Rhinocrisy

It may seem as if we’ve resigned ourselves to being “All global warming, all the time!” here at Rhinocrisy. However, this is only illusory. Any random process, like the workings of a human or a hedge-hog brain, will naturally produce confluences which have the appearance of the miraculous, but are in fact the product of mere coincidence.^* We will shortly return to talking about jello sculptures and cow flatulence.^† Meanwhile, here’s a few bits on just how screwed we really are.

If you believe the science, this couldn’t matter more. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is coming out this year, and I’m sure most of you noted the release of the Summary for Policymakers on February 7th, which, with much fanfare, announced that it was the opinion of the scientific community, with 90% certainty, that humans are responsible for the current warming trend.

The projections are quite dire; by 2090, even the low estimate puts the temperature rise at 1.8^oC; mid-range estimates yield a mean shift of 2.4-3.4^oC. But note that this is average warming - the warming on land will be much sharper than warming over the oceans, ~4-5 ^oC, and in the Arctic it will be an astonishing 6-8 ^oC. To put this in persepective, the last Ice Age was about 5 to 7 ^o C from the modern temperature. And as Hedgy points out below, carbon cycle feedback will continue to contribute to warming despite our best efforts on quite long timescales (for us).

Meanwhile, the Policymakers themselves are not speaking in terms of halting or reversing our emissions, but rather in merely slowing their rate of growth.^‡ Just to be clear, this means we will emit more than we did last year or the year before, and next year we’ll emit even more - but the amount of our increase will be smaller. This is presumably a sensible way to look at things if you’re used to thinking in terms of continuous rates of growth and the creep of inflation. In this case, perhaps not so much.

The most concrete steps the Administration likes to crow about is “clean coal”. I wrote about this previously. Surprisingly, the amount they’ve spent on it is rather sparse; only $2.2 billion to date. The favored child of the DOE’s efforts in this regard is something called “FutureGen”, initially touted as a zero-emissions coal-based plant supposed to come online in 2012. Sounds dreamy. What does FutureGen say about this?

During normal operations, emissions will be as low as, if not lower than virtually any other coal plant in the world. However it should be noted that there may be criteria emissions, such as NOx, SO2, and particulates, when the plant is starting up and shutting down.

Here’s some icing on that cake: FutureGen is working hard to find sites for carbon dioxide injection, as part of the much-touted carbon sequestration program. Their minimum target is 1 million tons, but they hope to get as high as 50 million tons. How much CO₂ does the U.S. produce in a year? 5.8 billion tons. Yeah.

At this point you should do your best impression of Curly. Slap your face a few times. Go “woop woop woop woop!” Run around the room, possibly up and down a few walls.

Now that you’ve relaxed a bit, let’s review: coal is the major source of electricity generation in the United States. 50% of our power comes from coal. This number is only going to go up; demand is probably going up thanks to our continuing profligacy. And coal is attractive, despite its considerable environmental failings. It is abundant and cheap. It seems likely that the dozens of new plants that are going to be built in the upcoming years will be coal-based plants. So it’s somewhat distressing that the best result we can hope for out of this is that in ten years’ time, we’ll have almost no improvement whatsoever.

^* For example, if you are watching some re-runs of the X-Files with some friends, and then later that same day you are beamed up by space aliens.

^‡ E.g., see this White House open letter on climate change.

Since everyone’s been asking about where I’ve been for the past couple months, let me fill you in. First of all, my Civil War wound started flaring up again and they didn’t have room at Walter Reed, calling the gangrene in my thigh a “cosmetic” issue that would “clear” up with “time.” So I went and lived with family for a while and let them pour fine scotch into the old hole — not a bullethole as some have claimed but actually a nest hole for a family of finches. They pecked it out when I was hiding in a tree before I got killed at Shiloh.

Anyway I wasn’t too worried that my absence (nor my abscess) would cause anyone trouble because I had long since outsourced all my bloggy needs to Jonathan. The guy is preternatural at posting the stuff I was just thinking about. Or would have been thinking about if I were smarter.

There is no shortage of clever ideas for solving climate change once and for all. I’m not talking about amateur-hour stuff like electric cars or planting lots of eucalyptus trees. I mean serious proposals with at least a little scientific backing that might screw everything up for everyone but would solve some aspect of climate change. They might prevent some of the tipping scary feedback loops from accelerating out of control. And the good news is they are guaranteed against any unforeseen effects. After all, everyone knows that reengineering the world’s climate is a simple, linear process that has no possibility of failure.

Here’s one that was presented at a scientific conference in December with the I-wish-I-were-joking title, “Are Salps A Silver Bullet Against Global Warming And Ocean Acidification?” No, the term “silver bullet” isn’t being used sarcastically. It’s a concept by this fellow to pump nutrients out of the deep ocean to increase the population of salps, strange jelly-like creatures, which then shit out lots of carbon-rich excreta which drop to the bottom of the sea, sea-questering it for “ever.” The nice inventors appear to be positioning themselves to make money with this kind of scheme when carbon credits go above $26 a ton, as companies will pay them big bucks to sequester carbon so they can keep pumping out more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Another idea is to spray sulfur compounds into the upper atmosphere to reflect light and “counterbalance most of the warming associated with the greenhouse gas forcing. Surface temperatures return to within a few tenths of a degree(K) of present day levels. Sea ice and precipitation distributions are also much closer to their present day values. The polar region surface temperatures remain 1-3 degrees warm in the winter hemisphere than present day values.” They note that they didn’t study “the important ethical, legal, and moral issues that are associated with deliberate geo-engineering efforts.”

Thanks to Saurabh, master of all things bloggy, I am writing my first post in months. First a little update: I am semi-retired as I am going through a job transfer that is likely to leave me on a different continent. I have spent recent weeks rummaging through my burrow, realizing how closely related hedgehogs are to packrats. Meanwhile I have outsourced all of my blog needs to Jonathan at Tiny Revolution, who has been doing a yeoman’s job of smiling into the apocalypse.

Speaking of the apocalypse, here is the best news I’ve heard in ages:

The relative lifetimes of CO2 and aerosol in the atmosphere result in the expectation that reducing fossil fuel use will accelerate warming. A CO2 molecule has a lifetime of about 100 years in the atmosphere, while an aerosol particle has an average life expectancy of only about 10 days. Therefore, if we instantaneously ceased using combustion engines, the (cooling) fossil fuel-related aerosols would be cleaned out of the atmosphere within weeks, while the (warming) CO2 would remain much longer, leaving a net positive forcing from the reduction in emissions for a century or more.

Meanwhile, this quote from Colorado:

“I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

Colorado? Yes, the source of such gigglers as this:

The Greeley Tribune has agreed to end a years-old practice of copying stories from competing newspapers and falsely labeling them as Associated Press stories, the newspaper’s publisher said today….the practice began several years ago when Chris Cobler was the newspaper’s editor. Cobler is currently overseeing the paper’s online operations and announced this week that he was leaving to take a job with the Poynter Institute, a St. Petersburg, Fla., organization that provides training programs for professional journalists….Cobler agreed the practice was unethical and said it was his fault if it happened on his watch, but added repeatedly that he had not been the editor for 18 months.

For those of you who are extremely unobservant and are navigating the Internet by closing your eyes and clicking wildly: we have moved.^*

A small update on my life: I’ve had typhoid fever for the past month. Actually it’s been going around my house; all of us have gotten it except my roommate Mary, who apparently has a sturdier constitution. However, this weekend I cured myself by application of an enema made with extract of burdock and galangal root. I am hale and fit and ready to take on the world again.

After a long absence, this is perhaps a poor way to reintroduce ourselves. I can only encourage you to, like Tantalus, keep reaching for those grapes. Some succulent fruit is on the way.