The BP Statistical Review if World Energy

The annual Review has just been published (http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html).  The data are readily downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet.  A few minutes work soon gives an excellent idea of the trends in the world’s energy. The changes since 1965 in the consumption of the primary energy sources, in millions of tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe), are:

Global consumption continues to increase. A linear model suggest an annual growth of 176±7 Mtoe over the full period, although in this century it has been growing far faster, 265±18Mtoe annually. Much of this acceleration in growth has come from the use of coal, but that has slowed in recent years with the downturn in the Chinese economy.
Those who are concerned about our fossil fuel use will be gratified to know that we are getting a little less of our energy from fossils: 

The Kyoto Protocol seemed to have the effect of increasing our fossil consumption between 1996 and 2008. It took the economic catastrophe of 2008 to have any impact, and the relative consumption is now falling.

Some would point to the growth in renewable energy supplies, and indeed renewables are no longer completely insignificant. If we look at electrical generation rather than primary energy, then today nuclear yields about 2 500TWh annually, hydropower about 4 000TWh and renewables about 1500TWh:


Nuclear has started to grow slowly; hydropower is growing steadily at about 90TWh per annum; and renewable are growing exponentially – the past year added over 200TWh to renewable generation.  This growth comes primarily from wind power:


although solar photovoltaics have started to grow rapidly.

The BP Review permits a review of the efficiency of wind and solar power, because it gives both the installed capacity and the energy generated. The global capacity factor for solar PV was below 10% but has risen to about 12% in recent years. The capacity factor for wind has been growing steadily and is now about 22%:

The annual BP Statistical Review is a rich resource indeed, and my mining has only just scratched the surface.  For those having ambitions to control temperature rises by reducing fossil fuel consumption, it gives cold comfort – fossil fuel use is still growing at over 150Mtoe per annum and will make up more than 80% of global energy for quite a few years yet. Who are the culprits?  From the Review, you can soon work out who uses most fossil fuel.  Throw in population figures, however, and it is evident that the per capita consumption varies dramatically:

China consumes more fossil fuel than the US and Canada put together, but the average Chinese burns less than 2t of fossil fuel each year, where the average American burns over 6t and the average Saudi burns nearly 10t. India burns over 600Mtoe every year, but the average Indian uses just over 0.5t annually. If the Indian economy were to double, which is by no means impossible, it would use more fossil fuel than the US. 

There are those who strongly believe the globe is on a path to ruin unless the energy system is "decarbonised". The BP Review gives the hard facts. “Decarbonisation” is the stuff of dreams.

Our Climate Emperors

Hans Christian Andersen wrote the tale of two weavers who promised an emperor a new suit of clothes that was invisible to those who were unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. When the Emperor paraded before his subjects, no one dared to say that they could not see his new suit until a child shouted "But he isn't wearing anything at all!"

   
The climate emperors gathered in Paris last year, convinced they were going to given a suit of armour that would enable them to lead the fight to save the world from carbon dragons. They left, cheering the fact that the dragons would not be allowed to heat the world by more than 1.5oC. Their arms? Nothing more than pieces of paper on which were written “intended nationally determined contributions”, INDC’s.

 
Even before the climate emperors’ return flights had landed, their subjects had found weaknesses in the suits.  There were gaps with some areas, where countries were doubtful about the strength of the INDC’s.  After all, they were only intended – and good intentions are a well-known road to hell. Worse, the INDC’s might have been incomplete, and the suits full of holes, but there were too many dragons to avoid the purported 1.5oC attack.  The weavers urged the climate emperors to be brave and even more ambitious.

  And duly they were.  They flew to New York to sign other bits of paper, in which they swore to believe in their own INDC’s. They would do their best to convince their subjects that the bits of paper were real armament against the forces of nature.  

It mattered not that earlier suits of armour, given out at Kyoto in Japan, had proved useless. The CO2 dragon had flourished even though most of the developed nations had done their bit. The Chinese dragon in particular had made a mockery of the Japanese armour.

 
But this time it would be better.  The dragon would be contained so that it could cause no more than 1.5oC damage, where the 1.5oC rise was measured from “pre-industrial” temperatures.  And suddenly the small children were laughing, because even they knew that thermometers had only become effective around 1860. “Pre-industry” was before James Watt’s steam engine of 1800.  No one knew what the “pre-industrial” temperatures had been.

 
Yes, there had been some necroManncy trying to read tree rings to guess the temperatures, but the International Magicians Union had shown the flaws in that approach. “Pre-industrial” temperatures were a ±1oC myth, and even little children knew that.

  
Meanwhile, there were so many dragons on the loose that people were beginning to turn them into pets.  Dragonfire makes the world warmer, so the grim reaper of winter had less work to do. Plants love dragonfire, so the world was a cleaner, greener place. Dragonfire gives us energy to do things that overtax our own muscles. It pushes our massive trains and aeroplanes. Just wisps of it power our mobiles. 
 

The climate emperors just don’t understand. They thought they could persuade us that dragonfire was dangerous, so we could be taxed and they could have bigger cars and larger homes and breed many princes to rule over us.  Some unfortunate nations were convinced. They are now are suffering, with huge increases in the costs of energy and loss of jobs. 

 
That’s what can happen when emperors are deaf, and cannot hear what the children are telling them.

  

The fifth and last step - drowning!

Yes, there is fossil fuel carbon dioxide building up in the air; it might be contributing to the warming of the world; it is almost certainly not wishing wild weather upon us; so there remains the last question - will the seas rise and submerge huge swathes of real estate?

First it needs to be recognized that the sea level is rising. It has been rising for about the past 25 000 years. However, for the past 7 millennia it has been rising slower than ever before:

The critical question, however, is whether the observed slow rate of rise has increased as a result of the warming climate. There are several lines of evidence that it has not.  One is the long-term data from tide gauges. These have to be treated with caution because there are areas where the land is sinking (such as the Gulf of Mexico, where the silt carried down the Mississippi is weighing down the crust), and others where it is rising (such as much of Scandinavia, relieved of a burden of a few thousand metres of ice about 10 000 years ago). A typical long-term tide gauge record is:

The 1860-1950 trend was 2.47-3.17mm/a; the 1950-2014 trend was 2.80-3.42mm/a, both at a 95% confidence level. The two trends are statistically indistinguishable. There is <5% probability that they might show any acceleration after 1950.

Another line of evidence comes from satellite measurements of sea level.  The figure below shows the latest available satellite information – it only extends back until 1993. Nevertheless, the 3.3±0.3mm/a rise in sea level is entirely consistent with the tide gauge record:

Thus several lines of evidence point to the present rate of sea level rise being about 3mm/a or 30cm per century. Our existing defences against the sea have to deal with diurnal tidal changes of several metres, and low-pressure-induced storm surges of several metres more.  The average height of our defences above mean sea level is about 7m, so adding 0.3m in the next century will reduce the number of waves that occasionally overtop the barrier.

The IPCC predicts (using its rather suspect models) that the sea level will rise by between 0.4 and 0.7m during this century. It claims:

"It is very likely that the mean rate of global averaged sea level rise was 1.7 [1.5 to 1.9] mm/yr between 1901 and 2010 and 3.2 [2.8 to 3.6] mm/yr between 1993 and 2010"

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There are many tide gauges where the land does not appear to rising or falling. They all show a change in sea level the region of 2.5-2.9mm/a over the 20th century. On the other hand there are some stations, such as Simonstown, that do indeed seem to show an acceleration in the 21st century; while, surprisingly, many tide gauges on Pacific and Indian Ocean islands show no sea-level rise at all e.g. Guam, Eniwetok, Johnston Atoll.

A very recent paper notes that there was probably a fall of the order of 0.2mm/a as the world cooled after the Medieval Warm Period, and that as we recover from the Little Ice Age (which ended about 1850) the sea has been warming and expanding and, of course, is fed by melting glaciers. They estimate the 20th century sea-level rise to have been only about 0.15m, but predict that the 21st century could see a rise of between 0.24 and 1.31m.

Given the wide range of the prediction, there is a possibility they could be right. Importantly, of course, is the fact that even a 1.3m rise is not likely to be a disaster, in the light of the fact that our defences are already metres high – adding 20% to them would be costly, to be sure, but we would have decades to make the change, and should have more than adequate warning of any significant increase in the rate of sea level rise.

Envoi

Our five steps have shown:

• the combustion of ever increasing quantities of fossil fuel has boosted the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere.  
• the impact of that increase is not demonstrable in a scientific way. There may be some warming of the atmosphere, but at present any warming is almost certainly hidden in the natural variation of temperatures. 
• there is no evidence for any increase in the frequency or magnitude of weather phenomena, and that includes droughts and floods.  
• there is a small possibility that sea level rise may make some real estate uninhabitable, but the rise over the coming century is not likely to present any insuperable challenge.

 It can only be concluded that our world will remain perfectly habitable in the face of rising carbon dioxide levels.

The fourth stumbling step

Thus far we have seen that carbon dioxide really is increasing in the atmosphere, and that the evidence that it originates from burning fossil fuels is good. However, in the third step, we found that the link between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global temperatures was tenuous at best, and certainly not at the level of understanding where anyone could say "We can control the global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees C by controlling carbon emissions!" They can't, and we will stop wasting money the sooner they realize the falsity of such a statement.

In this fourth step we examine what the climate effects of a warmer world might be.  First, what is “climate”? It is the result of averaging a climatological variable, such as rainfall or atmospheric pressure, measured typically over a month or a season, where the average is taken over several years so as to give an indication of the weather that might be expected at that month or season.

Secondly, we need to understand the meaning of “change”. In this context it clearly means that the average of a climatological variable over X number of years will differ from the same variable averaged over a different set of X years.  But it is readily observable that the weather changes from year to year, so there will be a natural variation in the climate from one period of X years to another period X years long.  One therefore needs to know how long X must be to determine the natural variability and thus to detect reliably any change in the measured climate.

This aspect of “climate change” appears to have been overlooked in all the debate about climate change.  It seems to be supposed that there was a “pre-industrial” climate, which was measured over a large number of years before industry became a significant factor in our existence, and that the climate we now observe is statistically different from that hypothetical climate.

The problem, of course, is that there is very little actual data from those pre-industrial days, so we have no means of knowing what the climate really was.  There is no baseline from which we can measure change. 

Faced by this difficulty, the proponents of climate change have modified the hypothesis. It is supposed that the observed warming of the earth will change the climate in such a way as to make extreme events more frequent. This does not alter the difficulty; in fact, it makes it worse.

To illustrate, assume that an extreme event is one that falls outside the 95% probability bounds. So in 100 years, one would expect 5 extreme events on average.  Rather than taking 100 years of data to obtain the average climate, there are now only 5 years to obtain an estimate of the average extreme event, and the relative error in averaging 5 variable events is obviously much larger than the relative error in averaging 100 variable events.

The rainfall data for England and Wales demonstrates this quite convincingly:-

The detrended data is close to normally distributed, so that it is quite reasonable to use normal statistics for this. The 5% limits are thus two standard deviations either side of the mean.  In the 250-year record, 12.5 extreme events (those outside the 95% bounds) would be expected.  In fact, there are 7 above the upper bound and 4 below the lower bound, or 11 in total. Thus it requires 250 years to get a reasonable estimate (within 12%) of just the frequency of extreme rainfall.  There is no possibility of detecting any change in this rate, as would be needed to demonstrate “climate change”.

Indeed, a human lifespan is insufficient even to detect the frequency of the extreme events.  In successive 60-year periods, there are 2, 4, 2 and 2 events, an average of 2.5 events with a standard deviation of 1.0. There is a 95% chance of seeing between 0.5 and 5.5 extreme events in 60 years, where 3 (5% of 60) are expected. Several lifetimes are necessary determine the frequency with any accuracy, and many more to determine any change in the frequency.

It is known to have been warming for at least 150 years. If warming had resulted in more extreme weather, it might have been expected that there was some evidence for an increase in extreme events over that period. The popular press certainly tries to be convincing when an apparently violent storm arises. But none of the climatological indicators that have data going back at least 100 years show any sign of an increase in frequency of extreme events

For instance, there have been many claims that tropical cyclones are increasing in their frequency and severity.  The World Meteorological Organisation reports:  “It remains uncertain whether past changes in tropical cyclone activity have exceeded the variability expected from natural causes.”

It is true that the damage from cyclones is increasing, but this is not due to more severe weather.  It is the result of there being more dwellings, and each dwelling being more valuable, than was the case 20 or more years ago.  Over a century of data was carefully analysed to reach this conclusion.  The IPCC report on extreme events agrees with this finding.

Severe weather of any kind is most unlikely to make any part of our planet uninhabitable – that includes drought, severe storms and high winds. In fact, this is not too surprising – humanity has learned how to cope with extreme weather, and human beings occupy regions from the most frigid to the most scalding, from sea level to heights where sea-level-dwellers struggle to breath. Not only are we adaptable, but we have also learned how to build structures that will shield us from the forces of nature.

Of course, such protection comes at a cost. Not everyone can afford the structures needed for their preservation.  Villages are regularly flattened by storms that would leave most modern cities undamaged. Flood control measures are designed for the one-in-a-hundred year events, and they generally work – whereas low-lying areas in poor nations are regularly inundated for want of suitable defences.

Indeed, it is a tribute to the ability of engineers to protect against all manner of natural forces.  For instance, the magnitude 9 Tōhoku earthquake of 2011 (which caused the tsunami that destroyed the reactors at Fukushima) caused little physical damage to buildings, whereas earlier that year, the “mere” magnitude 7 earthquake in Wellington, New Zealand, toppled the cathedral.


So we should not fear extreme weather events. There is no evidence that they are any stronger than they were in the past, and we have generally adequate defenses against them.  Of course, somewhere our defenses will fail, but that is usually because of a design fault by man, not an excessive force of Nature. So here, on the fourth step of our journey, we can clearly see the climate change hypothesis stumble and nearly fall.



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