Will CO2 Shocker Rattle Global Climate Talks?
Don’t bet on it. Sure, this AP story about the 2010 global emissions spike is quite the shocker. But as I discuss at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, it should not be surprising.
And while the news may hang over the upcoming COP talks in South Africa, it won’t change the near certain Groundhog Day outcome.
I think the game is changing and the change is due to the massive increases of emissions in (so-called) developing countries that will continue.
The countries that will be most affected (negatively) by climate change are bound to realize that the cuts by Western countries are swamped by the increases of emissions in China, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Russia etc.
For example India will be hit hard and in that sense, building coal power plants that each gobble up to 20 million tons of coal annually while demanding Western countries to cut emissions sounds silly.
Jarmo,
India is actually already committed to binding emissions limits:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,590964,00.html
Per capita emissions for Indians is not to exceed the average per capita emissions for developed countries. This puts them ahead of many developed countries (and especially the US) in terms of promised commitments.
Actually Jarmo, India has already committed themselves to binding emissions targets:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,590964,00.html
http://www.pewclimate.org/international/country-policies/india-climate-plan-summary/06-2008
Their per capita emissions are not to exceed the per capita emissions averaged across developed countries. This is a more ambitious commitment than most developed countries, especially the US.
The only thing that comes out of this AP report that should rattle the Durban AGW Revival Meeting is the FACT that the proportion of CO2 emissions coming from the so called ‘underdeveloped’ countries has risen (and will continue to rise rapidly), which should emphasize how flawed to Kyoto arrangement was and is.
What was to be shocked about. The ‘recession’ was masking some of the emissions growth in China.
Neither India or China currently has the human and industrial infrastructure capacity for a rapid rollout of nuclear power.
The best case scenario for China is an emissions peak around 2025.
http://china.lbl.gov/sites/china.lbl.gov/files/2050_Summary_Report_042811_FINAL.pdf
We wasted 20 years on the magical ‘kyoto protocol’ before figuring out that there we ‘non-financial’ barriers to achieving lower emissions.
Stuff like no one would sell India uranium under any circumstances.
#2
That report has some very good points. They point out that electric vehicle deployment in China will actually contribute to emissions if the energy sector is not decarbonized. Emphasizes the need to look at the wood rather than individual trees.
Hopefully they get their act together with nuclear power. By this I do not mean just rapid deployment but proper safety culture (which seems to have been absent in Japan). Accidents like the one in the link should not happen but the rule seems to be: The more foolproof, the bigger the fool.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf37.html
#3
<i>mean just rapid deployment but proper safety culture</i>
In 2012 Chinese Industrial infrastructure will be able to produce the heavy forgings for 14 nuclear plants per year.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/default.aspx?id=23340&terms=heavy%20forging
The Chinese government is holding the 2020 target at 80GW.
IMHO The ‘holdup’ at this point is that it takes a long time to grow the proper regulatory and safety culture.
Alex at #2,
According to that link: “The volume of US emissions today constitutes… 20 tons annually per person. Despite our much larger population, India produces… 1.1 tons per person.”
So, when you say “commitment to binding emissions limits” what you actually mean is a commitment to increase emissions 20-fold.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think the global temperature will be if India goes from producing 1.1 tons per person to 20? If the U.S. manages to reduce emissions 80%, that still means India will need to increase emissions four-fold in order to meet their “binding commitment.” This is a joke, right?
Alex 3 2 & 3
Welcome to climate change negotiation reality!
Your info is from 2008 and way out of date.
This is WSJ, Sept. 15 2011:
India Won’t Accept Legally Binding Rules on Emission Cuts
NEW DELHI ““ India Thursday said it won’t accept any legally binding limits on emission of greenhouse gases.
“Let’s first see what proposals developed countries bring to the table on what they are pledging on emission cuts,” Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan told a press conference. For India, “there’s no question of any legally binding cuts,” she added.
Countries are still divided on several issues ahead of a ministerial-level United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December in Durban to try and create a new mechanism to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.
Ms. Natarajan said India will talk to other developing countries on various issues ahead of the Durban meet.
She added the Kyoto Protocol on emissions should be extended.
The Kyoto Protocol, which requires developed countries to cut emissions, expires at the end of 2012.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904060604576572410654774024.html
6# electric vehicles, strip mine bolivia, etc for all the Lithium in those electric vehicles,, ie 4kg Lithium per nissan leaf… charged up by lots of new coal fired power station for all that extra electrical demand.
Sorry about the double post.
#8 The idea behind pegging the target to whatever the average emissions of developed countries is, is to encourage developing countries to decrease their own emissions. That was the point. I hope I don’t have to mention the whole fairness issue which I’m sure everyone here is aware of.
Apparently my info is out-of-date as #9 pointed out, but for the time it was certainly a bold move and far in advance of most developed country targets. If I were an Indian citizen or politician I’d be pretty discouraged by the gridlock at Copenhagen and in current US politics.
Is this the same Seth Borenstein who reassured me, a couple of years ago, that he’d read all the Climategate emails and looked at the programmer’s log and, well, there was nothing to see there?
The same Seth Borenstein who wrote, last week, about how Koch Industries — those evil right-wingers — got tricked into funding the BEST research? Hahahahaha!
I find it hard to believe that AP does not notice the bias in his writings. Hardly reporting and news writing, as it was once done, in olden days. ….Lady in Red
PS: Now, Keith: pls don’t spend days and days “moderating” this. Comments have a shelf life. Yesh.
#12
Am I missing something? I thought all the Climategate stuff was pretty much covered. Every investigation of the e-mails turned up nothing except recommendations that scientists be more open. Now that the CRU has released all of their CRUTEM3 data I’m not sure what else could be the problem. And I’m sure you’ve heard of Clear Climate Code and all those other verification efforts done long before BEST.
#13,
Yes, you’re missing something. The UEA investigations of the emails were careful not to dig too deeply, failed to answer most of the questions the emails raised, but even then did say a bit more than that scientists needed to be more open. For example, that they breached freedom of information law.
But you won’t find any discussion of the Wang-Jones-Keenan accusations of academic fraud, you won’t discover whether the paper of which Cook said “It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically” got past their hostile reviewing. You won’t find any extensive discussion of the ‘Harry’ file and the software quality disaster behind the CRU TS3 database – data being made up, files lost, calculations fudged, results non-replicable. You won’t find any re-examination of the science – every enquiry so far has specifically excluded it from consideration.
The two UEA enquiries were set up and run by the university itself, loaded with people who were their friends, with the evidence selected for them, and with no ‘witnesses for the prosecution’. They contained enough quotable statements to the effect there was nothing to worry about to satisfy the media, but give no explanation or evidence of how or why they came to that conclusion.
And to some degree, it depends what standards you think are applicable. In a backwater academic subject it may be acceptable to have absent-minded professors bimbling along, with chaotic data management and a tolerance for sloppy methods, and for them to dress it up as professionally done for the sake of the usual academic concerns of further funding, prestige, and career. People who do science for industry see it as the foundation for multi-trillion dollar decisions affecting billions of lives – more critical even that avionics software or nuclear reactor safety – and expect certain standards. When I do science where only a few tens of millions of dollars ride on it being right, I get my work very thoroughly checked.
A lot of the contentiousness in the climate arena has been due to this collision between the academic ‘ivory tower’ and industrial ‘real world’ mindsets.
I can certainly understand that academics have a different viewpoint. What I can’t understand is how they can still have the same attitude when it’s supposedly a world-threatening emergency. There’s a giant asteroid on a collision course for Earth, but you’re not going to share the data and code because it’s your personal intellectual property, and because you want to get a few more papers out of it? Seriously?
But as with most things in this debate, the enquiries didn’t change any minds. Those already convinced that there was nothing wrong are convinced the enquiries showed this, and those already convinced there was a problem see the enquiries as proving nothing and merely a continuation of the same sort of disingenuous manoeuvring that Climategate had already revealed. Take your pick.
NIV,
Once again you are arguing for the sake of argument.
The idea that significant data which shows global warming is not happening has been hidden from the public in a secret conspiracy is nonsense. All the data that is needed to do the analysis of the thermometer record and the Paleoclimate record is online. Anyone with the appropriate skills and background can do the analysis. The BEST study didn’t have any trouble 5 times the number of stations in the Global Historical Climatology Network. They got the same results as CRU, and GISS for the land temperatures.
The fact that some scientists felt they were being harassed by some opponents of global warming theory and wanted to retaliate, doesn’t prove that AGW is a hoax, as is claimed by some so called “skeptics”.
If you want to criticize bogus science, the proper targets are the so called “skeptics” such as Lindzen, Michaels, and Singer, who publish crap in the peer reviewed literature, and Monckton and Plimer, psuedo sciientists who make up stuff. There is an error in almost every paragraph they write.
Your asteroid analogy is nonsense. In fact, people have replicated Mann’s results using different statistical methods and different combinations of Paleoclimatology data.
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a completely off-topic and random comparison involving Climategate approaches1.”
Clowns arrive early here at #12, #14.
Only true believers who continue to fantasize that the governments of countries other than Europe and Australia, and those who choose to ignore simple math, can claim to be astounded by this “news”.
The earth’s economy is powered primarily by carbon based fuels. The economies of China, India, Brazil, etc. are growing rapidly. Rapid growth is facilitated and depends on building more power generating capacity, and their only practical method for building that capacity is coal fired power plants.
I am astounded when the sun comes up in the east and high tide arrives twice on most days. Apparently if you are an academic researcher, being astounded helps generate more grant income.
#14
“data being made up, files lost, calculations fudged, results non-replicable.”
Out of these accusations, only the first and third (fabrication) is really worthy of sanction. I haven’t really seen evidence of that occurring. The results are clearly replicable, because it’s exactly what the ICCE Review, BEST, and many other teams have done.
Behind all these accusations is often an implicit or explicit notion of the scientists intentionally fudging or fabricating the data. If their intention was the mislead, how did their results get verified over and over again? Why even post online repositories of data and code in the first place if the purpose was to conceal the truth?
#11
#8 The idea behind pegging the target to whatever the average emissions of developed countries is, is to encourage developing countries to decrease their own emissions. That was the point. I hope I don’t have to mention the whole fairness issue which I’m sure everyone here is aware of.
The idea is crazy. Just do the math.
The US, EU, Canada, Russia, Japan, Australia have about 1140 million people. Let’s give them very low per capita emissions of 8 tons of CO2 (that’s EU27 average now). The true average is around 12 tons.
Now, multiply that 8 tonnes by 5 billion. That’s 40 billion tonnes of CO2. Current emissions are about 30 billion tonnes. If you used the true average, number would be 60 billion tonnes. But let’s assume that the developing countries would adopt a more ambitious target.
So, this “fair deal” would lead to increase of current emissions by 33 %, even assuming that meanwhile the developed countries would cut their emissions to zero. Note that I have not included the extra 2 billion people we will have in the developing countries by 2050 into this simplified exercise….
Eric,
The issue of replicability in climate science is an issue. It may be less of an issue now that skeptics have been so insistent about this. If you don’t thing that this has been a problem in the past then I urge you to look through the climate audit archives. Plenty of stuff there to chew on.
I dont see where NIV argued that there is data somewhere which is hiding the reality of global warming. As far as I’m concerned NIVs point about standards is important. IPCCs handling (I think from its inception) of UHI has been to present work from Phil Jones where the data backing up his conclusions is unobtainable. This is hardly satisfactory. You may also agree with the inclusion of grey literature. Again, this is about standards- and the IPCC presents itself as the gold standard.
Quotes about wanting to trash a paper although the ‘maths appears to be correct’ cast doubt on the quality and intentions of some scientists. It doesn’t say anything about climate science as a whole, as less about science in general. Science eventually gets around to correcting this stuff. So let’s get to correcting it.
Actually, I want to step back a bit. I just pulled up the larger quote in my last paragraph.
It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved inverse regression method is actually better in a practical sense. So they do lots of monte carlo stuff that shows the superiority of their method and the deficiencies of our way of doing things, but NEVER actually show how their method would change the Tornetrask reconstruction from what you produced.
…
Which sounds a lot more reasoned than the selective quote I was responding to unthread. Sorry.
Jarmo #19 Alex is a prime example of one of “climate concerned” who aren’t really concerned about climate. This hasn’t been a serious movement for a long while now.
Double posting from Keith’s Yale site.
Seems that this aspect of this story has been largely ignored:
“Global carbon intensity on the rise for first time in a decade”
“Global emissions output is now outpacing economic growth, meaning that the world’s carbon intensity has increased for the first time since 2000.”
“The combination of strong growth in the emerging economies of China, Brazil and South Korea, unusually cold winters in the northern hemisphere, a drop in the price of coal relative to gas, and a slowdown in renewable energy deployment was credited with driving the increase in emissions…
The report calculates that global carbon intensity now needs to reduce by 4.8 per cent a year, over twice the rate required in 2000…”
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2122864/global-carbon-intensity-rise-decade
That reduction will be impossible as more and more GDP come from China and India, powered primarily by coal. This article also includes this fantasy scenario:
“PwC also said the UK will need sweeping reforms to generate the annual cuts in emissions of 5.6 per cent that are required if it is to stay within its carbon budget, noting that the necessary emission reductions equate to turning off power to the entire UK for a third of the year, every year, until 2020.”
#19
Your assumption here seems to be that countries can never change their emissions targets. You have to admit that this is a little bit silly. Eventually, cuts will have be be pretty dramatic across the board, in developed and developing countries alike, but we all have to start somewhere. My point is not that India’s 2008 commitment alone would be enough to mitigate dangerous levels of climate change, only that they have mode bolder moves politically than most other nations. So accusations that developing countries “don’t do enough” relative to developed countries seems misinformed at best. To be absolutely clear, I believe current commitments from all countries are inadequate.
#20
“IPCCs handling (I think from its inception) of UHI has been to present work from Phil Jones where the data backing up his conclusions is unobtainable.”
Is it? Aren’t there many non-IPCC efforts to quantify the effect of UHI? The data, if it wasn’t freely available before, is certainly available now. The Berkeley team also obtained and used a much vaster dataset, and their results actually show stronger warming than that of the CRU.
#22
How is it that I’m not “really concerned” about climate? Do you consider yourself serious? If so, how are you serious in a way that I am not?
Alex, A “commitment” to dramatically increase emissions- which is what India has done- would only be “bold” to a partisan hack who doesn’t care about global emissions. Your claim that this is just a first start and real lots will happen later is either stupidity or delusion. Tell us how it would work- after building coal-fired plants that will be in operation decades from now, they will… Turn them all off? Cause Alex will say pretty please? So this makes you a denier of tipping points.
It seems the record co2 output in 2010 isn’t reflected by the Mauna Loa measurements. At Mauna Loa the annual co2 increase was 2.42 ppm. 1998, 2002 and 2005 had larger increases. I believe Mauna Loa figure is more reliable than an estimate of annual co2 output. That leaves me thinking either the output figure is wrong or the biosphere set a record for co2 sequestration during 2010.
The annual atmospheric content stood at 389.78 ppm for 2010.
Here is the NOAA Mauna Loa data.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_data
#15,
“The idea that significant data which shows global warming is not happening has been hidden from the public in a secret conspiracy is nonsense.”
Significant data that reputedly shows that global warming *is* happening has been hidden from the public. Why?
—
“I wouldn’t worry about the code. If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them.”
“1. Think I’ve managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.”
“One of the problems is that I’m caught in a real Catch-22 situation. At present, I’m damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he requested.”
“It would be odious requirement to have scientists document every line of code so outsiders could then just apply them instantly.”
“1. In my considered opinion, a very dangerous precedent is set if any derived quantity that we have calculated from primary data is subject to FOIA requests.”
“Yes, we’ve learned out lesson about FTP. We’re going to be very careful in the future what gets put there. Scott really screwed up big time when he established that directory so that Tim could access the data.”
“p.s. I know I probably don’t need to mention this, but just to insure absolutely clarify on this, I’m providing these for your own personal use, since you’re a trusted colleague. So please don’t pass this along to others without checking w/ me first. This is the sort of “dirty laundry” one doesn’t want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try to distort things”¦”
“The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”
Etc…
—
“All the data that is needed to do the analysis of the thermometer record and the Paleoclimate record is online.”
No it isn’t. There is still paleoclimate data not archived. They’re still resisting requests and even FOI, even after everything that has happened. And BEST commented on the lack of metadata in a form they could use for certain parts of their analysis – they’re still working on it.
“The BEST study didn’t have any trouble”
The BEST study is a preliminary result with a lot of cleaning up to do yet, issued for the purposes of starting a scientific dialogue, and to create a placeholder for the IPCC’s literature search. There isn’t an issue with the estimate itself – a lot of sceptics have produced more or less the same numbers, too – the issue is with the validation, biases, and uncertainty of that estimate, and they’ve scarcely started on that. They were doing fine, until some activist members of the team decided to jump the gun with some idiotic press interviews declaring victory.
“Your asteroid analogy is nonsense. In fact, people have replicated Mann’s results using different statistical methods and different combinations of Paleoclimatology data.”
First, I’m talking about Mann’s methods, not his results. I’m talking about the scientific community’s reaction to them – the attitude that errors don’t matter so long as they agree with the conclusion. Second, all the so called replications had the same or similar flaws. An erroneous paper cannot be justified or excused by listing thirty more erroneous papers. And the fact that the first paper got through unchecked suggests that none of the others have been checked either, and are hence unreliable. Whether they’re right or not, none of the other results can be trusted until we can see that the problems with the first have been acknowledged and dealt with.
#18,
“Out of these accusations, only the first and third (fabrication) is really worthy of sanction. I haven’t really seen evidence of that occurring.”
I guess that’s a difference between our working environments, then. Where I’m from, they would be. You would be expected to have important/valuable data backed up and archived, and code and calculations under configuration control.
And the fact that so many people haven’t seen the evidence of that occurring is precisely my point. Nobody on the AGW side discusses it. The enquiries should have.
“Behind all these accusations is often an implicit or explicit notion of the scientists intentionally fudging or fabricating the data.”
Not all of them. And not always for dishonest reasons.
‘Harry’, for example, was doing it because he didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t have the time or resources to fix it properly, the database was already screwy anyway, and nobody else cared about data quality. He felt bad about it, but seems to have lost any hope of being able to reform the system from the inside.
“If their intention was the mislead, how did their results get verified over and over again?”
That is, indeed, the question.
The answer, I think, is that it is because they didn’t get verified. Everybody assumed that because “the experts” said it had been accepted as the consensus, everybody else took their word for it. When people did finally get around to verifying them, the verification failed. But by that time important people’s reputations were fully committed.
“Why even post online repositories of data and code in the first place if the purpose was to conceal the truth?”
In many cases, they have been extremely reluctant to post online repositories of data and code. Why not, unless your purpose was to conceal the truth?
I’m not saying they were – I personally think it was something else they didn’t want to reveal. But I don’t rule it out, a priori.
#21,
“Actually, I want to step back a bit. I just pulled up the larger quote in my last paragraph.”
Good. I’m glad you did so, and that you said so. It gives me the opportunity to explain that bit, too.
The paper being discussed criticises a statistical approach for reconstructing information from related data. There are two ways to do that: directly with the mathematics, and experimentally with Monte Carlo methods. To demonstrate that the method doesn’t work practically, you have to know what the “truth” is, so that you can see whether your reconstruction differs. You can’t use real-world observations in which you don’t know what the actual truth was.
As Ed says, they did both: proving it theoretically with lots of “Box-Jenkins stuff”, and via Monte Carlo experimentation. What Ed is talking about is a common response on the part of climate scientists which is to say that “the errors don’t matter”. What he wants to do is show that the effect of the errors on the real-world reconstruction don’t make a big difference to the conclusion.
It completely misses the point. Showing that an error “doesn’t matter” doesn’t mean that it is not an error, or that the paper pointing it out is wrong. The only reason we trust scientific results is that we believe the methods used are correct and the logic rigorous, because we’re confident we’d have heard about it if they weren’t. The paper correctly (Ed says) argues that the methods used are “wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc.” That should be enough to get published. If someone else wants to use correct methods to show that the conclusion still holds, that’s fine, but first you have to make sure everyone knows not to rely on the old methods. That’s a distinct and important result that shouldn’t get lost.
However, my main point was that the enquiries should have discussed it. They should have found out what happened to the paper, whether it’s arguments were correct, whether methods used by the climate scientists were changed as a result, and how this relates to policy and normal practice on peer review: sharing papers in review with rival researchers, passing unpublished data around via private back channels, apparently trying to kill perfectly correct papers because you don’t like the conclusions.
Maybe there’s a perfectly innocent explanation, a context we’re missing. But if so, the enquiries needed to have provided it, and they didn’t.
#24
#19Your assumption here seems to be that countries can never change their emissions targets. You have to admit that this is a little bit silly. Eventually, cuts will have be be pretty dramatic across the board, in developed and developing countries alike, but we all have to start somewhere.
In fact I assumed quite massive changes to emission targets in the scenario: industrialized countries would cut their emissions to zero and developing countries would set their target to EU27 level instead of the current “We shall agree to no caps for our emissions”-policy. The point was that even under that scenario, emissions would go up 33% from the current record levels.
All current scenarios visualize, at their most positive, the peaking of emissions in 2020-25. This outcome would require a binding international treaty right now and that just isn’t in the cards (As KK has pointed out several times).
Now, I agree that all have to start somewhere. But I think it is a fallacy to set your emission target so that it more than quintuples your per capita emissions, as 8 tonnes of CO2 per capita would in India.
My point is not that India’s 2008 commitment alone would be enough to mitigate dangerous levels of climate change, only that they have mode bolder moves politically than most other nations.
So accusations that developing countries “don’t do enough” relative to developed countries seems misinformed at best.
You ignore the numbers. This “bolder move” (that turned out to be rhetorical, anyway) is a chimera. It would mean another China’s worth of additional emissions.
#26
It seems the record co2 output in 2010 isn’t reflected by the Mauna Loa measurements.
That is because if you take out the 2009 Global Recession ‘downward blip’ the 2010 ‘trend’ isn’t all that interesting.
#25
Jeff, you pretty much echoed my point that most current commitments are inadequate and unrealistic. I’m not sure why you’re disagreeing so vehemently with something you agree with.
But assuming we agree on these points, you seem to imply that it is impossible to mitigate climate change at all. On that I have to disagree. Correct me if I interpreted you wrong.
#30
Again, I agree that current commitments are inadequate, as I mentioned in #24.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/08/chinas-climate-cah-blackmail/#more-50818