The Paris "Agreement"

All the excitement, the back-slappings, the hubbub is over, and the 40 000 have jetted back home. COP21 has come and gone. We have now had time to assess all 32 pages of the Paris Agreement.

In spite of the claims about saving the planet, there is little for your carbon comfort. Much of the Agreement has to do with noble intentions: ”Each Party shall prepare, communicate and maintain successive nationally determined contributions that it intends to achieve. Parties shall pursue domestic mitigation measures, with the aim of achieving the objectives of such contributions.” (Article 4.2) Legally binding? No! And wasn't there something about the path to Hell being paved with good intentions?

Much of the Agreement has to do with accounting: “Parties shall account for their nationally determined contributions. In accounting for anthropogenic emissions and removals corresponding to their nationally determined contributions, Parties shall promote environmental integrity, transparency, accuracy, completeness, comparability and consistency, and ensure the avoidance of double counting - -.” (Article 4.13) It will be nice to be able to tell how rapidly we are committing carbon suicide (if indeed we are), but it is difficult to see how this is going to save the world.

An issue largely left unresolved is what to do about the big emitters who have emerged since 1992, when the Convention on Climate Change came into being. It is all very well for the Agreement to say “Developed country Parties shall provide financial resources to assist developing country Parties with respect to both mitigation and adaptation in continuation of their existing obligations under the Convention. “ (Article 9.1), but there is no clarity of who is ‘Developed’ and who ‘Developing’. Which category does China fit into? Or South Africa, for that matter?

On the money, the Agreement is gloriously vague: “strongly urges developed country Parties to scale up their level of financial support, with a concrete roadmap to achieve the goal of jointly providing USD 100 billion annually by 2020 for mitigation and adaptation.” (Para IV, 54) In other words, for all the pious promises, S100 billion a year will not be available soon.

You will understand that I am seriously underwhelmed by the Paris Agreement. The fact that it is little more than hand-waving is made clear by Article 28: “1. At any time after three years from the date on which this Agreement has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Agreement by giving written notification - -. 2. Any such withdrawal shall take effect upon expiry of one year from the date of receipt - - of the notification of withdrawal, - -” An agreement from which you can opt out any time you feel so inclined? That’s no agreement!

As the Romans would have put it, “The mountains have been in labour, and given birth to a little mouse.” (Horace)

The hot-air balloon has gone up!

The 21st Conference of Parties has ground to a halt, predictably late. It has produced a 31-page Paris Agreement. It looks very like previous agreements, with much gnashing of teeth over climate threats. It is full of pious decides, also decides and further decides. But nearly all the decisions are about forming new committees, or making progress on earlier decisions. Decisions on real action are conspicuous by their absence, which is probably a merciful release for us all. The basis for carbon-cutting is the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDC's. Most nations were urged, after COP 20 in Lima,to dream up ways they could cut their emissions. Many responded. The UNFCCC sausage machine ground up the INDC's and found that by 2030 the world would emit some 55 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, rather than the hoped-for 40 million tons. Note that the INDC's are only intended - there are lots of good intentions paving this particular path to hell. But right at the end, it becomes clear that all this teeth-gnashing has worn the poor molars away: "1. At any time after three years from the date on which this Agreement has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Agreement by giving written notification to the Depositary. 2. Any such withdrawal shall take effect upon expiry of one year from the date of receipt by the Depositary of the notification of withdrawal, or on such later date as may be specified in the notification of withdrawal. 3. Any Party that withdraws from the Convention shall be considered as also having withdrawn from this Agreement." Some agreement!

Copious Parisian hot air.

I thought you would really REALLY like to know how the Paris talks are progressing. With three days to go to reach a consensus, I have the feeling that consensus is still a long way away: "Each Party shall regularly prepare, communicate [and maintain] [successive] ### and [shall][should][other][take appropriate domestic measures] [have in place][identify and] [pursue] [implement] [[domestic laws], [nationally determined] policies or other measures] [designed to] [implement][achieve][carry out][that support the implementation of] its ###]." I don't like to ask about "###" - I fear it may be something naughty and unfit for readers of this blog. But there it is, in all its triple hash glory, for all the world to see. What will they get up to next? The mind boggles at the idea of 40 000 people descending on poor Paris, to waste each others time in this way. Do they sincerely believe that they can control the global climate? Are they honest in their ambition? Do they really have a clue just how strong Mother Nature really is? Can they possibly be blind to how energy has made this world a better place to live in? Is it credible that the future they seem to believe in will prove achievable within the lifespan of those born today? Slowly the world is coming to the conclusion that violent storms must have stripped the UNFCCC emperors of their clothing - either that, or they were never properly dressed in the first place. Expect more hot air from Paris!

A really bad proposal!

Our Treasury has finally published a draft bill introducing a carbon tax.  They have been talking about it for years, and one would have hoped that had got it right by now.  They haven't. 

Of course, their timing couldn't be worse. The first protest came from the Chamber of Mines, which has requested a delay in the imposition of any carbon tax for five years.  It deserves every support.  

Our actual carbon emissions today are significantly lower than they were expected to be when the tax was first mooted.  The electricity crisis has increased the cost of power, which has made us more energy efficient, so that we are doing a little more with significantly less. Our economy is struggling for lack of power, but we are emitting about 80 million tons of carbon dioxide less than we were expected to do by this time. So any nudge to do more by imposing a carbon tax could well push our economy over the edge.  

Then we do not know what the outcome of the Paris discussions next month will be, but it is extremely unlikely that we will see any agreement of a legally binding nature, so there is no compulsion on us to try to cut our emissions further. 

It is also unlikely that any funds will be committed to assisting developing countries such as South Africa to reduce their emissions. It is eight years since we offered reductions if we got financial help. According to recent submissions by the Department of Environment Affairs and Tourism to Parliament, we have received about R200 million in aid, but we have already committed over R260 billion to adaptation alone. Less than 0.1% aid is no aid at all.  I can only conclude that the developed nations are giving no more than lip service to promised $100 billion a year meant to support such activities.  

The draft Bill that has been published for comment has some extraordinary provisions.  For instance, you could be taxed for burning wood, or wood waste, or biofuels. “Oh, but we will give you 100% exemption!” is the response.  Really? How kind. The Bill doesn’t define fossil fuels or pollution.  Yet it treats carbon dioxide, the source of all life on earth, as a pollutant. 

Meanwhile, the evidence that a warmer world will be a disastrous one is lacking – while we hear daily that record X has been broken, an examination of the data for the past 150 years of warming reveals no trends of increasing frequency of anything other than warmer days - but that is just what you would expect in a warmer world.  

We do not need a carbon tax now. One fears that Treasury may need more revenue, but to raise it in the name of saving the world from a disaster of the world’s making is a very bad idea.

How do you tell if it is "extreme"?

There are constant claims that extreme events are becoming more frequent, but when you really dig down, you cannot see any trends even in long-term data.  Of course, the scaremongers claim that it hasn’t happened yet, but their models predict it is going to happen any day real soon now, just you wait! All agree it has been warming for at least the past 150 years.If there were any effect such as the models predict, surely we would have seen it by now? It surprises many, but there is no detectable trend in extreme events in the historical data sets. 

However, it is not quite straightforward.For instance, how do you define an extreme event, particularly with phenomena that are not normally distributed? Do you only have to consider the high extremes,or must you also consider the low extremes? And how many extreme events does it take to determine a baseline, let alone a trend? 

To illustrate the challenges, consider the longest rainfall record we possess, that of England and Wales, which has monthly data back to 1766. The annual totals are close to normally distributed, as shown in the figure. 

A multi-parameter distribution such as a Weibull would do a better job, but we can treat the distribution as normal for the purposes of this exercise. The average annual rainfall is 918mm with a standard deviation of 119mm. 

We would expect 12.5 extreme events in 250 years, if an extreme event is defined as one that exceeds the 95% confidence limits. The figure shows that there are seven such events above the upper limit and four below the lower, or 11 in total, where 12.5 had been expected.

Given the slight skewness of the data and the approximation of normality, the difference is not significant. What is significant, however, is that there is no detectable change in the frequency of the extreme events.Indeed, to detect such a change with any degree of confidence, you would need far more than eleven events or, in the present case, far longer than 250 years. So those who claim we are facing disaster from “climate change” need to reflect on the fact that even with a generous 95% measure of extremeness, it took 250 data points to approximate a baseline.How can we tell if an event is extreme if we have no baseline? 

Is 95% generous? I think it is.Engineers typically design for the 1:100 year event, not 5:100. For really critical structures, they may use the 1:1000 year event. By and large, the engineers have been successful in protecting us against all manner of natural forces.The Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 devastated Tokyo; it had a magnitude of 7.9. The Great Tohoku earthquake of 2011, which caused the tsunami that destroyed the nuclear reactors at Fukushima, had a magnitude of 9.0 and the rebuilt, earthquake-proofed Tokyo was virtually unscathed.

When you hear that the effects of climate change will fall more strongly on poor nations, realize that it is probably true.However, it actually has nothing to do with climate change, and everything to do with some poorly engineered infrastructure in those nations.

Those naughty engineers at VW

“How could they have been so stupid?” is a question I have heard numerous times over the past few days. “How could they not have seen the risks?” “Purposely defeating testing must surely be criminal?”

I think the problem may be deeper than it seems.  Perhaps those clever engineers were too clever.  Perhaps they recognized some things that we need to recognize.  Perhaps they have identified  underlying challenges that need to be faced.

One challenge is the use of language in American law that allows perfectly natural processes to be described as harmful.  For instance, we may think we know what a “pollutant” is, but US law defines carbon dioxide as a pollutant. I’m not certain how they manage to avoid arresting every citizen for breathing, or destroying every plant, but in 2007, the US Supreme Court held that the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] the authority to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases. Two years later the EPA issued an endangerment finding that "greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated both to endanger public health and to endanger public welfare.”

In the same vein, nitrogen oxides, which the VW diesel evidently emits at up to 40 times the legal limit when not being tested, are natural substances, produced whenever there is a wildfire.  Wildfires are part of nature – many fynbos species require fire to propagate. Lightning makes nitrogen oxides.  Many decay processes lead to release of ammonia, which is converted into nitrogen oxides.  And the nitrogen oxides are essential substances for the growth of most plants.  These days we use artificial nitrogenous fertilizers rather than night soil to fertilize our crops.

The perceived problem is that humans produce excessive nitrogen oxides.  So, for instance, nitrogen oxides were supposed to contribute to “acid rain”.  That is an environmental scare about which we do not hear very much these days, because it turned out to be another “sky-is-falling-on-our-heads” problem.  The Germans are particularly aware of the failure of “acid-rain”. They were suckered into spending billions uselessly to prevent Waldsterben – forest death.  They love their forests, and were horrified to think that the “acid rain” might be killing them.  It transpired that the forests were dying of old age, and that the “acid rain” was actually nurturing them. All rain is acid. What happens when rain reaches the ground determines whether the runoff is acidic or alkaline.

A real environmental impact of nitrogen oxides is the “eutrophication” of water. Nitrogen, being a nutrient, can stimulate growth of plants and algae in water systems to the point where the systems become unstable and the whole system dies.  The problem arises particularly from excessive use of artificial fertilizers.  So, for instance, the Mississippi river is a rich source of nutrients and there are frequently dead zones in the ocean at its mouth.

The impact of nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere is small.  Human-related emissions come largely from artificial fertilizers, sewerage works and animal feedlots, and to a lesser extent from the burning of fossil fuels. One of the oxides, nitrous oxide, is a potent greenhouse gas, but its concentration is very low, so that its impact is about one-ten thousandth that of the primary greenhouse gas, water vapour. It is also implicated in ozone destruction, but its effect is ameliorated by the fact that other nitrogen oxides help to form ozone at lower levels in the atmosphere.

How severe is the impact of vehicle emissions compared to all emissions, natural and anthropogenic? The EPA says about 40% of all emissions are anthropogenic, 75% of the anthropogenic emissions come from agriculture and only 5% from transport. So transport is responsible for 2% of the total emissions; aircraft, shipping, heavy construction and mining equipment, diesel-electric sets on trains and and the trucking industry are responsible for 80% of that.  So those awful VW diesels were making a small contribution to about 0.4% of the putative problem.

Perhaps the engineers at VW asked themselves some simple questions. How much is it worth spending to help reduce 0.4% of a putative problem? Are the limits set by a US regulator realistic?  Just because you can measure something, does it mean it is a problem? Is something which is predominantly natural a pollutant? Even if it is, when agriculture is the main source, isn’t that where it needs to be addressed?

American law is in danger of threatening all our lives, on the one hand by redefining our language and on the other by conferring power on Government agencies that in many cases have grown so powerful that they can no longer be controlled. These may well be behind the thinking that led the VW engineers to an economic solution to a non-problem.

Note well, I am NOT saying they were right to take the law into their own hands.  But I am saying that VW's reputation would have suffered far less if it and other car manufacturers had challenged the EPA in the court of law when the EPA first proposed its ridiculous limits.  The environment is not something to be protected at all costs. De minimis non curat lex.

BIG projects

Everyone seems to agree that megaprojects should be avoided.  They are over time and over budget.  On these grounds, we shouldn't undertake them.

This isn’t new.  When I was involved in international construction, my bible was a 1988 study by the Rand Corporation of the problems associated with large civilian infrastructure projects.  Fifty-two projects of a value of over $500 million (1984$) were studied.  Only four came in on budget, and the average cost growth was 88%. In contrast, 18 projects were completed on time and the average time growth was 17%. 

The causes of the  overruns were identified.  Using new technology played a role; lack of familiarity with the construction techniques was another; institutional problems to do with environmental controls, labour practices and procurement restraints also loomed large. It was recommended that much more work went into the head-end design of the project to ensure that these factors were addressed as far as possible.

Does this sound familiar?  It should.  Medupi and Kusile are some of the largest coal-fired power stations in the world.  They are using supercritical technologies that are novel in South Africa. Eskom used to have the construction skills; they were lost over a decade ago when Government decided Eskom should no longer build power stations.  The stations have had desulphurization imposed on them for the most doubtful of environmental reasons.  They have been beset by union problems, which have even involved the destruction of construction equipment. They have had to maximize local procurement, and the acquisition of the major component, the boilers, was the subject of Government involvement.  The project starts were rushed when it was finally realized that we were about to run out of power. All the factors that are known to lead to cost and time growth were present.

So when people complain about the lack of information about our nuclear programme, perhaps they need to recognize that time spent in planning properly is time well spent, and when you are planning, there is very little information available to discuss.  

But above all, our nuclear planners need to read the update on the Rand report - Industrial Megaprojects: Concepts, Strategies,and Practices for Success by Edward Merrow, available via Amazon.