One of the stories that crept under my personal radar a couple of week ago related to aircraft engines. Aircrafts account of 2% of the greenhouse gas emissions. The impact of this figure is thought to be higher because the emissions are expelled at height, where they can do the most absorption of light energy. Further aircraft expel vapour trials which are thought to have an effect on the amount of light reaching the surface of the planet by dimming it.

So it is possible, but not completely proved, that flying gives us the worst of all possible worlds – heating the air and dimming the surface.   In the UK  Business Secretary, Mr Peter Mandelson, has announced that £45 million of taxpayer’s money will be spent on funding a “partnership” (as these things are fashionably bit inaccurately called) between nine Universities and Rolls-Royce, who produce aircraft engines, in a quest to discover ways of making aircraft engines more efficient. If the research finds a more efficient engine, there is no guarantee that the world’s airlines and military will adopt it. The nine Universities concerned would be better to focus research on projects less grand but with better environmental effect.It is an interesting contrast to the way that the Government has treated water heating, where for £45 million, there are existing ways to reduce emission. The aircraft industry has over the years received many hand outs form the taxpayer.  Justification of this is that “The knowledge, skills and high-end production … give us huge opportunities to benefit as global demand for low carbon products grows.” Yes, the opportunities are so huge that Rolls-Royce needs a hand out in order to take advantage of them. By all means invest in low carbon research which is important, but when the ship is sinking it is not the time for the crew to start re-arranging the deckchairs.

If they have any sense, the leaders of the world will do well to play down expectations for next winter’s climate change conference in México. The conference in Copenhagen left a great many people disappointed. I predicted that the conference would not be successful, as it seemed to me that the nations of the world needed more time. They might not be in climate change denial, but they are certainly in denial that they are doing anything worthwhile to protect us from climate change. (more…)

What do people from Mexico City, Norway, Central Slovakia, Northern China, and South Australia all now have in common with the British? It is talking about the weather. One time the weather was a subject that I only really heard the British and Irish talk about. We would be famous for going on about it, sometimes in minute detail, perhaps that was how we partly overcame our reserve. Nowadays everyone is talking about the weather. (more…)

There is a kind of simplistic approach that some journalists use when it comes to climate change. Some treat climate change as a religion claiming that a single very hot summer is evidence of climate change. Some are climate change deniers who can be even more fervently religious in their approach.

In a leading national newspaper in the United Kingdom recently a whole list of “evidence” to support the claim that climate change is bunkum, was published. Among the points made (such as Alaska experienced its coldest winter for ten years recently) was a claim about polar bear numbers actually increasing over the past few years as though this was evidence that the climate is not changing at all.

Of course it is not surprising that newspapers write this kind of nonsense – they have to sell papers to get advertisers – and that is how they make profits for their owners and stay in business. They generally cannot make money with complicated articles that this most complex of sciences – climatology and thermo dynamics – entails.

I thought that I would look at the polar bear statement in detail. You can read it at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1194589/Turkey-Twizzlers-GOOD-polar-bears-ARENT-dying-out.html . The statement was “Polar bear numbers are now doing very nicely thank you. Despite the (limited) melting seen in the Arctic ice cap over the past fifty years polar bear numbers have more than doubled since 1950”.

It is very difficult to know the connection of that statement to climate change – do they mean that because polar bear numbers are increasing (so they claim) there cannot be global warming?

There has never been an adequate census of polar bears. They are listed as potentially endangered because the “limited” loss of Arctic ice referred to in the Daily Mail constitutes as area (since 1950) the size of Alaska, Texas and Washington State combined.

As for the claim that polar bears numbers are increasing, this is not what the science shows us.

There are a number of pockets of polar bear populations – thought to be 19 all told. Of these five populations are declining, five are stable, two are increasing and there is insufficient data for the rest. If polar bear populations are not declining as rapidly as they had been, it is due to the efforts of conservation and international treaties. The polar bear argument is not conclusive proof of climate change one way or another but the naturalists assure us that loss of ice habitat will make the polar bears an endangered species and this loss of habitat will occur if there is rapid climate change.

You can get the view of the organisation that seeks to protect polar bears at http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/bear-facts/ . What reason they have to blame climate change if the pressure on polar bear populations is nonexistent is beyond my imagination. Of course they could be plain wrong, and so could the newspaper.

There are around 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears in the world, but because they live remote from humans and because they are rather dangerous animals we do not know exactly how many there are or what precisely is happening to all their populations.

We do know, however, that reindeer and caribou populations are greatly reducing around the world. We also know that warmer weather, even marginally warmer weather makes it hard for reindeer and caribou to survive.

Across Finland, Russia, Canada, Greenland and Scandinavia the herds are declining, which is what a study by Liv Vors and Mark Boyce at the University of Alberta has found. They compiled data on 58 reindeer and caribou herds. 38 were declining rapidly, no data existed on 16 herds and only 8 herds were increasing in size.

The scientists were shocked to discover that 34 of the herds were declining, while no data existed for 16 more. Only eight herds were increasing in number. Many herds had been declining for a decade or more.

It seems that the climate, for the caribou at least, is getting warmer. There are more insects which trouble them and cause them not to put on as much weight as they need. The spring plants are coming out too early to enable their calves to feed on them, due to their migratory patterns. Warmer winters provide freezing ice, rather than snow on the land. They cannot dig through ice to feed, and sometimes starve.

Now this is not evidence of climate change. It is simply one part of the evidence in the climate change debate, and like the vast majority of such evidence points to the probability (perhaps now to 85%) that man made climate change is real and is happening and is causing the climate to change rapidly.

It would be nice to read a newspaper article that did not either treat climate change as a politically correct kind of religion or seek to mock the science with sophistry. If I do run across one, I’ll let you know.

As the world’s nations prepare to negotiate at Copenhagen in December the specific negotiators will be concentrating on targets. Each major nation will have a different idea about which target is right for it, and each small nation will have more ambitious targets than each large nation.I expect that at the end of the negotiations various leaders will attend and as a result of their attendance claim credit for a deal that has saved the world because the nations of the world will have signed up to a series of targets. Hooray! Unfortunately most of targets will be flexible and capable of various interpretations. Never mind flexible and ambiguous targets are better than no targets at all, the world’s leaders will say, and they will explain their confidence in having saved the planet because the world has signed up to targets.

Now everyone agreeing to reach a specific target (or as I prefer to think of these things, agreeing to pass a specific milestone) is very different from actually reaching a target.

In the United Kingdom there have been “legally binding” targets to abolish fuel poverty for the past ten years. Today more people are in fuel poverty than ever, because the legally binding target has been defined but the measures that are required to reach that target has not been legally set out.

So it will be with climate change. Setting a target (or milestone) without the means of getting to it, makes no sense to me. It is as though the world’s leaders are telling the population of the world to go on a long, difficult journey without telling them which road to use and which means of travel to adopt.

Already the world’s nations have given up on what is the sensible target which is to reduce the greenhouse gas emission to the amount which the planet can recycle. This target is far greater than any target that may be agreed at Copenhagen, because of the time scales. The most common green house gas, carbon dioxide, lasts over a hundred years in the atmosphere before it is broken down, and if we can only recycle (as we can now) about half of the carbon dioxide emissions, we are already committed to some global warming. In order to keep emissions at the level of what the planet can recycle we need to reduce emissions by 80% now. That would save the planet.

Obviously no such agreement will be reached at Copenhagen, which is why the politicians are talking about limiting emissions so that there is not more than a two degree rise in average global temperatures by 2020. Again, the talk does not really fit in with my understanding of the science. The relationship between emissions and average temperature is not fully understood; we have Arctic ice melting, most glaciers retreating rapidly but at the same time average temperatures are for the time being stable. The danger to the planet from average temperatures is difficult to understand in terms of climate change processes and all the modelling in the world may not make our understanding sharper.

The relationship that worries me more than that between emissions and average temperatures is the relationship between emissions and local weather patterns, because it is changes in local weather – intensity and frequency of storms, hurricanes, typhoons, flooding and drought – that will be more dangerous to humanity than an increase in average temperature without a change in weather events.

Probably accords like that which is likely to be struck at Copenhagen, will be meaningless in terms of saving the planet from climate change. It is only when we have a combination of specific measures and specific things that create greenhouse gas emissions outlawed will the planet have a meaningful agreement which not only shows the danger but also shows us the way out if it.

Solar water heating is the most cost effective form of clean renewable energy that a householder can get.  If you are thinking about becoming “greener” and investing in a solar system, then this guide will help you.

1. Modern solar systems work with heat exchange; the household water does not flow through the panels, but a heat exchange fluid is pumped through them. This ensures long panel life.
2. The heat exchange fluid has anti-freeze properties. Modern systems should not use car anti freeze, but a special food safe polypropylene glycol, which is harmless.
3. The great advantage that solar heat has over renewable electricity is that heat, unlike electricity can be safely and conveniently stored. This means that you should get your installer to fit the largest hot water tank that you can, compatible with the area of panels that you can afford.
4. Sizing – Most solar panels are made in two square metre sizes (around twenty two square feet) and best performance is when you have around 50 litres of stored hot water for every square metre of panel.
5. It is very difficult to predict the financial savings that a solar hot water system will bring; payback or return on your investment depends upon (a) future energy prices (b) the amount of hot water your household uses (c) your lifestyle and (d) any future carbon taxes that may be imposed. There are indirect savings because your fossil fuel water heating system will be subject to less wear and tear and should last longer. There is no payback on fossil fuel.
6. Solar panels can look great on a roof, especially when they are roof integrated.
7. Germany installed over two million square metres of thermal solar panels each year; much of the German solar is used for heating support, but unfortunately hardly any Irish installations also provide central heating support.
8. The Carbon dioxide savings depend upon the fuel that is displaced. Displacing electrical water heating with solar will usually save about a tonne of carbon dioxide each year.
9. Most Irish solar systems can provide the whole of the average household’s hot water for up to six months of the year, and will contribute some solar energy at other times when the backup is also being used.
10. Good solar systems come with good guarantees. It is important to buy a system that is trouble free and reliable too.

If you live by our close to the Atlantic Ocean it would be wise to do something to protect yourself from hurricanes. It seems, I stress seems, that hurricanes are more frequent now than at any time in the past one thousand years so it must we worth reviewing your storm protection measures.

I know that we were not measuring and recording hurricanes a thousand years ago but researchers can examine sediments left behind by previous anti cyclones and date them with reasonable accuracy. Penn State University has been doing just this and they conclude that the planet suffers from more hurricanes than ever, or in the past thousand years at least.

Hurricanes pick up sand and soil from the sea side and deposit it inland in their wake. In places where they deposit the debris at an inland lake or lagoon, the debris builds up sediment. The folks at Penn State have studied seven such places where sediment has been deposited – six in the United States and one in Puerto Rico. It is a fairly small sample and only records those hurricanes that make it to land.

Using this as a sample the data can be extrapolated to indicate, not prove, that the current frequency in the number of hurricanes were only experienced in the Medieval warm period. Comparing these extrapolations with measured hurricanes making it to land provides the conclusion that the scientists have drawn about hurricane frequency. It is not a certain conclusion, but it is the best evidence of hurricane activity over the past one thousand years that we can get.

The researchers think that the high number of hurricanes in the Medieval Warm period was due to extended La Nina conditions in the Pacific, which aid hurricane formation. There has been no present extended period of La Nina activity – it is reasonably stable, but the Atlantic has been measurably warmer recently and this aids hurricane formation, it is thought. There is probably not enough information to be able to definitively conclude that global warming has increase hurricane activity, but it certainly seems possible.

There is, most scientists feel, not enough data to link more hurricanes with warmer climates.  In theory, tropical hurricanes are very similar to a heat engine – heat build up has to go somewhere and it goes into a natural force of a hurricane. In theory if you make the atmosphere at the sea surface warmer it interacts with the colder upper atmosphere to increase the force and intensity of hurricanes. This theory has been offered many times, but the present research is pointing to a slightly different connection indicating that global warming may increase the number of hurricanes.

There is hard evidence that there have been more major Atlantic hurricanes (that is categories 3, 4 and 5) since 1995, although the numbers are within what we would regard as normal variability. It may just be bad luck that there have been more hurricanes in the past 14 years – just one of those things. Between 1970 and 1995 there were few hurricanes, but there were more in the period from 1944 to 1950 particularly in Florida, which was used as a setting for a hurricane storm in the film Key Largo.

Kerry Emanuel of MIT has measured the power dissipation of hurricanes. He calculates the power by measuring the lifetime of the storm and its maximum wind speed. This shows that for storms both in the North Atlantic and the Western part of the northern Pacific in the past fifty years the power dissipation has virtually doubled. That is certainly food for climate change thought.

Scientists have tried to model hurricanes but different models were contradictory, so we cannot as yet lay the blame on global warming for them. I think that it is important when we talk about global warming that we stick to the truth and as far as i can judge there is a possibility that global warming increases the frequency and strength of hurricanes. We must not overstate the case when it comes to global warming impacts. We do not need to.

Is there going to be enough food for the earth’s expanding population by the end of the 21st Century, when the planet will need to feed some ten billion people? Will there be enough timber to provide wood and the other resources which the world’s population will need by then? These are two questions that have been vexing scientists, which we can condense into one – can plants adapt to climate change.

Some research that will provide some guidance on these questions has been done, but it seems to have been given little publicity. The work has been done as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s work, which is published every five years in a highly condensed form, which of needs must omit some important findings.

I should first set the context. Most of the food we eat depends directly on growing. Obviously our staples, wheat, corn, rice and potatoes and directly consumed. Our meat is usually got from ruminant animals, like cattle, that eat plant growth. Most of the food chain, I think but cannot be sure, depends ultimately on growing things.

That must mean that while we are busy planning and talking about our low carbon future, we should also be looking at the effect of climate change on growing things, but that directly affects our food and how much we have to eat.

Regardless of any measures that humans may take to cut emissions, the IPCC thinks that we are going to experience a minimum average temperature rise by 2100 of slightly less than one degree Celsius. In fact, having regard to the measures that governments across the world are not taking, the average temperature rise will be more than that, but less us, for the time being assume that we are only dealing with less than one degree rise.

The critical question is perhaps less than obvious, because it is not some much about temperature but by is about carbon dioxide levels. If there will be elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere how will this affect plant growth?

One study at the University of California at San Diego has shown that plants can adapt to rising carbon dioxide levels. It seems that an increased carbon dioxide level in the air indicates that plants can and will adapt, by opening and closing the leaf stomata, which is the mechanism that plants use for taking in and expelling gases. The studies did not show that plants will actually grow faster or better as a result of having more carbon dioxide, which is what many people thought.

Instead the plants are likely to take what they need, not more. It seems to follow that in order to use plant to help sequestrate carbon dioxide, we need more of them, rather than expecting them to do more work than they have evolved to do.

Results of another experiment involving soya beans have also been published. This study was in natural conditions, rather than in laboratory conditions, and might ell explain the other function that plants have which releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It was conducted by the Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment facility at Illinois. As well as drawing carbon dioxide and making sugars for growth in the process of photosynthesis, plants respire out carbon dioxide, like most living things.

Until recently no one understood whether plants would respire more (oxygen in and carbon dioxide out) as atmospheric carbon dioxide content increased, or less, or whether the respiration levels would remain the same. There was scientific support for each scenario.

The soya bean experiment indicates that in levels of carbon dioxide concentrations at 550 parts per million (the present concentration is 386ppm, but 550ppm is not inconceivable by 2050) plants expired 37% more than they did in today’s atmospheric conditions.

The greater amount of respiration may well mean that plants will be breathing more because they are expending more energy – on growing. If that is the right conclusion to draw, then it may be that the inevitably increased carbon dioxide levels may result in being able to grow more plants for food.

We do not know yet for certain, but if that is the case we have some way of feeding the world at the end of the century, providing other climate changes – such as drought, flooding and desertification – do not prevent us from doing so.

With the hypocrisy of which only thick skinned beasts are capable without understanding the irony you might remember that last December the politicians of the world jetted off to a climate change conference. In order to keep their personal carbon feet as large as possible they went to Bali, in the South Pacific, probably the most inconvenient place they could find in terms of location. Never mind, the politicians and other attendees no doubt consoled themselves in their spare time with the pleasures of that South Sea Island. Once in Bali they started their deliberations about saving the planet from climate change.

Looking back on my post of 15th December 2007 I find that I described the agreement reached at Bali as “virtually worthless”. Sixteen months on, it is no surprise that the developed nations who reached the accord at Bali are now having second thoughts about it.

The European Union have now decided that they should attach a condition to financing clean technology in undeveloped and developing countries. The main condition that they wish to attach is that those countries should curb their growth of emissions as a condition of getting the money to invest is clean technology. If the undeveloped and developing countries do not curb emissions, there is little point in giving them free money to install renewable energy while they are merrily increasing emissions. I suppose it is a bit like providing the owners of a boat with the money to paint it, instead of the money to fill up the holes in the hull.

I suspect that the main target of the European Union’s new stance is the developing countries, particularly China and India, rather than the small African States whose per capita emissions of greenhouse gas are so small that they are hardly measurable.

The United Nations has cried foul; the UN thinks that the EU should stick to what was agreed at Bali and that the money should be provided regardless of whether the recipient is curbing its own growth in emissions.

The existing way of reducing emissions in the undeveloped and the developing world is the disgraced Clean Development Mechanism, which is a very bureaucratic scheme and has ended up in many cases providing free money for projects that would have been done without the free money. The bureaucracy has replaced judgment in the CDM’s decision making, as it often does in complex schemes which offer free money.

Of course at Bali there was no treaty signed, simply a statement in writing and I think the European Union is right to rethink its position on the statement. The point of the statement was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not to increase them, and it seems sensible to me to provide money for clean energy for nations which are curbing emissions, if they can, not to nations like China who have been given a free pass to emit greenhouse gas by the Kyoto Protocol.

In December the nations of the world will attempt to reach agreement on a new climate change treaty. Kyoto has worked only in the sense that it has raised awareness of the problem of climate change and provided some inspiration and resolve to deal with it. I doubt if Kyoto has done more than marginally reduce the rate of emissions increase.

Again, as with all environmental matters the reduction of emissions comes into conflict with large vested interests of business and of nations. You cannot devise a set of rules to curb emissions in such a way that the largest polluters, China and the United States, are either, in the case of China, excluded from sticking to the rules or in the case of the United States, can argue that the rules are unfair to them and therefore they will not adopt them.

Vested interests have always prevailed against the common good. Somehow I do not expect any new climate change regime to alter this unfortunate fact of life.

 the past forty years one Brazilian State, Amazonia, has turned land with the surface area four times the size of Wales from tropical rain forest into farmland or waste land. The farmland is used for rearing cattle, to feed the mouths of the ever prosperous world which is what happens when people can afford a richer diet.

How does the loss of the tropical rain forest fit into the overall climate change picture? Brazil is not the only place where tropical forest is being lost. If I listed every nation where there is tropical forest, whether rain forest or deciduous forest, every single one would have seen a loss of forest on the same scale as has happened in Amazonia.

Forest of all kinds are important in capturing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which the plants and trees use in photosynthesis, and storing the carbon in their structures and expelling the oxygen as waste product.

The best estimates we have indicate that around 32 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide are expelled into the air each year, humans as waste from energy production, mainly by burning coal, oil and natural gas. We know that some carbon dioxide is dissolved in sea water, and some is sunk into the earth and plants. As far as we can tell half the carbon dioxide expelled by humans is left in the atmosphere, because the carbon dioxide sinks can only cope with about 17 billion tonnes a year, before they overflow and form that invisible blanket that is changing our climate by making our world hotter.

Research by many international scientists, led by Dr Simon Lewis of Leeds University, have estimated that the forests in the tropics are sequestrating around 4.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, which translates into about .6 tonne per hectare. Tropical forests, which we humans cut down so readily for profit, are absorbing 18% of the carbon dioxide which we humans put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.

With these figures you can see every reason to increase the amount of tropical forests in the world, reclaiming farmland where necessary, but instead we are destroying them at a rapid rate. It would make better sense to pay the countries in which these forests are located to expand and protect them, even at the present traded price of 10 Euros a tonne, that would be a benefit to humanity.

It is worth looking at how the scientists did their calculations, because it can be relevant to your own decisions. Imagining carbon dioxide by weight is difficult, because it is a gas and most of us understand gas by volume, not weight.

In the case of the tropical forest studies, the scientists did their work by mapping and measuring all trees above a certain size in 79 different untouched tropical forests. They could calculate the density of each tree, according to its species, and from that calculate the amount of carbon stored in the tree. To calculate the carbon dioxide emissions from a given quantity of carbon is a simple process, especially if you have a handy calculator.

Carbon dioxide is one molecule of carbon and two molecules of oxygen. The atomic weight of carbon is 12 (well 12.001115 actually) and the atomic weight of oxygen is 16 (all right, 15.9994). therefore (you can do it more accurate with the figures in bracket) the weight of carbon dioxide is 44, comprising two atoms of oxygen at one of carbon. In other words just over a quarter of the weight of carbon dioxide is pure carbon.

Looking at it the other way, the ratio of carbon dioxide to carbon is 44 divided by 12, which is about 3.666. Once you know the weight of the carbon in the tree multiply it by 3.666 to find out the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed to create the tree.

You can get interesting information that you can visualise about your own carbon footprint; work backwards to find out the weight of the carbon in your personal carbon dioxide emissions each year. In the United Kingdom, the average family emits (excluding transport) about six tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum. That amounts to 1.6 tonnes of carbon each year. A tonne of carbon dioxide is about the equivalent of an average sack of coal filled with soot, which is almost pure carbon – that is six sacks of soot. Dirty, aren’t we?

But look at the positives; the carbon dioxide saved with your solar system is significant. If your solar system displaces oil or electricity in the United Kingdom it will save around one tonne of carbon dioxide reducing the amount of carbon being thrown in the air by our burning.