bursting the carbon bubble

After listening to the panel of IPCC experts on Tuesday night - which kinda spooked me - I needed to hear this on halting fossil fuel use: "Renewable energy could provide all global energy needs by 2090," according to a study just released by the European Renewable Energy Council and Greenpeace. But it all depends on political will. If there's one thing the IPCC scientists don't agree on, it's whether or not humanity has the gumption to make the changes necessary to avoid dangerous levels of climate change. Science and technology are not the obstacles. Does it require flooding of the Cape Flats before we take this thing seriously?

We've had a dot.com bubble, a financial bubble, and all kinds of other situations where human behaviour has taken us beyond reason. On a longer timescale, we are in a carbon bubble, bingeing on a resource that seems too good to be true - as indeed it is. Like every other bubble, this one will end. It's not possible to indefinitely sustain limitless growth based on borrowing beyond our means, ignoring the casualties, hoping that rational behaviour will ensure that things don't get out of control. And like every other bubble, things got out of control long before we recognised it. We explain away the early warning bells as aberrations, the messengers as freaks, and the first fatalities as fools who lost their nerve.

With this one, our "borrowing" is in the form of capital depletion (dipping into energy and water stores that are non-renewable within the timeframes that we work with) and destruction of habitat at a rate that is faster than Earth can regenerate its ecosystems.

climate change forum hits Cape Town

I do find it vaguely curious that the American Association of Petroleum Geologists should hold the AAPG 2008 International Conference and Exhibition in Cape Town, and host a Global Climate Change Forum one evening during the event, financed in part by Shell. I just love how Americans think they can represent the world. (You've heard of American baseball's World Series, right?) Anyway, regardless of the AAPG's motivation, and my cynicism, they did in fact put up a world-class panel of four lead authors of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report of 2007, last night at the CTICC.

None of the four panelists is a climate change sceptic, but they didn't claim there is no controversy or debate around climate modelling or the interpretation of the multitude of data sources for understanding the historic record and forecasting future climate. What they did say was that the science is evolving, and the differences don't negate the clear convergence that is strengthening month by month. There is a huge volume of data constantly being exchanged, checked, integrated and adjusted to provide a cohesive body of work.

Thomas Peterson, of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in North Carolina, sees it as his job to perform "quality control" functions on the data sets. His team identifies erroneous data through various tests and comparisons, finds ways to fill in gaps in sparse data sets, and adjusts historical data so that they reflect what would have been recorded by modern instruments, so that data is homogenous.

All this adjusting doesn't mean "make the data fit the conclusions", it means making sense of differences in analysis methodologies and data type, source, age, and so on. The extent to which the IPCC reports are peer reviewed is unprecedented - in the normal course of scientific advancement, what individual research paper is reviewed by literally thousands of scientists over a number of iterations?

What this panel pointed out is that there are always data that seem like anomalies, or contradictions, and these generate intense debate, particularly among people outside the process who may see the information as undermining of the IPCC findings on climate change. In most cases, the anomalies can be explained by those who understand the data.

For example, Georg Kaser from Innsbruck, Austria, is an expert in glaciers, and he has generated some heat by pointing out that while most glaciers are shrinking, some are actually increasing in size. What he pointed out last night was that certain glaciers, for different reasons, are more sensitive to changes in rainfall than changes in temperature. This can be because they are in cold climates where warming of a few degrees might have no effect on melting, or because of the particular type of glacier. The glacier behaviour is consistent, however, with the changes in total energy in the system in all its forms - not just measured in terms of temperature.

And while it is now irrefutable that the climate is warming, there are parts of the globe that are cooling - so, for example, there is more sea ice around Antarctica because it is getting colder there.

Some things are still not clearly understood, but the number of mysteries is being relentlessly reduced. Where they remain, that's ok; no model is perfect, and the important thing is to understand its limitations and uses.

Jonathan Overpeck, whose field is paleoclimatology (study of the ancient climate record), pointed out that from the perspective of the ancient record, current greenhouse gas concentrations are far above what would be natural levels without human influence. We are not in a historically warm period, but the rate at which we are changing concentrations of CH4, CO2 and N2O are unprecedented. The record shows that there is good correlation between temperature and GHG levels, but what is worrying is that there is not a clear understanding of what caused some of the very abrupt changes in global temperature. Scientists don't know what might take us over a tipping point that would accelerate our already high rate of change.

125,000 years ago, the Arctic temperature was 3-5 degrees warmer than it is now, and the sea level was 4-6m higher (current investigations are suggesting that the sea may have been as much as 9m higher). We are now on course to bring the Arctic temperatures back to that level, even if we dramatically slow emissions right now.

Bruce Hewitson, director of UCT's Climate System Analysis Group and a Coordinating Lead Author on regional climate change projections for both the IPCC's 3rd (2001) and 4th (2007) Assessment Report, highlighted two key shortcomings of the IPCC's work. One is that Global Climate Models (GCM), while useful, are limited in their ability to help with national and regional responses to climate change. The models are improving all the time, and are useful for what they do, but Prof Hewitson is undertaking groundbreaking work in downscaling the GCMs for regional interpretation. Where the various models differ is not on the overall trends, but on where the regional boundaries are between areas that will show particular changes in future.

At these boundaries, scientists can't be sure what will happen, and governments don't know how to plan for adaptation. Most of the Western Cape, for example, is repesented as one point on a GCM, despite significant variations in temperature and rainfall within the region - the global models just can't reflect teh diversity at this scale. So the UCT team is testing perturbations in the model parameters, to generate a "cloud" of variable outcomes at the regional level. This will help deal with probabilities, which is the best way to respond to uncertainty.

The other limitation that Hewitson sees is that there is no integration between the science and the social challenges we face in responding to climate change. Vulnerability is a function of exposure to risk, the magnitude of the risk, and capacity to respond. Africa faces high exposure to climate-related risk of high magnitude, and has a poor capacity to respond positively. He is taking the modelling forward, since the global models aren't up to the job of regional planning.

Climate change is already happening in Africa. Plants and animals are on the move, and agriculture is under pressure. Hewitson believes that indigenous knowledge can be useful in validating the regional models, but perhaps more importantly in finding ways to improve community resilience and adaptation to change. The big challenge is in gaining access to that knowledge. There are some initiatives, such as weADAPT, that are beginning to find ways to collaborate on adaptation strategies, but we have a long way to go.

material improvements in design

An interesting website called materia reports on innovations in the development and use of materials, in order to stimulate and inspire architects, designers and producers to apply these materials to their designs. One example is the discovery that concrete in which sand and gravel have been replaced with the mineral olivine, seems capable of absorbing, in the course of its life, ten times more CO2 from the air than the amount of CO2 that is emitted in concrete production. Another example is the construction of structures by reusing materials that are capable of being recycled or reused again at the end of the structures' usefulness.

in-your-face waste

Geoff Manaugh, an editor of Dwell magazine and BLDGBLOG blogger, writes about an investigation into the possiblities for establishing buildings in London that could be purpose-built to house waste management systems. Distributed waste towers not only might make it more practical to use energy generated within these buildings, they also might raise the possibility of ubiquitous waste management - as opposed to dumping trash in landfill sites that are out of sight and out of mind. Making waste is one of the things we do (really well), so maybe if we stopped hiding it, we would stop pretending it doesn't exist.

Of course, here in South Africa our waste is made more obvious by the army of street people who scour our wheelie bins for recyclables and trundle down the streets with Pick 'n Pay trollies laden with goodies. And the network of recycling depots that receive those goodies are well distributed across the city. Even the more formal collection of municipal waste is, in some parts of Cape Town, already carried out by local workers going through informal townships and collecting waste at local depots for the municipal workers to collect. What we need is to find ways to process that waste locally, in ways that can create employment and turn waste into something useful. Compost it, gather methane from it, turn it into public art, create new forms of craft - whatever can make better use of resources.

back to the future

It's important to find better ways to build houses for reduced environmental impact, but most existing housing stock will still be around fifty years from now, and all that time they will continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. With 25 million houses in the UK alone, that's a real concern.

So E.ON in the UK has built a replica 1930s house, complete with "more than 100 sensors to monitor energy use, temperature and humidity, making it one of the most sophisticated research houses in the world." Even the housing occupants "will wear the latest tracking devices to pinpoint the energy cost and CO2 emissions of their activity as well as helping understand how the living space is used and how it changes as the property is upgraded." All for the sake of finding the best way to upgrade old houses to bring them as close as possible to carbon neutrality. The UK government wants all new homes to be carbon neutral from 2016.

stories from Africa

The latest issue of Farafina is now out, and I've got an article in there on carbon trading. If you aren't familiar with the bimonthly publication, check it out - it's an online and print magazine published in Nigeria as a forum for Africans "telling our own stories". The magazine publishes "everything from photo essays to cartoons, art interviews to political exposes, narrative essays to short stories."

when goodwill isn't enough

The world's first automated carbon calculator has been developed by London-based firm Carbon Diem using software that turns your GPS-enabled mobile phone into a tracker that can figure out whether you are walking, driving or flying -- and calculates your carbon impact based on the amount of travel you do using each mode. You don't have to do a thing. So will you?

Is knowledge of their carbon impact enough to spur people to make changes in their lifestyle? The way mobile phone applications are going, there could be lots of ways in future to tie this kind of tool with incentive schemes, but for now altruism is all there is.

But across the pond, a New York company called RecycleBank is making strides in tying residential recycling with financial incentives. Again, modern technology is what makes it possible: a truck collecting the waste for recycling from a bin in front of your house automatically weighs what it collects and uses radio frequency ID (RFID) tags in the packaging to identify what you are throwing out. RFID can track a product from manufacture to retail outlet, to your home; and now, through RecycleBank, it can see how many Coke cans get diverted from landfill sites. And the householder gets a financial reward for recycling, in the form of banked points that can be redeemed for products sold by the retailers that have signed up with RecycleBank, a bit like frequent-flyer loyalty programmes.

A concern with this scheme is that it could provide an incentive for consumers to increase their purchase of goods with packaging, but this is partially addressed with a monthly limit on how many points a person can collect each month.

where there's sand, use it

Local South African firm MMA Architects have won $100,000 in an international design competition with their entry of a low-cost house (under R50,000 - they could build 16 houses with the prize money) using eco-build technology: essentially a timber and steel frame holding thousands of sand bags in place. The house has been built in Freedom Park, Mitchell's Plain, where there's enough sand to build an empire. Check out the photos. This has to be the ultimate in using locally-sourced building materials and labour. The award is the Curry Stone Design prize for humanitarian innovation from the University of Kentucky College of Design, awarded during the IdeaFestival last month.

urban agriculture

If Americans were able to grow 40% of their fresh produce in household gardens during World War II, then there must be hope for improving food security in present-day cities in developing countries.

With a steady process of urbanisation underway, it's getting harder by the day for municipal governments to provide for the needs of urban communities; what they need to do is focus on empowering communities to look after themselves by supporting NGOs and the range of initiatives that emerge to fill the gaps in service provision. Impoverished communities can be the most resourceful of all when it comes to living frugally, but growing veggies doesn't come easily, even for people who have resources, as the aspirant locavore is discovering.

Cape Town has long had the luxury of the Philippi Horticultural Area growing a significant quantity of the city's fresh vegetables within its urban boundaries, so more of our food is local than is the case for many cities. But Philippi is under threat from urban expansion, plans for a new highway, and theft from fields. And there is the concern that agriculture in Philippi is draining the aquifer under the Cape Flats, and polluting runoff with fertilizer and pesticides.

So maybe we need a combination of more small-scale homeowner gardens, new areas set aside for shared community gardens, and some high-tech vertical farming. What I like about the high-rise farm idea is that it must, by its very nature, be efficient in its use of water and other resources. Whether it would really be commercially feasible is another question, but many would argue that current agricultural practice is so inefficient and resource-intensive that something has to change. Either we must stop eating meat, or we'll have to find another way to reduce farming's consumption of land, oil and water.

adaptation to climate change

Efforts to help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change just received a shot in the arm. The National Center for Capacity Building in the US was established in 2004 to address the issued of adaptation in developing countries, but somebody pulled the government funding and it looked like the demise of an organisation that could help developing countries. But the Rockefeller Foundation has just given the center a $1 million grant to keep it alive.

Most efforts related to climate change address mitigation, or efforts to keep change to a minimum. But the effects of global warming are already being felt, particularly in developing countries, so there is increasing attention being paid to minimizing its impact by giving communities the means to change the way they do business.