Climate policy after Kyoto

The first thing to understand about the policy implications of abandoning the Official Science of climate is that we are, indeed, living after the Kyoto era. Many don't understand this yet.

In quick succession, the seeds of the "climate change" hysteria sown in the late 80s sprouted into the 1992 Rio "Earth" summit, followed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN, which started issuing regular reports in 1997. A pact committing signatory nations to significant reductions in CO2 emissions (back to 1990 levels) was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in 1996. Many countries ratified it. The US gave preliminary presidential approval. But a 95-0 advisory vote in the Senate rejected the treaty, and the Clinton administration didn't even bother to formally submit the treaty for Senate ratification.

The scientific case fails. The years since have seen two basic developments. One is that the case for current and recent warming, never more than ambiguous, underwent the rise and fall of the "hockey stick." For ten years, people were sent running around in circles by a manifestly wrong scientific claim. In the end, in 2007, the IPCC implicitly abandoned the "hockey stick" for the pre-1980s climate and implicitly acknowledged the long-term, four-to-five century warming trend (far too long to have anything to do with human activity), sticking to much more modest claim of post-1980 human-caused warming. Even this claim has fallen in the last decade, however, as mixed trends of the 1990s have been followed by a clear, decade-long cooling trend. The observational case for "global warming" fell apart. There was never any serious theoretical case.*

The Kyoto Accord fails. The other development is that, after a decade-plus of the Kyoto emission limits, the countries that ratified the Kyoto Accord have failed to come anywhere close to their quotas. They never will. The cost is politically unacceptable. In the last two years, the revolt against Kyoto has spread far and wide in the signatory countries, now that they're faced with "put up or shut up." The required reductions in CO2 emissions would inescapably shut down a noticeable chunk of industrial civilization. The people who devised and signed the Accord were, at least to an extent, aware of this. Always pious frauds, the Kyoto agreement and its regulatory system are dead.

Some economic comparisons. I'm fortunate in that Freeman Dyson, the last of those mid-century physics greats, has done most of the policy work for me in his recent and refreshingly honest article in the New York Review of Books. Couched as a review of two recent policy books on climate, Dyson lays out the issue with a scientific simplicity and clarity rare today. He summarizes the conclusions of economist William Nordhaus in considering the one- to two-century results of following various policies, given the IPCC's already exaggerated predictions.

Nordhaus estimates economic benefits and costs, both from climate change and policies designed to combat it and uses constant 2005 US dollars as his unit, with time discounting at 4% yearly. He estimates the absolute cost of "do nothing about CO2 emissions" at $23 trillion over a century, or about $230 billion annually. His figure of merit for comparing policies is a "net benefit," the total benefit relative to the "do nothing about CO2 emissions" baseline. (For comparison, the US annual economic output is about $15 trillion and constitutes about a quarter of the world's production.)

In rank order of "net benefit," the results are:

• Low-cost with technological breakthrough(s) (Nordhaus), +17
• Realistic and economically optimal policy (Nordhaus), +3
• Kyoto Protocol with (without) the US (Kyoto Accord), +1 (+0)
• Stern (Nicholas Stern^a), -15
• Gore (Al Gore), -21

^aStern is a British science advisor and was part of Tony Blair's government.

We must take the exact numbers with a grain of salt, since the inherent unknowns in such estimates are large. (Nordhaus assumes economic growth and inflation at the overall rate of the last century.) But the rank ordering, and the strikingly close results of the second and third policies, and the fact they are close to zero (that is, close to "do nothing about CO2 emissions") are very telling. $230 billion a year is about 1/65th (1.5%) of the annual US output, or 1/260th (0.38%) of global output. It's smaller than current interest rates, which can be taken as an overall social "discounting" rate incorporating risk and uncertainty.

From such results, "climate change" looks like, not non-existent, but still quite marginal. And the policies pushed by Gore and Stern, far more restrictive than Kyoto, are clearly lunatic and should not be considered further.

Dyson's article is also one of the few, outside of narrow technical forums, I've seen that discusses the effect of plants. That alone makes it invaluable, and I strongly recommend that you read the whole thing, as they say. To Dyson's lucid discussion should be added some additional points. The time scale for noticeable climate impact from CO2 emissions is one to two centuries. When we consider the smallness of the effect, scaling the costs of "do nothing about CO2 emissions" and the benefits of "doing something about CO2 emissions" down to account for the IPCC's exaggerations (at least a factor of two, probably three, in temperature change), the case for any but minimal countermeasures vanishes. Indeed, once you step outside the media- and environmentalist-saturated Western world, you run into much stronger skepticism about both the science and policy of "climate change." The reasons are no more than those presented here and in previous postings.**

Some important quibbles. I have only two significant points of disagreement with Dyson. The first concerns his characterization of "climate change consensus" as representing the large majority view of "climate change" among climate and allied scientists. This is simply false. The IPCC's scientific annexes alone, with their broad and large differences with the summary reports, demonstrate this. Consider as well organized protests by climate and other geoscientists against the Official Science of "global warming," such as the Heidelberg Appeal and Leipzig Declarations. The media generally capture the same group of self-appointed "true believers" over and over.

My other point of disagreement is Dyson's overly sanguine view of environmentalism, which he correctly acknowledges as the great secular religion of our time and the latter-day replacement for socialism, the last big secular religion. Disconnecting the "climate change" propaganda machine, starting at the governmental level and in the schools, is an essential step. The "climate change" hysteria has needlessly frightened both adults and children, warped and darkened their view of science, technology, and industrial civilization, and corrupted how science is taught and understood. The rampant runaway bad metaphors alone represent a new level of manufactured ignorance, something our society is getting better and better at.†

Slightly more than nothing. Dyson's article is a sanity tonic in a subject that, 15+ years ago, left scientific standards and protocols behind for the status of religious belief. The smorgasbord of policy alternatives he summarizes from Nordhaus, together with the other considerations presented here, leads to some natural policy conclusions. The phenomenon should be viewed on the time scale of a couple centuries, with at least a guess of cloud enhancement, plant metabolism, and ocean absorption taken into account. The IPCC's reports don't currently do this in a serious way, because the reliable science to do it isn't there.

Based on what we know now and what we don't know, there's no justification for any active countermeasures against CO2 emissions, beyond a mild form of geoengineering, which I've previously and cheerfully denounced as crazy. Here's my one exception: the most important geoengineering scheme, the one with the least risks, is more and better plants. Dyson reaches the same conclusion. The coming century will be one of biotechnology, just as much as the last was one of electronics and information. Superplants with enhanced CO2 metabolism are not at all impossible. Genetically engineered, or simply cultivated by the selective breeding that humans have been doing for millennia, such plants, spread wide enough, put the atmosphere's CO2 level under human influence no less than CO2 emissions form burning fuels do.

If a more aggressive policy toward slowing human emissions of CO2 and CH4 should ever prove necessary, the right approach is to tax them.†† Of course, politicians hate taxes for environmental purposes, because they hate putting the cost of their pet policies up front and visible to all. Complex and obscure regulatory systems are far more attractive to environmentalists, because they hide the real costs of the regulation. In any case, CO2 is not a poison or a pollutant in the classic sense. (Is π=3? Is the Earth flat? Why are courts involved in deciding such issues?) It's a naturally occurring gas respired and metabolized by plants and absorbed by oceans. If anything, it should be treated like water. No one thinks of water as a pollutant, even though people occasionally drown in floods, and clear-air water vapor is the main infrared-active gas at the heart of "global warming." At about 30 billion metric tons (Gt) of CO2 emitted per year and using Nordhaus' estimates, the external costs run to roughly $23,000 billion/100 years/(30 Gt/yr) = (US 2005) $7.80/metric ton.‡ The US is a relatively efficient burner of fossil fuels, by comparison with China, now the world's biggest CO2 emitter, or Russia and India. Their technologies are simply not as efficient or clean as ours: here's the world's real contemporary pollution crisis.

Finally, and always, keep in mind the crucial point made so effectively by Bjørn Lomborg: wealthy and technologically advanced societies have more means and choices at their disposal. There's no problem that we face, have faced, or will ever face made harder by better technology. (Whether we make good use of it is another matter.) Whatever the future holds for humanity and Earth's climate, there's no case for shutting down civilization or significantly impairing it. On the contrary, the better science and technology we have, the better we understand both the climate and the limits of our knowledge, the better decisions we'll make and the better off we and our descendants will be in facing whatever's headed our way.
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* Anyone who thinks otherwise has been fooled by fuzzy, runaway bad metaphors about "greenhouses" and a climate modeling science still in its early infancy.

** I've never met a Russian scientist who takes the "global warming" hysteria seriously or views the climate problem as anything more than marginal. And the Chinese aren't about to impoverish the next two generations of Chinese for marginal and uncertain benefits.

† It's not the natural ignorance we're all born with. We're an advanced society and have the means to "do" ignorance far better now :)

†† "Cap-and-trade" should be abandoned as soon as possible. It's easily corrupted and subject to confusing manipulation by all parties involved. Also see this by Megan McArdle. Work like that of Nordhaus provides a first answer to the question of "costing" the CO2. But there's no "natural and optimal" level of CO2; all we can do is compare scenarios and ask, "What do we want?" (BTW, it's carbon dioxide gas, not "carbon.")

‡ One gigaton (Gt) of CO2 would fill about 89 million Goodyear blimps. The CO2 emission control schemes of Gore and Stern imply costs of $300-1000/metric ton CO2, which shows in a different way how far out of line with reality their proposals are.

A metric ton of CO2 emitted in the US produces about $1850 of economic value. Compare with the Nordhaus estimate of external cost ($8) and, again, the marginality of the problem is evident. And remember, these Nordhaus numbers assume the IPPC's already exaggerated claims.

Escape from the greenhouse

What is a greenhouse? Is the Earth's climate a greenhouse? Why are infrared (IR)-opaque gases misnamed "greenhouse" gases?

What is a greenhouse? A greenhouse is an environment artificially controlled to maintain equable conditions of temperature and humidity suitable for growing plants in colder and highly variable climates. It's a controlled "climate box."

There is one source of heat in the Earth's lower atmosphere (visible and ultraviolet radiation incoming from the Sun) and three means by which the radiation, converted to infrared, can escape upward. In one case, it remains IR radiation and escapes as such. In the other two cases, convection and evaporation, the IR radiation is converted to a form of heat in matter (air and water vapor) before it moves upward. The first mechanism is, by itself, easy to understand and straightforward to control. The other two are much harder to either control or understand.

What a greenhouse does is to put a lid on the escape of heat through convection and evaporation. These two upward heat flows are trapped and turned back downward. OTOH, a greenhouse allows radiation in and radiation out unimpeded or only mildly controlled. Because radiation flow is easy to control, conditions in the greenhouse - temperature and humidity - can be regulated with a fair degree of accuracy. That's the point of a greenhouse. The walls of a greenhouse also put the kibosh on winds, shutting off another source of climate variability.

Is the Earth's climate a greenhouse? No. A greenhouse is close to a "pure radiative heat transport" situation. The Earth's climate is strongly influenced by the other two heat flow mechanisms and can't be considered a greenhouse, even as an approximation. Greenhouses are built because the Earth's climate conditions are not equable, especially in temperate regions that experience large daily and seasonal swings of temperature and humidity. The closest natural situation on Earth to a greenhouse is the tropics, and even there conditions vary a lot over the year. Upward heat convection and evaporation are, if anything, stronger in the tropics than elsewhere.*

But there's a deeper point. As concentrations of IR-opaque gases rise, they put a larger obstacle in the way of heat escaping from the surface as radiation, but they do nothing directly to affect the other heat flows (convection and evaporation). IR-opaque gases don't make the Earth's climate more "greenhouse-y" in fact. To do that would require strong limits on the other forms of heat transport, just as a real greenhouse does. But the IR-opaque gases modify the radiative heat flow - the opposite of a greenhouse.

Why the "greenhouse" effect and "greenhouse" gases? A posting last year discussed the origins of this misguided metaphor in both popular and scientific misunderstandings about heat transport from a century or more ago. In 1909, English scientist R. W. Wood proved that greenhouses don't "trap" radiation - quite the contrary.

Unfortunately, the bad metaphor stuck in decades of popular books and scientific texts on climate. Climate and weather books often flag the faulty double metaphor (greenhouses don't "trap" radiation, and the Earth's climate isn't a greenhouse anyway). But most scientists have given up on trying to fix it. Some books use other metaphors as catchphrases and mneumonics, like "atmosphere effect," for what is in fact a complex series of heat flow constrictions and diversions. Last year, I used the fairly exact analogy of a constricted garden hose.

The "greenhouse" and "greenhouse gas" language is fallacious through and through. Now that they have contributed to the rise of the "global warming" hysteria, these runaway bad metaphors have done far more damage than anyone could have imagined 50 or 100 years ago. The related bad metaphor of "heat trapping," rarely stated in explicit form, also lurks in the background and adds to the confusion.

A lesson from greenhouses about control and predictability. Armed with a correct understanding of greenhouses and why Earth's climate isn't one, we can see that greenhouses exemplify a very important point about control and prediction of climate.

Greenhouses have a steady climate inside because they're "radiation boxes." Radiation transport is the simplest part of the climate problem and, by itself, the easiest to predict. That's why greenhouses work: they rely on "radiation in-radiation out" only. Part of the trick of greenhouses is that they also shut off (or strictly confine) the other, "wilder" parts of climate, convection-turbulence and evaporation-condensation. If these forms of heat flow were allowed to roam wild and free, the temperature and humidity in the greenhouse could be not controlled or predicted. That would destroy its purpose and make the greenhouse no different from the general lack of predictability and control in the atmosphere - the real weather we face every day.

To paraphrase Foster Morrison again, the degree of isolation controls the degree of predictability. That's especially the case when climate has two parts wildness (chaotic-turbulent convection and evaporation-condensation) to one part easy (radiation). A greenhouse isolates a small piece of the atmosphere from the larger wildness outside and allows that piece to be heated and cooled by a steady and thoroughly nonchaotic flow of radiation.

The Earth's climate as a radiation box. It might be objected that viewed from the outside, the Earth's atmosphere is a radiation box. After all, there's no air or water vapor in outer space, so radiation is the whole game. Radiation flows in, and only radiation flows out. That's correct, but it doesn't make the Earth's atmosphere a greenhouse.

The ultimate reason is one of relative scales. In the Earth's atmosphere, the scale of convective heat transport is tens or hundreds of meters; the scale of evaporation and condensation (as clouds), a kilometer or so. The latter is six to 12 times smaller than the height of the lower atmosphere, the former 20 to 100 times smaller. There is no sense in which the Earth's atmosphere as a whole can be viewed as a single greenhouse - it's too big. It can fit many, many greenhouse-sized boxes. But none of these imaginary boxes would be closed; they would have to be open to air and water flows and thus not greenhouses. While they would have the right size, they would not function as greenhouses, which work because they isolate a small piece of atmosphere from the rest.

Without being closed to air and water flows, such imaginary would-be greenhouses couldn't act as greenhouses, with all their steadiness and predictability. And, because of its size, neither can the atmosphere as a whole.

POSTSCRIPT: Freeman Dyson, one of the last representatives still alive from the heroic mid-century era of physics, writes about "global warming," carbon dioxide, and plants in the New York Review of Books.
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* Thus the troposphere-upper atmosphere boundary is highest in the tropics, because of that strong upward "push." Upward convection and evaporation are weakest in the polar regions, and that same boundary is low over the poles, sometimes (during the polar winter) almost touching the surface ("sky falling to the ground").

Planting trees

A rigorous conclusion about increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere is that plants will benefit. While getting less light, they will receive more CO2 to breathe and more water precipitation. All plants will benefit from the latter; but certain plants - the kind that like to hang out in the shade of other plants, low-light types - will be selectively more favored. The relatively larger favoring of low-light plants is a case of Darwinian selection, but overall, the effect is anti-Malthusian. And since we humans tend to have a landlubber bias, it should be mentioned: "plants" here very much includes ocean plankton and the like.

The exact size of the plant enhancement and its effect in turn on removing some of the CO2 are hard to estimate. However, it is clear that plants are the most significant sink of CO2 in the atmosphere. They experience one to two growing seasons a year, which is a much faster response time than the nearest competing CO2 sink, ocean absorption (decades or longer). This geophysical effect is less important, although easier to estimate: the CO2 diffuses into ocean water, then dissolves and enters the carbonate cycle (time scale: about 10 years); the carbonates then sink to the deep ocean (time scale: 100 years), where they sediment out and are subducted into the Earth's crust (time scale: few 1000 years).

But the sheer impact of plants on the atmosphere is best gauged if you consider the following facts.

• Essentially all of the oxygen (O2) in the atmosphere is due to plant exhalation. Molecular oxygen is a highly reactive compound; without a source of continual replenishment, the O2 in the Earth's atmosphere would disappear quickly by oxidation reactions (like rust) with rocks and soil.*

• The atmosphere doesn't have much CO2 (somewhat less than 0.04%) compared to O2 (20%); the ratio is more than 500:1. The plant respiration reactions (photosynthesis) match one CO2 to every O2. So plants must be doing a lot of breathing to convert such a small amount of CO2 to such a large amount of O2.

• The famous Mauna Loa graph measuring atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 1957 (the first International Geophysical Year) shows the impact of plant growth in spring and summer in the significant cyclical squiggle imposed, year by year, on the rising CO2 concentration. In some years, the annual variability (which is mostly due to plants) is larger than the annual mean increase itself.

It's tempting to relate the CO2 concentration directly to plant growth in this way, but it must be kept in mind that both plant growth and the CO2 level are affected by multiple factors. For example, if the amount of plant respiration is lower in one year or a series of years for some reason other than reduced CO2 concentration (say, less rainfall or lower temperatures), then the CO2 concentration will rise - fewer plants means less less plant respiration and less CO2 converted to O2. The atmosphere, geosphere, and biosphere are linked by multiple and generally stabilizing feedback mechanisms of this sort.

Freeman Dyson, one of the last surviving giants of the heroic mid-century age of physics, discusses plants and their effect on atmospheric CO2, among other things, on these YouTube interviews here and here.

So plant trees. Actually, plants will respond on their own just fine to enhanced CO2 and precipitation; human planting will simply add to what the plants will already do by themselves. My real point is, planting is not expensive - and it is good for a lot of other, more tangible reasons: trees look nice, they provide shade (especially for urban heat islands), and (most importantly) they are excellent for holding soil and water.

In the meantime: relax. The human effect on climate variability needs to be viewed as important, but not urgent.** There's plenty of time to do more pressing things: understand the climate better, especially the Earth's CO2 and carbon budgets, which are now measured very imperfectly - more things climatologists should be doing instead of wasting their time with questionable computer models. Instead of guessing, imagining, and frightening ourselves, a better approach would be to measure lots of things, especially related to plants, that are not understood.

Advanced countries will adopt new energy technologies in any case. Here the political and economic need for change is far more pressing than the ecological one, operating on a time scale of decades, not centuries. A couple centuries from now, when manmade CO2 increases in the atmosphere will probably start to have a noticeable impact on climate, our descendants will thank us if we do good things (understand the climate better, develop reasonable and sustainable alternative energy technologies) but also if we don't do stupid things (wasting resources or destroying modern civilization in a fit of hysteria). Our legacy to them will be not just what we do; it will also be what we don't do - the dumb things we avoided.

I've ducked addressing the plant respiration subject in a quantitative fashion for just the reasons Dyson mentions: the whole question has been broached scientifically only in the last decade, and there's a lot to be learned. But there's lots of time to study it.
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* Indeed, in the next generation of searches for planets revolving around other stars, a key goal is to detect the presence of oxygen in their atmospheres, by looking for distinctive O2 spectral lines. Persistent O2 in planetary atmospheres would virtually clinch the case for the presence of plant life on those planets.

** As readers of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Planets will recognize.