Climate Change for Football (or Soccer) Fans

 Paul Haynes in conversation with James Atkins

Climate change policy is certainly an issue that receives attention – the search term generates more than half a million hits; however, a similar search for “Manchester United” generates nearly 100 million, and they are only 1 of the 92 professional football clubs in England.  This statistic seems to support my prejudice that football supporters (like myself – Wolverhampton Wanderers in case you wondered) are involved with their club in ways that very few issues can match.  If climate change apathy is the problem (and the blog title gives a clue about my view), the question is could we learn anything about the enthusiasm and engagement of football fans.  It turns out that someone else (a Manchester United fan no less) has already thought about this and written a book about football fans, for football fans that also examines climate change policy issues.  The novel, which I’m reading at the moment, is a well observed and comical story about individuals with a passion for football, and another with a passion for addressing climate change, and how they learn from each other.  I caught up with the author, James Atkins, to ask him about the motives for writing his book:

Climate Change for Football Fans is an attempt to talk about climate change policy, a dull subject, in a more palatable way: a chocolate digestive in a world of Lincolns.  In the last ten years working in emissions trading I have thought a lot about environmental problems and climate change and what governments and individuals can do about them. I have also written about this in articles and in my blog The Bustard.  Then a friend suggested that I compile the blog entries into a book in order to expand the readership.  Not wanting to repeat what had already been written I started reading around the topic.

I found that books and reports on climate change policy are an uphill struggle.  Few books on climate change are readable or enjoyable, despite it being an extremely important topic. So I tried to find a way of making the book more entertaining.  This was partly through putting dialogue and humour in it, and partly through introducing the loose parallel of another subject.

The book is a series of conversations between Joe, a Burnley lad who is football mad, and Professor Igor who's obsessed with climate change.

Petroleum: A Crude Estimate of the Value of Oil

Last Month I wrote about the need to act on energy consumption far beyond the recommendations of experts and advisors in order to mitigate against climate change effects considerably worse than those anticipated by the advisors that policy makers rely on.  One issue that represents the difficulty, opportunity and necessity of changing the way we consume energy is our use of petroleum, or put another way, our dependence on crude oil.

What is left to say about petroleum that isn’t already obvious? It is a valuable resource that can be converted into many vital commodities very cheaply, not just pharmaceuticals, plastics, fertilisers, solvents and similar products, but thousands of different components of vital technologies and products.  It provides most of the world’s fuel for transport and contributes considerably to the heating and power capacity of our energy supply.  Burning it produces lots of energy, but also CO2 and other undesirable emissions.  It is being used at a rapid rate – best guess is about 84 million barrels a day.  It is a limited – and non renewable – resource, with total oil reserves amount to around 1.2 trillion barrels, with much of these reserves (around sixty percent) in the Middle East, and other reserves concentrated in the former Soviet Union, Venezuela and Africa, leaving only around 20% of oil reserves in countries that the US senate would consider unambiguously stable. 

Another consideration is that while global demand is remains high, easily extractable reserves are declining, and declining rapidly.  High demand, coupled with limited supply, uncertainty over production, a cartel controlling much of the available supply, uncertainty over the existence and viability of extraction, uncertainty over the costs, risks and efficiency of extraction, the growth of a number of emerging economies, institutionalised speculation and changes in the terms of trade between different consumer nations, coupled with greater mobility and more intense global trade has meant that prices are at present both high and volatile.  In short, the price of a vital commodities on which trade and the economy depend, is very difficult to forecast.

In addition to price volatility and limited supply of oil, there are other issues we need to consider in assessing if our relationship with oil is a healthy one. For example, meeting our various climate change agreement targets will require using considerably less fossil fuel; ensuring that the limited landfill space isn’t crammed full of plastics will mean reducing our dependence on plastic packaging; reducing the use of chemicals in the atmosphere is also an opportunity to use fewer petroleum based products.  True, our dependence on oil is deep, but motives for reducing this dependence are strong and multiple. 

This brings me to the subject of climate change, or more specifically to the relationship between climate change and oil.   

Tipping Points and the top 1% OR “if you hope for 1° C don’t act for 4°C”

A week or so ago Prof Kevin Anderson, from Tyndall Manchester gave a talk to 4CMR entitled: Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous.  The talk assessed the numbers and the models used to determine policy on decarbonising the economy.  The consensus view, he argued, is as follows - an increased global mean temperature of 2°C (on pre-industrial levels) is the point at which climate change was considered a major problem, and the lowest stabilisation point that we could manage though practical and expedient policies. 

Assessing the latest research findings and analysing the data in great detail his conclusion was twofold:

2°C is likely to have dangerous (or extremely dangerous) consequences, and hence 1°C should be the upper limit if we are to avoid dangerous climate change (i.e. the consensus view is too optimistic: the target should be lower)

In practice, 2°C is becoming less likely, with 4°C a more likely stabilisation point if we implement even the more ambitious carbon emissions reduction strategies that are available to us AND assumes:

• IPCC’s link between cumulative emissions and temperature is broadly correct
• Non-Annex 1 nations peak emissions by 2025
• There are rapid reductions in deforestation emissions
• Food emissions halve from today’s values by 2050
• No tipping points occur

His conclusion is that 2°C is nearly impossible and that 4°C is likely by 2070 and depending on the effects of various tipping points, there is a chance that stabilisation will be even higher (i.e. the consensus view is too optimistic: the target reduction is unobtainable).

The 2°C target is thus doubly pessimistic, but is there any room for optimism? Well, failure to reach a 1°C target assumes that policies and agreements are directed towards the global population, divided into countries and regions, which leads to the more profound question: If we are to meet a 1°C stabilisation point, how many people need to make the necessary changes to?

Being Certain about Climate Change Uncertainty

By Martin Sewell, Senior Research Associate, 4CMR

There are aspects of climate change about which we are almost certain (the physical chemistry), and areas in which uncertainty is rife (e.g. the effect of clouds, the ocean, the response of biological processes, climate change mitigation). My view is that we must explicitly engage with uncertainty, and the best way to do so is using a probability distribution, and the wider the distribution, the greater the uncertainty.

The 18th century philosopher (and economist) David Hume pointed out that ‘even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience’. In other words, one can never generalize beyond one’s data without making subjective assumptions, so science always involves a degree of uncertainty.

What is the best way of communicating uncertainty? In March 1951, the CIA secretly warned US officials that a Soviet attack on Yugoslavia should be considered a ‘serious possibility’. When Sherman Kent, a CIA intelligence analyst, asked his colleagues what probability they attributed to the likelihood of an attack on Yugoslavia in 1951, he was shocked to hear such a wide range of responses that varied from 20% to 80%. In 1964 Kent wrote the seminal Words of Estimative Probability in which he attempted to quantify qualitative judgements and eliminate what he termed ‘weasel’ words. For example, he recommended that ‘probable’ meant 63–87%, and ‘almost certain’ 87–99%. Since then, the BBC and the IPCC have also given serious consideration to how to communicate uncertainty. My view is that we should use probability.

Climate Change Blogs: Different Ways to Deny Anthropogenic Climate Change

I often contribute to other blogs, in particular, those in The Guardian and on the BBC website, generally when they feature the topic of climate change, especially when related to policy and economic issues. It isn’t part of my job description, but I feel that it is part of my role as someone involved in academic research, particularly when I recognise the importance of engaging with people from outside academia on some of the latest research findings, as well as discussing and receiving feedback on a range of topics related to climate change theories and strategies, which most certainly make me a more effective researcher.

Both the Guardian and the BBC promote discussion by commissioning an article by an expert (including 4CMR’s Terry Barker) or personality of some kind (or both, in the case of George Monbiot’s Guardian blog). Having such an article as the basis of a discussion has often enabled me to have a focused dialogue with a range of interesting people, testing the logic and coherence of my argument, learning about other ideas and filling in some of the gaps in my knowledge.

There is, though, a darker side to climate change blogs; there are a group of people who call themselves sceptics but they are not sceptical at all. These are not people who are just not sure that the evidence is sufficient to reach a conclusion.

Bottled Water – Bottled Gas?

 

 By Tom Berman: Tom currently works for IBM having previously been employed by the Centre for Sustainable Development, Cambridge University.

Years ago priests, shaman, magicians, blessed water, manipulated water and gave it power, today its corporations, government, celebrities, brands.

The idea behind this article came after watching the BBC documentary “The Foods that Make Billions” describing the birth of bottled water industry in the 1970’s and its development into a multi-billion pound industry, that everyday ships water from the French Alps around the world.  The following morning I read about Longannet Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) scheme.  Longannet, a coal fired power station in the Firth of Forth, provides electricity to 2 Million people with annual emissions of between 7-8 Million t CO2.  The CCS scheme, due to begin operations in 2014, has been designed to capture over 1 million tonnes of CO2 from the energy generated at Longannet.

It struck me as an interesting symmetry; our efforts to sustain society, which bottles and transports water, a resource available (almost) everywhere to (almost) everyone, by “bottling” CO2, the potentially harmful side effects of the generation of energy needed to support such an undertaking.

As a modern Malthus, this article could go on to suggest that a technological solution will never be able to keep pace with the invented, insatiable wants of consumers; wants, created in part by companies needing to find continuous revenue streams, as mirrored by the continual growth needed by the economy.  Indeed it seems that for many the only option on the table is to find efficiency through large technological systems.  Prof Dave Mackay, Scientific Adviser to DECC, dismisses the mere possibility of making serious inroads into our energy demand in his book Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, thus providing the intellectual justification for increasing the UK’s nuclear capacity - racing to keep up with demand while action is indefinitely deferred, until a new technology removes the problem.

Other blogs are available

For those interested in the events in Cancun, here is one recommended by Cambridge's Zero Carbon Society.
The two blogs I read regularly, each from a different perspective, are RealClimate and Judith Curry.

I recently saw an interesting blog article on cycling in Cambridge.