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Weiye Loh

The Breakthrough Institute: New Report: How Efficiency Can Increase Energy Consumption - 0 views

thebreakthrough.org/...eport_how_efficiency_can.shtml

Climate Science Review Meta-analysis Academic Research Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • There is a large expert consensus and strong evidence that below-cost energy efficiency measures drive a rebound in energy consumption that erodes much and in some cases all of the expected energy savings, concludes a new report by the Breakthrough Institute. "Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena" covers over 96 published journal articles and is one of the largest reviews of the peer-reviewed journal literature to date. (Readers in a hurry can download Breakthrough's PowerPoint demonstration here or download the full paper here.)
  • In a statement accompanying the report, Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote, "Below-cost energy efficiency is critical for economic growth and should thus be aggressively pursued by governments and firms. However, it should no longer be considered a direct and easy way to reduce energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions." The lead author of the new report is Jesse Jenkins, Breakthrough's Director of Energy and Climate Policy; Nordhaus and Shellenberger are co-authors.
  • The findings of the new report are significant because governments have in recent years relied heavily on energy efficiency measures as a means to cut greenhouse gases. "I think we have to have a strong push toward energy efficiency," said President Obama recently. "We know that's the low-hanging fruit, we can save as much as 30 percent of our current energy usage without changing our quality of life." While there is robust evidence for rebound in academic peer-reviewed journals, it has largely been ignored by major analyses, including the widely cited 2009 McKinsey and Co. study on the cost of reducing greenhouse gases.
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  • The idea that increased energy efficiency can increase energy consumption at the macro-economic level strikes many as a new idea, or paradoxical, but it was first observed in 1865 by British economist William Stanley Jevons, who pointed out that Watt's more efficient steam engine and other technical improvements that increased the efficiency of coal consumption actually increased rather than decreased demand for coal. More efficient engines, Jevons argued, would increase future coal consumption by lowering the effective price of energy, thus spurring greater demand and opening up useful and profitable new ways to utilize coal. Jevons was proven right, and the reality of what is today known as "Jevons Paradox" has long been uncontroversial among economists.
  • Economists have long observed that increasing the productivity of any single factor of production -- whether labor, capital, or energy -- increases demand for all of those factors. This is one of the basic dynamics of economic growth. Luddites who feared there would be fewer jobs with the emergence of weaving looms were proved wrong by lower price for woven clothing and demand that has skyrocketed (and continued to increase) ever since. And today, no economist would posit that an X% improvement in labor productivity would lead directly to an X% reduction in employment. In fact, the opposite is widely expected: labor productivity is a chief driver of economic growth and thus increases in employment overall. There is no evidence, the report points out, that energy is any different, as per capita energy consumption everywhere on earth continues to rise, even as economies become more efficient each year.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: This Quote Cannot be Accurate - 0 views

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Energy Wealth Country

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • An article on energy efficiency over at Yale e360 has this quote allegedly from Energy Secretary Steven Chu: "it’s a myth that the wealth of a country is proportional to its energy use."I do not believe that this can possibly be an accurate quote, for the simple reason that it is wrong (and I can find no evidence of it online other than in the Yale e360 story).  The figure at the top of this post comes from Gapminder (the exact graph can be found here), and shows the very strong relationship of the wealth of a country to its energy use.  No myth.
  • UPDATE: A colleague emails to suggest that a linear-linear graph might show something different.  Good question, it does not.
  • UPDATE 2: Here is the source of the quote, a few minutes into Steven Chu's 2008 speech at the National Clean Energy Summit. Chu is clearly saying that beyond a certain level energy use, metrics of quality of life (and he shows a graph using the Human Development Index) do not increase proportionately to increases in energy consumption. I have no problem with such a claim. However, it is highly misleading to reduce that to "it’s a myth that the wealth of a country is proportional to its energy use" absent the broader context, as was done at Yale e360. Thus, the quote is accurate but used improperly. The wealth of a country is indeed proportional to its energy use, which is quite different than saying, once you are very wealthy, consuming more energy does not increase proportionately indicators of quality of life. Thanks to the folks at Yale e360 for quickly responding to my query!
Weiye Loh

The messy business of cleaning up carbon policy (and how to sell it to the electorate) ... - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...45810.html

Carbon Tax Global Warming Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • 1. Putting a price on carbon is not only about the climate.Yes, humans are affecting the climate and reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a key commitment of this government, and indeed the stated views of the opposition. But there are other reasons to price carbon, primarily to put Australia at the forefront of a global energy technology revolution that is already underway.In future years and decades the world is going to need vastly more energy that is secure, reliable, clean and affordable. Achieving these outcomes will require an energy technology revolution. The purpose of pricing carbon is to raise the revenues needed to invest in this future, just as we invest in health, agriculture and defence.
  • 2. A price on carbon raises revenues to invest in stimulating that energy technology revolution.Australia emits almost 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. In round numbers, every dollar carbon tax per tonne on those emissions would raise about A$100 million. A significant portion of the proceeds from a carbon tax should be used to invest in energy technology innovation, using today’s energy economy to build a bridge to tomorrow’s economy. This is exactly the strategy that India has adopted with a small levy on coal and Germany has adopted with a tax on nuclear fuel rods, with proceeds in both instances invested into energy innovation.
  • 3. The purpose of a carbon tax is not to make energy, food, petrol or consumer goods appreciably more expensive.Just as scientists are in broad agreement that humans are affecting the global climate, economists and other experts are in broad agreement that we cannot revolutionise our energy economy through pricing mechanisms alone. Thus, we propose starting with a low carbon tax - one that has broad political support - and then committing to increasing it in a predictable manner over time.The Coalition has proposed a “direct action plan” on carbon policy that would cost A$30 billion over the next 8 years, which is the equivalent of about a $2.50 per tonne carbon tax. The question to be put to the Coalition is not whether we should be investing in a carbon policy, as we agree on that point, but how much and how it should be paid for. The Coalition’s plans leave unanswered how they would pay for their plan.A carbon tax offers a responsible and effective manner to raise funds without harming the economy or jobs. In fact, to the extent that investments in energy innovation bear fruit, new markets will be opened and new jobs will be created. The Coalition’s plan is not focused on energy technology innovation.The question for the Coalition should thus be, at what level would you set a carbon tax (or what other taxes would you raise?), and how would you invest the proceeds in a manner that accelerates energy technology innovation?
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  • 4. Even a low carbon tax will make some goods cost a bit more, so it is important to help those who are most affected.Our carbon tax proposal is revenue neutral in the sense that we will lower other taxes in direct proportion to the impact, however modest, of a low carbon tax. We will do this with particular attention to those who may be most directly affected by a price on carbon.In addition, some portion of the revenue raised by a carbon tax will be returned to the public. But not all. It is important to invest in tomorrow’s energy technologies today and a carbon tax provides the mechanism for doing so.
Weiye Loh

Breakthrough Europe: Emerging Economies Reassert Commitment to Nuclear Power - 0 views

breakthrougheurope.org/...hina_india_japan_nuclear.shtml

Greenhoues Gases Green Energy Nuclear Risk

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Nearly half a billion of India's 1.2 billion citizens continue to live in energy poverty. According to the Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, Srikumar Banerjee, "ours is a very power-hungry country. It is essential for us to have further electricity generation." The Chinese have cited similar concerns in sticking to their major expansion plans of its nuclear energy sector. At its current GDP growth, China's electricity demands rise an average of 12 percent per year.
  • the Japanese nuclear crisis demonstrates the vast chasm in political priorities between the developing world and the post-material West.
  • Other regions that have reiterated their plans to stick to nuclear energy are Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Prime Minister of Poland, the fastest growing country in the EU, has said that "fears of a nuclear disaster in Japan following last Friday's earthquake and tsunami would not disturb Poland's own plans to develop two nuclear plants." Russia and the Czech Republic have also restated their commitment to further nuclear development, while the Times reports that "across the Middle East, countries have been racing to build up nuclear power, as a growth and population boom has created unprecedented demand for energy." The United Arab Emirates is building four plants that will generate roughly a quarter of its power by 2020.
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  • Some European leaders, including Angela Merkel, may be backtracking fast on their commitment to nuclear power, but despite yesterday's escalation of the ongoing crisis in Fukushima, Japan, there appear to be no signs that India, China and other emerging economies will succumb to a similar backlash. For the emerging economies, overcoming poverty and insecurity of supply remain the overriding priorities of energy policy.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11
     
    As the New York Times reports: The Japanese disaster has led some energy officials in the United States and in industrialized European nations to think twice about nuclear expansion. And if a huge release of radiation worsens the crisis, even big developing nations might reconsider their ambitious plans. But for now, while acknowledging the need for safety, they say their unmet energy needs give them little choice but to continue investing in nuclear power.
Weiye Loh

The Breakthrough Institute: ANALYSIS: Nuclear Moratorium in Germany Could Cause Spike i... - 0 views

thebreakthrough.org/...is_nuclear_moratorium_in.shtml

Greenhoues Gases Green Energy Nuclear Risk

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The German government announced today that it will shut down seven of the country's seventeen nuclear power plants for an indefinite period, a decision taken in response to widespread protests and a German public increasingly fearful of nuclear power after a nuclear emergency in Japan. The decision places a moratorium on a law that would extend the lifespan of these plants, and is uncharacteristic of Angela Merkel, whose government previously overturned its predecessor's decision to phase nuclear out of Germany's energy supply.
  • The seven plants, each built before 1980, represent 30% of Germany's nuclear electricity generation and 24% of its gross installed nuclear capacity. Shutting down these plants, or even just placing an indefinite hold on their operation, would be a major loss of zero-emissions generation capacity for Germany. The country currently relies on nuclear power from its seventeen nuclear power plants for about a quarter of its electricity supply.
  • The long-term closure of these plants would therefore seriously challenge Germany's carbon emissions efforts, as they try to meet the goal of 40% reduction below 1990 carbon emissions rates by 2020.
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  • The moratorium could cause a spike in CO2 emissions as Germany turns to its other, more carbon-intensive sources to supply its energy demand. Already, the country has been engaged in a "dash for coal", building dozens of new coal plants in response to the perverse incentives and intense lobbying from the coal industries made possible by the European Emissions Trading Scheme. (As previously reported by Breakthrough Europe).
  • if lost generation were made up for entirely by coal-fired plants, carbon emissions would increase annually by as much as 33 million tons. This would represent an overall 4% annual increase in carbon emissions for the country and an 8% increase in carbon emissions for the power sector alone.
  • Alternatively, should the country try to replace lost generation entirely with power from renewables, it would need to more than double generation of renewable energy, from where it currently stands at 97 billion kWh to about 237 billion kWh. As part of the country's low-carbon strategy, Germany has planned to deploy at least 20% renewable energy sources by 2020. If the nation now chooses to meet this goal by displacing nuclear plants, 2020 emissions levels would be higher than had the country otherwise phased out its carbon-intensive coal or natural gas plants.
  • *Carbon emissions factors used are those estimated by the World Bank in 2009 for new coal-fired power plants (0.795 t C02/MWh) and new gas-fired power plants (0.398 t C02/MWh) **Data from Carbon Monitoring For Action, European Nuclear Society Data, and US Energy Information Administration
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11
     
    Carbon dioxide emissions in Germany may increase by 4 percent annually in response to a moratorium on seven of the country's oldest nuclear power plants, as power generation is shifted from nuclear power, a zero carbon source, to the other carbon-intensive energy sources that currently make up the country's energy supply.
Weiye Loh

Read Aubrey McClendon's response to "misleading" New York Times article (1) - 0 views

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Journalism Energy Activism Bias

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Since the shale gas revolution and resulting confirmation of enormous domestic gas reserves, there has been a relatively small group of analysts and geologists who have doubted the future of shale gas.  Their doubts have become very convenient to the environmental activists I mentioned earlier. This particular NYT reporter has apparently sought out a few of the doubters to fashion together a negative view of the U.S. natural gas industry. We also believe certain media outlets, especially the once venerable NYT, are being manipulated by those whose environmental or economic interests are being threatened by abundant natural gas supplies. We have seen for example today an email from a leader of a group called the Environmental Working Group who claimed today’s articles as this NYT reporter’s "second great story" (the first one declaring that produced water disposal from shale gas wells was unsafe) and that “we've been working with him for over 8 months. Much more to come. . .”
  • this reporter’s claim of impending scarcity of natural gas supply contradicts the facts and the scientific extrapolation of those facts by the most sophisticated reservoir engineers and geoscientists in the world. Not just at Chesapeake, but by experts at many of the world’s leading energy companies that have made multi-billion-dollar, long-term investments in U.S. shale gas plays, with us and many other companies. Notable examples of these companies, besides the leading independents such as Chesapeake, Devon, Anadarko, EOG, EnCana, Talisman and others, include these leading global energy giants:  Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, Conoco, Statoil, BHP, Total, CNOOC, Marathon, BG, KNOC, Reliance, PetroChina, Mitsui, Mitsubishi and ENI, among others.  Is it really possible that all of these companies, with a combined market cap of almost $2 trillion, know less about shale gas than a NYT reporter, a few environmental activists and a handful of shale gas doubters?
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11
     
    Administrator's Note: This email was sent to all Chesapeake employees from CEO Aubrey McClendon, in response to a Sunday New York Times piece by Ian Urbina entitled "Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush."   FW: CHK's response to 6.26.11 NYT article on shale gas   From: Aubrey McClendon Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2011 8:37 PM To: All Employees   Dear CHK Employees:  By now many of you may have read or heard about a story in today's New York Times (NYT) that questioned the productive capacity and economic quality of U.S. natural gas shale reserves, as well as energy reserve accounting practices used by E&P companies, including Chesapeake.  The story is misleading, at best, and is the latest in a series of articles produced by this publication that obviously have an anti-industry bias.  We know for a fact that today's NYT story is the handiwork of the same group of environmental activists who have been the driving force behind the NYT's ongoing series of negative articles about the use of fracking and its importance to the US natural gas supply growth revolution - which is changing the future of our nation for the better in multiple areas.  It is not clear to me exactly what these environmental activists are seeking to offer as their alternative energy plan, but most that I have talked to continue to naively presume that our great country need only rely on wind and solar energy to meet our current and future energy needs. They always seem to forget that wind and solar produce less than 2% of America electricity today and are completely non-economic without ongoing government and ratepayer subsidies.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: How to Get to 80% "Clean Energy" by 2035 - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...o-80-clean-energy-by-2035.html

Energy Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • I have put together a quick spreadsheet to allow me to do a bit of sensitivity analysis of what it would take for the US to get to 80% "clean energy" in its electricity supply by 2035, as proposed by President Obama in his State of the Union Speech
  • 1. I started with the projections from the EIA to 2035 available here in XLS. 2. I then calculated the share of clean energy in 2011, assuming that natural gas gets a 50% credit for being clean.  That share is just under 44% (Nukes 21%, Renewable 13%, Gas 10%). 3. I then calculated how that share could be increased to 80% by 2035.
  • Here is what I found: 1. Coal pretty much has to go away.  Specifically, about 90% or more of coal energy would have to be replaced. 2. I first looked at replacing all the coal with gas, all else equal.  That gets the share of clean energy up to about 68%, a ways off of the target. 3. I then fiddled with the numbers to arrive at 80%.  One way to get there would be to increase the share of nukes to 43%, gas to 31% and renewables to 22% (Note that the EIA reference scenario -- BAU -- to 2035 has these shares at 17%, 21% and 17% respectively, for a share of 45% just about like today.)
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  • Increasing nuclear power in the EIA reference scenario from a 17% to 43% share of electricity implies, in round numbers, about 300 new nuclear power plants by 2035.***  If you do not like nuclear you can substitute wind turbines or solar thermal plants (or even reductions in electricity consumption) according to the data provided in The Climate Fix, Table 4.4.  The magnitude of the task is the same size, just expressed differently.
  • One nuclear plant worth of carbon-free energy every 30 days between now and 2035.  This does not even consider electrification of some fraction of the vehicle fleet -- another of President Obama's goals -- which presumably would add a not-insignificant amount to electricity demand. Thus, I'd suggest that the President's clean energy goal is much more of the aspirational variety than a actual policy target expected to be hit precisely.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: What Prompted the Decline of Oil Power? - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...pted-decline-of-oil-power.html

Oil Energy Capitalism Pricing

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • The figure above comes from the IMF World Economic Outlook released earlier this week in a chapter on "oil scarcity" (PDF).  The report explains the figure as follows: Most OECD countries saw a big switch away from oil in electric power generation in the early 1980s. After oil prices rose sharply compared with the prices of other fossil fuels in the 1970s, the power sector switched from oil to other input (Figure 3.6): some countries went back to coal (for example, the United States); others increased their nuclear capacity (for example, France) or turned to alternative energy sources.
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 11
     
    Over about 40 years oil lost about 90% of its role as a source of energy for electricity production (from a 25% share to a 2.5% share).  There are a few interesting points to take from this dramatic shift, some of which seem obvious but nonetheless worth highlighting. 1. Significant energy shifts happen. 2. They can take many decades. 3. Such shifts depend upon available substitutes. 4. The trend was from more expensive energy to less expensive energy, not vice versa.
Weiye Loh

asahi.com（朝日新聞社）：INTERVIEW/Lee Kuan Yew: Nuclear accident hurt Japan's reputa... - 0 views

www.asahi.com/...TKY201106160328.html

Nuclear Energy Green Energy Politics International Relations

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 18 Jun 11
     
    Q: One big question, which has emerged from March 11, is how we should find the right source of energy, and how we satisfy our energy demands without jeopardizing the security of the lives of the people and the region. The dependence on nuclear power generation has been called into question in many countries. It will also have an extensive impact on the regional security order. What is the right way to think through this enormous challenge? Lee: This is a difficult question to answer. If no other sources of energy are discovered besides coal, gas and oil, we may have no alternative but nuclear power.
Weiye Loh

Renewable energy is too expensive - 0 views

www.skepticalscience.com/le-energy-is-too-expensive.htm

Green Energy Coal Fossil Fuel

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Due to its abundance and low market price, coal combustion is the largest source of energy production in the world, accounting for 40% of all electricity worldwide.  In the USA it accounts for 45% of electricity generation, and approximately 75% in Australia. Unfortunately, coal combustion is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions as well, accounting for 30% of total anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions worldwide, and 72% of CO2 emissions from global power generation.  In addition, non-power generation uses increase its contribution to global human CO2 emissions to a whopping 41% (as of 2005).  Many people prefer coal combustion to renewable energy because it seems to be cheaper.  However, when accounting for the true costs of coal power, most renewable energy sources are actually significantly cheaper in the long-run.
  • Weiye Loh on 11 Apr 11
     
    When you account for the effects which are not reflected in the market price of fossil fuels, like air pollution and health impacts, the true cost of coal and other fossil fuels is higher than the cost of most renewable energy technologies.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: The Guardian on Difficult Energy Choices - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...-difficult-energy-choices.html

Green Energy Nuclear Energy

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • For all the emotive force of events in Japan, though, this is one issue where there is a pressing need to listen to what our heads say about the needs of the future, as opposed to subjecting ourselves to jittery whims of the heart. One of the few solid lessons to emerge from the aged Fukushima plant is that the tendency in Britain and elsewhere to postpone politically painful choices about building new nuclear stations by extending the life-spans of existing ones is dangerous. Beyond that, with or without Fukushima, the undisputed nastiness of nuclear – the costs, the risks and the waste – still need to be carefully weighed in the balance against the different poisons pumped out by coal, which remains the chief economic alternative. Most of the easy third ways are illusions. Energy efficiency has been improving for over 200 years, but it has worked to increase not curb demand. Off-shore wind remains so costly that market forces would simply push pollution overseas if it were taken up in a big way. A massive expansion of shale gas may yet pave the way to a plausible non-nuclear future, and it certainly warrants close examination. The fundamentals of the difficult decisions ahead, however, have not moved with the Earth.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11
     
    The Guardian hits the right note on energy policy choices in the aftermath of the still unfolding Japanese nuclear crisis:
Weiye Loh

Breakthrough Europe: "Coal Kills 4,000 Times More People Per Unit of Energy than Nuclear" - 0 views

breakthrougheurope.org/...ills_4000_times_more_peo.shtml

Coal Energy Nuclear

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Last year, for example, coal mining accidents killed 4,233 in China alone, while coal pollutants killed an estimated 13,200 Americans. And while you may remember a few of the 25 worst energy-related disasters of 2010, most went unnoticed by Western media and the public.
  • When you actually do the math, coal kills somewhere on the order of 4,000 times more people per unit of energy produced than nuclear power. Or to put it another way, outdoor air pollution, caused principally by the combustion of fossil fuels, kills as many people every 29 hours as will eventually die due to radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, according to World Health Organization figures (Source: nuclear; air pollution).
  • Yet since coal-related deaths have a much lower profile than nuclear disasters, and because they largely occur in the conveniently far-away obscurity of the developing world, they tend to be severely underreported by the mainstream media in the West.
Weiye Loh

How We Know by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...how-we-know

Information Language Data History Science

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Another example illustrating the central dogma is the French optical telegraph.
  • The telegraph was an optical communication system with stations consisting of large movable pointers mounted on the tops of sixty-foot towers. Each station was manned by an operator who could read a message transmitted by a neighboring station and transmit the same message to the next station in the transmission line.
  • The distance between neighbors was about seven miles. Along the transmission lines, optical messages in France could travel faster than drum messages in Africa. When Napoleon took charge of the French Republic in 1799, he ordered the completion of the optical telegraph system to link all the major cities of France from Calais and Paris to Toulon and onward to Milan. The telegraph became, as Claude Chappe had intended, an important instrument of national power. Napoleon made sure that it was not available to private users.
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  • Unlike the drum language, which was based on spoken language, the optical telegraph was based on written French. Chappe invented an elaborate coding system to translate written messages into optical signals. Chappe had the opposite problem from the drummers. The drummers had a fast transmission system with ambiguous messages. They needed to slow down the transmission to make the messages unambiguous. Chappe had a painfully slow transmission system with redundant messages. The French language, like most alphabetic languages, is highly redundant, using many more letters than are needed to convey the meaning of a message. Chappe’s coding system allowed messages to be transmitted faster. Many common phrases and proper names were encoded by only two optical symbols, with a substantial gain in speed of transmission. The composer and the reader of the message had code books listing the message codes for eight thousand phrases and names. For Napoleon it was an advantage to have a code that was effectively cryptographic, keeping the content of the messages secret from citizens along the route.
  • After these two historical examples of rapid communication in Africa and France, the rest of Gleick’s book is about the modern development of information technolog
  • The modern history is dominated by two Americans, Samuel Morse and Claude Shannon. Samuel Morse was the inventor of Morse Code. He was also one of the pioneers who built a telegraph system using electricity conducted through wires instead of optical pointers deployed on towers. Morse launched his electric telegraph in 1838 and perfected the code in 1844. His code used short and long pulses of electric current to represent letters of the alphabet.
  • Morse was ideologically at the opposite pole from Chappe. He was not interested in secrecy or in creating an instrument of government power. The Morse system was designed to be a profit-making enterprise, fast and cheap and available to everybody. At the beginning the price of a message was a quarter of a cent per letter. The most important users of the system were newspaper correspondents spreading news of local events to readers all over the world. Morse Code was simple enough that anyone could learn it. The system provided no secrecy to the users. If users wanted secrecy, they could invent their own secret codes and encipher their messages themselves. The price of a message in cipher was higher than the price of a message in plain text, because the telegraph operators could transcribe plain text faster. It was much easier to correct errors in plain text than in cipher.
  • Claude Shannon was the founding father of information theory. For a hundred years after the electric telegraph, other communication systems such as the telephone, radio, and television were invented and developed by engineers without any need for higher mathematics. Then Shannon supplied the theory to understand all of these systems together, defining information as an abstract quantity inherent in a telephone message or a television picture. Shannon brought higher mathematics into the game.
  • When Shannon was a boy growing up on a farm in Michigan, he built a homemade telegraph system using Morse Code. Messages were transmitted to friends on neighboring farms, using the barbed wire of their fences to conduct electric signals. When World War II began, Shannon became one of the pioneers of scientific cryptography, working on the high-level cryptographic telephone system that allowed Roosevelt and Churchill to talk to each other over a secure channel. Shannon’s friend Alan Turing was also working as a cryptographer at the same time, in the famous British Enigma project that successfully deciphered German military codes. The two pioneers met frequently when Turing visited New York in 1943, but they belonged to separate secret worlds and could not exchange ideas about cryptography.
  • In 1945 Shannon wrote a paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography,” which was stamped SECRET and never saw the light of day. He published in 1948 an expurgated version of the 1945 paper with the title “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The 1948 version appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal, the house journal of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and became an instant classic. It is the founding document for the modern science of information. After Shannon, the technology of information raced ahead, with electronic computers, digital cameras, the Internet, and the World Wide Web.
  • According to Gleick, the impact of information on human affairs came in three installments: first the history, the thousands of years during which people created and exchanged information without the concept of measuring it; second the theory, first formulated by Shannon; third the flood, in which we now live
  • The event that made the flood plainly visible occurred in 1965, when Gordon Moore stated Moore’s Law. Moore was an electrical engineer, founder of the Intel Corporation, a company that manufactured components for computers and other electronic gadgets. His law said that the price of electronic components would decrease and their numbers would increase by a factor of two every eighteen months. This implied that the price would decrease and the numbers would increase by a factor of a hundred every decade. Moore’s prediction of continued growth has turned out to be astonishingly accurate during the forty-five years since he announced it. In these four and a half decades, the price has decreased and the numbers have increased by a factor of a billion, nine powers of ten. Nine powers of ten are enough to turn a trickle into a flood.
  • Gordon Moore was in the hardware business, making hardware components for electronic machines, and he stated his law as a law of growth for hardware. But the law applies also to the information that the hardware is designed to embody. The purpose of the hardware is to store and process information. The storage of information is called memory, and the processing of information is called computing. The consequence of Moore’s Law for information is that the price of memory and computing decreases and the available amount of memory and computing increases by a factor of a hundred every decade. The flood of hardware becomes a flood of information.
  • In 1949, one year after Shannon published the rules of information theory, he drew up a table of the various stores of memory that then existed. The biggest memory in his table was the US Library of Congress, which he estimated to contain one hundred trillion bits of information. That was at the time a fair guess at the sum total of recorded human knowledge. Today a memory disc drive storing that amount of information weighs a few pounds and can be bought for about a thousand dollars. Information, otherwise known as data, pours into memories of that size or larger, in government and business offices and scientific laboratories all over the world. Gleick quotes the computer scientist Jaron Lanier describing the effect of the flood: “It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.”
  • On December 8, 2010, Gleick published on the The New York Review’s blog an illuminating essay, “The Information Palace.” It was written too late to be included in his book. It describes the historical changes of meaning of the word “information,” as recorded in the latest quarterly online revision of the Oxford English Dictionary. The word first appears in 1386 a parliamentary report with the meaning “denunciation.” The history ends with the modern usage, “information fatigue,” defined as “apathy, indifference or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information.”
  • The consequences of the information flood are not all bad. One of the creative enterprises made possible by the flood is Wikipedia, started ten years ago by Jimmy Wales. Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it. Distrust and productive use are not incompatible. Wikipedia is the ultimate open source repository of information. Everyone is free to read it and everyone is free to write it. It contains articles in 262 languages written by several million authors. The information that it contains is totally unreliable and surprisingly accurate. It is often unreliable because many of the authors are ignorant or careless. It is often accurate because the articles are edited and corrected by readers who are better informed than the authors
  • Jimmy Wales hoped when he started Wikipedia that the combination of enthusiastic volunteer writers with open source information technology would cause a revolution in human access to knowledge. The rate of growth of Wikipedia exceeded his wildest dreams. Within ten years it has become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest battleground of conflicting opinions. It illustrates Shannon’s law of reliable communication. Shannon’s law says that accurate transmission of information is possible in a communication system with a high level of noise. Even in the noisiest system, errors can be reliably corrected and accurate information transmitted, provided that the transmission is sufficiently redundant. That is, in a nutshell, how Wikipedia works.
  • The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.
  • Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
  • The rapid growth of the flood of information in the last ten years made Wikipedia possible, and the same flood made twenty-first-century science possible. Twenty-first-century science is dominated by huge stores of information that we call databases. The information flood has made it easy and cheap to build databases. One example of a twenty-first-century database is the collection of genome sequences of living creatures belonging to various species from microbes to humans. Each genome contains the complete genetic information that shaped the creature to which it belongs. The genome data-base is rapidly growing and is available for scientists all over the world to explore. Its origin can be traced to the year 1939, when Shannon wrote his Ph.D. thesis with the title “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics.
  • Shannon was then a graduate student in the mathematics department at MIT. He was only dimly aware of the possible physical embodiment of genetic information. The true physical embodiment of the genome is the double helix structure of DNA molecules, discovered by Francis Crick and James Watson fourteen years later. In 1939 Shannon understood that the basis of genetics must be information, and that the information must be coded in some abstract algebra independent of its physical embodiment. Without any knowledge of the double helix, he could not hope to guess the detailed structure of the genetic code. He could only imagine that in some distant future the genetic information would be decoded and collected in a giant database that would define the total diversity of living creatures. It took only sixty years for his dream to come true.
  • In the twentieth century, genomes of humans and other species were laboriously decoded and translated into sequences of letters in computer memories. The decoding and translation became cheaper and faster as time went on, the price decreasing and the speed increasing according to Moore’s Law. The first human genome took fifteen years to decode and cost about a billion dollars. Now a human genome can be decoded in a few weeks and costs a few thousand dollars. Around the year 2000, a turning point was reached, when it became cheaper to produce genetic information than to understand it. Now we can pass a piece of human DNA through a machine and rapidly read out the genetic information, but we cannot read out the meaning of the information. We shall not fully understand the information until we understand in detail the processes of embryonic development that the DNA orchestrated to make us what we are.
  • The explosive growth of information in our human society is a part of the slower growth of ordered structures in the evolution of life as a whole. Life has for billions of years been evolving with organisms and ecosystems embodying increasing amounts of information. The evolution of life is a part of the evolution of the universe, which also evolves with increasing amounts of information embodied in ordered structures, galaxies and stars and planetary systems. In the living and in the nonliving world, we see a growth of order, starting from the featureless and uniform gas of the early universe and producing the magnificent diversity of weird objects that we see in the sky and in the rain forest. Everywhere around us, wherever we look, we see evidence of increasing order and increasing information. The technology arising from Shannon’s discoveries is only a local acceleration of the natural growth of information.
  • . Lord Kelvin, one of the leading physicists of that time, promoted the heat death dogma, predicting that the flow of heat from warmer to cooler objects will result in a decrease of temperature differences everywhere, until all temperatures ultimately become equal. Life needs temperature differences, to avoid being stifled by its waste heat. So life will disappear
  • Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox. The best popular account of the disappearance of the paradox is a chapter, “How Order Was Born of Chaos,” in the book Creation of the Universe, by Fang Lizhi and his wife Li Shuxian.2 Fang Lizhi is doubly famous as a leading Chinese astronomer and a leading political dissident. He is now pursuing his double career at the University of Arizona.
  • The belief in a heat death was based on an idea that I call the cooking rule. The cooking rule says that a piece of steak gets warmer when we put it on a hot grill. More generally, the rule says that any object gets warmer when it gains energy, and gets cooler when it loses energy. Humans have been cooking steaks for thousands of years, and nobody ever saw a steak get colder while cooking on a fire. The cooking rule is true for objects small enough for us to handle. If the cooking rule is always true, then Lord Kelvin’s argument for the heat death is correct.
  • the cooking rule is not true for objects of astronomical size, for which gravitation is the dominant form of energy. The sun is a familiar example. As the sun loses energy by radiation, it becomes hotter and not cooler. Since the sun is made of compressible gas squeezed by its own gravitation, loss of energy causes it to become smaller and denser, and the compression causes it to become hotter. For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past.
  • The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information.
  • A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in a famous story, “The Library of Babel,” by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.3 Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe.
  • Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition:We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » A Creationist Challenge - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...a-creationist-challenge

Creationism Evolution Logic

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The commenter starts with some ad hominems, asserting that my post is biased and emotional. They provide no evidence or argument to support this assertion. And of course they don’t even attempt to counter any of the arguments I laid out. They then follow up with an argument from authority – he can link to a PhD creationist – so there.
  • The article that the commenter links to is by Henry M. Morris, founder for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) – a young-earth creationist organization. Morris was (he died in 2006 following a stroke) a PhD – in civil engineering. This point is irrelevant to his actual arguments. I bring it up only to put the commenter’s argument from authority into perspective. No disrespect to engineers – but they are not biologists. They have no expertise relevant to the question of evolution – no more than my MD. So let’s stick to the arguments themselves.
  • The article by Morris is an overview of so-called Creation Science, of which Morris was a major architect. The arguments he presents are all old creationist canards, long deconstructed by scientists. In fact I address many of them in my original refutation. Creationists generally are not very original – they recycle old arguments endlessly, regardless of how many times they have been destroyed.
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  • Morris also makes heavy use of the “taking a quote out of context” strategy favored by creationists. His quotes are often from secondary sources and are incomplete.
  • A more scholarly (i.e. intellectually honest) approach would be to cite actual evidence to support a point. If you are going to cite an authority, then make sure the quote is relevant, in context, and complete.
  • And even better, cite a number of sources to show that the opinion is representative. Rather we get single, partial, and often outdated quotes without context.
  • (nature is not, it turns out, cleanly divided into “kinds”, which have no operational definition). He also repeats this canard: Such variation is often called microevolution, and these minor horizontal (or downward) changes occur fairly often, but such changes are not true “vertical” evolution. This is the microevolution/macroevolution false dichotomy. It is only “often called” this by creationists – not by actual evolutionary scientists. There is no theoretical or empirical division between macro and micro evolution. There is just evolution, which can result in the full spectrum of change from minor tweaks to major changes.
  • Morris wonders why there are no “dats” – dog-cat transitional species. He misses the hierarchical nature of evolution. As evolution proceeds, and creatures develop a greater and greater evolutionary history behind them, they increasingly are committed to their body plan. This results in a nestled hierarchy of groups – which is reflected in taxonomy (the naming scheme of living things).
  • once our distant ancestors developed the basic body plan of chordates, they were committed to that body plan. Subsequent evolution resulted in variations on that plan, each of which then developed further variations, etc. But evolution cannot go backward, undo evolutionary changes and then proceed down a different path. Once an evolutionary line has developed into a dog, evolution can produce variations on the dog, but it cannot go backwards and produce a cat.
  • Stephen J. Gould described this distinction as the difference between disparity and diversity. Disparity (the degree of morphological difference) actually decreases over evolutionary time, as lineages go extinct and the surviving lineages are committed to fewer and fewer basic body plans. Meanwhile, diversity (the number of variations on a body plan) within groups tends to increase over time.
  • the kind of evolutionary changes that were happening in the past, when species were relatively undifferentiated (compared to contemporary species) is indeed not happening today. Modern multi-cellular life has 600 million years of evolutionary history constraining their future evolution – which was not true of species at the base of the evolutionary tree. But modern species are indeed still evolving.
  • Here is a list of research documenting observed instances of speciation. The list is from 1995, and there are more recent examples to add to the list. Here are some more. And here is a good list with references of more recent cases.
  • Next Morris tries to convince the reader that there is no evidence for evolution in the past, focusing on the fossil record. He repeats the false claim (again, which I already dealt with) that there are no transitional fossils: Even those who believe in rapid evolution recognize that a considerable number of generations would be required for one distinct “kind” to evolve into another more complex kind. There ought, therefore, to be a considerable number of true transitional structures preserved in the fossils — after all, there are billions of non-transitional structures there! But (with the exception of a few very doubtful creatures such as the controversial feathered dinosaurs and the alleged walking whales), they are not there.
  • I deal with this question at length here, pointing out that there are numerous transitional fossils for the evolution of terrestrial vertebrates, mammals, whales, birds, turtles, and yes – humans from ape ancestors. There are many more examples, these are just some of my favorites.
  • Much of what follows (as you can see it takes far more space to correct the lies and distortions of Morris than it did to create them) is classic denialism – misinterpreting the state of the science, and confusing lack of information about the details of evolution with lack of confidence in the fact of evolution. Here are some examples – he quotes Niles Eldridge: “It is a simple ineluctable truth that virtually all members of a biota remain basically stable, with minor fluctuations, throughout their durations. . . .“ So how do evolutionists arrive at their evolutionary trees from fossils of organisms which didn’t change during their durations? Beware the “….” – that means that meaningful parts of the quote are being omitted. I happen to have the book (The Pattern of Evolution) from which Morris mined that particular quote. Here’s the rest of it: (Remember, by “biota” we mean the commonly preserved plants and animals of a particular geological interval, which occupy regions often as large as Roger Tory Peterson’s “eastern” region of North American birds.) And when these systems change – when the older species disappear, and new ones take their place – the change happens relatively abruptly and in lockstep fashion.”
  • Eldridge was one of the authors (with Gould) of punctuated equilibrium theory. This states that, if you look at the fossil record, what we see are species emerging, persisting with little change for a while, and then disappearing from the fossil record. They theorize that most species most of the time are at equilibrium with their environment, and so do not change much. But these periods of equilibrium are punctuated by disequilibrium – periods of change when species will have to migrate, evolve, or go extinct.
  • This does not mean that speciation does not take place. And if you look at the fossil record we see a pattern of descendant species emerging from ancestor species over time – in a nice evolutionary pattern. Morris gives a complete misrepresentation of Eldridge’s point – once again we see intellectual dishonesty in his methods of an astounding degree.
  • Regarding the atheism = religion comment, it reminds me of a great analogy that I first heard on twitter from Evil Eye. (paraphrase) “those that say atheism is a religion, is like saying ‘not collecting stamps’ is a hobby too.”
  • Morris next tackles the genetic evidence, writing: More often is the argument used that similar DNA structures in two different organisms proves common evolutionary ancestry. Neither argument is valid. There is no reason whatever why the Creator could not or would not use the same type of genetic code based on DNA for all His created life forms. This is evidence for intelligent design and creation, not evolution.
  • Here is an excellent summary of the multiple lines of molecular evidence for evolution. Basically, if we look at the sequence of DNA, the variations in trinucleotide codes for amino acids, and amino acids for proteins, and transposons within DNA we see a pattern that can only be explained by evolution (or a mischievous god who chose, for some reason, to make life look exactly as if it had evolved – a non-falsifiable notion).
  • The genetic code is essentially comprised of four letters (ACGT for DNA), and every triplet of three letters equates to a specific amino acid. There are 64 (4^3) possible three letter combinations, and 20 amino acids. A few combinations are used for housekeeping, like a code to indicate where a gene stops, but the rest code for amino acids. There are more combinations than amino acids, so most amino acids are coded for by multiple combinations. This means that a mutation that results in a one-letter change might alter from one code for a particular amino acid to another code for the same amino acid. This is called a silent mutation because it does not result in any change in the resulting protein.
  • It also means that there are very many possible codes for any individual protein. The question is – which codes out of the gazillions of possible codes do we find for each type of protein in different species. If each “kind” were created separately there would not need to be any relationship. Each kind could have it’s own variation, or they could all be identical if they were essentially copied (plus any mutations accruing since creation, which would be minimal). But if life evolved then we would expect that the exact sequence of DNA code would be similar in related species, but progressively different (through silent mutations) over evolutionary time.
  • This is precisely what we find – in every protein we have examined. This pattern is necessary if evolution were true. It cannot be explained by random chance (the probability is absurdly tiny – essentially zero). And it makes no sense from a creationist perspective. This same pattern (a branching hierarchy) emerges when we look at amino acid substitutions in proteins and other aspects of the genetic code.
  • Morris goes for the second law of thermodynamics again – in the exact way that I already addressed. He responds to scientists correctly pointing out that the Earth is an open system, by writing: This naive response to the entropy law is typical of evolutionary dissimulation. While it is true that local order can increase in an open system if certain conditions are met, the fact is that evolution does not meet those conditions. Simply saying that the earth is open to the energy from the sun says nothing about how that raw solar heat is converted into increased complexity in any system, open or closed. The fact is that the best known and most fundamental equation of thermodynamics says that the influx of heat into an open system will increase the entropy of that system, not decrease it. All known cases of decreased entropy (or increased organization) in open systems involve a guiding program of some sort and one or more energy conversion mechanisms.
  • Energy has to be transformed into a usable form in order to do the work necessary to decrease entropy. That’s right. That work is done by life. Plants take solar energy (again – I’m not sure what “raw solar heat” means) and convert it into food. That food fuels the processes of life, which include development and reproduction. Evolution emerges from those processes- therefore the conditions that Morris speaks of are met.
  • But Morris next makes a very confused argument: Evolution has neither of these. Mutations are not “organizing” mechanisms, but disorganizing (in accord with the second law). They are commonly harmful, sometimes neutral, but never beneficial (at least as far as observed mutations are concerned). Natural selection cannot generate order, but can only “sieve out” the disorganizing mutations presented to it, thereby conserving the existing order, but never generating new order.
  • The notion that evolution (as if it’s a thing) needs to use energy is hopelessly confused. Evolution is a process that emerges from the system of life – and life certainly can use solar energy to decrease its entropy, and by extension the entropy of the biosphere. Morris slips into what is often presented as an information argument.  (Yet again – already dealt with. The pattern here is that we are seeing a shuffling around of the same tired creationists arguments.) It is first not true that most mutations are harmful. Many are silent, and many of those that are not silent are not harmful. They may be neutral, they may be a mixed blessing, and their relative benefit vs harm is likely to be situational. They may be fatal. And they also may be simply beneficial.
  • Morris finishes with a long rambling argument that evolution is religion. Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality . . . . Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today. Morris ties evolution to atheism, which, he argues, makes it a religion. This assumes, of course, that atheism is a religion. That depends on how you define atheism and how you define religion – but it is mostly wrong. Atheism is a lack of belief in one particular supernatural claim – that does not qualify it as a religion.
  • But mutations are not “disorganizing” – that does not even make sense. It seems to be based on a purely creationist notion that species are in some privileged perfect state, and any mutation can only take them farther from that perfection. For those who actually understand biology, life is a kluge of compromises and variation. Mutations are mostly lateral moves from one chaotic state to another. They are not directional. But they do provide raw material, variation, for natural selection. Natural selection cannot generate variation, but it can select among that variation to provide differential survival. This is an old game played by creationists – mutations are not selective, and natural selection is not creative (does not increase variation). These are true but irrelevant, because mutations increase variation and information, and selection is a creative force that results in the differential survival of better adapted variation.
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Mar 11
     
    One of my earlier posts on SkepticBlog was Ten Major Flaws in Evolution: A Refutation, published two years ago. Occasionally a creationist shows up to snipe at the post, like this one:i read this and found it funny. It supposedly gives a scientific refutation, but it is full of more bias than fox news, and a lot of emotion as well.here's a scientific case by an actual scientists, you know, one with a ph. D, and he uses statements by some of your favorite evolutionary scientists to insist evolution doesn't exist.i challenge you to write a refutation on this one.http://www.icr.org/home/resources/resources_tracts_scientificcaseagainstevolution/Challenge accepted.
Weiye Loh

The Devil's Kitchen: Scientists hoist by their own petard - 0 views

www.devilskitchen.me.uk/...hoist-by-their-own-petard.html

Science Carbon Tax Carbon Emission

shared by Weiye Loh on 31 May 11 - No Cached
  • the vast majority of the world's scientists back urgent action on carbon emissions: energy must be made much more expensive. Oh, wait, we didn't mean for us!World-class research into future sources of green energy is under threat in Britain from an environmental tax designed to boost energy efficiency and drive down carbon emissions, scientists claim.Some facilities must find hundreds of thousands of pounds to settle green tax bills, putting jobs and research at risk.
  • Among the worst hit is the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, a facility for research into almost limitless carbon-free energy. The lab faces an estimated £400,000 payment next year, raising the spectre of job losses and operational cuts. "Considering our research is aimed at producing zero-carbon energy, it seems ironic and perverse to clobber us with an extra bill," a senior scientist at the lab said. "We have to use electricity to run the machine and there is no way of getting around that."
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Japan's New Emissions Math - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...japans-new-emissions-math.html

Green Energy Nuclear Japan

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 May 11 - No Cached
  • Japan currently gets 24% of it energy needs from nuclear power.  To replace that additional 26% that was supposed to come from nuclear (to get to 50%) implies 78,000 (!) 2.5 MW wind turbines (see TCF, p. 144, Table 4.4). The Japanese Wind Energy Association optimistically foresees 11.1 GW of capacity by 2020, or less than half that would have been needed to reach the 5% reduction target.  Abandoning nuclear does not make the emissions reduction targets easier, but far, far more difficult. 
  • I have argued that Japan's 2020 emissions reduction target of a 25% reduction was always far out of reach.  I don't think that the phrase "even more impossible" makes much sense, but perhaps Japan's new political context will at least make its emissions reductions commitments "even more obviously impossible." 
  • Weiye Loh on 17 May 11
     
    Earlier this week the Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan announced that Japan was no longer seeking to source 50% of its energy needs from nuclear power and terminated plans for 14 new nuclear facilities.  What might this decision mean for Japan's ability to meet its current carbon dioxide emissions reduction target of 25% below 1990 levels?
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: You Take the Risks, We'll Take the Watts - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...ake-risks-well-take-watts.html

Nuclear Risk Energy

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • From Der Spiegel: Germany has been importing nuclear power from France and the Czech Republic since it switched off its seven oldest nuclear power stations last month in the wake of the Fukushima accident, power company RWE said on Monday. A spokesman for RWE confirmed a report in Bild newspaper that Germany had become a net importer of power since March 16. Previously, Germany had been a net electricity exporter because of its rising output of power from renewable energy sources. RWE said the country's power imports from France and Czech have been amounting up to 3,000 megawatts and up to 2,000 megawatts respectively. Three quarters of France's power supply comes from nuclear energy while the Czech Republic relies on reactors for 34 percent of its energy needs. Hildegard Müller, head of the German Association of Energy and Water Industries also said on Monday that power imports were up. "Since March 17, there has been an increase in imports. Flows from France and the Czech Republic have doubled," she said.
  • Weiye Loh on 08 Apr 11
     
    Germany's moratorium on nuclear power has not necessarily reduced Germany's reliance on nuclear power by as much as one might think
Weiye Loh

If climate scientists are in it for the money, they're doing it wrong - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...nsus-its-not-for-the-money.ars

Climate Science Funding

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Since it doesn't have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department's salary information available. It's easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000.
  • That's a pretty healthy salary by many standards, but it's hardly a racket. Penn State appears to be on the low end of similar institutions, and is outdone by two other institutions in its own state (based on this report). But, more significantly for the question at hand, we can see that Earth Sciences faculty aren't paid especially well. Sure, they do much better than the Arts faculty, but they're somewhere in the middle of the pack, and get stomped on by professors in the Business and IT departments.
  • This is all, of course, ignoring what someone who can do the sort of data analysis or modeling of complex systems that climatologists perform might make if they went to Wall Street.
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  • It's also worth pointing out what they get that money for, as exemplified by a fairly typical program announcement for NSF grants. Note that it calls for studies of past climate change and its impact on the weather. This sort of research could support the current consensus view, but it just as easily might not. And here's the thing: it's impossible to tell before the work's done. Even a study looking at the flow of carbon into and out of the atmosphere, which would seem to be destined to focus on anthropogenic climate influences, might identify a previously unknown or underestimated sink or feedback. So, even if the granting process were biased (and there's been no indication that it is), there is no way for it to prevent people from obtaining contrary data. The granting system is also set up to induce people to publish it, since a grant that doesn't produce scientific papers can make it impossible for a professor to obtain future funding.
  • Maybe the money is in the perks that come with grants, which provide for travel and lab toys. Unfortunately, there's no indication that there's lots of money out there for the taking, either from the public or private sector. For the US government, spending on climate research across 13 different agencies (from the Department of State to NASA) is tracked by the US Climate Change Science Program. The group has tracked the research budget since 1989, but not everything was brought under its umbrella until 1991. That year, according to CCSP figures, about $1.45 billion was spent on climate research (all figures are in 2007 dollars). Funding peaked back in 1995 at $2.4 billion, then bottomed out in 2006 at only $1.7 billion.
  • Funding has gone up a bit over the last couple of years, and some stimulus money went into related programs. But, in general, the trend has been a downward one for 15 years; it's not an area you'd want to go into if you were looking for a rich source of grant money. If you were, you would target medical research, for which the NIH had a $31 billion budget plus another $10 billion in stimulus money.
  • Not all of this money went to researchers anyway; part of the budget goes to NASA, and includes some of that agency's (rather pricey) hardware. For example, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory cost roughly $200 million, but failed to go into orbit; its replacement is costing another $170 million.
  • Might the private sector make up for the lack of government money? Pretty unlikely. For starters, it's tough to identify many companies that have a vested interest in the scientific consensus. Renewable energy companies would seem to be the biggest winners, but they're still relatively tiny. Neither the largest wind or photovoltaic manufacturers (Vestas and First Solar) appear in the Financial Times' list of the world's 500 largest companies. In contrast, there are 16 oil companies in the of the top 100, and they occupy the top two spots. Exxon's profits in 2010 were nearly enough to buy both Vestas and First Solar, given their market valuations in late February.
  • climate researchers are scrambling for a piece of a smaller piece of the government-funded pie, and the resources of the private sector are far, far more likely to go to groups that oppose their conclusions.
  • If you were paying careful attention to that last section, you would have noticed something funny: the industry that seems most likely to benefit from taking climate change seriously produces renewable energy products. However, those companies don't employ any climatologists. They probably have plenty of space for engineers, materials scientists, and maybe a quantum physicist or two, but there's not much that a photovoltaic company would do with a climatologist. Even by convincing the public of their findings—namely, climate change is real, and could have serious impacts—the scientists are not doing themselves any favors in terms of job security or alternative careers.
  • But, surely, by convincing the public, or at least the politicians, that there's something serious here, they ensure their own funding? That's arguably not true either, and the stimulus package demonstrates that nicely. The US CCSP programs, in total, got a few hundred million dollars from the stimulus. In contrast, the Department of Energy got a few billion. Carbon capture and sequestration alone received $2.4 billion, more than the entire CCSP budget.
  • The problem is that climatologists are well equipped to identify potential problems, but very poorly equipped to solve them; it would be a bit like expecting an astronomer to know how to destroy a threatening asteroid.
  • The solutions to problems related to climate change are going to come in areas like renewable energy, carbon sequestration, and efficiency measures; that's where most of the current administration's efforts have focused. None of these are areas where someone studying the climate is likely to have a whole lot to add. So, when they advocate that the public take them seriously, they're essentially asking the public to send money to someone else.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Germany's Burned Bridge - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...germanys-burned-bridge.html

Nuclear Climate Science Disaster Politics Governmentality

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The politics of Merkelism are based on two principles. The first is that, if the people want it, it must be right. The second is that whatever is useful to the people must also be useful to the chancellor.
  • I have quickly calculated the implications for carbon dioxide emissions of the German decision, based on a projection of the 2020 electricity mix from RWI as reported by the Financial Times.  These estimates are shown in the graph to the left.
  • Using these numbers and the simplified carbon dioxide intensities from The Climate Fix I calculate the carbon dioxide emissions from Germany electricity generation, assuming constant demand, will increase by 8% from 2011 to 2020. The Breakthrough Institute also runs some numbers.  See Reuters as well.
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Jun 11
     
    In The Climate Fix I lauded Germany's forward-looking energy policies, in which they had decided to use the technologies of today as a resource from which to build a bridge to tomorrow's energy technology (German readers, please see this translated essay as well). Germany's government has now burned that bridge by announcing the phase-out of nuclear power by 2022.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Wanted: Less Spin, More Informed Debate - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...spin-more-informed-debate.html

Carbon Trade Climate Change Pragmatism Public Relations

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • , the rejection of proposals that suggest starting with a low carbon price is thus a pretty good guarantee against any carbon pricing at all.  It is rather remarkable to see advocates for climate action arguing against a policy that recommends implementing a carbon price, simply because it does not start high enough for their tastes.  For some, idealism trumps pragmatism, even if it means no action at all.
  • Ward writes: . . . climate change is the result of a number of market failures, the largest of which arises from the fact that the prices of products and services involving emissions of greenhouse gases do not reflect the true costs of the damage caused through impacts on the climate. . . All serious economic analyses of how to tackle climate change identify the need to correct this market failure through a carbon price, which can be implemented, for instance, through cap and trade schemes or carbon taxes. . . A carbon price can be usefully supplemented by improvements in innovation policies, but it needs to be at the core of action on climate change, as this paper by Carolyn Fischer and Richard Newell points out.
  • First, the criticism is off target. A low and rising carbon price is in fact a central element to the policy recommendations advanced by the Hartwell Group in Climate Pragmatism, the Hartwell Paper, and as well, in my book The Climate Fix.  In Climate Pragmatism, we approvingly cite Japan's low-but-rising fossil fuels tax and discuss a range of possible fees or taxes on fossil fuels, implemented, not to penalize energy use or price fossil fuels out of the market, but rather to ensure that as we benefit from today’s energy resources we are setting aside the funds necessary to accelerate energy innovation and secure the nation’s energy future.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Here is another debating lesson -- before engaging in public not only should one read the materials that they are critiquing, they should also read the materials that they cite in support of their own arguments. This is not the first time that Bob Ward has put out misleading information related to my work.  Ever since we debated in public at the Royal Institution, Bob has adopted guerrilla tactics, lobbing nonsense into the public arena and then hiding when challenged to support or defend his views.  As readers here know, I am all for open and respectful debate over these important topics.  Why is that instead, all we get is poorly informed misdirection and spin? Despite the attempts at spin, I'd welcome Bob's informed engagement on this topic. Perhaps he might start by explaining which of the 10 statements that I put up on the mathematics and logic underlying climate pragmatism is incorrect.
  • In comments to another blog, I've identified Bob as a PR flack. I see no reason to change that assessment. In fact, his actions only confirm it. Where does he fit into a scientific debate?
  • Thanks for the comment, but I'll take the other side ;-)First, this is a policy debate that involves various scientific, economic, political analyses coupled with various values commitments including monied interests -- and as such, PR guys are as welcome as anyone else.That said, the problem here is not that Ward is a PR guy, but that he is trying to make his case via spin and misrepresentation. That gets noticed pretty quickly by anyone paying attention and is easily shot down.
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