Setting Samuelson Straight on Global Warming

The Scientific American blog Observations plays "bad cop in responding to the prattle" by Robert Samuelson in his recent column on global warming:

Samuelson's Wishful Thinking on Global Warming, SciAm Observations: My good-cop colleague George Musser is doing the saintly work of reasoning with global-warming skeptics by calmly laying out the evidence for them. That leaves an opening for somebody to be bad cop in responding to the prattle of more politically influential skeptics and deniers. ...

This past Wednesday, Robert J. Samuelson, contributing editor to Newsweek and columnist for the Washington Post, published "Global Warming's Real Inconvenient Truth." You can read it all here. Shorter version: "Trying to do anything about global warming now would be hard, and therefore stupid; the smart strategy is to wait for a magical technology to make our problem go away effortlessly."

Several points on this:

1. Samuelson does a fine job of keeping to the hardcore skeptic game plan of denial-in-depth, which you may recall goes like this:

(a) Global warming is not real.
(b) Even if it is real, it is entirely natural.
(c) Even if people are causing it, it is nothing to worry about.
(d) Okay, it is something to worry about, but there's nothing we can do about it (optional: anymore) except adapt. Economic growth and technology will eventually make it all okay.
-- Start at the top and work down only as necessary; whenever possible, find opportunities to jump higher up the list again and repeat.

Samuelson's column perches at (d) but he manages to make a backward swipe at (b) ... when he writes,

I'm unqualified to judge between those scientists (the majority) who blame man-made greenhouse gases and those (a small minority) who finger natural variations in the global weather system. But if the majority are correct, the IEA report indicates we're now powerless.

Bravo! Well played, sir!

2. Several times in his column, Samuelson seems to invoke an odd definition of "hypocricy." He approvingly quotes himself from 1997:

Global warming may or may not be the great environmental crisis of the next century, but -- regardless of whether it is or isn't -- we won't do much about it. We will ... make some fairly solemn-sounding commitments to avoid it. But ...Little will be done. . . . Global warming promises to become a gushing source of national hypocrisy.

And follows up with:

Ambitious U.S. politicians also practice this self-serving hypocrisy. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a global warming program. Gore counts 221 cities that have "ratified" Kyoto. .... None of these programs will reduce global warming. They're public relations exercises and -- if they impose costs -- are undesirable.

Samuelson wants to paint saying one thing while doing the opposite and trying but failing to accomplish something as morally equivalent. Only by denying the sincerity of people working against global warming can he deride acts meant to show leadership and commitment as empty "public relations exercises." ...

4. The real hope for the future, according to Samuelson, is yet-to-be-identified technology. In his words, global warming is really just "an engineering problem." ... What that new technology might be and when it might emerge, Samuelson doesn't really know and doesn't seem disposed to fret about. He's confident that it will arrive, however. So the Samuelson plan for global warming in a nutshell (no jokes, please!) works like this:

• Do nothing to curb CO2 emissions now because only hypocrites would want to try.
• Invent new technologies that make CO2 go away.
• Enjoy world saved from global warming.

At least it sounds realistic. ... But by delaying doing anything about global warming, we leave ourselves fewer options about how to deal with it later. ...

Comments

[Tymbrimi]

Like what? First of all, it is unlikely that all, or even most, of current global warming is due to human activity. Second of all, a lot of the damage has been done. Third of all, a super volcano, an event that while very infrequent, does occur periodically, and I believe is overdue, often initiates a period of global cooling. Weather, climate, even the Earth's magnetic field varies. You just have to adapt. What you don't do is incur a lot of costs for little or no gain. :)

[ndk]

The skeptics on the underlying science aren't worth arguing with anymore. I just hand them the survey of the literature that Science Magazine compiled recently which shows no disagreement on the premise of anthropogenic climate change.

The skeptics on our willingness and ability to do anything about it have a dramatically stronger case. This has been an important issue to me personally, and I've very carefully used only wind generated electricity and never driven a car(I'm now 24). My friends think I'm mad, and would never make a quarter of that sacrifice.

Coal electricity isn't too hard to replace, but liquid transportation fuel -- oil -- sure is. I'm just thrilled that geology and economics in the form of economically recoverable oil reserves are riding to the rescue. Thank goodness, because without that backstop, I'm worried that we would uncork a much more awful genie. Yes, it'd be hell dealing with a world of extremely expensive energy, but it's the lesser of two hells in this case. Or, to borrow from Dante, one circle narrower.

[groucho]

global warming vs global cooling?

We are currently in an ice age. Glaciers have been retreating for about 10k yrs. Yet they are still there; ready to expand at their next opportunity.

Current "global warming" is best viewed as an insurance policy against the next glacial attack.

"Snowball earth" periods of glacial advance have produced ice sheets all the way down to the equator.

Let's try and keep the ice sheets near the poles.

[Lee A. Arnold]

"...it is unlikely that all, or even most, of current global warming is due to human activity."

This is incorrect.

[pgl]

Full disclosure. I emailed Mark when Robert "no relation to Paul" Samuelson published this and starting getting rave reviews from the know-nothings at the National Review. Mark outsources the task to someone who did an incredibly nice job of taking down Samuelson point by point. Well done! I'll bet the ranch that none of the know-nothings will even bother to acknowledge how thoroughly their new hero has been refuted.

[No Name]

Okay global warming is happening. What do you do? Cut emissions, a little all or all the way?

There seems to be no replacement of our fuel source anytime soon so it seems we will keep spinning our wheels, emitting maybe less (at least back to 1990, I guess when there was no global warming, right guys, we wouldnt cut emissions for nothing, right...) and we will just slow down the growth rate of the temp.

And you guys should look up global dimming, which has been masking global warming apparently. Im sure you already know about it, but just in case you dont. Yeah.

[Ninjaplease]

Re NoName

I firmly believe that Global Warming is formed as a result of the hot air coming from Bill O'Reilly's and Sean Hannity's mouth.

Please don't contribute.

-Love always,

Ninjaplease.

[Adam]

Samuelson has thin rope to walk on. He, like everyone else, wants to make entirely no sacrifices or change to the status quo, yet because he can't throw himself in with the hoax crowd, has decided that he can criticize politicians that talk about global warming (which I agree is by no definition hypocritical). I am agreed that technology is going to be the solution to these problems, but without economic incentives, a CO2 tax, grants to research new energy, etc, its not going to happen. Scientific breakthroughs wont come out of thin air, and alternative energy sources wont out compete ones that trash the environment and are protected by Washington. Real political change on this issue is necessary. Why wont America take the lead on this?

[dryfly]

Samuelson needed to be taken to the woodshed on that one.

FYI - Good links on the issues at the Stanford Solar Center...

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html

They cover topics discussing both human & 'natural' causes of the current warming trend. Appears human activity is playing a very big role right now. It is almost impossible to deny that with any credibility considering the trends & data.

However the planet has been warming up - gradually - for something like 10,000 yeas or so since the end of the last glacial period. It hasn't been a straight line even then - volcanoes, solar cycles, etc. So there are natural factors too.

Its just that human factors are currently much more significant. Lots a links at the Stanford site to follow - not much debate on that, just on EXACTLY how much human activity plays a role.

You will never convince the professional doubters - their mind is made up, close the book. However the majority of folks are undecided - don't understand the issues & what's at stake (both if we do and if we don't fix it).

It would be wise for people who want to see some kind of corrective action take place be faithful to the facts ALWAYS and make the arguments clear & concise but grounded in the best science we have.

[reason]

I love these people who talk about costs and benefits, as though the costs and benefits are born by the same people. It is the distributional consequences that are the potential catestrophe. If the human species was politically mature and unified, I imagine we could reasonable adjust to the consequences. The problem is we aren't. We can't even manage getting winners to compensate losers within a single country, let alone internationally.

Besides which, if there is a technological solution - how will we get it adopted? We need to set up mechanisms (cap and trade?) first.

[reason]

dryfly,
you will eventually convince the professional doubters... when their beachside condo is under water!

[ob]

Maybe they can move from the ocean to the great lakes, where we should be having lower water levels thus increasing their frontage!

[Roger A. Rydin]

Comments on the Scientific Consensus of Climate Change
Roger A. Rydin
Associate Professor Emeritus of Nuclear Engineering
University of Virginia

Introduction

Just the other day at my granddaughter’s birthday party in Chapel Hill, one of the parents of a toddler asked me about Global Warming. He said, “Why can’t scientists give us ordinary people a clear answer about climate change? Don’t they have the right answer all worked out, so they can show us the proof? You are a scientist, so don’t you know something about it?” These are fair questions, which beg a thoughtful answer.

I admitted that this was not my particular field of study, but I didn’t think that the data was at all conclusive as to whether or not climate change was real. I told him that contemporary scientists were often wrong about things, for example, about the Earth being at the center of the universe, which was subsequently proven to be untrue. Nonetheless, it got Galileo into a lot of trouble. Even if 90% of the scientists are in consensus on any given subject, does that mean that they are right, or are the other 10% right, or just a single dissident? After all, science is not a popularity contest, like American Idol. The winner is not the one who gets the most votes, even if the voting is restricted to highly qualified voters.

Global Warming Facts

Last April, at the 2006 AAAS-SWARM meeting at the University of Tulsa, the keynote speaker, Professor Maureen Raymo from Boston University, gave a talk about the historical record on carbon dioxide and Ice Ages. Data had been reconstructed over the millennia from ice borings, rock formations, etc., and was connected to modern data that has been recorded over the past century. Several striking things come out of these studies. First of all, there are known cycles of hundreds of thousands of years to tens of thousands of years, where data patterns repeat. One of these cycles is related to the net motion of all the planets in the solar system, and another is related to the wobble in the earth’s axis. The other striking thing is that there were periods in history where the carbon dioxide levels were an order of magnitude greater than they are today! That means that we are not in danger of adding a small amount of extra carbon dioxide, and crossing a tipping point where all hell breaks loose. Carbon dioxide is sequestered in plants, oceans, rocks, etc., and movements between these reservoirs occur when the balance is upset. This particular scientist carefully avoided making any conclusions as to where the data from the last century may be pointing, because she sees the picture on a much longer time scale.

On Wednesday, July 5, 2006; Page A13, Robert J. Samuelson, contributing editor to Newsweek and columnist for the Washington Post, published "Global Warming's Real Inconvenient Truth." He stated, “Al Gore calls global warming an "inconvenient truth," as if merely recognizing it could put us on a path to a solution. That's an illusion. The real truth is that we don't know enough to relieve global warming, and -- barring major technological breakthroughs -- we can't do much about it. This was obvious nine years ago; it's still obvious. The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.” Specifically, Samuelson said that it was unlikely that any huge expenditures made to solve the problem of global warming, even if they could be justified politically, would have much practical effect.

Alternatives

The real engineering problem is to obtain the energy that we and the rest of the world need without making the carbon dioxide levels appreciably higher. One suggested method is the use of ethanol and biomass to replace the use of oil. That is not a solution per se, since these are carbon based fuels. With this approach, the best we can do is to run in place by burning something we made from using atmospheric carbon dioxide to put its carbon dioxide back into the air. We can never decrease carbon dioxide levels this way!

Conservation is touted as a solution, but again this is just running in place in a different way. Certainly, some current energy resources could be used more efficiently and displace for a time the construction of new energy sources. But there is a thermodynamic limit to how much efficiency can be achieved. And population increases, and especially the increasing economic development of huge nations such as China and India, argues that new energy sources will indeed be needed.

Why not use solar cells or windmills? To replace one modern 1200 MWE electric power plant with solar collectors would require the exclusive use of the entire surface area of a modest city like Charlottesville or Chapel Hill. I for one cannot conceive of any such amount of land being made available anywhere in the states of Virginia or North Carolina for this purpose. The eventual need is not for one such plant, but for tens of them! Windmills have a nominal power of about 1 MWE, so the number needed to replace a single such power plant is about a thousand. That means that every hill crest in either state would have to be filled with such devices, as well as select areas off of both coasts. Note the current political difficulties about the proposal to site a small windmill farm off the coast of Nantucket, or near the Appalachian Trail in Maine!

And what is the actual operating experience of a country such as Germany, which has an extensive number of windmills to go with its large strip-mined lignite-burning power plants and its nuclear power plants that are scheduled to be phased out? Here is what the Germans conclude in their E.ON NETZ WIND REPORT 2005, “In order to guarantee reliable electricity supplies when wind farms produce little or no power, e.g., during periods of calm or storm-related shutdowns, traditional power station capacities must be available as a reserve. This means that wind farms can only replace traditional power station capacities to a limited degree.” E.ON Netz GmbH is a major German grid operator serving a population of 20 million people living in 40% of the country's land area. It runs 32,500 km of high-voltage and extra-high voltage power lines, and is responsible for integrating 7,000 MWE of wind power, nearly half of all that installed in Germany. Germany's 16,394 MWE of wind power produced 26,000,000 MWh, which is around 4.7% of Germany's gross demand, and is operating at a load factor (percent of the time it operates) of approximately 0.19. A typical nuclear power plant operates at a load factor near 0.9.

Solution

To me, the only practical solution to the energy problem, one that could be achieved with today’s technology, is a large increase in the use of nuclear power. Nuclear power supplies 20% of the electricity in the US, and 80% of the electricity in France.

Llewellyn King, who publishes a newsletter, made just such a point about restarting nuclear power plant construction in the US at an American Nuclear Society meeting several years ago, when he said and I paraphrase, “Nuclear Power will be accepted again when the Myth of Global Warming overtakes the Myth of Nuclear Disaster from an accident like Three Mile Island.” It seems that King was prophetic; at least 10 new nuclear power plant construction permit applications are currently under consideration.

But isn’t nuclear power dangerous? What do you do with the nuclear waste? Where do we get new fuel and at what environmental cost? What about proliferation? I’ll try to answer each of these concerns in turn.

The only two nuclear power plant accidents that ever happened were at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, where no one was hurt, and at Chernobyl in Ukraine, where a recent UN report confirmed about 40 deaths of heroic firefighters, and added some arguable additional hypothetical deaths from released radioactivity primarily in the form of cesium and iodine. There are no modern nuclear power plants made without a containment building, so Chernobyl cannot happen again. Also contrast this accident to the more than 2000 immediate deaths from the release of pesticide chemicals in Bopal, India many years ago. Modern nuclear plant containment buildings can withstand the crash of large passenger jet without breaking. You can’t say that about any chemical plant or refinery!

Where do we store the nuclear waste? My answer for the long term is, definitely not at Yucca Mountain! Nor should we store it at individual power plants. Yucca Mountain should be used as temporary storage for a few years until we reprocess the spent fuel elements into new fuel. After all, 80% of the nuclear fuel in those spent fuel elements has yet to be burned! We just have to do a bit of waste recycling. The really dangerous hot stuff is in the form of fission products. After reprocessing, all of this can be immobilized in glass blocks and stored in a place the size of your back yard swimming pool, probably at a site in a National Laboratory where defense waste has been successfully isolated. The rest of the uranium and plutonium should be made into new fuel elements called MOX for mixed oxide. It is a misnomer to say that we don’t currently use MOX. Once a new uranium fuel element is put in service, plutonium dioxide builds up and some of it also burns to produce power. We take the fuel elements out of the reactor when the fission product absorption and fuel burn-up get too large to keep the fission reaction going. During refueling, we add some fresh fuel elements, move partly burnt elements to new positions where they burn better, and remove the most burnt elements and store them in pools or dry storage racks until they cool down.

If we can reuse spent fuel by reprocessing, does this mean that we won’t have to mine and enrich any more uranium? Probably not, since uranium is barely radioactive, so it is easy and relatively cheap to handle, and enrichment by centrifuge is becoming a mature technology. MOX has to be handled by remote manipulators in glove boxes, so it is more expensive to handle. But the technology to do this exists, and MOX elements are being used in a demonstration at a power plant in North Carolina. In any event, countries like India and China do not have an inventory of spent fuel like Russia and the US, so they will be competing on the world market for uranium ore supplies and doing their own enrichment. At the same time, we are blending down surplus weapons grade uranium from Russia and the US with depleted uranium to make new fuel elements, thus obtaining them without any mining or enrichment steps, and reducing a proliferation problem at the same time.

As far as proliferation is concerned, there has never been a case where spent fuel has been used by a developing country in an attempt to make a weapon. Pakistan developed centrifuges to enrich uranium, and this is the path chosen by Iran. Iraq tried to do enrichment by magnetic isotope separation, mimicking a process developed at ORNL during the 2nd World War. India used heavy water to make plutonium, and this is the path chosen by North Korea. So in this regard, President Jimmy Carter was dead wrong when he stopped fuel reprocessing in the US. He made a political decision based upon faulty premises and reasoning, not unlike the decision to be made on global warming, and the US has paid a heavy price for this decision ever since.

Finally, if we are ever to get rid of our dependence on oil, we have to go to using hydrogen to fuel our automobile engines. The only way to get hydrogen is to make it with some type of energy source. One way is to decompose steam at high temperature, called steam reforming, but this would have to be done without burning coal or oil. Such a process was envisioned for the High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor (HTGR) developed by the Germans but never perfected. The South Africans are proposing to develop a power system based upon numerous small HTGRs, but there are no current plans to go further. The only practical way then is electrolysis, or decomposition of water by electricity, as demonstrated in high school chemistry laboratories. Done on a big scale using electricity from dedicated nuclear power plants, we could make enough hydrogen to replace the gasoline engine! Now, that is something that even Al Gore has recommended in his book, Earth in the Balance.

Would this solve the problem of global warming? I don’t even know if there is such a problem. But it would certainly clean up the air from fossil fuel burning. And it would make people feel good instead of having to say, “Don’t just stand there, do something!”

[Roger A. Rydin]

Here is a 2009 update on German wind energy production, as cited by MIT. It forecasts the approach to instability of the German electrical grid by using too much wind energy in an electrical power system unless major unconventional changes are made! Note that, with an availability of only about 20%, this amounts on average to only about 5 1/2 nuclear or coal-fired power plants in Germany. An additional amount of wind energy from 16,000 MW peak in 2005 to 22,000 MW peak in 2008 in Germany has led to a system that must plan its power production daily using weather forecasts, and then change its mind almost daily about how to cope with the public demand. Without an expenditure in the multibillions of dollars, and coercion of the public to comply with automated load reduction strategies, this system will fail and blackouts will result!
The solution by Al Gore, and now the Obama administration, is to spend huge amounts of money developing a smart grid to bring energy from the central regions of the USA to the East and West coasts where it is actually used. That involves the addition of a tremendous number of interconnected transmission lines, and installation of controls on the majority of American electricity users to turn off their power automatically. It does not even consider the tremendous opposition of the public to adding just two power line interconnections in Virginia and in New England, let alone the obvious reluctance of the public to add such controls to their individual homes and businesses.

From MIT Technology Review, January 2009
WITHOUT A RADICALLY EXPANDED AND SMARTER ELECTRICAL GRID, WIND AND SOLAR WILL REMAIN NICHE POWER SOURCES.
By DAVID TALBOT
Germany is the world's largest user of wind energy, with enough turbines to produce 22,250 megawatts of electricity. That's roughly the equivalent of the output from 22 coal or nuclear plants - enough to meet about 6 percent of Germany's needs. And because Vattenfall's service area produces 41 percent of Ger man wind energy, the control room is a critical proving ground for the grid's ability to handle renewable power.
Like all electrical grids, the one that Vattenfall manages must continually match power production to demand from homes, offices, and factories. The challenge is to maintain a stable power supply while incorporating electricity from a source as erratic as wind. If there's too little wind-generated power, the company's engineers might have to start up fossil-fueled power plants on short notice, an inefficient process. If there's too much, it could overload the system, causing blackout, or forcing plants to shut down.
The engineers have few options, however. The grid has limited ability to shunt extra power to other regions, and it has no energy storage capacity beyond a handful of small facilities that pump water into uphill reservoirs and then release it through turbines during periods of peak demand. So each morning, as offices and factories switch their power on, the engineers must use wind predictions to help decide how much electricity conventional plants should start producing.
But those predictions are far from perfect. As more and more wind turbines pop up in Germany, so do overloads and shortages caused by unexpected changes in wind level. In 2007, Vattenfall's engineers had to scrap their daily scheduling plans roughly every other day to reconfigure electricity supplies on the fly: in early 2008, such changes became necessary every day. Power plants had to cycle on and off inefficiently, and the company had to make emergency electricity purchases at high prices. Days of very high wind and low demand even forced the Vattenfall workers to quickly shut the wind farms down.
Vattenfall's problems are a preview of the immense challenges ahead as power from renewable sources, mainly wind and solar, start to play a bigger role around the world. To make use of this clean energy, we'll need more transmission lines that can transport power from one region to another and connect energy-hungry cities with the remote areas where much of our renewable power is likely to be generated. We'll also need far smarter controls throughout the distribution system - technologies that can store extra electricity from wind farms in the batteries of plug-in hybrid cars for example, or remotely turn power-hungry appliances on and off as the energy supply rises and falls.
If these grid upgrades don't happen, new renewable power projects could be stalled, because they would place unacceptable stress on existing electrical systems. According to a recent study funded by the European Commission, growing electricity production from wind (new facilities slated for the North and Baltic Seas could add another 25,000 megawatts to Germany's grid by 2030) could at times cause massive overloads. In the United States, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nongovernmental organization set up to regulate the industry after a huge 1965 blackout, made a similar warning in November. "We are already operating the system closer to the edge than in the past," says the group's president, Rick Sergel. "We simply do not have the transmission capacity available to properly integrate new renewable resources."
Last summer, former vice president Al Gore began arguing that the country needed to implement an entirely carbon-free electricity system within a decade to avert the danger of global warming. As part of his vision, Gore called for a "unified national smart grid" that would move power generated from renewable sources to cities, increase the efficiency of electricity use, and allow for greater control over renewable resources. He estimated that the grid overhaul would cost $400 billion over 10 years. Gore's plan doesn't spell out exactly how such a massive project would be executed.