised. This is a form of corpus linguistics, a field of study that goes back to Vedic scholars counting the occurrences of different sounds in Sansrkit holy texts. Arabic scholars also studied the Koran, and back in 1230 Hugo de Saint Cher made a concordance of the Bible, noting where and how often each word appeared in the holy book. Computers have made this a lot easier, and Corpus Linguistics has really taken off since the 1960s.
Ngram opens that door to anyone interested in what people have been writing, and we can see here that climate change, global warming and greenhouse effect all steadily increased until the mid 1980s, where they received a bit of boost. Global warming used to be more commonly used than climate change, but slowed and then plateaued in the early 1990s, slighly increasing since. At about the same time use of the phrase "greenhouse effect" peaked.

A climate denier may be tempted to interpret this as the greenhouse effect peaking in 1992 and decreasing since, and evidence that the data for climate change and global warming have been tampered with by NASA.

My interpretation is that discussion of this topic became increasingly important from the 1970s, initially led by discussion of the greenhouse effect. This is the method by which global warming was
happening, and reliable historical temperature data began to become available from this time.

By the end of the 1980s the discussion of how global warming happened was more or less decided, and we didn't need to talk about the greenhouse effect so much. I suspect discussion of "round earth" peaked shortly into the age of discovery when returning ships removed any serious doubt about the shape of the planet.

Global warming and climate change were discussed equally, and largely synonymously until 1992. It's not clear why this happened, but in 2002 a Republican party memo by Frank Lunz recommended that the term "climate change" was used rather than "global warming", which people found frightening. It seems that George W Bush did respond to the calls to "stop global warming" by not using the phrase any more. This is not exactly what people wanted! (See also Guardian, 4th March 2003).

A more detailed linguistic investigation by Dr. Martin Döring of the Institute for Geography at the University of Hamburg into perceptions of regional climate change in North Frisia found: "six prevailing conceptual metaphors: Climate change is an enemy, preventing climate change is fight/war, climate change is punishment for human sins, climate change is overheating/heat, climate change is hot air/hoax and climate change is eco-dictatorship."

Those of us who want to "fight" climate change need to take account of the last idea: climate change as eco-dictatorship. For some people this may be overwhelming, for examples libertarians who make up the right wing of the US Republican Party, for whom denial of climate change is perhaps primarily a rejection of government intervention.

What percentage of climate denial is driven by fossil fuels?

Although some people claim denial of climate change is not happening, there is a clear consensus among scientists that denial is real, and that it presents severe and long-lasting risks to humanity. There is also a clear consensus that a large proportion of this denial has come from fossil fuel industry emissions.

Actually just a drained rice field in late summer

Some claim that the observed climate change denial is due to other sources, for example scientific research. However, it is difficult to find evidence of understanding of the scientific process within these claims. This is an important markers that we would expect to see if climate change denial actually had anything to do with science.

"But how much of the climate change denial we see recently can be attributed the fossil fuel industry?"

This is a question than often confuses scientists, since it is obvious that if there were no fossil fuel industry, there would be negligible anthropogenic climate change, and no denial. However, it is helpful to look more closely at this question. 

Winter, in case you forgot how it looked

Climate change denial is a complex phenomenon, and it is often difficult to separate primary causes from secondary and tertiary feedback. For example fossil-fuel generated denial can have a knock-on effect on coverage in the scientifically illiterate media and in right-wing blog posts. These can act as amplifiers, so a single fossil-fuel source that leaks into the media can result in thousands of pages on the internet, each of which can generate hundreds of comments.  

Reduction in fossil fuel industry-generated denial is an essential step to stopping denial. However, many of these secondary and tertiary effects are likely to continue long after the fossil-fuel industry has stopped the emission of denial.

Denial has other drivers including extreme libertarianism, religious dogmatism, contrarianism, and people just being stupid. While fossil industry denial is the biggest driver, some of these other forms can be much more potent. For example, libertarian denial can activate a broad spectrum of people skeptical about the power of government. 

There is also a strong danger of irreversible denial tipping points. Once people have denied scientific method and the media, they may permanently lose a reasoned understanding of the world they live in. This will not only make them pose a greater risk to the environment, but may also put them at a greater risk from an environment that will change around them because of their actions and in spite of their words. 

Clearly the fossil fuel industry must put in place policies and procedures to reduce denial, with a timeline for reaching zero denial. However, this will not be sufficient on its own, and we must also be wary of other sources of denial. 

Reasons to be skeptical about climate change - or not

Six months ago when I was collecting suggestions for debate proposals in a class of second-year university science students, I had to politely reject one about global warming being caused by humans. I asked the class for a show of hands, and nobody was against this. "We can't really debate this," I had to tell them. "Nobody disagrees that global warming is caused by humans."

  

Since then, the climate change debate has reared its ugly head again. But it's not so much about whether climate change is true, or what can be done about it. It's more like a punch up between the protagonists in Fight Club. On one side the argument is that the science is irrelevant. On the other side, it is that politicians don't understand science. Debate is not really happening because the two sides are not engaging. One side is attacking "climate deniers" and the other is attacking "climate warmists". Nobody identifies themselves with these titles. 

Below are a few of the kinds of arguments that you'll hear, and what is wrong with them. 

Cherry picking of data 

"My grandfather smoked 20 cigarettes a day, drank, ate meat and lived to 95"

Ok, maybe he did, but my grandfather smoked, drank, ate meat and died at the age of 46. Neither of these proves anything about the connection between lifestyle and longevity, any more than rolling a dice once and getting a 1 will tell you what is on the other sides, how many sides the dice has, whether it's loaded, or what will happen on the next roll.

Climate science requires long and broad sets of data to find whether it's getting warmer or not. One swallow does not make a summer, and one snowball does not mean that global warming is a lie. The butterfly you saw in February is not proof that the world is getting warmer, but it is evidence, and taken with all the other evidence, it becomes very difficult to deny. See this list of climate monitoring groups that say the world is not getting warmer. 

Expecting scientists to be 100% sure

"There's a big black bear coming to kill you!"

"No, I think you'll find it's just a really dark shade of brown"

The reality with science is that nobody is ever 100% sure. Scientists often show how sure they are with a "p" followed by a percentage. That percentage is the probability that the results they saw were the result of a coincidence. Predictions should always have ranges, and in fact one problem between the media and the scientists who have tried to communicate with media is that these ranges are often left out.

So for example you get stories like Heat-related deaths will rise 257% by 2050 because of climate change. Not 256%, not 258%, but 257%! The original paper says "around 257%" in the abstract, and the actual paper no doubt gives margins of error. Unfortunately the actual science is protected by a pay wall, so we can't easily get it. We can get this headline, which will almost certainly be wrong, and access will be completely free to blog posts saying that scientists got it wrong again. 

Next time, please write something like: "Heat-related deaths to increase two and a half times by 2050...".   

There's an article here from the Max Planck institute saying there is a 1.7±0.5 mm per year rise in sea levels over the 20th century. That's a huge margin of error, but note that even the lower level means the sea rose over 120 mm in a hundred years. In their wildest dreams the sea level did not fall. 

Turning arguments against you

"No you're a big fat idiot"

People seeking to attack the climate science will often turn arguments around. 

For example:

Oil companies have been accused of a conspiracy to cover up global warming -> Scientists are accused of a conspiracy by the renewable energy industry to create climate science

The media were accused of taking information out of context from Climategate emails immediately before Copenhagen Climate Talks that helped sink any agreement there -> NOAA scientists were recently accused of speeding global warming data to publication immediately before Paris Climate Talks to create agreement

Right wing politicians have political objections to climate change and have attacked the science ->  Scientists are accused of politicising the science.  

Strategically what is happening here is a takeover of the rhetoric. The intention is that when we hear "climate change" and "conspiracy", instead of thinking of the well-documented conspiracies by oil executives to promote junk science, people will be duped into imagining some a group of communists who have got together to create climate science.

Accusations of hypocrisy

"If you ... you cannot be an environmentalist"

Where the "..." could be any of a number of things that have an impact on the environment, for example have children, drive a car, fly, use a computer, cook food, or breathe.

This is first of all an ad hominem attack, where things have turned from attacking arguments to attacking the person arguing. These kinds of attacks happen on both sides of tribal conflicts, and do not help. The establishment loves accusing idealists of hypocrisy, although ironically they often fail to see hypocrisy in themselves.

This kind of argument puts excessive restraints on who can be classified an environmentalist, which gives an excuse for many people to do nothing. It also seeks to create a gap between environmentalists and everyone else, making it more difficult for people to take environmental positions.

And these arguments often miss the point of environmentalism. For all but a lunatic fringe, environmentalism is not really about saving the planet. It is about making sure the planet can save us. For example, it is an admirable choice to not have children since population is a multiplier of environmental damage, but the whole point of environmentalism is to make a planet where our children, and their children can survive. 

Environmentalists are not all soppy romantics desperate to save cute furry animals and to hug trees. They are pragmatists who appreciate that all our food, fresh water and clean air come from complex ecosystems that have developed over millions of years, and that may not be able to survive the sudden changes we are imposing. The people who tell us everything will be fine are the wishy-washy idealists.

The reality is that we are a complex species living in a complex environment, and there are no simple solutions, but the first step is being honest. 

David Mackay for science adviser!

The so-called president of the United States has been very slow to appoint a science adviser. This may simply be because he just doesn't care about science. His mission is in changing people's perception of America, not actually changing anything in the real world.

If this isn't worrying enough, a more sinister reason may be that it is difficult to find a credible science adviser who will deny the climate and keep the fossil fueled forces behind the White House happy. He seems to be looking at William Happer now, a physicist who apparently says climate change is great. It's difficult to imagine somebody more on-target.

The argument that climate change will bring more advantages than disadvantages is a bit difficult to maintain, although it may be tenable. He also claims that predictions of warming were exaggerated, although when you look at Jim Hansen's work from 1988, the predictions have been very close.

Happer also appears on this list of 300 "scientists" telling trump to burn the climate, carefully analysed by the Guardian's John Abraham.

I think David Mackay would make a great science adviser. Not only is he able to put things in simple terms, but he also has a good grasp of the reality of our energy problem, and realistic suggestions about what we can do.

Here is his TED talk:

Creating an Ecosystem of doubt

The more interesting questions are why, and how, people are trying to stop us from believing that climate change is happening and was almost certainly caused by us. As well as the different stages of climate denial, there are different levels of deniers, and different motivations for denial. Some people are just trying to be annoying.

The first thing to say is that it is really easy to persuade people the climate science is fake. In many ways our brains are determined not to believe in it. Millennia of evolution have trained us to respond well to some threats, for example our fight or flight instincts are particularly well honed. We are not so good at coping with non-immediate threats, and our minds are usually bad at calculating low-level risk. If humans were good at working out probabilities we probably wouldn't have any casinos. 

"Don't they look funny out in the snow with their thick coats?"

At the same time we have a strong reaction to change, and a confirmation bias. We desperately want to believe that we can carry on as we are because things are going to stay more or less the same, and we will pounce on any evidence that supports this, and ignore information that suggests otherwise.

Also we suffer from loss aversion. Given the choice of gaining 100 quid or not losing 100 quid, we are much more scared of losing than happy to gain. In our psychology a bird in the hand really is worth two in the bush. Tackling climate change is often perceived as a personal loss, because a reduction in quantity of carbon suggests a reduction in the quality of our carbon-enriched lifestyles. In fact doing nothing about climate change threatens to be a personal loss for many people, but, see above, the losses won't come till later, and it may be someone else who is losing.

So, climate deniers have got a pretty easy job. Human psychology is on their side.

Next, in some parts of the world at least, climate change has become a political issue. This means we also have group mentality to deal with. The reasoning works something like this: Al Gore believes in Global Warming, Al Gore is blue, I am red, therefore Al Gore is wrong. This does not happen exclusively in the US, but the issue has been polarised to a large extent there. I've never been a fan of UK arch-conservative Margaret Thatcher, but unlike 97% of politicians she was a scientist, and she quickly understood the threat posed by climate change, and persuaded world leaders including George Bush senior to get behind the Kyoto Protocol back in the 1990s. Atmospheric carbon levels have been increasing steadily since then, but political action has not. 

So how do people attack climate change? 

Later I will give specific details of what people say, but the first question is which culture they are coming from. The idea of climate change comes from science, and that field has its own ground rules. They are different, for example, to religion or the law. Christianity has absolute truth that cannot be proved but needs faith to be believed. The law seeks truth beyond a shadow of doubt, and often there are two sides who must both try to prove that they are right. Science is not really concerned with truth, or being right, but in setting up hypotheses and trying to prove them wrong. 

Maths has proofs but is not really a science. Once something is mathematically proven it will be true for ever. Two plus two will always be four. If you are an engineer, and the twos are both large values then two plus two can be five, but I don't want to bring engineers into this.

The hard sciences of physics and chemistry have theories that can be experimentally shown to not be wrong. 

The theories in softer sciences, like biology, cannot always be shown to be true by experiment. For example, we cannot make an experiment to prove that evolution is happening in the same way that we can prove Newton's laws of motion. Theories are tested by observation, and if the observed facts obey the theory then it cannot be dismissed. Climate science is similar. We cannot go back to the 18th century, un-invent the steam engine and run the last couple of centuries without any anthropogenic carbon emissions.

And you'd probably believe he's walking on water.

So anyone attacking the theories of climate change from a religious perspective may be missing the point. They may also be attacking the very idea that the universe is controlled by theories that humans can divine, and that humans are capable of influencing any part of the divine universe. They may also be doing this from the pulpit, in positions of power over their communities.

People coming from a legalistic perspective may think that there are two sides in the case, that industrial civilisation is in the dock, and somebody has to find a shadow of doubt in the science. If someone was up on murder charges, and we were deciding whether to send them to the electric chair, then it may be reasonable to expect us to be 100% sure. This is not the case here, and many views of climate change predict that death penalties are already being handed out as people in power refuse to accept it is happening, and use that as an excuse to do nothing about our carbon emissions. The reality with climate science is that nobody is 100% sure that climate change is happening and is manmade, but they are very close to 100% sure, and there are no other theories that match the observed facts. 

Exactly the same applies to smoking causing cancer, or driving without a seat belt causing road death. And this leads nicely to another group of climate deniers who would also argue that we should do nothing about smoking or seat belts either. They don't want governments to legislate. They are not necessarily against the science, and may not like smoking, and may put seat belts on when they drive, but they have an ideological objection to governments telling people what to do. One way to stop the government legislating is to attack the climate science. 

So we have religious motivations for denying climate change, and political motivations from extreme libertarians. The legal profession is well equipped to deny climate science, but as a profession they usually do not act unless they are being paid. 

I wonder where the money is coming from? 

Notes and Further Reading

The US Environment Protection Agency still has some great scientific information on climate change. 

Verbal Warming: Labels in the Climate Debate. New York Times: 17th February, 2015

The Pope has called for action on climate change, which has been ignored by many. Protestants may have considered this to be a papist plot, and catholics on the right may have ignored this in favour of the rhetoric of their political allies. Guardian 24th October, 2016

Leaders of Islam, perhaps a much greener religion than Christianity, have produced a statement calling for action on climate change: Islamic Climate Declaration dot org

Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway

(By the way, the second photo was a result of lucky timing on the shutter, and photoshopping out the diving board.)

List of weather recording and climate researching organisations that say the world is NOT getting warmer (let me know if I've missed any)

Climate Science or Political Fiction?

A local group who provide English-language tours of the castle invited me back to speak at their monthly get together on 23rd January. I've spoken to them a couple of times before about low energy building, and they seemed to like my last talk about reading, so I spent my credibility capital trying to communicate climate change. 

I started talking about what was true the year I was born, almost half a century ago. For example: 

• The earth's population was 3.5 billion 
• Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, South Vietnam were countries 
• Every Prime Minister had been a man
• Life expectancy in the UK was 72 years
• Homosexuality was a crime
• Carrots helped you see in the dark
• Saccharine and tobacco were good for you
• There were 9 planets in the solar system and none outside 

All of these things are no longer true.

Going further back, there are many more things that used to be true:

• The continents were fixed on the earth
• Time was the same everywhere in the universe
• The world was created around 7,000 years ago with animals and plants in their current form
• The earth was the centre of the universe
• The earth was flat

Nice image but actually just a dried out rice field after harvest

In the case of the last "fact" I asked how people knew it wasn't true. Someone said their elementary school teacher had told them, which I had to point out was not a very good reason for believing something, based on all the things I'd just shown them were no longer true a few years later. Someone else said that you could sea the curvature at sea, which is a good reason. I added my own proofs: first that I've seen the shape of the earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse. Also I had been around the world, and had to change the date on my watch when I crossed from Asia to America. 

So what, I asked, is science? A series of facts? People in white coats with difficult equations? Good questions? A model of the universe? A process for finding truth?

It's a little bit of everything, but most of all it is a model for understanding the universe. As an example I told them about Newton and Einstein. For Newton time was universal, space was flat and had 3 dimensions, and gravity attracted masses to each other. Einstein's universe was radically different: the speed of light was universal, space-time had 4 dimensions, space was shaped by mass, and time was changed by gravity and speed. 

Some eyes were starting to glaze over and I could see they were wondering what use relativity was. After all, Newton's science got us to the moon. Einstein explains Mercury's orbit, which was a little out of sync with Newton's predictions, and GPS uses Einstein.

GPS, Global Positioning System, uses triangulation by measuring the distance from three or four satellites using light rulers. As we know from Newton, the speed of light is constant, and it travels around 30 cm every nano second. So if you are listening to timed signals from a few satellites, and you can can time the difference between the arrival of those signals, then you can work out where you are. 

The problem is that clocks in the satellites are 20,000 km up and moving at 14,000 km/h. The lower gravity up there means that the clocks are running 45 microseconds per day fast, and the higher speed means the clocks are 7 microseconds per day slow. This doesn't sound very much, but when you think that a nano second—one thousands of a microsecond—is 30 cm, this would put the satellite's positions out by 10 km per day.

The lessons to learn so far, before we've even dipped our toes into global warming, are that science changes, and that pure science has practical uses. When Einstein was pondering the structure of the universe, he was not trying to help people find themselves on google maps, but that has been one result.

So are there any scientific facts? Short answer: No. There is just the best model we have. Ideas that nobody has proven wrong yet; ideas that are probably not wrong.

For example, you have a friend with a coin that seems to come up heads a lot. You'd like to see the coin, but your friend is reluctant to let you closely inspect it. You suspect it's a double headed coin. You can't be sure, so you have to observe him using it. If he flips it once and it comes up heads, this tells you very little. There's a fifty-fifty chance that a two sided coin would come up heads. Two heads in row has a one in four chance, which is still not particularly unusual. Even three heads in a row has a one in eight change of happening with a fair coin. The more heads you see the more likely it becomes that the coin is rigged. If you see a hundred heads in a row, the chance of the coin being fair falls to one in a billion trillion trillion trillion.

Back to Newton and Einstein, we've been flipping the coin a lot more than a hundred times and it has come up heads every time, so it is very unlikely that their science is wrong. And it's not so much that Einstein proved Newton wrong, it's more about limits to where their ideas work. Newton's laws are correct on earth and for most planets around the sun, and for most parts of the universe. Einstein's are more widely applicable but they do stop working when we get near to black holes, or when we start looking at the very small scale of quantum mechanics. 

Now that we've talked about what science is, we can look at some scientific questions:

Is the earth getting warmer?

Is the earth getting warmer because of human activity?

Is carbon dioxide causing the climate to change? 

I asked what my audience thought, and they all seemed convinced that the earth was getting warmer, with one or two people not convinced that it was because of CO2 and human activity. 

To bring the first question close to home, I talked about Lake Suwa, where priests have been recording the date of Omiwatari, a crack that appears across the lake as the freezing ice expands. Ignoring any irony that the phenomena is named after gods crossing the lake, this represents the oldest human record that can be related to temperature. Everyone around here knows that the lake has not been performing is trick recent, but looking at the numbers makes things clearer. The lake did not freeze nine times in the 15 years 1998-2014. In the previous 47 years it did not freeze eight times 1950-1997. Looking at the first 257 years of the data, there were only three times when it didn't freeze over (1443-1700).

So what? This is compelling stuff, but does it prove the earth is getting warmer? It proves that lake Suwa has not been freezing over, but this could be a local climate change, or could be caused by chemical changes in what has gone into the lake in industrial times. When you look at a similar study of river in Finland where the date of ice break up has been recorded there is another bit of evidence.

On my next Powerpoint slide I had a list of organisations who are recording weather and researching climate and have concluded it is getting warmer. Powerpoint crashed on my computer, and I had to reboot. I don't have a list of organisation who are recording weather and researching climate who say it is not getting warmer. I don't think there are any. 

So the ten hottest years on record have all been in the last twenty years, and nine of them in this century. Figures are just out for 2016, which broke the 2015 record, which in turn broke the 2014 record. This is the kind of thing we see in the Olympics, where everyone is trying to break records. So is someone trying to break the climate record? If weather was random, you would expect a roughly even chance of the temperature being above or below average. There is a one in eight chance that the temperature is above average for three years running. The chance of the weather being higher than every year on record is small, and the chance of this happening three years in a row is vanishingly tiny.

So we can't be sure that the world is getting warmer, but it is very very unlikely that it is following random patterns. Could there be any reason that it is getting warmer?

Quick Chemistry question: How much CO2 does 1 litre of oil make? (see bottom for the answer)

This is Watt's steam engine, invented around 1800. Coal was burned to make steam, which pushed and pulled a piston to power a pump. The pump got water out of the mine and allowed more coal to be dug out. More coal went into the furnace to make more steam, to pump out more water, to get out more steam. And so on, for a couple of hundred years. These engines started working on railways to take the coal further away, and to reach further to get out more coal. 

Coal was the first fossil fuel, followed by oil, then gas. People have been talking about phasing out dirty coal, but it has kept on growing. Now that China has stopped plans to build more coal power stations, the planet has hopefully reached the peak and will start using less and less coal, although the White House today hides a love of the black stuff! 

So what? We have an increasing global temperature, and an increasing level of carbon dioxide. Does that prove that we are causing the planet to get warmer? No! Correlation does not prove causality. We do have a mechanism though. 

In 1896 Svante Arrhenius proposed the greenhouse effect, observing that different molecules store heat in the atmosphere by absorbing low frequency radiation coming from the earth and instead of letting it all out into space, radiating some of it back to the earth. This phenomenon can be seen by comparing our planetary neighbours. Venus has a thick CO2-rich atmosphere, and temperatures around 460°C day and night everywhere from poles to tropics. Mars has a very thin atmosphere and in the summer gets up to a pleasant 20°C in the day time, and down to a less hospitable -70°C at night.

So we have strong evidence that the planet is warming. We have increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 that have come from human activity. Also we have a historic match between CO2 levels and global temperatures based on air trapped in Antarctic snow. We have a mechanism by which CO2 increases temperature. Does this prove that we are causing global warming? No, it does not, but it is the best explanation we have, and no scientists have disproved it. 

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." 

(Upton Sinclair)

There are plenty of non-scientists who are disagreeing, and this is called climate science denial. There are five stages:

Stage 1: It's not happening

Stage 2: It is changing, but it's natural

Stage 3: We are causing it, but it's not a problem

Stage 4: It is a problem, but we can't solve it

Stage 5: It's too late!

What examples can we find:

Donald Trump on Twitter:

"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." (7 Nov 2012)

"The con artists changed the name from GLOBAL WARMING to CLIMATE CHANGE when GLOBAL WARMING was no longer working and credibility was lost!" (31 Dec 2013)

(In fact the change was encouraged by Republicans and explicitly suggested by a global warming skeptic who stated that "'climate change' is less frightening than 'global warming'" Luntz Research: environment)

"This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice" (2 Jan 2014)

"I want to use hair spray... So Obama's talking about all of this with the global warming and the—a lot of it's a hoax, it's a hoax. I mean, it's a money-making industry, okay? It's a hoax, a lot of it." (December 30, 2015)

(First of all, he's confusing ozone with climate change. And which is more important, hair or the global climate?)

"Perhaps there's a minor effect, but I'm not a big believer in man-made climate change." (Washington Post, 21 March, 2016)

"I'm still open-minded. Nobody really knows." (Fox News Sunday, December 11, 2016)

"President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan..." (White House website, accessed January )

And looking to his pick for leading the Environmental Protection Agency: Scott Pruitt

"Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind." (National Review, May 17, 2016)

(In fact there is a consensus among almost all scientists that global temperatures are rising and that it is because of mankind: Skeptical science: Climate consensus)

Secretary of Energy: Rick Perry

"It's all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight," (2010 book: Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington)

Attorney general: Jeff Sessions

"I believe there are legitimate disputes about the validity and extent of global warming … Carbon dioxide does not hurt you. We have to have it in the atmosphere. It is what plants breathe. In fact, the more carbon dioxide that exists, the faster plants grow." (Senate floor, 2003)

(The last part is obviously true. Plants also need water, but water can make you drown!)

Then there is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon Mobile who are being sued for climate change cover up. He was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship medal in 2013.

The cold war is most likely over, and now the Warm War has begun. This time, we have corporate interests uniting with people who believe in absolute freedom from regulation. While the US and Russia went head to head in the Cold War, they could be allies in the Warm War. The US has big corporations and Russia has little to lose and a lot to gain from global warming. 

Here is some basic physics telling us what will happen if the world gets warmer. Higher temperatures mean less ice. The sheets on Antarctica and on Greenland and other landmasses in the Arctic will melt and the sea level will rise. Many of the world's cities are on the coast. Russia's coastal cities are at risk, but Moscow should be safe. There is also a lot of frozen tundra that could thaw, and sea channels to the north of Russia that will open when the arctic ocean stops freezing over. 

Also with rising temperature there will be more evaporation from sea, leading to more moisture in the atmosphere. What goes up comes down, so there will be more rain, and heavier rainfall. An example of this already happening is the increasing floods in the UK. And heat is energy, and more energy means more weather, stronger storms and higher winds. And more energy means more chaos.

This is about as much as I could get through in the time available. I had much more to say, especially about the pathology of climate denial, but I had spent all the time getting to the topic. There were a few questions afterwards. Someone asked about the effects on the ocean, which I said I was very concerned about. I mentioned that bleaching had been observed on something like 70% of Okinawa's coral, which many people nodded about. 

And the big question was what to do about it. The most important thing, I told them, was to know what is happening. If you are an alcoholic, the first thing to do is to admit you have a problem. 

As people were leaving I heard someone saying that he thought global warming was probably just nonsense, and that it was all because of the sun's activity. Given more time to speak, or more time to prepare I would have addressed that exact point, and showed some scientific journals devoted to people researching solar activity. If there was any chance at all that solar activity could explain the facts of climate change then they would be jumping up and down shouting: "Over here! over here!" But they are not.  

Maybe next time.

References

Real-World Relativity: The GPS Navigation System 

Economist: Interview with Samuel Arbesman, author of Half life of facts 

A history of Saccharine 

Climate references 

Nature: Lake Suwa Omiwatari

Climate and politics

Guardian: Facts matter and on climate change Trump's picks get them wrong 

Huffington Post: Climate Change Trump White House 

Politico: Mad Dog sanest one among them!

https://www.whitehouse.gov/america-first-energy (accessed 22nd January, 2016)

Huffingtonpost: Exxon Mobil lawsuit 

Answer: 

One litre of oil produces 2.5 kg of Carbon Dioxide. Yes that's more than twice its own weight. Oil is almost all carbon, and when it burns each atom combines with two oxygen atoms from the atmosphere. 

Carbon-free and rent-free

Anyone fancy a move to Cambridge? Not only carbon-free but also rent-free.

http://be-zero.co.uk/

They are looking for a family with at least two children to live in a zero-carbon house for a year, starting before Christmas 2014.

I imagine this will be heavily over-subscribed!

Global warming - time to take the gloves off

There's something very funny about this picture. I'm not sure why, but when the left uses comedy to attack people on the right, it comes across as being very funny, with some underlying truth and justice. When people on the right use comedy to attack people on the left, it just doesn't seem to work.

This picture is funny, but not in the way it is meant to be. In fact, I think deep down it is not meant to be funny, and that may be the difference. The left is in a constant state of struggle against authority. Even when the left becomes powerful, it must struggle against itself and the inherent evil in the corruption of power, and the absolute corruption of absolute power. This is essentially comedy. The right, on the other hand, is dealing in tragedy. Their desire, their goal, and their destiny is to stay in charge. They are ultimately the victims of their own actions. And so are the rest of us. So if you're on the left, you can laugh. In fact, you have to.

Anyway, there is a serious point behind this joke with it's pyrrhic victory at getting a laugh. Not that Obama is setting out to kill the all-american bird. That idea is probably what makes this funny, in a kind of tragic way.

The serious point is that wind turbines do in fact kill birds.
In 2009, Electricity company PacifiCorp had to pay a $10.5 million dollar fine for killing 232 Eagles and other protected species.

Oh no, that was from electrocutions on power cables. Nothing to do with wind power--just supplying electricity from coal and maybe even nuclear power stations.

The avian fatalities from wind turbines are a little more modest, but even so they are significant.

You'd think that birds would have to be really stupid to fly into wind turbines. Those gracefully sweeping blades look easy to avoid. In reality though, the tips are moving at a very high speed, causing vortices that can disrupt birds' flight. I won't go into the Reynolds numbers here though.


Of course when it comes to Eagles, and especially the balding variety, we are talking about protected species, who probably are stupid. If they were so good at survival, they wouldn't be in the sorry state that humans are trying to help them.


Designers are now working to make turbines that will not affect birds, but this may be one more of those examples of taking the option with the least damage. We can continue with fossil fuels, and risk wholesale damage to the climate. Or increase carbon-neutral generation and kill a few pretty animals. There is no black and white in this, just shades of green and grey. Wind generation still looks pretty green if the choice is between killing a few pretty animals, or irrevocably changing the climate and killing many pretty animals.


I wonder how many birds are killed directly by pollution from thermal power plants? And what about all those canaries down mines?

And if you're worried about birds being killed in turbines, how many birds get killed by collision with aircraft?

Meanwhile, the state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany has reached 100% renewable generation, mostly from wind.

The German eagles are evidently doing alright.


(Let me apologise, too late, if anyone found my earlier comments eaglist. In future I will try to be eaglitarian.)

International standards

Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Three months after the first post, things seem to have been very busy, but I'm not sure how fast they have been moving.

We've decided to make a Passive House. This means it must follow strict standards for insulation and airtightness. It will need a mechanical ventilation system that will transfer the heat leaving the building to the heat coming in, so it will maintain ambient temperature.

Whenever I talk about insulation, people seem to automatically say how hot it's going to be in the summer. This seems intuitive but not completely logical. After all, thermos flasks can keep cold things cold, and fridges and freezers are insulated too.

Just like the old joke from the days when David Beckham played for England and Wayne Rooney still had his own hair:
They were stopping for lunch at the England training ground and took out their packed lunches
Rooney: What's that you got there Becks?
Beckham: It's a thermos flask. Posh Spice bought it for me for my birthday
Rooney: Ooh that's good. What's it do?
Beckham: Well, it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold
Rooney: Sound. What you got in it?
Beckham: Three cups of tea and a choc ice!

There's also a very strong sense in Japan that this country is completely different to the rest of the world, and what happens in Germany cannot be used here. As far as I can tell the same laws of thermodynamics apply, and water and air have more or less the same chemical composition in both places. The climate is certainly a bit different though.

Summer temperature is about five or ten degrees warmer in Matsumoto than in Germany, and five or ten degrees colder in the winter. Also there is a difference between average monthly highs and lows of over ten degrees every month, with August having average highs of 30.5 and lows of 19.8. January swings from 4.9 to -5.5. As well as looking at averages, the extremes are also interesting. In 1987 there were two days when nighttime temperatures stayed above 25 degrees. This was a record. In other words, on pretty much every day of every year, opening the windows at night is going to let in air below 25 degrees.

1943 saw 155 days where the temperature fell below zero. This makes me think that the cold is a more serious problem than the heat!

There are places in Austria with a similar temperature range, for example Eisenstadt or Baden. Searching for "passive house" on the internet in English, you find lots of people making them in the US and talking about making them in the UK. Searching for Passivhaus in Eisenstadt, I found most of the hits were estate agents selling those that have been built over the past twenty years!

Global Warming or Climate Change?

What's in a name?

These terms are often used interchangably. I think there is a difference, and I've tended to use climate change for two reasons. First, politically global warming seems to have taken a lot of flak and climate change seems a little more neutral. Global warming has been attacked and was famously banned from the White House. I imagine using climate change will lead to less knee-jerk reactions and has more chance of getting through to people.

Second, climate change is more scientific.

"Warm" seems to be a bit vague, and often rather nice, while potentially global warming is neither. Also "warm" refers to temperature, and there are all those confusions between temperature and heat.

During reports of record snowfalls on Fox news, the announcer was saying that Al Gore must be feeling really stupid now. Of course, colder weather is a very likely part of a warmer planet when you start looking at the heat of the system, and the way that heat moves around, or stops moving around.

You can even see this on a very small scale if you're in a hot room and have a glass of water with ice in it. The water is pretty much staying the same temperature, but that's because the ice is melting. The ice is also staying the same temperature, since the melting bits of it are no longer ice, but there is less and less of it, and the amount of heat in the system is increasing. When the ice is completely gone, the water temperature will start going up. Interestingly, the level of the water will not go up in this experiment, but if you had Antartica and Greenland in your glass, with the ice on top of them, then you may be in trouble.
The weather reporters know all this, since they were awake in the physics lessons at elementary school, but increasingly weather is getting reported on the news where scientific ignorance is almost a qualification for the job.

It turns out I may be completely wrong about using climate change. A report by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication suggests that global warming is associated with greater certainty, scientific consensus and understanding that humans are involved, at least on the political left. And everyone, left and right, seems to associate global warming with a greater sense of personal risk.

So I'm adding a tab for Global Warming. This translates into Japanese 地球温暖化 (chi-kyu on-dan-ka, literally Earth-temperature-warm-ification) or usually just 温暖化 (ondanka, warming). They have no need for another term!

Read more from nasa
And Climate Outreach UK

I think I heard this first from On The Media
The picture of the glass and the table (representing Antarctica and Greenland) is from 4-designer.com  

Water is not going to collect in the summer... or is it?

Back to the mystery of the dripping ventilation system, at first I was worried about the lack of a drainage channel for condensate from air coming into the house in the summer. We've had enough problems with the channel for water dripping from the air leaving the house in the winter. 

If it's very hot and humid outside, as the air comes into the house and through the heat exchange element, it's going to drop in temperature, and as it does so the relative humidity of the air will go up and over saturation, then water will start dripping from the air. 

For example, it could be thirty-five degrees outside, 80% humidity, and twenty-five degrees inside. As the air comes in from outside through the heat exchange elements, it's going to drop from 35 degrees to about 26 degrees. If the heat exchanger were 100% efficient it would drop to 25 degrees, but it's around 90% efficient. The dew point for air at 35 degrees, 80% humidity is 31 degrees. It's going to hit that temperature inside the heat exchanger, and water is going to start precipitating.

At first I thought this would be a problem, but I was assured that it would be fine since the water is going to head towards the chamber of the ventilation system where the temperature is the same as outside, and the extra heat will allow the air to absorb the moisture. 

But then I realised that actually it is going to be a problem, because water is going to be accumulating there, and while it might be fine in a steady state if you add some water to hot air, this is not a steady state. Humid air is constantly coming in, and water is going to be added to that chamber and will not be able to leave, so sooner or later it is going to push the humidity up and over 100% and water will start dripping. 

Hot and humid may be difficult to imagine in Europe, where the ventilation system was designed and is usually sold, but it does happen elsewhere. Japanese summers have both heat and humidity, and with discomforting frequency in some places. According to an article about Heat Index on Wikipedia, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia on July 8, 2003 the dew point was 35°C while the temperature was 42°C.

However, just looking at the temperature and humidity here in Matsumoto in July and August 2013, the outside dew point never went above the inside temperature, and the closest it got was still three and a half degrees lower. Over those two months, the highest the dew point reached was twenty-two and a half degrees, and the lowest the temperature got inside was twenty-one degrees, ten days earlier. So it's possible to imagine that we'd get a saturation problem, but in practice when the temperature goes up the relative humidity drops and we're safe. This part of Japan is acclaimed for having dry summers, so I'm sure the story would be different if you were closer to the Pacific coast, not surrounded by mountains which do a good job precipitating humidity from the air themselves.

References

I know pictures add to the readability of a blog, but that equations reduce it. So here's a picture of an equation.
(TD is the dew point, f is the relative humidity, T is the temperature.)

Online dew point calculator

Humidity charts

DECC Consultation on Community Energy

Any UK-oriented armchair activists out there, here's an opportunity to make a difference to UK energy policy by responding to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. I heard about this from Energy4all, which supports community energy, mostly wind farms that are financed, owned and run by communities with support from more distant investors like me.

Community energy may not change the world in itself, but is definitely one piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is the change to a smart grid of energy democracy from the nineteenth-century model of large fossil-fueled power stations built as far from the urban rich as possible, into which nuclear power stations were neatly added in the latter twentieth century.

The closing date for submissions is 1st August 2013 so you will need to act quickly.

 

There is a long questionnaire on the DECC web site. But apparently DECC has said that it is interested in informal submissions, in particular understanding the barriers to community energy. www.gov.uk/government/consultations/community-energy-call-for-evidence

Emails can be sent here: communityenergycallforevidence@decc.gsi.gov.uk

Or by post to:

DECC

3 Whitehall Place
London
SW1A 2AW

"It is really important that as many responses as possible are sent to DECC as part of this Call for Evidence.  The more evidence DECC has the more of a case they will be able to make to support community energy, so please do take the time to reply."

Science project - Electricity generation, temperature and sunlight hours in winter and summer

With a couple of days of summer holiday left, my oldest son, aged nine, began his project, or jiyu kenkyu--literally free research although if it were really free, then I'm sure he wouldn't have done it. His mum had been encouraging him to do something on flags of different countries, but in the end he decided to look at solar generation and the weather. This was partly inspired by his cousin, who was going to look at the amount of electricity and the amount of water they use. It wasn't my idea, although I was very happy to help him. It seems that these projects are more for the parents than the kids, and it felt like I was putting a lot more time and effort into this than I have done for my own research projects that have gone on to academic publications.
His first idea was that solar power generation depended on temperature, so he set about making a graph. One set of points was the the daily generation, which I've been copying into a googledoc spreadsheet from the display in the house, with his occasional help. Another data set was the temperature, courtesy of tenki.jp, who show nice monthly calendars with daily highs, lows and weather, with suns for sunshine, clouds for cloudy and so on. Because he wanted snow, he chose February first, then he decided to compare summer and winter, so he did another one for July later. He'd added the weather onto the February graph, which meant four lines running along the month, making it almost unintelligible with too much information.  The weather was very blunt, simply showing cloudy, sunny or snowy as of 3 pm. What we really wanted was the hours of sunshine.
It took a while to find data for sunlight hours online. Tenki.jp has the data but won't show it. Their live amedasu page has the last 12 hours for Matsumoto, but when you click for past data, it switches to Nagano city, which has different weather, on the other side of a mountain range, lower in altitude and closer to the influence of the Sea of Japan. We're in the mountains so even the next village has a different weather system.
JMA, Japan Meteorological Association, jma.go.jp, has extensive downloadable data, all the way back to 1872. Here they have nice monthly charts with the vital statistics for each day.
This allowed another two graphs of power generation (below in green) against hours of sunlight (in orange), which immediately appeared to be following each other, perhaps unsurprisingly.
His final report also showed graphs of power generation against temperature for July and February (daily highs in red, daily lows in blue). The power on the July graph seemed to be following the high temperatures, while the February graph power seemed inversely proportional to the low temperatures.

This makes sense as fine summer days are usually sunny, and cold winter nights are usually clear and followed by sunny days.
Next there was a table of the highest five days generating in February and the highest five days in July. The five best days in February were all over 50 kW hours, while the best five days in July were all under 50 kW hours, although the hours of sunlight were comparable. The averages were 52.1 kWh, 9.8 hours sunlight and 5.5 degrees maximum temperature in February, and 49.0 kWh, 10.2 hours sunlight and 32.5 degrees in July.
So it looks like, rather than higher temperatures meaning more generation, given the same hours of sunlight there will be more generation in Winter.
This is consistent with solar panels being more efficient at lower temperatures, which I think is because the resistance goes up with temperature. This was beyond the scope of this fourth-year elementary-school summer project, as we'd filled up the two pages which had already been a massive effort for all of us.

The pursuit of ambience

It's going to take us a year or two to work out exactly what to do with the cooling and heating of the house. It will probably boil down to three different strategies: cooling, passive heating and active heating. There may be some gaps in between where we don't have to worry, but I suspect at any given time we should either be cooling the house in anticipation of impending heat or heating it in anticipation of impending cold. The weather and climate are changing but the seasons are here for a while.

We switched off the active heating April 10th, and the house has not been cold since. The last night below zero outside was 8th April, when it was minus 2, according to tenki.jp, although it was down to 3 degrees above freezing in the wee hours of 13th May and this year it didn't start getting really hot until the middle of July. 

We're now in cooling mode and have begun a routine of opening up the windows when it drops below about 25, which is often at 7 pm, and closing them when the temperature outside rises above 25, which is around 7 am. July 21st was cool and rainy, in the low 20s all day, so the house was cooled a little more.

The bypass system on the ventilation is now working, so it will be pumping cooler air into the house throughout each night, exchanging all the air every two-and-a-half hours. Opening the windows substantially increases the air flow and cooling. In an ideal world they would open and close automatically, like the heat-exchanger bypass switches on and off automatically, depending on temperature difference.

The daily indoor temperature variation is bigger than I expected, probably due to the size of the windows on the south wall, and the lack of a decent awning to keep the heat off the terrace. At the moment we just have a little camping tarp over it.

Bypassing the heat

In the past I have been vehemently opposed to bypasses. Now I am delighted to have one in my house. Perhaps this is mellowing with age. More likely it is because the bypasses I hate are strips of concrete laid around towns encouraging more cars and trucks to speed through countryside, while the one in my house fits neatly as a part in the ventilation system.

I had assumed the ventilation system was fitted with the bypass, and shocked when I realised it was not. Six months later, on Friday 15th June, they came to put one in.

The ventilation system, rather crucially, has a heat exchanger. It's not perfect, but it means that if it's freezing outside, and 20 degrees inside, then the heat from the expelled air will be transfered to the incoming air, so rather than an icy draft, the fresh air comes in at around 18 degrees. This is great in the winter. It's also good news on a hot summer's day when it may be 35 outside, in the shade, and 25 inside. In this case the heat will be exchanged the other way, dutifully following the second law of thermodynamics, and fresh air will come in at perhaps 26 degrees.

Either way, the temperature comes into the house at more or less room temperature, keeping that temperature stable.

In the summer, all the things that help keep the house warmer in the winter, like solar radiation, heat from appliances and boilers, and even human bodies giving off 100 watts each, are now risking overheating the house.

On summer evenings, it tends to cool off and the trick of the bypass is, rather than exchanging heat, it directly expells the warm air from the house and draws in cool air from outside. I looked over record temperatures fo r Matsumoto and among the figures was the number of nettai-ya or "tropical nights", where the temperature stays above 25 degrees. The record was  two nights in a year, back in 1983. Past performace is no guarantee of future climate, but pretty much every night throughout the summer is going to drop to, or below, comfortable room temperature, and if we can keep the sun out during the day, the house is not going to get too hot. As long as the laws of physics hold up, that is.

The only question is, what exactly do the two temperatures in the settings mean? One is the "inside temperature", with a default setting of 22 degrees. The other is "outside temperature", with a default setting of 10 degrees. The people who came to fit the system had absolutely no idea.

It seems their boss was against this kind of bypass. I'm not sure why but one reason I heard was a fear that the pipes in the heat exchanger would start to get moldy from condensation if they didn't have air flowing through them. As the bypass is not going to be working the whole time, this seems like an unwarranted worry.

It would be nice to be sure but I guess that if the inside temperature is above the higher temperature, then the bypass will switch on when the temperature outside is below that. But if the outside temperature gets below the lower temperature, then it will stop bypassing and go back to heat exchanging. It seems like we're getting cool air coming in at night, and at the end of the month there may be some actual results to show. 

Shimo bashira

Now that we're in the middle of summer, it's a good time to publish some pictures of ice.  They're called Shimo bashira in Japanese. Apparently "needle ice" in English.

I think these are quite unusual, geographically speaking. I heard somewhere that they need volcanic soil that's wet and above freezing,  and air that is below freezing.

Obviously we haven't had any for a while.  
Charlie has a better picture. Have a look!

Post-Promethian Society

Burning stuff has been a pretty important part of humanity for a while now. Fire has been around in nature a long time, and we have to say that it was discovered and harnessed by humans rather than invented. According to Greek myth, Prometheus stole it from the gods to give to man. Other mythologies share this theme of theft

Perhaps in the distant future there will be myths of how the god Watt stole coal from the ground and turned it into thick air, or how divine Einstein found electricity in rays of sunlight. Wikipedia mentions the hero Mātariśvan in the Rig Veda (3:9.5), recovering fire, which had been hidden from mankind. In Cherokee myths and those of some Pacific Northwest tribes, fire was variously stolen, or almost stolen but ultimately handed over to humans by Possum, Buzzard, Grandmother Spider with her web, Coyote, Beaver or Dog while among some Yukon First Nations people, Crow stole fire from a volcano in the middle of the water. According to the Creek Indians, Rabbit stole fire from the Weasels.

It sounds far-fetched, but remember the ancient four elements—fire, air, water, earth—are in fact four states. Plasma, gas, liquid and solid, liquid.

I watched the Day After Tomorrow the day before yesterday. The basic plot is that drastic climate change happens, but not by a couple of degrees over a few score years, but by scores of degrees over a couple of days. The science is hardly that rigid. It seems that changes in ocean currents cause a massive hurricane-like storm system over the northern hemisphere. I suppose that much is possible, although it's unlikely as hurricanes hardly ever happen high in the arctic, possibly
due to the Coriolis effect, which is largest in the tropics and sub-tropics.

The eyes of these storms brought down cold air from the troposphere, where the temperatures are very low, and froze everything in sight. I think the problem with this is that temperatures are very low in the troposphere because pressures are very low. We'll find out more of this when we consider how heat pumps work, but basically as the pressure drops, the temperature drops and as the pressure rises the temperature rises. You can feel this with a bicycle pump. Generally a rise of 100 metres will lead to a drop of one degree (although less if the air is humid) and a fall of 100 metres will lead to an increase of one degree. This causes the Foehn effect in alpine climates, where humid wind blows up one side of an alp, dropping in temperature slowly and shedding its humidity as rain. It then heads down the other side of the alp dry, gaining temperature as it falls leading to a very hot day in the valley on the other side.

If the eyes of these storms were making holes in the atmosphere where there was no air at all, then there would have been no pressure either, and rather than freeaing, people would probably have boiled, and their eyes popped out. However, I digress from Prometheus. That's sounding more like Tantalus.

I suppose the movie was trying to advocate action against global warming, although a lot of the time it felt like it was just nostalgia for those disaster movies of the 80's. The biggest problem was the reaction to this storm, which was for them to burn as much as they could. The hero was holed up in a library with his septicemic girlfriend, an aging gentleman of the road and a couple of librarians,
and their solution was to start burning books. It would have been much more sensible for them to line the books around the walls for more insulation and to reduce the size of the room, and start burning the furniture and shelves, or the guy who was clutching the bible. The only allusion to this was the gentleman of the road tearing bits out of a book and stuffing them in his clothes. The hero, his two sidekicks and the romantic adversary were all supposed to be academic decathletes, but the bum seemed to know more about thermodynamics than they did, and more than the people who made the movie for that matter.

So the moral of the story was... global warming's coming but you'll be OK if you burn lots of stuff.

Exhaust air and heat pumps

As well as being a highly insulated, highly airtight and wind-tight structure, the house has an active ventilation system with a heat exchanger. It's a good idea to have active ventilation with an
airtight house as it will stop us from suffocating. It's a good idea having a heat exchanger because this will mean we lose less heat in the winter, and gain less heat in the summer. It's a good idea having
an airtight house with active ventilation because this means the air goes in and out through the heat exchanger. Try sucking through a straw with holes in it, and you'll see what I mean.

The heat exchanger is over 90% efficient, so most of the heat will be recovered from the exhaust heat, and transferred to the fresh air coming in. This means if it's 20 degrees inside, and zero outside, the air coming into the house will be 18 degrees and the air going out will be 2 degrees above freezing. In the summer, if it's 20 degrees inside and 30 degrees outside, air will come in at 21 degrees. There is an over-ride so, for example on a summer night, if it's 25 degrees inside and 20 degrees outside, rather than trying to exchange heat, it will just get rid of the hot air and bring in the cool air.

There is a heat pump on the roof which is used by the "Eco Cute" water heating system. This takes heat out of the cold air and pumps it into hot water in a way that is worthy of another post, if you're not careful. The ventilation system is in the loft and will be sucking air in from the East wall and blowing out of the north wall. I was quite seriously suggesting that the exhaust air should be directed straight towards the heat pump. In the winter, exhaust air is going to be a couple of degrees above ambient, which will make it slightly more efficient, and less likely to be below freezing. The heat pump is set to run at night time, using cheap electricity, and in the summer, when the ventilation system is in over-ride, the air being pumped out is also going to be hotter than ambient. Even though it can exceed 35 degrees in the day time, it's usually below 25 degrees at night. In 1983 there were two days when it stayed above 25 degrees all night, and that was a record.

The only time it is likely to be warmer than ambient is in summer daytime, when we're least likely to be making hot water.

An end to fossil fuels?

I went to buy some more kerosene yesterday. Hopefully for the last time, although I thought I was buying kerosene for the last time last year. It's now May, but it's still cold in the morning, and the heater goes on. Hopefully the new house will only need heat for January and February, and it should stay warm on its own from March. I got three cans of 18 litres, so all five cans are now full. I suppose we could have got a tank by the house and had it delivered, but that would have been more expensive and I couldn't thoil to pay. In the middle of winter I can get one tank in the front panier and one in the back panier of the bicycle and ride to the nearest petrol station, on the lines of the Russian proverb, "chop your own wood, then it will warm you twice". 

Most of the heaters we use are fan-heaters which blow out up to 3 or 4 kilowatts of heat. We also have some older heaters that will work with no electricity, and on which you can put a kettle or a pan of food. A friend in Sendai  used some old ones after the earthquake when it was bitterly cold and there was no electricity. In situations like this, movable heaters make sense, as they need no infrastructure, and there are no gas pipes to leak. We have nine rooms in the house and four electric fan-heaters, so we can be flexible about which room we heat. Usually it's just the ones we're in. If we heat more of the house, we'll get through an 18 litre can every day. 

To put that into carbon dioxide and into perspective, 18 litres of kerosene will release about 54 kg of CO2. It may seem strange that it can release more than its own weight in gas, but it just releases the carbon, which is the main constituent, somewhere between 6 and 16 atoms per molecule. Each carbon atom takes two oxygen atoms hostage from the atmosphere to make one carbon dioxide molecule.  The lowest twenty CO2-producing countries emit less than 100 kg per capita per year, so in a couple of cold days with a couple of cans, we're well over our average, and that's before we've switched on the TV, done any cooking, or got into a car, bus or train. Average emissions in Japan are a hundred times this, at around 10 tonnes per person per year, very close to Germany, and about half the US.

It makes more sense to me to have a high level of insulation and keep the house warm the whole time. In spite of poor insulation levels, Japanese houses use very little fuel for heating. I think this is down to an idea "gaman" which translates fairly neatly into "keeping a stiff upper lip". People quite happily put up with cold, because it's good for them. This is a great thing in times of crisis, although I can't help feeling there are times when people need to stop putting up with hardship and make life better.

There seems to be a kind of wisdom in the philosophy of Japanese architecture that there's something wrong with a house if it doesn't reflect the outside temperature.  If it's cold outside, it should be a little colder than normal inside, so that people are in touch with the seasons.This is ironic in a culture with such a strong sense of "inside" and "outside". Luckily there is no such sentiment regarding rain, as the same philosophy would mean that you should get slightly wet when it rains. Actually, I have heard many stories of newly-built houses leaking, but I'm sure that's not deliberate. There does seem to be a resistance to my quaint idea that houses should maintain a difference between the temperature inside and outside and it is not just a case of inability or incompetence. This is not just a matter of comfort; there are health consequences.  Levels of stroke are much higher in Nagano Prefecture than in Hokkaido. Hokkaido is colder, but insulation is standard, and the temperature inside is much higher. Nagano is still one of the coldest parts of Japan, but only 18% of new houses meet the "next generation" energy standards, which correspond to European energy standards a couple of generations ago...