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.