Monbiot: A Sudden Change of State

[Guest guest]

Monbiot: A Sudden Change of State

George Monbiot

 

Guardian 3rd July 2007

 

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 centimetres but by 25 metres. 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 centres 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.â€(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 programme, partly as a result, is characterised 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

“aspirationâ€, 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 Centre 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 flipâ€. 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:

 

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

 

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

 

I am grateful to Marc Hudson for drawing my attention to this paper and giving

me a copy.

 

James Hansen et al, ibid.

 

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

 

Emails from David Meechan, press officer, Renewables, Department for Business,

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

 

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

 

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%20Energ\

y%20Review%20-%20electricity.pdf

 

Centre for Alternative Technology, 10th July 2007. ZeroCarbonBritain: an

alternative energy strategy. This will be made available at

www.zerocarbonbritain.com.

 

 

 

What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure

that just ain't so.

- Mark Twain