Solar Generation: Part One

How can you generate electricity? Here is a comparison of different methods including a comparison of energy return on energy invested. Guess which is the best way to generate electricity in you house?

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.

Electricity demand in southern Europe to soar with air con

After the hurricane in Texas, there has been a lot of news about how the weather will affect energy use. Of course the big story is how energy use is already affecting weather! I'm sure I heard people twenty years ago warning about global warming making storms bigger and more frequent. 

Another angle is news from the Guardian here about the increase in electricity demand in southern Europe for air conditioning due to increased temperatures. The UK will probably also need more cooling, but will need less heating, so in terms of energy may break even. Obviously the increase in temperature depends partly on whether we do anything about carbon emissions, and of course there will be some feedback if Europe does not de-carbonise the electricity supply.

The article does mention increasing insulation as a way to maintain comfortable temperatures, which is good.

The picture accompanying this shows an array of air conditioners from four different manufacturers, all Japanese.

Here is a report on global demand from the Japan Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Industry Association which shows that demand for air conditioners is already increasing around the world. They estimate 2016 global demand to be around 100 million units, growing 2.9% from the previous year.

In terms of market size, China is the biggest with 40% share, followed by Rest of Asia, North America, Japan, Latin American and then Europe with 6 million unit sales. In terms of market growth there is a very different picture, with Europe growing at over 12%, followed closely by Latin America, then Rest of Asia growing at over 8%. The more mature air conditioner markets of North America and Japan show the lowest growth rates of 1.8% and 2.8% respectively.

Since they can work as heaters as well as coolers, and since they run off electricity which is the medium of choice for renewable energy, split-unit heat-pump-based air conditioners may increasingly become the unit of choice for domestic heating and cooling needs. I may even get one myself.

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. 

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.)

2015: Hottest year on record

Yes, 2015 is the hottest year on record. It's official! Admittedly my records only go back three years. But this year is definitely the hottest!

Usually we switch on the heating 1st December. This year it's already a week later and we haven't thought about switching it on yet. It doesn't feel like we need it, but maybe that's just us getting hardy? 

With sixteen thermometers built into the the house, recording data for the past four years, it's possible to actually check the data. Numbers don't have feelings!

I looked at just three temperatures: the centre of the slab, the south-west corner of the slab, and the north-west corner of the slab. The slab is something like seventy centimetres deep, so there is a big different in the fluctuation of temperature from top to bottom, and up to a couple of degrees difference in actual temperature. The temperature at the top of the slab can vary by up to half a degree in a day, while at the bottom it's more like half a degree a week. 

As of 8th December, the middle of the slab is warmest, currently around 23 degrees. The South West corner is a couple of degrees cooler, around 21 degrees, and the North West corner is a few degrees cooler still, around 17 degrees. This is near the front door, and that's another story. 

As the temperature outside rises and falls, the temperatures inside slowly follows, heat making it's unassailable journey from hotter to cooler. The North East corner of the house gets cooler quicker, less affected by the sun, and more affected by outside air. The centre of the house is slowest to cool, surrounded by all the thermal mass of the concrete. In the summer it is the slowest to warm up.

Looking back over data for the last three years, the house was at the same temperature on 16th November 2014, 13th November 2013, and 20th November 2012. That's around three weeks earlier. 

The threat of global warming threatens increased flooding, extreme weather conditions and climate disruption. A reduction in my already very small heating bill may offer a silver lining, admittedly a pathetically thin one that may not help people who have to cross their living room by dinghy. I may be able to buy a new paddle for my dinghy. 

What if we were talking about cocaine, rather than coal?

Australian prime minister Malcolm seems-like-Jesus-after-the-last-guy Turnbull has just decided to keep shipping coal, and ignore suggestions to stop digging any new mines. (World's largest coal exporter) Australia takes over 400 million tonnes of coal out of the ground each year, exporting over 300 billion tonnes and earning AS$37 billion last year.  

Let's pretend this was the president of Columbia talking about cocaine and re-analyse his arguments. 

You may think it's flippant to compare coal to cocaine but there are a few important similarities. First, they are both addictive. Coal creates dependencies. Once you build those power stations, you need to feed the habit. You can try putting other stuff in there instead, but it just doesn't give the same kick. Switch it off, and all those connections down stream will hit serious lows, and you'll get cravings and yearnings. Actually this is sounding more like heroin. 

Second, coal, like cocaine, will increase your productivity. It will give you extra power.

Third, coal, like cocaine, is a highly profitable item that can only be produced in certain parts of the world.

So let's translate a few of Turnbull's arguments and see how they sound. Words with an asterisk have been change.

***

"If *Columbia stopped exporting *cocaine, the countries to which we export it would buy it from somewhere else ... there is absolutely quite a lot of *cocaine around ... so if *Columbia were to stop all of its *cocaine exports it would not reduce *drug use one iota. In fact, arguably it would increase ... because our *cocaine, by and large, is cleaner than the *cocaine in many other countries."

He points out: "*Cocaine is a very important part...the largest single part of the global *drug mix and likely to remain that way for a very long time. "

He also uses the moral argument, which basically goes along the lines that we have been using *cocaine, it has helped us get where we are, so it would be unfair to deprive the rest of the world. As his predecessor said, *cocaine is "good for humanity".

"You have to remember that *drug poverty is one of the big limits on global development in terms of achieving all of the development goals, alleviating hunger and promoting prosperity right around the world – *drugs are an absolute critical ingredient. So *cocaine will play a big part in that."

He goes on that it's "important to take the ideology out - just approach it in a very clear-eyed, cool-headed, rational way".

*Farmers, *cartel bosses and other people involved in the *cocaine industry are applauding his decision.

Reading what he says, I don't think Turnbull even really believes this. He's just being pressured by people in the right wing of his party, and the billions of dollars income from exports. 

He'd much rather see people just surviving on sunlight. And I'm sure people in Australia would be able to help show them how to do that!

***

Read more
in the Guardian

Sydney Morning Herald 

Australian financial review

Notes:

Cocaine is not actually the same as coal in a couple of crucial ways:

1. Cocaine comes from plants, and is therefore a renewable source. Exporting a lump of cocaine this year does not stop you from exporting it next year.

2. Using cocaine has impacts on the users, but these are mostly confined to the user, and perhaps those in the immediate vicinity. As well as producing local pollution, coal leads to global warming, so has global consequences. You can safely export cocaine, and if you're not doing any of it yourself, there will be few ill effects. Coal, on the other hand, will affect your climate, wherever in the world it is burnt, and if you export it, people will burn it. I mean, they're not using it for rock gardens, are they!
3. It's difficult to get precise figures, but Columbia probably earns around US$4 billion from cocaine exports. Around a tenth of what Australia gets for coal. Somewhere around 200 tonnes is exported, although it's very difficult to know how much, because it seems to fall off the boat. This is less than a millionth of Australia's coal exports. Something the Australian government should seriously consider. Or start exporting whatever drugs they're taking!

Evolved from a monkey - though not very far

Marsha Blackburn may not think she looks like a monkey. 

She also doesn't think that humans are causing global warming. This would not be so alarming, if she wasn't the vice chair of the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce. 

That's a bit like having someone on a medical committee who doesn't believe in the germ theory. 

Where do they get these people?

Of course it's ridiculous to suggest that humans evolved from monkeys. It would be like saying you are descended from your cousin. Actually humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor, just like you and your cousin descended from your grandmother. 

And Ms Blackburn may have missed a few other key events in human evolution since our branching away from the other apes. We already share with other primates some self-awareness, social intelligence and mental processes that distinguish us from other parts of the animal kingdom.

Ms Blackburn and the conduits of her DNA were probably part of the cognitive revolution. This allowed humans to indulge in abstract thought. Before this we still roamed around in bands, but could only really communicate about immediate and concrete matters. The cognitive revolution meant that large groups of humans could follow myths, leading to cooperation at scales beyond immediate kin. In the past these myths included worshipping the sun and sacrificing children. More recent myths included growth economics and the belief that a grey-haired old man created the earth for us and that he sent his hippy son to remind us.

Ms Blackburn was probably part of the cognitive revolution, or perhaps she is just aping the other primates in her band, and mirroring them as they jump up and down screaming. 

Around a hundred thousand years after the cognitive revolution, and a couple of hundred years ago came the scientific revolution. This was just another myth, but different in an important way. The scientific revolution provided us with an objective way of reaching facts. No longer were we bound to follow the most popular stories. We could produce hypotheses, test them, and establish facts. The power of science is evidenced daily, in the cars that drive by or the planes flying in the sky. When Nasa gets a satellite to land on a comet we have further evidence supporting science. 

I think Ms Blackburn may have missed the scientific revolution. She is on the house energy committee, but I doubt she even knows what energy is. Representing Tennessee, she probably just thinks energy is coal, and her job is to increase its use. 

But of course we have to remember that science is still just another myth, and the fact that it happens to be a very successful one does not guarantee it will prevail. If the world's richest and most powerful economy can promote people ignorant of science into positions of power, then we have to worry that it may just be a flash in the pan, and we are heading back into the dark ages. 

News of this appeared on 24th September, 2015 in the BBC's Science and Environment coverage, Believing in neither it is unlikely she noticed.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34342808

Divest from the fossil fuel industry

Pressure is rising from groups calling for investors to stop putting money into the fossil fuel industry. For example, Stanford University is divesting from the coal industry.

People have been saying that it's a bit like the anti-apartheid campaign, when the withdrawal of investments from South African countries brought the regime to its knees, but this may be a problem on a wider scale. Oil is the life blood of our economy and fossil fuel burning is currently our major activity, thermodynamically speaking. It's going to take some bigger, more fundamental changes to get to a world like in Star Trek, even though we already have the mobile phones, tablets and dress codes without ties.

While portfolios free of oil industry stocks are part of the solution, they may not be the whole answer. These companies are incredibly rich and powerful, and momentum will keep them going in the same direction. They are fed growth economics by the economy that they are feeding and making grow. Divesting from them may work, but there may still be enough money out there that will not ask questions beyond the annual income and return on investment.

Also, these companies are run by people who are not complete idiots. They have consciences, and they have children and grand children. They will be very aware that the polar ice is melting, because it's allowing them access to more fossil fuel reserves. Global warming actually means more access to more oil. And they have sharp scientific minds that will be able to join the dots to anthropogenic climate change. They will be well aware that burning the known reserves of fossil fuels will produce far more global warming gases than even the most conservative climate scientists predict is safe.


But as the quote from Upton Sinclair said back in the 1930s: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

What the fossil fuel industry needs to do, in the long term interests of the planet, is quite simple:

• Plan a year-on-year reduction in production of fossil fuels.
• Keep a fixed or increasing amount of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground.
• Reduce the amount of fossil fuels sold to people who will burn them.
• Stop wasting money exploring for new fossil fuels. 
• Stop spending money trying to convince people global warming is not happening.

If the companies can adopt these policies, they will become more stable in the long term. Divesting from these companies may be helpful, but another tack is to encourage the shareholders of them to insist they include these policies. Since pension funds often have share portfolios, and share portfolios often have oil shares, this could be a lot of people.

Certainly, if companies in the oil industry change to these policies, they are likely to lose some of their lucrative business, but they will still have plenty of resources to manage. And anyway, there are plenty of companies that have managed to diversify into different businesses.

There was a company in Italy that used to make saddles, but branched into handbags, and is still in business. A stationery shop in Manhattan had been going fifteen years before changing their business to jewellery. And there's a company in Japan that had been making playing cards for around 80 years before it started making video games.

Thanks to http://www.bestoftheleft.com/

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