Global
Warming: A Sudden
Change Of State
By George Monbiot
04 June, 2007
Monbiot.com
Reading
a scientific paper on the train this weekend, I found, to my amazement,
that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but
nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James
Hansen at NASA, it suggests that the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change could be absurdly optimistic(1).
The IPCC predicts that sea
levels could rise by as much as 59cm this century(2). Hansen’s
paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn’t
fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does
not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one
state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees above today’s
level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimeters but
by 25 meters. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature(3).
We now have a pretty good
idea of why ice sheets collapse. The buttresses that prevent them from
sliding into the sea break up; meltwater trickles down to their base,
causing them suddenly to slip; and pools of water form on the surface,
making the ice darker so that it absorbs more heat. These processes
are already taking place in Greenland and West Antarctica.
Rather than taking thousands
of years to melt, as the IPCC predicts, Hansen and his team find it
“implausible” that the expected warming before 2100 “would
permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for
a century.” As well as drowning most of the world’s centers
of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises
in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back
into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore
be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes.
“Civilization developed,” Hansen writes, “during a
period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000
years in duration. That period is about to end.”(4)
I looked up from the paper,
almost expecting to see crowds stampeding through the streets. I saw
people chatting outside a riverside pub. The other passengers on the
train snoozed over their newspapers or played on their mobile phones.
Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from
their likely termination, we drift into catastrophe.
Or we are led there. A good
source tells me that the British government is well aware that its target
for cutting carbon emissions - 60% by 2050 - is too little, too late,
but that it will go no further for one reason: it fears losing the support
of the Confederation of British Industry. Why this body is allowed to
keep holding a gun to our heads has never been explained, but Gordon
Brown has just appointed Digby Jones, its former director-general, as
a minister in the department responsible for energy policy. I don’t
remember voting for him. There could be no clearer signal that the public
interest is being drowned by corporate power.
The government’s energy
program, partly as a result, is characterized by a complete absence
of vision. You can see this most clearly when you examine its plans
for renewables. The EU has set a target for 20% of all energy in the
member states to come from renewable sources by 2020. This in itself
is pathetic. But the government refuses to adopt it(5): instead it proposes
that 20% of our electricity (just part of our total energy use) should
come from renewable power by that date. Even this is not a target, just
an “aspiration”, and it is on course to miss it. Worse still,
it has no idea what happens after that. Last week I asked whether it
has commissioned any research to discover how much more electricity
we could generate from renewable sources. It has not(6).
It’s a critical question,
whose answer - if its results were applied globally - could determine
whether or not the planetary “albedo flip” that Hansen predicts
takes place. There has been remarkably little investigation of this
issue. Until recently I guessed that the maximum contribution from renewables
would be something like 50%: beyond that point the difficulties of storing
electricity and balancing the grid could become overwhelming. But three
papers now suggest that we could go much further.
Last year, the German government
published a study of the effects of linking the electricity networks
of all the countries in Europe and connecting them to North Africa and
Iceland with high voltage direct current cables(7). This would open
up a much greater variety of renewable power sources. Every country
in the network would then be able to rely on stable and predictable
supplies from elsewhere: hydroelectricity in Scandanavia and the Alps,
geothermal energy in Iceland and vast solar thermal farms in the Sahara.
By spreading the demand across a much wider network, it suggests that
80% of Europe’s electricity could be produced from renewable power
without any greater risk of blackouts or flickers.
At about the same time, Mark
Barrett at University College London published a preliminary study looking
mainly at ways of altering the pattern of demand for electricity to
match the variable supply from wind and waves and tidal power(8). At
about twice the current price, he found that we might be able to produce
as much as 95% of our electricity from renewable sources without causing
interruptions in the power supply.
Now a new study by the Center
for Alternative Technology takes this even further(9). It is due to
be published next week, but I have been allowed a preview. It is remarkable
in two respects: it suggests that by 2027 we could produce 100% of our
electricity without the use of fossil fuels or nuclear power, and that
we could do so while almost tripling its supply: our heating systems
(using electricity to drive heat pumps) and our transport systems could
be mostly powered by it. It relies on a great expansion of electricity
storage: building new hydroelectric reservoirs into which water can
be pumped when electricity is abundant, constructing giant vanadium
flow batteries and linking electric cars up to the grid when they are
parked, using their batteries to meet fluctuations in demand. It contains
some optimistic technical assumptions, but also a very pessimistic one:
that the UK relies entirely on its own energy supplies. If the German
proposal were to be combined with these ideas, we could begin to see
how we might reliably move towards a world without fossil fuels.
If Hansen is correct, to
avert the meltdown that brings the Holocene to an end we require a response
on this scale: a sort of political “albedo flip”. The government
must immediately commission studies to discover how much of our energy
could be produced without fossil fuels, set that as its target then
turn the economy round to meet it. But a power shift like this cannot
take place without a power shift of another kind: we need a government
which fears planetary meltdown more than it fears the CBI.
George Monbiot’s book
Heat: How to Stop The Planet Burning is now published in paperback.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. James Hansen et al, 2007.
Climate Change and Trace Gases. Philiosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society – A. Vol 365, pp 1925-1954. doi: 10.1098/rsta.2007.2052.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/
2007_Hansen_etal_2.pdf
2. Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, February 2007. Climate Change 2007: The Physical
Science Basis – Summary for Policymakers. Table SPM-3. http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf
3. I am grateful to Marc
Hudson for drawing my attention to this paper and giving me a copy.
4. James Hansen et al, ibid.
5. In the Energy White Paper
it says the following: “The 20% renewables target is an ambitious
goal representing a large increase in Member States’ renewables
capacity. It will need to be taken forward in the context of the overall
EU greenhouse gas target. Latest data shows that the current share of
renewables in the UK’s total energy mix is around 2% and for the
EU as a whole around 6%. Projections indicate that by 2020, on the basis
of existing policies, renewables would contribute around 5% of the UK’s
consumption and are unlikely to exceed 10% of the EU’s.”
Department of Trade and Industry, May 2007. Meeting the Energy Challenge:
A White Paper on Energy, page 23. http://www.dtistats.net/ewp/ewp_full.pdf
6. Emails from David Meechan,
press officer, Renewables, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory
Reform.
7. German Aerospace Center
(DLR) Institute of Technical Thermodynamics Section Systems Analysis
and Technology Assessment, June 2006. Trans-Mediterranean Interconnection
for Concentrating Solar Power. Federal Ministry for the Environment,
Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Germany. http://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/
dokumente/institut/system/projects/
TRANS-CSP_Full_Report_Final.pdf
8. Mark Barrett, April 2006.
A Renewable Electricity System for the UK: A Response to the 2006 Energy
Review. UCL Bartlett School Of Graduate Studies – Complex Built
Environment Systems Group.
http://www.cbes.ucl.ac.uk/projects/energyreview/
Bartlett%20Response%20to%20Energy%
20Review%20-%20electricity.pdf
9. Center for Alternative
Technology, 10th July 2007. ZeroCarbonBritain: an alternative energy
strategy. This will be made available at www.zerocarbonbritain.com.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.