From an article by James Hansen, author of ‘Storms of my Grandchildren’ and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, published in the New York Times.

The global warmingsignal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.

We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.

Beezer here.  Just another pointy head scientist warning the sky is falling in like Chicken Little.    And it’s published by that commie rag, the New York Times, so that says it all.  What, me worry.

From an article at Yale’s environmental blogsite ‘e360′ , NRG CEO David Crane explains what he thinks is on the verge of happening to utilities across the United States.

David Crane, president and CEO of NRG Energy, is not your typical power company executive, as becomes clear when he calls climate change a “slow-moving catastrophe” and “the fundamental issue of our day.” As head of a Fortune 500 company that produces electricity for up to 20 million U.S. households, he is still neck-deep in hydrocarbons, with more than 90 percent of NRG’s electricity production coming from natural gas, coal, and oil. But the future, vows Crane, will look radically different.

NRG Energy

David Crane

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, Crane said he believes the U.S. electricity-generating market is on the verge of a profound transformation, not unlike the era two decades ago when the antiquated world of land-line telephones and “Ma Bell” companies was about to give way to cell phones and mobile communications. The electricity future, says Crane, will be transformed by the widespread adoption of three innovations: solar panels on residential and commercial roofs, electric cars in garages, and truly “smart meters” that will seamlessly transfer power to and from homes, electric vehicles, and the grid.

Beezer here.  Don’t know if Crane is early, or even right, but his reasoning certainly appears sound, and as the CEO of one of the nation’s largest utilities one can’t say he doesn’t have real world experience backing up his opinions.   Later on in the article he breaks down the process he anticipates will happen.

e360: Can you explain your three-pronged approach to transforming the country’s electricity system.

Crane: Democratization of customer choice in our sector begins with two things. One is the electric car and the other is the solar panel on the roof. I think it actually starts with the electric car. You put the electric car in your garage and you really have a mini power plant because these batteries that drive electric cars are quite substantial pieces of equipment. The average car in the United States is sitting still about 22 hours a day. Those are hours where the car can either be accepting power from the grid or selling power through the grid in a phenomenon we refer to as V2G, vehicle-to-grid. That leads to the third leg of the trilogy, which is the smart meter, because between a smart meter in your house, combined with time and use pricing, you essentially want that electric car to be charging between midnight and four in the morning. And you want to have it available to basically drain itself a little between 2 and 6 o’clock in the afternoon. But someone has to tell it what’s going on with the grid at that point. And that’s what the smart meter does.

Right now around the country people are trying to introduce smart meters as just another information device. In our view, no one wants to pay for another information device, particularly when the information being given is about something that people don’t care about, which is their electricity use. So smart meters will only be accepted by the American

Smart meters will only be accepted by the American public when they do something of value.”

public when they do something of value. And the first thing that they’ll do of value is they will sense when it’s expensive to run electricity and they’ll turn appliances off around the house. But the next thing they’ll do, which is the most valuable thing that will actually put dollars in your pocketbook, is that when the smart meter recognizes that the wholesale system is getting tight and there is good pricing, it will actually sell into the grid from the car battery. Or if power from the grid is getting really expensive, the smart meter might just turn the house off from the grid and then run the key appliances in the house off the electric car in the garage.

Then you have the solar panels on the roof. If you tie in a rooftop solar panel with a smart meter, then it’s exactly analogous to the electric car battery. The smart meter could turn off the house from the grid at 3 in the afternoon and rely exclusively on the power that’s coming from the solar panels on the roof, saving the customer a lot of money on their bill from the grid. And if the person puts a big solar panel on their roof, they could sell power from that.

Beezer again.   Crane acknowledges that a smart government can help all this along, and he’s discouraged by the partisanship in Congress and elsewhere that’s not allowing that to happen.  Nevertheless he sees that transformation as inevitable even without government support–it will just take longer.   Oh well.  

The earth appears to be warming and the amount of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere is one metric scientists pay attention to when trying to predict future trends.   From an article in the New York Times, written by energy and environment journalist Justin Gillis and entitled ‘The Threats to a Crucial Canopy.‘

In the 1950s, when a scientist named Charles David Keeling first obtained accurate measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a mystery presented itself. Only about half the carbon that people were releasing into the sky seemed to be staying there. It took scientists decades to figure out where the rest was going. The most comprehensive estimates on the role of forests were published only a few weeks ago by an international team of scientists.

As best researchers can tell, the oceans are taking up about a quarter of the carbon emissions arising from human activities. That is causing the sea to become more acidic and is expected to damage marine life over the long run, perhaps catastrophically. But the chemistry is at least somewhat predictable, and scientists are reasonably confident the oceans will continue absorbing carbon for many decades.

Trees are taking up a similar amount of carbon, but whether this will continue is much less certain, as the recent forest damage illustrates.

Carbon dioxide is an essential part of the cycle of life on Earth, but geologic history suggests that too much can cause the climate to warm sharply. With enough time, the chemical cycles operating on the planet have a tendency to bury excess carbon.

In the 19th century, humans discovered the usefulness of some forms of buried carbon — coal, oil and natural gas — as a source of energy, and have been perturbing the natural order ever since. About 10 billion tons of carbon are pouring into the atmosphere every year from the combustion of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests.

The concentration of the gas in the atmosphere has jumped 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and scientists fear it could double or even triple this century, with profound consequences.

Beezer here.  The article documents several attacks that are underway against our forests, from warmer temperatures that are drying out forests making them vulnerable to huge fires, to the expansion of tree destroying beetles whose populations are no longer controlled by cold winters.   Between forests and oceans, fully half of atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed in a natural tug of war that keeps the earth’s systems in rough balance.  In geological time frames these swings can take hundreds of thousands of years, longer than our existence as a species. These swings have wiped out species who dominated the ecosystem for millions of years.   We may be the first specie that would recognize the danger posed by global warming, but recognizing danger and knowing what to do about it may be quite different challenges. 

From a wide ranging interview of celebrated economist Daren Acemoglu, published at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve website, comes a discussion of what is called ‘directed technological change.’   Simply put, economists try to model the effects of technological changes, both at the micro and the macro level.

In one section of the interview Acemoglu talks about the conflicts between fossil fuel energy systems and technological innovation in so-called ‘clean’ energy.  Can a huge economy like that of the US navigate towards cleaner systems without damaging overall future growth? 

Directed Technical Change & Global Warming

Region: I definitely want to ask about your related work with James Robinson on economic and political transformation, but first let me jump to another of your seminal contributions in economics: directed technical change. In brief, the idea is that innovation is directed by two competing forces: the price effect that encourages innovation toward scarce factors and the market size effect that does the opposite, directs it toward abundant factors.

You and your co-authors recently applied this idea to the environment—global warming, in particular—and concluded that because of the externalities involved, sound policy should re-direct technical change toward clean technologies without delay, and also that optimal regulation with carbon taxes and research subsidies need not reduce long-term economic growth.

And you compare it to other economic analyses of climate change intervention, such as the Nicholas Stern report and William Nordhaus’ work. But could you give a quick primer on directed technical change and how you apply it to climate change?

Acemoglu: Sure. It’s useful for me to express it the following way, I think. The directed technical change idea really has two layers to it.

The first layer is sort of obvious to economists, but hadn’t really been developed and stated. It’s that just as we think all other factors go toward more profitable areas, investment in new technology and innovative activities also goes toward more profitable areas. I think in a micro sense, nobody would doubt this. We don’t talk of “technological change” in the abstract. We talk of technological change in the pharmaceutical sector, for example. We talk of technological change going after heart disease. We don’t just talk of broad technological change. And when we want to understand technological change for heart disease, we ask, What’s the market for heart drugs, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, statins or whatever?

So, that’s the most important part. Directed technical change was pushing this idea at the economywide level. Technology, either across sectors or across different types of factors—factor-augmenting or factor-substituting technologies—is also going to be determined by their profit incentives.

I first tried to develop these ideas in the context of inequality and skill-biased technological change. There the market size and the price effects, which you’ve mentioned, turn out to be quite important. If you want to understand how this works in a more detailed level, you need to understand how these market size and price effects work. They create countervailing forces, but one of them always dominates, and so on.

When we turn to the environment, I think the bigger picture insights seem to be more important. Market size and price effects come out in the context of the environment, and they’re in our paper, of course. But for purposes of our conversation here, I think I can do justice to the main ideas without getting into those details.

Essentially, the bulk of the literature in environmental economics has been about how we have to tax economic activity to slow it down so that we don’t damage the environment. If you think of a single-sector economy, with one sector that depends on coal, or on gas, that’s the only thing you can do: slow down that one sector. If you want to reduce carbon emissions, you just have to slow down that sector. Now, you don’t directly slow it down; you change its composition of factors, perhaps, but you can’t let that sector take off at a very rapid rate and still, at the same time, limit carbon emissions.

Our perspective was, well, the economy has several technologies; some of them are cleaner than others. How should we shift toward the cleaner ones? When you look at the climate science, there’s a lot of emphasis precisely on this and on questions such as, When is it that nuclear power will become economical? When will geothermal or wind or solar solve both their cost and their delivery problems?

Therefore, the perspective shouldn’t be, How can we slow down economic activity? Instead, it should be, How can we shift the composition of economic activity away from dirty technologies to cleaner technologies?

Now, that’s a very directed-technical-change-related question, but it already comes with a very important implication: The focus shouldn’t be on slowing down economic activity, but on changing its composition and changing the type of technological changes that the market generates.

Moreover, and importantly, we expect there to be a distinctive cumulative aspect to research. Different technologies often build on past successes in the same line of technology. So when you’re building a new car, you build on the past advances in car technology; you don’t as much build on advances in solar technology. In the same way as when you build new solar panels, you’re building on the previous solar panels, not on the diesel engine. What that means is that there’s going to be strong self-reinforcement in changing the direction of technological change. So when technological change shifts away from the dirty technologies that are so fossil-fuel-dependent to the cleaner technologies, it will also make it potentially cheaper to produce these innovations, these cleaner technologies, in the future.

That was the basic observation that I think was most important in the approach. And that’s the source of the more optimistic conclusions. Let me explain that in the following way. If you have a Nordhaus-type model—and I don’t want to caricaturize it, because Nordhaus in other work has considered richer models—but the seminal contribution that Nordhaus made in the early 1990s, for example, was sort of a neoclassical growth model used for the environment, and reducing carbons is reducing capital accumulation. In a model like that, parameters are going to determine how aggressive you should be in reducing carbon, but when you reduce carbon, you’re reducing GDP, you’re reducing growth.

The more optimistic aspect of our perspective came from the realization that if what you’re doing with environmental policy is “tax one sector, but subsidize another sector,” you might actually achieve in the long run quite successful growth, because the other sector is going to pick up the slack. If we have enough technological ingenuity—and that is an if, which I think we tried to make explicit in the paper—and can generate cleaner technologies that avoid the negative environmental consequences of coal and oil, then there is no reason for our economy not to grow at a healthy rate in the long run. So that was the optimistic part.

So in that sense, factoring in directed technical change made this conclusion much more optimistic relative to Nordhaus and, of course, more optimistic than Stern’s review, which was much more effective, and I believe rightly so, [in warning] of the potential dangers from climate change.

But on the other hand, it also made policy prescriptions much more proactive than Nordhaus and, in that sense, far more similar to Stern. And the logic of that relates very tightly to the directed technical change aspect. In the Nordhaus approach, it’s like a ramp-up thing: You don’t want to do too much because reducing emissions today is costly, while the future is discounted. If you can cut things in the future, why do it today? Now you can also add, “We don’t know where we’re going to go, so let’s go slowly,” a very gradualist approach.

But let’s think of the logic of directed technical change with cumulative research. The less we do on green technology today, the less knowledge is accumulated in the green sector, so the bigger is the gap between fossil-fuel-based technology and energy, and the cleaner energy, so the harder it will be in the future to close that gap. With more proactive, decisive action today, we already start closing the gap, and we’re making it easier to deal with the problem in the future.

Beezer here.  The main point is that somehow the government needs to keep subsidizing technological innovation in the clean energy areas.  Without this effort, and Acemoglu argues net GDP growth may be unchanged by the subsidy, it will become harder in the future to transition into cleaner energy systems because postponing initial innovation also postpones other innovations that always follow the initial discoveries.    It’s the old saw about when is the best time to plant a tree?  Now.   As almost always, hat tip to  Mark Thoma’s economist’s view for highlighting this interview.

The climate change denialists, and the mass media, argue that there is controversy over the validity of climate science, particularly that involving the idea that the warming caused by greenhouse gases threaten the public.

So here’s a real list of those who stand on one side or the other from the blog wonk room…

Those who support the validity of climate science regarding this issue is long and includes just about every recognized scientific community around the globe.  On the other side is a list of power companies, manufacturers and their associations.  No academic communities cited.  What a surprise.  The Greenhouse gas makers think the science is ‘controversial.’

Beezer is a faithful reader of Princeton economist Paul Krugman, who through his New York Times columns and frequent blog posts, brings quick insight about economic subjects.  He makes the world around us more understandable as he applies his economic logic to what he observes.  That said, he sometimes illuminates other issues than economics, by using his economic training.  The following is a recent blog post about global warming.  In true Krugmanesque style, he describes global warming in clear terms, using economic tools.

“February 8, 2011, 7:51 am

Gradual Trends and Extreme Events

I’ve spent a lot of the last several days reading about climate change, extreme weather events, food prices, and so on. And one thing that became clear to me is that there’s widespread misunderstanding of the relationship between the gradual trend of rising temperatures and the extreme weather events that have become so much more common. What I’m about to say may seem obvious, because it is obvious, at least if you approach it the right way; but I still think it needs saying.

So, let’s start with an observation: weather varies. (Duh.) Heat waves and other stuff happens. Think of it in terms of a probability distribution for temperatures, with the area under the curve over some range representing the probability of temperatures in that range in a given place over a given period. And define an extreme event as a case in which the temperature exceeds some threshold. The the picture looks like this:

Now suppose that a warming trend shifts the whole probability distribution to the right — which is what we mean when we talk about climate change. Then the result looks like this:

What happens is that the right tail gets fatter: the probability, and hence the frequency, of extreme events goes up.

Two immediate implications. First, there will still be cold stretches: global warming shifts the distribution, it doesn’t eliminate the left side of the distribution. So there will still be cold spells; that proves nothing.

Second, no individual weather event can properly be said to have been “caused” by global warming. Heat waves happened 30 years ago; there’s no way to prove that any individual heat wave now might not have happened even if we hadn’t emitted all that CO2.

But the pattern should have changed: we should be getting lots of record highs, and not as many record lows — which is exactly what we do see. And we should be seeing 100-year heat waves and similar events much more often than history would have suggested likely; again, that’s what we actually do see.

The point is that the usual casual denier arguments — it’s cold outside; you can’t prove that climate change did it — miss the point. What you’re looking for is a pattern. And that pattern is obvious.”

Beezer here.  The only observation I can add is that, if mathematician Nassim Taleb is correct, then Krugman may be underestimating the real probabilities of  extreme events because he uses Gaussian math.  Taleb maintains that when human activity is involved in some way, then the more accurate math to use is Mandelbrotian.

Therefore, if mankind’s contribution to carbon dioxide levels is meaningfull, then the incidence of so-called ‘extreme’ weather is probably under-represented in the charts.