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In Cancun, everyone’s talking about Blue Carbon

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The term Blue Carbon seems to be gaining traction outside of the world of science and environmental economics. Or – at the very least – its gaining traction in Cancun.

Numerous groups have strategically launched new reports regarding the capture, conservation, and capitalization of carbon on our coasts. Just in time for the climate menagerie in Mexico: COP16.

World Bank, ICUN, the Nicholas Institute at Duke University, and a new Blue Climate Coalition are laying material on the table — and the web. You can access the new Blue Carbon policy brief from Duke and read about the Blue Climate Coalition here. The World Bank  and IUCN put our their own report on building mitigation and adaptation for carbon-rich coasts. If  you were able to read Dan Laffoly’s  (IUCN) eloquent New York Times Op-Ed last January, this report provides some great follow-up and  substance.

The World Bank, together with IUCN and ESA PWA, announces the release of a brief for decision-makers entitled, “Capturing and Conserving Natural Coastal Carbon – Building mitigation, advancing adaptation.” This information brief highlights the crucial importance of carbon sequestered in coastal wetlands and submerged vegetated habitats like seagrass beds for climate change mitigation.

Coastal wetlands, such as mangroves, tidal flats and salt marshes, along with seagrass beds sequester large amounts of carbon within their plants and especially in the soil. However, degradation of these habitats–as a result of drainage, conversion and reclamation–can result in substantial and ongoing emissions of greenhouse gases.

However, these natural carbon sinks and the emissions resulting from their degradation and loss remain largely unaccounted for within the UNFCCC. Restoring degraded wetlands–in particular deltas which are subsiding as a result of natural geomorphology, human disturbance to the hydrological cycle, and sea level rise–can reverse the loss of these sinks and reverse the release of GHGs to the atmosphere. Protecting these natural carbon stores in the first place prevents the rapid loss of carbon that immediately follows disturbance, as well and preserving has substantial co-benefits for adaptation to climate change in terms of reducing the physical vulnerability of shorelines and increasing the social and economic resilience of coastal communities through positive impacts on livelihoods and food security.

Recognizing the role and value of coastal wetlands and seagrass beds under the Climate Convention will contribute to a global approach to natural carbon management.

The brief is based on the findings of a larger report by Crooks et al, which will be presented at a side event at the UNFCCC COP-16 in Cancun on Wednesday, December 1, 11:30—1:00pm, Cancun Messe, Jaguar. This side-event, organized by Conservation International and IUCN, is entitled ‘Blue Carbon: Valuing CO2 Mitigation by Coastal Marine Systems. Sequestration of Carbon Along Our Coasts: Are We Missing Major Sinks and Sources?’.

Climate change sceptic Bob Carter continues to ply his trade

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Here’s a piece in the the Guardian by Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Bob Ward was interviewed by Robyn Williams on The Science Show earlier this year, which was also covered by Deltoid.

………………………………………………………………………

Like many deniers of man-made global warming, Prof Carter’s views may say more about his politics than scientific evidence

Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation is this afternoon hosting a public lecture from Prof Bob Carter on “An alternative view of climate hazard – a basis for policy?”.

Carter, a geologist at James Cook University, is one of the world’s most prominent voices of climate change denial and one of the very few who has published his views in academic journals. Two years ago, he had a paper called “Knock knock: where is the evidence for dangerous human-caused global warming?” published in Economic Analysis and Policy, the official journal of the Queensland branch of the Economic Society of Australia.

Carter’s paper contains a stunning array of errors, the most serious of which I itemised in an analysis for the same journal. Some of the inaccuracies are laughable. For instance, Carter cites a palaeotemperature reconstruction as evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the late 20th century, even though it only provides temperature data up to 1935. Elsewhere he suggests wrongly that atmospheric carbon dioxide only produces a small warming effect, basing his assertion solely on erroneous calculations posted on a website about “Plant Fossils of West Virginia”. And he attributes the warming in the late 20th century to solar activity, but refers to a paper that used inaccurate data about sunspot activity, and which when corrected show no correlation with the recent global average temperature record.

I concluded that Carter’s paper was “possibly the most inaccurate and misleading article about climate change that has ever been published by a journal”. In his response, rather than explaining or justifying the many flaws in his paper, Carter merely stated that the issues I raised were “weary ones, and have been put to bed by qualified, independent scientists many times”.

However, Carter did at least admit that a quotation that he claimed to have taken from a book by Sir John Houghton, the former chair of the science working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was never said: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.” This “quote” was first used by a columnist in a rightwing Australian newspaper four years ago, and has been repeated by self-proclaimed climate change “sceptics” many times since. But in February, Sir John wrote to the Observer to point out: “The quote from me is without foundation. I have never said it or written it.”

However, even in acknowledging the mistake, Carter has still not been able to come completely clean. His grudging erratum in the journal claimed that the quotation he “had in mind to reflect Dr Houghton’s views, but failed to identify accurately” was from an article in the Sunday Telegraph in September 1995: “If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster.”

Carter’s new book, Climate: The Counter Consensus, continues to propagate the mythical quotation, in a Prefatory Essay apparently written in March 2010 by the publisher Tom Stacey. It states that Sir John “had purportedly been overheard passing the word around, ‘Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen’, and were he to have uttered those words (for he has energetically denied it) they were surely listened to assiduously”.

Apart from inserting the disputed quote, Stacey has added some other interesting features to Carter’s book which might catch out the unwary reader. The inside front cover claims that Carter “dispassionately assesses whether politicians and campaigners are right to believe the dire warnings of the global warming lobby”, but the inside back cover neglects to list among his affiliations a role as “senior policy adviser” at the Institute of Public Affairs, an Australian free market lobby group which promotes “the free flow of capital” and “a limited and efficient government“.

Carter will no doubt continue to be feted by climate change sceptics because of his academic credentials, but as with many of the other voices of denial, it appears that his views may say more about his politics than the scientific evidence.

Would you let Michael O’Leary run your business?

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Several people have sent me this quote from Michael O’Leary, head of Ryanair.

You have to wonder how they could let a fellow like this run an airline who doesn’t understand the difference between noise and trends!  Question:  Would you let someone guide your investment portfolio who draws more inspiration from the day-to-day jitter in stock prices than the long-term trends?  Probably not!

Time for another Guinness!

What type of denier are you?

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Hans Hoegh-Guldberg is a prominent specialist on the economic impacts of climate change on natural ecosystems and dependent industries.  He recently posted the following discussion on the list server, coral-list.  I believe he makes some important points regarding types of climate change denial out there today and the way forward given their existence and persistence.

By Hans Hoegh-Guldberg, Economic Strategies, NSW, Australia

The Pew survey showing that public belief in climate change and its reasons has waned should be no surprise to anyone who has been observing the scene over the past couple of years. Neither should there be much surprise that attitudes to climate change tend to follow party lines. The same thing happens in my adopted country, Australia, according to a recent University of Queensland survey.

Structural change is always resisted by mainstream corporations with huge investments in present plant, but while it can be delayed it will happen. Joseph Schumpeter as early as 1914 identified “creative destruction” as a hallmark of capitalism. It is true today as much as 100 years ago, with climate change the current elephant in the room. Scientists, and economists taking a hard look at the long-term implications of their own discipline, agree that the crucial issue is whether the structural change that is needed will be in time to avoid a worst-case scenario.

There are two kinds of climate change deniers. Vested interests are the most influential because of their power to operate through lobby groups and other channels, and doing their best to discredit the scientific evidence and generally try and delay when they themselves have to adapt. But by far the biggest group is made up of those who are influenced. The lobbyists have an easier task because the short term is instinctively the most important, and climate change is not generally seen as a critical issue in that context. So we can have the Australian opposition leader being a cat’s whisker from winning the August 2010 election by warning the electorate against a proposed carbon tax as “a great big tax on everybody”.

The financial crisis naturally brings the short term into greater focus, causing climate change to recede.

Some scientists try to perfect the art of strategic conversation (to use Kees van der Heijden’s description of scenario planning) with the general public and popular press. They realize that their case is not so convincing that they can just rely on lecturing others about the righteousness of the case.

On July 14, “adaptation mavens” Lara Hansen and Jennifer Hoffman referred to the classical Cartesian insurance argument that if God doesn’t exist, and you express faith, you are no worse off, but if you don’t express that faith, and there is a God, you may rot in hell. The parallel in the CAKE version is that if climate change doesn’t exist it doesn’t matter whether or not you adapt, but if it does exist and we don’t cut our greenhouse gas emissions it could cost humankind dearly. The insurance policy is that we all pay a relatively small cost now to mitigate against a big future risk before the adaptation task becomes too huge(http://www.cakex.org/community/advice/we-adapt-therefore-we-are).

Here is a list of some possible ways forward:

  • Support and elaborate on the insurance argument promoted by the mavens and others.
  • Identify more “canaries in the mine” to add to the most famous original one – coral reefs.
  • Island nations have been trying to attract attention for a long time – still for deaf ears?
  • Sea-level rise has added urgency to the original global warming dimension. Florida and other threatened areas would provide a special voice to support and promote.
  • The impact of ocean acidification (“the evil twin of global warming”) not just on coral reefs but on all oceanic calcareous organisms is not well-known and understood by the voting public.
  • Promote the virtues of technological change and its commercial benefits, and other positive  aspects, rather than continuing with in-your-face climate change doom-saying with negative or at least mixed results. People are very good at switching off against persistent arguments.
  • Advocate the development of a better Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) as an alternative to or at least development of GDP (which still takes little or no notice of environmental and social costs). The GPI went a long way but was last published in 1995 and when or if reconstituted is likely to underestimate the impact of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
  • Build on the fact that President Sarkozy of France lost patience with economic statistics last year and commissioned Nobel Prize-winning economists Joe Stiglitz and Amartya Sen to investigate how these statistics might be developed to incorporate the social and environmental costs into a proper economic measure, not just catering for the GDP growth fetish (http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/rapport_anglais.pdf.
  • Demonstrate that significant technology change is already happening and gathering pace, nationally and internationally, in renewables, energy efficiency, developing green and blue carbon sinks, and spreading to a widening circle of countries, including the least developed ones. In Schumpeterian terms, this may be seen as part of the creative destruction that will eventually prevail – one can only hope in time.
  • Advocate web links that can be even better publicized, e.g. John Cook’s Skeptical Science – “getting skeptical about global warming skepticism” (see especially the arguments page (http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php)).

Hans Hoegh-Guldberg, Economic Strategies, NSW, Australia


NASA reports 2010 hottest year on record so far.

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From Climate Progress, Nov 11 2010

Last month, NASA reported it was the hottest January-September on record.  That followed a terrific analysis, “July 2010 — What Global Warming Looks Like,” which noted that 2010 is “likely” to be warmest year on record.

This month continues the trend of 2010 outpacing previous years, according to NASA:

October 2010 NASA

It now seems pretty certain 2010 will outpace 1998, which currently ties for fourth hottest year in the NASA dataset (though it is technically described by NASA folks as tied for the second hottest year with 2005 and 2007).

Outpacing 2005, the hottest year on record, will be closer.  In NASA’s surface-based dataset, we are unlikely to set the record monthly temperatures for the rest of this year; last month wasn’t close to the hottest October for NASA, though it was third warmest.  We  have entered a moderate to strong La Niña, which NOAA says is “expected to last at least through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2010-11.”  That said, as you can see, the October anomaly (deviation from the 1951-1980 average) was higher than September, in spite of the La Niña.

NASA’s surface-based temperature record appears to be the most accurate, as I’ve noted many times (see Finally, the truth about the Hadley/CRU data: “The global temperature rise calculated by the Met Office’s HadCRUT record is at the lower end of likely warming”).

As I discussed earlier, last month, the hottest September in UAH satellite record, puzzled Roy Spencer with its “stubborn” temperatures.  He now concedes that this year is likely to tie 1998 for the hottest year in the UAH satellite record (see “January-to-October tied for hottest in satellite record“).

For what it’s worth, here’s the latest UAH data, which, at least until it’s ‘adjusted’, shows what appears to be the warmest early November on record:

UAH 11-10+

UPDATE:  Michael in the comments directs us to this map of recent temperature anomalies from NOAA, which shows remarkably warm temperatures over much of Northern Hemisphere:

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/Global_Monsoons/Figures/curr.t.weekly.figb.gif

Finally, it bears repeating that the record warmth we are seeing this year is all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming “because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect,” as a recent must-read NASA paper noted:

It is just hard to stop the march of human caused global warming — other than by sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Coal Crash Coming?

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Paul Gilding more than often has some interesting and provocative insights.  In Cockatoo Chronicle number 24 Paul discusses whether or not coal is the terrific investment opportunity after all.   This and the recent study published in the internationally respected magazine Nature, which highlighted the instability of future coal prices due to over-estimates of the availability of coal worldwide, should have people and organisations starting to wonder whether investing in coal mining is a great idea after all.

By Paul Gilding | November 18th, 2010 | From: Cockatoo Chronicles

The very conservative International Energy Agency has just released its closely watched annual World Energy Outlook (WEO), with forecasts for the structure of the energy market through to 2035. This year’s WEO was much anticipated, given the pace of developments in renewables and climate policy, and it didn’t disappoint. The report included the IEA’s interpretation of what major governments’ commitment to a 2°C temperature target would mean for the energy market. The contrast with what most market players assume, particularly coal companies, could hardly be more dramatic.

One global coal player, Peabody, recently told the World Coal Conference that it assumes demand for coal will increase by over 50 per cent by 2030. The IEA on the other hand tells us that if we are to have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 2°C degrees, coal demand will have to peak by 2020, and by 2035 will have dropped to levels last seen in 2003. These are dramatically different views of the market and the implications for company valuations, and therefore for investors and corporate strategy, are considerable.

The same IEA report compares coal and oil’s current 46 per cent share of global electricity generation to what it would be in 2030 under the 2°C degree scenario. The answer is just 22 per cent. The difference would be picked up by low CO2 energy, nuclear and renewables, which would see massive growth. They assume non-hydro renewables would go from 3 per cent to 20 per cent, all the more remarkable given the assumed increase in overall energy demand. Interestingly, despite significant demand growth, even the total amount of coal-generated electricity would fall in absolute terms.

The significant thing about these forecasts is that the IEA has generally been considered to be excessively conservative and largely aligned with the views that dominate the fossil fuel industry. Indeed, the Peabody forecasts referred to above reference an earlier IEA WEO report. So what’s going on when this industry friendly body chooses to prick the coal bubble? And what does it all mean for investors and resource companies?

What it means is the coal industry is headed for a crash. This is heresy in the industry and would be dismissed by some as starry-eyed naivety. But the numbers don’t lie and this issue has cold hard rational numbers all over it.

One of these numbers is 2°C. There are many uncertainties in the detail of climate science, but there is clear consensus on that number. It is the line in the sand scientists have drawn and said, if we go past it we face catastrophic system-wide risk. While some scientists argue that number is too high and too risky, none of any consequence argue it is too low. That’s why the governments of China, India, Europe and the USA have all agreed, along with many global corporates, that 2°C is the line we can’t cross.

Not crossing it requires the numbers in the IEA report to be achieved. This is hard science. If you put any more CO2 in the atmosphere than that, we will almost certainly be heading past 3-4°C. The economic consequences of that would make the collapse of the coal industry look like a picnic. The science also tells us, supported now by the IEA, that the decision will be made this decade, by action or lack of it.

Further complicating assumptions of growth is a very interesting analysis published today in Nature by two well regarded US energy experts, Richard Heinberg and David Fridley. Their article, “The End of Cheap Coal,” calls into question assumptions of endless supplies of cheap coal, using much of the same logic as earlier predictions around the end of cheap oil. It’s worth remembering that those who have been predicting the end of cheap oil since the late 90s, including Heinberg, were ridiculed for many years.

Now even the IEA supports that view with comments like “the age of cheap oil is over.” The new analysis in Nature suggests there may be a similar dynamic at play with coal, with reserves constantly being revised downwards as time passes. They also remind us that industry has a history of getting their forecasts wrong, noting that for oil, “the current price of more than $US80 per barrel is about three times higher than the upper range in official forecasts for 2010 that were being issued in the late 1990s.” Like oil, the issue is not any risk of running out, but volatile and rising prices as the peak level of quality supply is reached.

But isn’t this good news for the coal industry? Aren’t rising coal prices good? The answer is surprising – and this is where the two issues combine. In the short term the answer is yes, but ultimately higher prices will trigger the death of coal. Everyone knows the only way coal can survive in the low-carbon world the science demands, is if carbon capture (CCS) technology can make coal a zero CO2 energy source. The economic viability of CCS is already questionable and is rapidly losing support, but if it is ever to work it can only do so with cheap coal.

This is because the additional cost of CCS equipment and CO2 pipelines, along with the inherent loss of efficiency involved in its use, means that if coal prices rise, renewables will become cheaper than coal with CCS. So if Heinberg and Fridley are right, coal prices will increase, CCS will be confirmed as uneconomic and renewables will take over. This, of course, will then see coal prices drop again. But it seems likely, by then, that the market will have shifted its focus to renewables, and perhaps nuclear, with coal unlikely to recover given renewables prices will keep falling.

So why do Peabody and so many others assume levels of growth that are in such contrast to this hard logic of both the market and climate science?

Firstly, of course, because they want it be so. They sell coal and the more they can convince the market of an endless coal boom, the higher their share price. This is particularly so for resource companies that are heavily or exclusively reliant on coal like Peabody. Self-interest is a powerful driver of denial. But it’s more complicated than that.

What these people and their investors are falling for, supported by many people in government, is what I call the “economic inertia trap”. This is the belief that something that is big and moving in a certain direction will continue to do so. They simply can’t imagine the level of change required to shift that inertia could possibly occur. The argument goes: coal is cheap and plentiful, people need lots of energy, so coal will be burnt. This is delusion on a grand scale. Does anyone really believe society will calmly stand by as we head towards 3°C, then 4°C, staring economic and social collapse in the face while we focus on cheap energy as some kind of overriding objective?

Let there be no doubt, we will act on climate change – and when we do, the coal industry will face an almighty crash, as Phil Preston and I argued in our recently released paper on the financial implications of all this. Probably not this year or next, but we think before the end of this decade.

But don’t expect Peabody or their friends to come on board early. Horse and cart companies didn’t become auto companies. Amazon reshaped the book retailing business before book retailers woke up. Kodak failed to be ready for digital photography, and so on. We can safely expect coal companies to stay in denial all the way to the finish line – or in their case, their finished line. That is their choice to make. It is also their investors’ choice on whether to go with them or when to jump. The clock is now ticking.

Interview with Naomi Oreskes and John Cook (Sceptical Science)

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2fntae4OYI&w=600&h=350]

We hosted Naomi Oreskes recently and admire the work of John Cook of Sceptical Science.  This link takes you to a cracking episode of The Climate Show at Hot Topic this week, featuring a must-listen interview with Naomi Oreskes discussing the background to her book Merchants of Doubt. The people who attacked her 2004 paper on the scientific consensus about global warming didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for. Also in the show: excellent infographics, Arctic warming bringing colder winters to the northern hemisphere, European biofuels, John Cook of Skeptical Science discusses the new Twitter bot that auto argues with denier tweets, electric cars again, and steady state economics.

UNCOMFORTABLE CLIMATE

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Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, Nov 22 2010

Darrell Issa, a Republican representative from California, is one of the richest men in Congress. He made his money selling car alarms, which is interesting, because he has twice been accused of auto theft. (Issa has said that he had a “colorful youth.”) As the ranking minority member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he earned a reputation as President Barack Obama’s “annoyer-in-chief.” Issa told the Times a few months ago, “You can call me a pain. I’ll accept that as a compliment.”

Now, with the Republicans about to take control of the House, Issa is poised to become the chairman of the Oversight Committee. The post comes with wide-ranging subpoena powers, and Issa has already indicated how he plans to wield them. He is not, he assured a group of Pennsylvania Republicans over the summer, interested in digging around for the sort of information that might embarrass his fellow-zillionaires: “I won’t use it to have corporate America live in fear.” Instead, he wants to go where he sees the real malfeasance. He wants to investigate climate scientists. At the top of his list are the long-suffering researchers whose e-mails were hacked last year from the computer system of Britain’s University of East Anglia. Though their work has been the subject of three separate “Climategate” inquiries—all of which found that allegations of data manipulation were unfounded—Issa isn’t satisfied. “We’re going to want to have a do-over,” he said recently.

Issa’s priorities are, to an astonishing degree, representative of the new Republican House majority. Last year, when John Boehner, of Ohio, the incoming House Speaker, was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about his party’s plans to address climate change, he had this to say: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, that it is harmful to our environment, is almost comical.” John Shimkus, of Illinois, is one of four members now vying for the chairmanship of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. At a congressional hearing in 2009, he dismissed the dangers of climate change by quoting Genesis 8:22: “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” He added, “I believe that’s the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it’s going to be for His creation.” Another contender for the Energy Committee post, Joe Barton, of Texas—who is one of the House’s top recipients of contributions from the oil-and-gas industry—argues that CO2 emissions have nothing to do with climate change, and, in any event, people will just adapt. “When it rains, we find shelter,” he has said. “When it’s hot, we get shade. When it’s cold, we find a warm place to stay.” (Barton is perhaps best known for the apology he offered, last June, to the C.E.O. of BP, Tony Hayward, for what he described as a “shakedown” of the company by the Obama Administration.)
To be sure, even before the midterm elections, the prospects for meaningful action on climate change in Washington were dim. In June of 2009, the House approved the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill, which would have imposed a nationwide cap on emissions. The bill was convoluted in all the usual, special-interest-driven ways, and not nearly ambitious enough to produce the emissions cuts that are needed. Even so, Waxman-Markey was too demanding for the Senate. After months of posturing and further concession-making, Senate Democrats failed to come up with a bill that they were willing to bring to the floor. While the Senate dithered, President Obama was silent. He did nothing to rally public opinion on the issue, and what he did do—open up new areas to offshore oil drilling, for example—only undermined the negotiations.

Still, the recent election represents a new low. For the past two decades, the United States has been officially committed to avoiding “dangerous” climate change. One Administration after another—Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama—has reaffirmed this commitment, even as they all have failed to live up to it. House Republicans and their Tea Party allies reject even the idea of concern. Not content merely to ignore the science, they have decided to go after the scientists. Before the election, congressional Republicans had talked of eliminating the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Why, after all, have a panel on energy independence and global warming if you don’t believe in either? Now James Sensenbrenner, of Wisconsin, who is likely to become the select committee’s chairman, is arguing that it should be preserved. His rationale? The panel provides an ideal platform for harassing the Environmental Protection Agency, which, in the absence of legislative action, is the only body with the power to regulate carbon emissions. At least one group of scientists is organizing a “rapid-response team” to counter climate misinformation, but, since the misinformation is now coming from the very people charged with solving the problem, that task seems a peculiarly thankless one.

Meanwhile, as John Boehner chortles about the dangers of CO2, the world keeps heating up. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the first half of 2010 was the warmest January to July on record. And this is just the beginning. Owing to the inertia of the climate system, the warming that we’re experiencing is only a fraction of the temperature increase that’s already guaranteed.

The United States is no longer the world’s largest carbon emitter; that honor belongs to China. But we’re still the largest source of warming in terms of cumulative emissions, and on a per-capita basis Americans produce more CO2 than just about anyone except the Qataris. Without the active support of the United States, there’s no way to make progress on emissions globally. This month, negotiators will meet in Cancún for another round of international climate talks, and it’s a safe bet that, apart from the usual expressions of despair, nothing will come of them. It may seem that we’ll just keep going around and around on climate change forever. Unfortunately, that’s not the case: one day, perhaps not very long from now, the situation will spin out of our control.

The end of cheap coal?

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As coal reserves are depleted, busy coal-train facilities, such as this one in Norfolk, Virginia, will become a thing of the past. C. DAVIDSON/CORBIS. Nature article: doi: 10.1038/nature08017

An article released in Nature today has challenged the commonly held view that the world has cheap and plentiful coal supplies that will fuel the world for decades to come.

Richard Heinberg and David Fridley argue that coal prices are likely to rapidly increase in the near future, due to a combination of rapid growth in the demand for coal, and recent findings which suggest useful coal reserves are less abundant than what has previously been assumed.

In China, proven recoverable reserves of coal (that is, those that are technically and economically feasible to mine) have been estimated at a total 187 billion tonnes, which is expected to last another 62 years – assuming the rate of consumption of coal remains at 2009 levels.

But this estimate is likely to be too optimistic, since consumption of coal in China is accelerating rapidly. Applying the same techniques used to estimate the future expected peak production of oil , researchers have found that coal production in China could peak as early as 2025.

There are of course coal supplies to be found elsewhere (including Australia), but at current rates of import growth, China alone could absorb all current Asia-Pacific exports with just three years – ultimately increasing competition (particularly with other rapidly developing nations such as India) and driving up the cost of coal.

What does this mean for climate change? Well, apart from the fact that we simply can’t afford to burn all of the Earth’s available fossil fuels if we want to maintain a stable climate, Heinberg and Fridley suggest that coal supply limits also have implications for the development of clean-coal technology. If coal prices do increase as recent studies suggest, then it makes little economic sense to continue building new coal plants — whether they be conventional or retrofitted with CCS technology (which still hasn’t been proven on a commerical scale).

Seems like it may be time to invest heavily in energy efficiency and alternative energy.

______________________________________________

Listen to Richard Heinberg on ABC radio from this morning.

Youtube: Richard Heinberg: The Inconvenient Truth on Clean Coal

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References

Heinberg, R. and D. Fridley (2010). “The end of cheap coal.” Nature 468(7322): 367-369. doi: 10.1038/468367a

Meinshausen, M., N. Meinshausen, et al. (2009). “Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2ºC.” Nature 458(7242): 1158-1162. doi: 10.1038/nature08017

Tao, Z. and M. Li (2007). “What is the limit of Chinese coal supplies–A STELLA model of Hubbert Peak.” Energy Policy 35(6): 3145-3154. doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2006.11.011

Pesticide impacts on the Great Barrier Reef – Croplife misinformation?

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By Jon Brodie.

The pesticide industry group Croplife have recently published their latest assessment of the threat to the Great Barrier Reef from pesticide use. The report can be found at:

http://www.croplifeaustralia.org.au/files/Great Barrier Reef. pdf

The report is notable for its extreme ‘cherry picking’ of data with which to make the assessment. It uses one data set from a summary report (not the original science report) for the GBRMPA Marine Monitoring Program from 2007/2008 (Prange et al Reef Water Quality Protection Plan Marine Monitoring Program: 2007/2008 Summary Report pp18-19). Note the Croplife report was very recently released in 2010. The data used is from the use of passive samplers only which are generally deployed only in non-flood conditions and represents the ‘low’ concentration end of pesticide detections in contrast to samples taken in the wet season which are generally much higher (as you might expect).

Since 2007 a large number of pesticide studies in the GBR have occurred and the results have been published in the peer reviewed literature (journals) e.g. Lewis et al 2009; Davis et al 2008; Shaw et al 2010 in marine waters. River discharge of pesticide studies include Packett et al 2009, Lewis et al 2009; Bainbridge et al 2009. Peer reviewed technical reports are also numerous in this period and are all available on the web. Even before 2007 a number of pesticide papers were published with data from rivers and/or marine waters of the GBR e.g. McMahon et al 2005; Shaw and Mueller 2005; Mitchell et al 2005. Finally a considerable body of work on the toxicity of pesticides to GBR organisms (mainly recently from Andrew Negri’s group at AIMS) has been published in the peer reviewed literature since 2007 (and a lot before 2007 as well). If any other readers want access to any of this literature please contact me.

Croplife chose to ignore all this published information and data. When this data is taken into account the outcome is an entirely different assessment, opposite in conclusions to that presented by Croplife.

One wonders at the ethics of a ‘respectable’ industry organisation like Croplife putting out such misleading information. It’s also sad in a period when we are making progress in pesticide management in the GBR catchment with farmers investing in better application technology such as shielded sprayers (see photo) with the assistance of the Australian Government’s Reef Rescue initiative.