Rethink carbon taxes!

I'm glad the Minister of Finance gave us all some respite in this year’s budget.  For this was the year when he was supposed to be introducing a carbon tax.  However, he first made the proposal back in 2009.  Since then, the world has changed and his original rationale is now looking very suspect.

For instance, internationally the price of carbon has plunged.  The EU, which was particularly strongly committed, has been trying to support the price, and failed (at great cost). So we now have the prospect of taxing something at about twice its actual value.  That suggests that carbon is a very great sin indeed; only sin taxes are higher than the basic cost of what is being taxed.

Internationally, too, nations which have tried to set up carbon limits are abandoning them when faced by reality.  Germany, for instance, has had laudable carbon targets, but the political decision to phase out nuclear power has meant the death of the targets.  This year alone Germany will bring on line some ten new coal-fired power stations, with more to follow.  In Japan, too, the closure of nuclear plants following a re-assessment of the risks in an earthquake-prone land has meant discarding their target to reduce carbon emissions. Japan now faces increasing emissions for the foreseeable future. Carbon targets are far less important than keeping the lights on.

The great efforts of the UN have come to naught.  At Copenhagen in 2009, they reached an Accord, but it was merely noted.  Some elements of the Accord were accepted at Cancun in 2010.  In Durban in 2011, they developed a “Platform for Enhanced Action”. It was hoped to agree something by 2015 for implementation by 2020 – some enhancement! At Doha in 2012, there were grave reservations that few nations were committing aggressively enough to the 2^oC target – an understatement, if ever there was one. The 2013 meeting in Warsaw broke up in disarray – those awful developing states were demanding that the developed nations pay for the damage they had caused. Ridiculous! Didn’t they understand it was a global problem?

It is now questionable if carbon is as severe a global problem as was thought five years ago. Emissions have soared, but the thermometer has remained stuck on “warm” – since 1997, according to some commentators. Yes, this decade is warmer than any since we got accurate instruments, but it is not getting warmer still. Meanwhile some of those naughty developing nations, like China and India, are emitting more and more carbon every year. The annual growth in China’s emissions is larger than South Africa’s total output.

Another global phenomenon is the realisation that carbon taxes are not the answer.  They are supposed to cut emissions.  Our official policy is to slow emissions until they reach a peak around 2025, after which they may decline.  But carbon taxes have not been able to stop emissions. Australia tried it, and didn’t like the taste. In eighteen other jurisdictions around the world, the best that can be said is that it has slowed the growth in emissions, not reversed them.  Only in the Canadian province of British Columbia has a carbon tax managed to cut emissions. Only there did the government reduce income tax in direct proportion to the carbon tax. In some countries, carbon emissions have more than doubled since the tax was put in place.  

Even here, some circles of Government are somewhat less enthusiastic than they were five years ago.  Treasury itself has been mulling over the problem which they first identified, that the impact of the tax falls heaviest on the poorest, and enriches the richest.  The Department of Energy, in its November 2013 review of its IRP2010, has found better ways of reducing carbon than a tax.  And it has found a carbon budget, beloved of the Department of Environment Affairs, to be really disastrous – but that is another story.

The Energy review also had difficulty in identifying the impact of higher energy prices on the demand for power.  All of us have felt the impact of the higher prices; all of us have tightened our belts as far as we can. The drop in consumption seems largely to be due to the restrictions on the supply and to the increasing downtime for maintaining Eskom’s power stations.  The stations used to be available 86% of the time; the target is now 80%.

This is an important finding, because the whole thesis underlying the carbon tax is the Pigovean idea that demand will drop if you increase the price.  The trouble is that energy is one of those things that are essential to our lives in general and to the economy in particular.  It is a critical factor of production. You can’t increase efficiency beyond certain limits. Once those limits are reached, reducing the energy means reducing the output.

There are already taxes on our energy.  There is the non-renewable energy levy, and the tax to pay for the additional cost of renewable energy. Neither of these have had any detectable effect on the demand.  In economic terms, the price of energy is not very elastic.  You can see this most dramatically in the oil price.  From the 1950’s to the early 1970’s, the demand grew at 150Mt/a.  In the 1970’s there was a ten-fold increase in price. Since the early 1980’s, the demand has continued to grow somewhat slower at 50Mt/a.  So even a really dramatic price increase will only slow the growth – it will not cut it in absolute terms. If you want to cut emissions, you have to find an alternative technology. We are attempting to do that with our renewable energy programme, but with the best will in the world, we cannot replace our coal-fired power stations overnight.

There is also a growing realisation that the value of energy to the economy is far more than what we pay for it.  The great power crash of 2008 allowed us to estimate the cost of unserved energy – the cost of not having power.  It is about R75/kWh.  I know of nothing else that contributes to our economy over 100 times its cost. That is why taxing it to death is a very poor concept.  So please use the year of grace drop the idea, Mr Gordhan.

Consensus? What consensus?

The American Physical Society has just held an extraordinary meeting. It has a Subcommittee looking at climate change. The Subcommittee found it necessary to understand the IPCC consensus on climate science through a workshop which dived deeply into some of the more uncertain aspects. In doing so, it hoped "to illuminate for itself, for the APS membership, and for the broader public both the certainties and the boundaries of current climate science understanding."

People taking part in the workshop included the great climate modeller, Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory; the climatologist Judith Curry from Georgia Tech; the atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen of MIT; and climate scientist John Christy from the University of Alabama. Each of the specialists would be given a chance to address a set of issues drawn up by the APS panel; the panel would ask questions; there would be a general discussion; and they would move on to the next specialist.

I read the 500-odd pages of transcript.  I think there must be something masochistic in the desire to capture every word, even the announcement that cake was served.  But in amongst the reams of dross, there lay gems.  For instance, Santer produced a lovely graphic showing the problems with his own models:

 

The top half is what the models say should have happened in the upper atmosphere over the past 34 years; the bottom half is what has actually happened.  The "fingerprint"of the human-derived carbon dioxide is annoyingly absent - well, annoying to the modellers.  The tropical hotspot between about 500 and 700hPa pressure just isn't there.  Yet the physics underlying the carbon-dioxide-driven global warming hypothesis is clear - it should be! Sceptic and believer agree on that. Why is it missing?  And why, for that matter, has the Arctic air warmed ?

Christy confirmed the problem:

The dots give the data; the squares the average of the data; and the spaghetti lines show the attempts of 25 different models to show what might be happening.  Clearly, they fail - the pattern of the fingerprint is wrong. Christy spent some time castigating the IPCC for ignoring this gap between data and models.  The IPCC claimed that the data in the upper troposphere, as shown here, was somehow deficient yet, as you can see, the spread of four independent sets of measurements is quite small and the model average is a long way from the measurement average.

Christy also had some fascinating things to say about the "average global temperature". The estimation of this starts with measuring the temperature at a whole lot of points around the globe.  At each point, the daily maxima and minima are recorded, and the average temperature at that point for that day is the average of the maximum and minimum.  

The trouble comes when you consider what happens in nature, when very often inversions occur and cool air is trapped near the surface.  Then you put a few buildings around the place, and the turbulence they cause destroys the inversion layer and the night air is warmer than it would otherwise be - regardless of any heat coming from the building.  

The net result is that when you look at data from areas that have become increasingly urbanised, there is little change over time in the day-time maxima, but the nights steadily warm, and this then gets recorded as "global warming." Again, the IPCC claims to have looked at the "urban heat island" effect, and to have taken it into account, but Christy showed that a significant correction was needed - because of the basic atmospheric physics.

The APS Panel was concerned as to how is was possible that the IPCC could claim greater certainty in the latest Assessment Report AR5 than in the previous AR4.  In particular, the human impact had gone from 90 to 95% 'certain'. Lindzen was sniffy:

Do you still believe there is consensus?

The end of snow?

Today the New York Times ran an extraordinary tale about the end of snow. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/08/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-snow.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20140209&_r=0.

"The planet has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1800s, and as a result, snow is melting. In the last 47 years, a million square miles of spring snow cover has disappeared from the Northern Hemisphere. Europe has lost half of its Alpine glacial ice since the 1850s, and if climate change is not reined in, two-thirds of European ski resorts will be likely to close by 2100."

"The same could happen in the United States, where in the Northeast, more than half of the 103 ski resorts may no longer be viable in 30 years because of warmer winters. As far for the Western part of the country, it will lose an estimated 25 to 100 percent of its snowpack by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are not curtailed — reducing the snowpack in Park City, Utah, to zero and relegating skiing to the top quarter of Ajax Mountain in Aspen."

Now I knew that glaciers had been retreating, but my glaciologist friends have difficulty in accepting that it is purely thermal.  So while Europe may have "lost half its Alpine glacial ice", global warming wasn't necessarily the culprit.

I also knew that, while the globe may have warmed a bit, it was very difficult to say that a particular part of the globe had warmed - warming is patchy.  Just because the average global temperature is a bit up does not mean that the snow line is in retreat.

So I went to look for the facts, and found that Rutgers University has a dataset showing the weekly area of the extent of the snow in the northern hemisphere over the past 40-odd years:

 http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/table_area.php?ui_set=0&ui_sort=0

Can you see the end of snow there? Seems to me variable but without any real trend in either the maximum or minimum. The minimum was a bit ragged until about 1972, but it was the start of the satellite era, so some missing data is understandable.

I cannot wait for this climate farce to end, so that I can return to trusting newspapers like the NYT.  Every time they run a piece bleating about climate change I have to check the tale, and invariably find the science is against them. 

The freedom to be wrong

Last night I attended an extraordinary event. A biography of Helen Suzman was launched in the ballroom of the Mount Nelson Hotel. Now a book launch is not normally something to write about, but this was some launch! 

First up to introduce the book was the author, Robin Renwick, or Lord Renwick of Clifton, to give him his full title. He had been British Ambassador to South Africa in the late 1980's, and had played a crucial role in facilitating the transition out of apartheid. He spoke briefly, because he had learned a long time ago that you couldn't keep people from the bar for too long! 

He was followed by Helen Zille, Premier of the Western Cape, who said some things about Suzman that I will talk about later. She was her usual trenchant self, firm, to the point, and quite brief. Next up was ex-President FW de Klerk, full of bonhomie and rueful of the many occasions when he had been bested in Parliament by Suzman. Then we had Mamphaela Ramphaela, newly welcomed to the DA ranks as Presidential candidate, who was wise and nostalgic in her praise of Suzman. And to round off the list of luminaries, none other than Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who also remembered Suzman warmly. 

But Zille said something which grabbed my attention. She quoted Suzman as saying that she had lived through three ideologies, Nazi Fascism, Communism and Apartheid. Each of them was dominated by its own ideological 'truth'. In every case they fell because the 'truth' carried the seeds of its own destruction, when reality eventually forced its way past the misconceptions. 

She - Suzman - was a liberal, which was not an ideology because no liberal ever lays claim to be the holder of the 'truth'. In a liberal democracy you are allowed to make mistakes, but mistakes get picked up and corrected because there is no perceived 'truth'. Instead there is open debate about what is best for society, and that debate is fostered by freedom of speech and the rule of law. 

I knew Suzman quite well, but I had never heard her advance this. Yet it has a ring of veracity about it. Something gave her the will to fight. For 17 years she was the lone voice of reason. Then, in 1974, Gordon Waddell became the first progressive to join her in Parliament. 

 I remember that night well, because at long last a tiny crack had opened in the rigid facade of the apartheid government. Waddell was no light-weight, and I and another tall bloke were only too keen to put him down when we were so foolish as to raise him up in triumph. There was a car close at hand, and Waddell stood on the roof to make his victory speech - which was interrupted by the officer in charge of voting shrieking "Get off my blerry car!" We had to pay for the repairs to the dented roof. 

 So I leave you with the thought that none of us can lay claim to be right. We can have views, and as long as we have the freedom to express those views, then what is right and just will emerge. But attempts to shut down the debate, by declaring that there is 'consensus' or that is is wrong to publish 'falsehoods' miss the point - today's consensus is tomorrow's mistake. That is one of the things that makes life worth living.

Tricky IPICCY

In the debate about climate change/global warming, there is a lingering question – how can many apparently sensible people question the findings of the IPCC?  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is one of the shining lights in the UN’s collection of bodies. Does it not represent the consensus views of many scientists from around the world?

Sadly, it does not.  But this leads to the question - how do you determine 'consensus'? It is difficult to go round asking people if they agree - you don't know if they are telling the truth, or they may give you misleading answers.  You may slant the question or fudge the answers to get the 'consensus' you desire - which has happened in this sphere recently, as shown by the flaws in the so-called '97% consensus' story.

 I think a good way to test consensus is to see what happen if you keep asking the same question.  Ask a question, see what the response is; ask it again, and see what the response is; ask it a third time, and then compare the responses.  Are there differences over time?  If not, then you have true consensus.

This should be one way in which the IPCC finds consensus.  The drafts of it's Assessment Reports go through three drafts before being published.  Each of those drafts is reviewed by hundreds of reviewers from all over the world.  Comments are carefully logged, and summarised by review editors.  Changes are made in texts and figures. The end result is supposed to represent the consensus view.

The latest IPCC Assessment Report went through the requisite three rounds of drafting. In September 2013, the report was published in final draft, “accepted by Working Group I of the IPCC but not approved in detail.”There was a key diagram in each of the first three drafts.  It showed how the most recent measurements of the global temperatures were diverging from predictions made in earlier Assessment Reports. 

In the first two rounds of drafting, the figure appeared with other figures comparing predictions to reality.  The First Order Draft, Technical Summary, TFE 3 Figure 1, p79 has it thus:-

             

The black dots represent the different estimates of global temperatures, the various coloured bands represent the predictions, and the grey band is supposed to represent the range of the various predictions.

The AR4 predictions were made in 2007, so by 2012 when the 2011 data was available, everyone was concerned that the measurements were well below the lower range of a prediction made only five years before. There were comments to the effect that this was an important finding, and in the third draft of AR5, the figure was moved up in importance and shown separately as Second Order Draft, Figure 1.4:-

 By time of the Third Draft, the full data for 2011 were available, and most of the data for 2012. When shown on this graph, they confirmed that the AR4 predictions were high.  So you would think consensus had been achieved.  The question as to whether this was a valid representation of the state of the science had been asked repeatedly, and the diagram had been accepted unchanged.  I and many other scientists accepted that there was a gap between what we had thought in 2007 would happen, and what by 2013 had actually happened, and were girding our loins to try to find the source of the problem.

Then September 2013 arrived, and with it the final draft:-:

The Final Draft Figure 1.4 was totally different - the scales had changed; the measurements had been slightly shifted, the predictions had been rebased,and the critical data, the comparison between reality and model, had been buried under a mound of spaghetti, being the output of a whole lot of models.  Now you could no longer see that there was a difference between model and reality, or that the earlier predictions were high. The simple message of the first three rounds of drafting had been lost. Instead somebody somewhere in the IPCC hierarchy had decided that the simple message was unacceptable, and what the scientists had shown with perfect clarity should instead be buried in a diagram of total incomprehensibility.

Governments everywhere had hoped the IPCC would provide them with sound advice. Slowly the truth is coming out - the IPCC would rather bury a simple message with sleight-of-hand than admit to an obvious shortcoming.  Tricky IPICCY indeed!

  

 

The great Mawson boondoggle

At Christmas came the news that an Australian expedition, aimed at following the footsteps of an explorer called Mawson one hundred years earlier, had become trapped in the ice in Commonwealth Bay. When Mawson was there, the Bay had been ice-free.  So, the expedition evidently argued, with 'Global Warming' under way, there would be no chance of ice.  Surprise, surprise! There was enough to freeze the Akademik Shokalskij hard and fast.

Of course, the Russian captain saw it coming, but the intrepid explorers were ashore, and doing vital scientific work counting penguins. When the weather changed, and they received the message to return to ship urgently, they finished counting before they returned, and by then the ship was stuck.

At that, they panicked.  Not for them a few years locked in the ice.  Nansen and his Fram could have taught them a thing or two about waiting for the ice to take you where it will, but their sense of history did not extend more than 100 years, apparently.  So from around the world, ships were diverted to try to rescue the team. Before long, a Chinese and an Australian ship were also trapped. So much for global warming and mid-summer!

But the team was connected.  The internet is indeed everywhere.  And slowly it all came out.  The 'team' was not just scientists, and not just scientists with the basic sciences needed to study climate change.  Mawson's wife and daughter were aboard, and a Green Party Australian senator.  There were reporters from The Guardian and the BBC.  There were educationists and sociologists (expect a paper on "The dynamics of penguin colonies").  It was a taxpayer-funded Christmas party with a bit of science as an excuse.  After only a few days of being locked in the ice, the Guardian reporter was missing his banana milk shake and his girl-friend. The intrepid spirit of Mawson was conspicuously absent.

Incredibly, they did not even have weather prediction capabilities. Ocean racing yachts worry about the winds for the next week, and an antarctic expedition didn't.  So the farce continued when the ice-bound team sought help, and got it from weatherman Anthony Watts, who runs the worlds largest anti-climate-change blog Watts Up With That. He told them that the weather would probably change for the better after about a week.

Could they wait? No way.  The moment the blizzard was over, and the Chinese helicopter could land, they were off, leaving the 22 crew members to their fate.  The rescued party was duly transferred to the Australian vessel, now almost free of the ice, and began their trip back to Melbourne. A week later, the weather changed as expected and the Akademik Sholalskij sailed off under its own steam.

The leader of this abortive junket, Prof Turney, could not wait to get his side of the story before the public.  Nature ran a letter from him in which he tried to justify the disaster.  Interestingly, the comments Nature ran below his letter were almost universally negative.  Nature has a reputation for being so pro-global-warming that it will never run a contrary view, but on this occasion it changed its policy. 

I sincerely hope that the days when pseudo-science could drum up huge financial support merely by mentioning the words "climate change" are coming to an end. For the sake of real science, it cannot happen too soon. 

A Public Protector for food?

When I started studying chemical engineering, it was called "Applied and Industrial Chemistry."  Half way through the course, the name was changed to Chemical Engineering and that was how I started out in life.

The advantage of this was that I learned a lot of chemistry - we had to do virtually the full Honours course.  When I stayed on to do post-graduate work, we were still housed in the chemistry department, and had our tea each day with the chemists.  

The bookshelves of the tea room were lined with bound copies of chemical journals. One of the most fascinating was The Analyst. It started in 1876, and the early issues were largely devoted to identifying adulterants in food. There was chalk in the milk, mineral oil in the butter and limestone in the bread.  It was quite amazing how creative the early food producers were in flogging dirt as food.

Nothing has changed, except in many cases it has become legal. "Chicken" is mysteriously laced with a significant percentage of brine. I don't know what they add to "bacon" but I do know that as you grill it, it exudes white gunk and shrinks to less than half its size. I bought real bacon from the local German butcher just to prove to myself I wasn't imagining things - I wasn't!

Then there is the health story that fats are bad for you, and some fats are worse than others.  A recent investigation into the nutrition industry in the US concluded that "nutrition science" failed every test of being a science.  If you ever glance at a "health" magazine, you will see the result.  On page 1, there is a tale of the horror of salt; on page 11 there is "Salt - the most vital mineral."

This has spawned "lite" products. What "lite" means is "this product contains more water than the real thing" and sometimes the added water is as much as 50%.  Milk is the particular victim of this marketing ploy.  You pay just as much for "low-fat" milk as you pay for ordinary milk.  Either the producer has removed more of the fat to make butter, which he can then sell at a nice profit, or just watered down the product. The net result is a grey liquid.  The customer doesn't score, because you have to add twice as much to your coffee to get the same taste as you would with undiluted milk.

The latest scam of this kind to come my way is the watering-down of Marmite.  Now Marmite used to have a jelly-like consistency. It had to be spread on warm toast to get a nice even layer.  Now it is a thin gruel, and you need four times as much to get the real taste - and if you spread four times as much on warm toast, it melts and runs off to make everything sticky.

What I want for Christmas is a Public Protector for our food. Have a good one!