A chemical engineer’s view of climate change.

We chemical engineers are a privileged group. We are well grounded in chemistry, physics and math. We are used to handling complex systems and understanding the subtleties of their behaviour. We do our best to integrate environmental sustainability into our work. This may surprise those for whom the very word “chemical” is an anathema, but they do not understand the extent of the challenge posed by a cradle-to-grave system for dealing with chemicals. Once the chemicals get to the retail scale, it is extremely difficult to prevent environmental abuse.

Armed with the chemical engineer’s skill set, it is possible to take a unique view of climate change. First, it helps to define what we understand by “climate change”? The hypothesis is that an increase in the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere will increase the scattering of longwave infrared which would otherwise radiate harmlessly into space. The resultant imbalance in radiative fluxes would lead to heating of the atmosphere. Both the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and heating are observable, but it does not necessarily follow that the two are linked.

It is further supposed that the relative humidity will increase in a warmer world, and, because water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas, the rate of heating will increase exponentially. Intuitively, this makes sense. However, young chemical engineers soon learn that to every problem in a complex system there is always a simple straightforward solution – and that solution is always wrong!

The chemical engineer understands that feed forward disturbances in complex systems will indeed easily run out of control, and that there has to be feedback if the system is to be stable. The temperature control of the Earth is impressive. For any 100-year period during the past 8 000 years, the system has controlled itself within a range of ±2oC for more than 95% of the time. Climate science has been concentrating on the feed forward aspect, and seems to have completely neglected the stabilizing feedback mechanisms.

The world does appear to be warming. The official records claim to demonstrate this conclusively:

But there are a couple of problems with this official graph. If you take something like New York’s climate, and show the diurnal and seasonal changes, the official record looks insignificant:

That is “global warming”. Does it really look like a crisis? But worse is to come! Like a good chemical engineer, you check on the underlying data. You find, when you do this check, that the HADCRUT curve is a figment of someone’s imagination! The raw data has been “adjusted”. Cape Town’s data, for instance, shows slight cooling since 1880, but after adjustment the picture is dramatically different:

By ignoring the pre-1910 data and lowering the 1910 to 1960 data by exactly 1.21oC, the observed cooling has become a hypothetical warming! There are hundreds of sites to which similar “adjustments” have been made. A recent report observed “The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST [Global Average Surface Temperature] data sets are not a valid representation of reality.” HADCRUT is one of those three.

If you are a good chemical engineer, once your suspicions are aroused, you go very carefully. So when you are told “Extreme weather events, natural disasters and failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation” are high-ranking risks, you search for evidence in support. You go, for instance, to the climate bible, the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There you find such warnings as:
• “There is low confidence that any observed long-term increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust
• “There is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale phenomena such as tornadoes and hail”
• “There is limited to medium evidence available to assess climate-driven observed changes in the magnitude and frequency of floods. Furthermore, there is low agreement in this evidence, and thus overall low confidence at the global scale regarding even the sign of these changes.” (Emphasis added)
• “Uncertainty in projections of changes in large-scale patterns of natural climate variability remains large.”

Now I ask you to imagine your Board’s reaction if you were to ask them for a few hundred million to address the risks posed by climate change, as assessed by the IPCC. You would probably be lucky to keep your job.

However, some Board members may have been reading Al Gore or similar science fiction. “What about the melting ice/sea level/ malaria/polar bears/coral?” And you would show them the evidence that the glaciers are only a few hundred years old – they come and go; that the sea level has been rising at about 1.7mm per year for as long as we have been able to measure it; or that, in 1923, malaria caused 10 000 deaths in Archangel, just outside the Arctic Circle; or that polar bear populations had been declining because too many hunting permits had been issued, and have since grown back; or that bleaching of corals is primarily due to short-term sea level changes such as those caused by El Nino.

They may fall back on the law. “We have signed the Paris Agreement!” But the Paris Agreement is about controlling temperatures, and that is something we chemical engineers know a lot about. The target is to control the Earth’s temperature to less than 1.5oC above some pre-industrial temperature. Look again at the first figure. The most recent data – which probably hasn’t been adjusted – shows a perfectly natural 0.6oC rise caused by El Nino. And our politicians are going to show us how to control to less than 1.5oC? Plus/minus how much?

But where we chemical engineers get really annoyed is when there are predictions about the future climate based on models. We do a lot of modelling. It is key to consistently producing chemicals of clearly defined properties from inputs of surprisingly variable composition. We maintain that quality in spite of plant disturbances, failed sensors, dramatic phase changes, ageing pumps. Our models work in real time.

The climate “models” fail. They all tell us the upper troposphere between the tropics should be warming faster than the surface of the earth. It isn’t. They can’t take into account the energy release of a single tropical cyclone, so their energy balance errs by a few zettajoules. We chemical engineers cringe at the amateur attempts to do modelling. If a model is demonstrably wrong, you should fix it before you go any further.

So what do they do with their failed models instead? They run them many times, and average the bad results. Then they use the average bad results to make predictions – invariably of worsening conditions. The extraordinary thing is that people believe them. Perhaps it is easier to create a putative problem than to rebuild a bridge or replace an ageing dam or heighten a sea wall.
Hans Andersen wrote a fable of the emperor’s non-existent new clothes. If Andersen were still alive, he would be amused to see his tale come true.

How green WAS my valley!

We are all "green." We love nature. We will do all we can to save it from being ravaged by mankind. But there is a problem. As Einstein remarked “Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht,” roughly translated as "The Good Lord may be subtle, but He is not malicious."

This should be a warning that you must at all costs avoid being what I call a "galloping green." There is no point in plunging ahead when you think you have spotted a problem. Just remember, there is always a simple, straightforward solution to virtually every problem, and that solution is invariably wrong. You have to think before you act. Gut feeling for nature could do damage, not solve the problem!

There is a wonderful example in the latest Nature journal, http://www.nature.com/news/gridlock-over-italy-s-olive-tree-deaths-starts-to-ease-1.19939. Down in Puglia, the heel of the boot which is Italy, some olive trees started dying.  The plant pathologists identified a foreign bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, as the culprit. They recommended uprooting the infected trees and everything within 100m of it.

But the local green movement was against this.  They "knew" all about diseases of olive trees, and were not going to allow 1 000 year old specimens to be uprooted. They chained themselves to the infected trees to prevent them being taken down; they went to court to stop the "massacre." They convinced the Puglian judge that the problem was fungal, not bacterial, and that they were expert in handling olive trees attacked by fungi.  The judge believed them.

And so the problem has spread through the whole of Puglia, some 200 000ha of olive groves, and is moving steadily north.  It has taken six months, but the judgement has been reversed - probably not too late to save the rest of Italy's crop. 

But Puglia is doomed, dead trees everywhere.  And the bacterium seems to have spread - to coastal Spain, across the Adriatic to Greece. All because the tree huggers thought they had the answer. Sometimes one thinks green is the colour beloved by the Devil himself!

How green can you be?

Last night I gave a talk to the SA Academy of Engineering on "The opportunities for low-carbon energy technology for power generation." This was to present preliminary findings on some work an international team and I had been doing for the International Council of Academies of Engineering.  Suppose you desired a lower carbon world.  What could be done to keep the lights on and not see the cost of doing so spiral out of control?

We concluded that, by 2050, it was probably technically feasible to double our use of electricity and yet emit a third less carbon than we currently do. It would mean taking about half our coal-fired power plants out of service, and replacing them by hydropower, nuclear power and some renewable energy. 

At question time there were some sensible questions.  Gratifyingly, my bit of kite flying was not completely shot down in flames.  

And then my heart sank.  A student started to spout the usual collection of green beliefs.  It didn't matter that I had carefully analysed the possibilities, that I had presented a wide range of facts which taken in their totality indicated that it should be possible to reduce carbon emissions without running out of either energy or money. 

I didn't realize, he claimed, what a disaster the world was facing; how it was not enough to start talking about 2050, action was needed now if the world was to survive. We were facing increasing climate disasters that might lead to starvation at the very least.  The Government of Australia and the IPCC had spoken! I should have listened. Instead, what I was proposing was too little, too late.

It was question time, so I hoped he would forgive me if I forgave him for not asking a question, but making a series of statements.  However, it meant I should be allowed to ask him a question.  If things were so desperate, why was it that the world's leaders had failed to reach a decision at Copenhagen four years ago; failed again at Cancun a year later; and decided last year in Durban to wait until 2015 before deciding on actions to be followed from 2020 onwards?  Were the world's leaders wrong? He spluttered something about the world's leaders being nothing but a collection of politicians, which seemed to me a lame response.

But still, the incident rankled.  For once, I had tried to make a positive contribution to what some see as the world's greatest problem.  I don't see climate change that way - I think there are far more present dangers, here and now - but I needed to get to grips with the problem, such as it was.  And here was a True Believer, saying in effect that I had failed miserably, and lecturing me and the hundred or so other members of the audience about his beliefs, his fears, his questionable view of the world.

There comes a time when being green seems to mean that you no longer have to listen to any other point of view - shout loudly enough, and the conversation will be one way, your way. Debate promptly dies, and our world is the poorer.