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Earth Hour dilemma: When the ‘Like’ button harms the planet 

Green groups around the world are turning to social networking to drive their campaign for Earth Hour tomorow, when lights are turned off for an hour to signal concern about global warming.

But here’s the irony. With every email, every tweet, every appeal watched on YouTube or “liked“ on Facebook, environmentalists are stoking the very problem they want to resolve.

Each time we network, we emit carbon dioxide through the fossil fuels that are burned to power our computers and the servers and databanks that store or relay our message. That poses a small dilemma for the Australian-led campaign for Saturday’s switch-off.

In 130 countries around the world, people are being urged to turn off the lights for one hour at 8:30 p.m. local time as a show of concern about climate change. In emails alone, the typical office worker is responsible for 13.6 tons of CO2 or its equivalent per year, a French government agency for energy efficiency, ADEME, calculated last year.

That figure is based on a French company of 100 people who work 220 days a year and each receive 58 mails a day and send 33 per day, with an average mail size of one megabyte.

That's 91 emails a day for 220 days =  20020 emails a year per person, and it's apparently responsible for a staggering 13.6 tons of CO2, or 679 grams of CO2 per email.

That seemed a lot of CO2 to send or receive a few dozen lines of text. 1 megabyte also seemed rather large for an average email, as I've rarely sent or received one larger than 100kb in size, but we'll let that pass, perhaps French office workers send lots of pictures as attachments.

How much electricity does 679 grams of CO2 represent? The EPA says that a gas-powered station produces 1135 lbs CO2 per MWh (megawatt-hour). One pound is 453.6  grams, so 1 MWh produces 514826.92 grams, therefore I calculate 0.758 KWh per email. That's around 3 desktop computers running for an hour, the equivalent of a one-bar electric fire for 45.5 minutes, to send or receive a one megabyte email?

Every time I come across this type of claim, the maths doesn't support the claim, not just a little bit out, but often whole orders of magnitude.

Feel free to comment, safe in the knowledge you're not fuelling irreversible climate change (but stop breathing out CO2, just in case).

Where's the acceleration, dude?

We're constantly bombarded with portents of doom and gloom, and apparently, by extension "the end of civilisation as we know it". "Climate change" is accelerating, "global warming" is accelerating, sea level rise is accelerating, and (could, or may) threaten millions if not billions of people, "extreme weather events" are increasing in frequency and intensity. Of course, there's no actual evidence that these terrible events are occurring or that they will happen. They're all from model-based "projections", unjustified predictions, or just pure conjecture and general alarmism.

There's no doubt the Earth's been getting warmer in fits and starts, since the end of the last ice age. However, there's the flaw in the alarmists theories right there in that sentence - "fits and starts". The increase hasn't been on a relatively smooth upward trajectory; there's an irregular cycle built in, and no-one can explain the reasons behind the variability. Paleo-climatology has a stab at it, and there are some plausible theories, some "best-guesses", and some downright manipulation and cherry-picking of data, like Mann et. al.'s "hockey-stick". But there's no proof as to what caused the variations - there cannot be. Climatologists are looking back through a murky and distorting lens, and one which might be pointing in the wrong direction, or looking at the wrong data.

Let's look at some real data then, and see how the "x is accelerating" claims stack up. First temperature data, because most or at least may think this is the main indicator of things to come.

Latest Global Temps - UAH Satellite data to February 2012

HADCRUTt3 variance-adjusted global mean, 1979-present (Source: Wood for Trees)

I don't see much of an acceleration in either, rather a stasis, or a even a recent decline in the HADCRUT thermometer record, yet we are told "global warming has continued unabated, ar that it has accelerated. Where's the evidence for these assertions? "Habeus corpus" - "produce the body".

Variations in global mean sea level from a combination of TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, and Jason-2 altimeter measurements, using 60-day and annual smoothing of 10-day average values. A glacial isostatic adjustment correction of 0.3 mm/year has been applied.
Source: Woodworth, P.L., W.R. Gehrels, and R.S. Nerem. 2011. Nineteenth and twentieth century changes in sea level. Oceanography 24(2):80–93, doi:10.5670/oceanog.2011.29

Where's the acceleration, dude?

Disconnects in Logic (6) - 34 "Is not nearly as much" as 502

Earthsky blogger Daniel Tennant relays some good news and some not-so-good news (but which does he think is "good"?)

Most sea level rise due to melting polar ice, study confirms   

Researchers report that Earth’s polar regions are losing 502 billion tons of water annually out of the total amount 536 billion tons lost annually worldwide.

Scientists published results in a February 2012 issue of Nature that reveal a detailed picture of how Earth’s glacier regions have changed over the last eight years. In previous publications, GRACE satellite data confirmed that Earth’s polar regions are the major contributors to rising sea levels. The recent publication focuses on the high mountain areas, such as the Himalayas and Andes, and shows that these ecosystems are remarkably robust: they are not losing nearly as much water to the ocean as the polar regions.

That's good news, I'd say, and an E grade for all the glaciologists and others who've been predicting the imminent demise of glaciers in "high mountain areas" for years. A little later, we're shown this graphic

Map showing the September ice extent in the Arctic in 1980, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. The magenta line indicates the median September ice extent for the period 1979-2000. Image Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center Sea Ice Index:

From simple visual evidence, if nothing else, it is clear that our polar glacier regions are depleting due to melting ice. 

Arctic report card for 2011

The "polar glacier regions", aren't shown, just the Arctic, and this is graphic data for sea ice, and has nothing to do with sea level. Sea ice has no net effect on sea level, freezing or melting. No glaciers are shown. It's certainly not clear from that graphic that "our polar glacier regions are depleting due to melting ice". Why were we given this irrelevant information and erroneous conclusion?

After this slip, band some details of how the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellites work, we get the "bottom line" (my bold)

Bottom line: A publication in Nature in February 2012 presents the results of an analysis of GRACE satellite data, showing that high mountain areas, such as the Himalayas and Andes, are not losing nearly as much water to the ocean as Earth's polar regions.

Shhuurely he means ice not water? If "the polar regions are losing 502 billion tons of water annually out of the total amount 536 billion tons lost annually worldwide" then how can the 32 billion tons from mountain glaciers be termed "not nearly as much" as 502 billion tons? The 32 is 6.8% of 502, or about one-fifteenth. Did he write this piece before he saw the figures? Was he disappointed when he saw them? Does his brain work logarithmically? Why did he spoil a perfectly good article with a superfluous add-on, an unsubstantiated claim, and a flawed sense of proportion (in the true sense)? Why do I get worked up about this kind of thing?

If you have any of the answers, please let him know, I'm past caring.

Disconnects in Logic (5) - Correlation & Causation

Steve Rissing writes in the Columbus Dispatch (my comments in italics)

Any one still doubt climate change?

Are we there yet?

If we haven’t entered a period of human-caused climate change yet, what will it take for us to agree that we have? Maybe events such as the following:

• Almost 1,500 U.S. high-temperature records fell in one week.

So? Did citizens complain and stay indoors to avoid the deadly heat?

• Health-care specialists warn that Chagas’ disease, spread among humans by blood-sucking insects in tropical regions, might spread as temperatures rise in the United States.

Might.

• Biologists identify mechanisms by which earlier snow melts decrease populations of a rare Rocky Mountain butterfly.

Clearly devastating for mankind. Did biologists actually identify "earlier snow melts"?

• Agricultural specialists attribute global changes in crop maturation, for example early ripening of grapes, to increased global temperatures.

Good-oh, we get the vintage earlier, and growers can take an early holiday.

• NASA releases maps showing a reduction in snow cover for North America in 2012 compared with 2011.

So North America has been seeing increases in snow cover until 2012?

• Studies suggest that the houses where 4 million Americans live on the coasts confront increased risk of storm-surge flooding by midcentury because of warming oceans.

Suggest. Not predict, project, but suggest. Is a suggested "increased risk by midcentury" proof of anything whatsoever?

• News reports say the iconic cherry trees in Washington, D.C., were in full bloom a week before the month-long National Cherry Blossom Festival started. All of these things occurred over just two days this month. No one seriously doubts that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising. Over the past 30 years, they have increased by 15 percent - a rate that continues to grow with no sign of stopping. No one seriously doubts that the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a result of burning fossil fuels and cutting and burning forests. And no one seriously doubts that global mean temperatures are rising. In the past 30 years, the global mean temperature has increased by about a half a degree Celsius. 

You're absolutely right - still waiting for your conclusion. No one would organise a Cherry Blossom Festival to start on a day when there was no blossom in sight, so the "week before" cannot be unprecedented, or likely even a full "week before". Cherry trees lead naturally to cherry-picking, like picking one warm winter as "proof".

This is the usual stuff we see touted as "evidence" - a mixture of cherry-picked "proof" and irrelevancies, and the implication that all such things are "bad". Is "earlier crop maturation" bad? Is one instance of early blooming (by a week!) of cherry-trees in Washington "bad", or proof or indication of anything? Now we come to the central argument:

Almost all scientists and related professionals who collect and analyze data about climate change or its effect on biological systems agree that the increased carbon dioxide levels cause much of the climate change and warming. The remaining climate skeptics tend to be policymakers who would rather not make policy.

No evidence as to who "almost all" are, and if "increased carbon dioxide levels" caused "much of the climate change and warming" what caused the remainder. Is "much"  the same as "most", or is it "some"? What business have "related professionals" got pronouncing on science and causation?

So how do the hold-out skeptics propose to test their hypothesis that no link exists between carbon-dioxide increases and climate-change effects? Good science demands explanations and hypotheses that can be tested.

It's not an hypothesis, it's a fact-based objection to an hypothesis that CO2 alone will cause catastrophic warming and climate change. It's your hypothesis, not ours.

An explanation that can’t be tested isn’t an explanation — it’s a dream, a belief, a political position. It might make for good campaign rhetoric, but it makes for poor public planning.

You said it brother, not me "An explanation that can’t be tested isn’t an explanation - it's a dream, a belief, a political position." Catastrophic global warming and climate change can't be tested, can't be falsified, and is therefore not an hypothesis at all, but "a dream, a belief, a political position". Great guys these catastrophists, they do all the work for you, and the best part is they don't know when they've done it.

Disconnects in Logic (4) - We don't do Physics

Ever come across the "space mirror"? If not (where were you, on Mars?), let me provide a little illumination. The mirror concept comes in several flavours, from the sublime to the ridiculous single large "sunshade" to trillions (I kid you not) of small sunshades, between the Earth and the life-giving deadly solar rays from our Sun. The intention is to reflect or filter or diffract a portion of the incoming insolation to offset "global warming" caused by life-giving deadly CO2 and other "pollutants" in Earth's atmosphere. Before I continue, I suggest you put down any drink, fragile artefact or large heavy object you might be holding, and swallow anything in your mouth - gum, toothbrushes, pens, thumbs and similar objects excepted - these should be removed. I fear for your safety, dear reader, should you laugh, chortle, guffaw or splutter while reading on.

One of the earliest ideas was for sunshades in orbit around Gaia, a simple and relatively inexpensive concept, one which could be phased over decades, and involve all those countries capable of putting such objects in orbit. International co-operation involving spending large sums is so easy to organise, as we all know. This would cost tens of billions of dollars per year over the coming decades. If you were paying attention, you might have noticed that I referred to this as "relatively inexpensive", which should give you a clue as to the cost of the other schemes. A major disadvantage is of course that roughly half of the orbiting parasols would be on the shady side of Earth at any given time, performing no useful function, and also spoiling things for astronomers beneath. Somewhat disconcertingly (and rather alarmingly) none of the articles I've read mention this problem. Logic disconnect number 1.

Because of the 50% redundancy and consequent additional cost involved, those engineers and scientists who had a well-thumbed copy of "101 things you didn't know about the Solar System" came up with a cunning wheeze to exploit something called a "Lagrange Point". Any object orbiting between the Earth and Sun would have a shorter orbit and greater speed, so would rapidly move away from the Earth, re-visiting in less than a year, if orbiting in contra-rotation (going the other way round) relative to Earth. Johannes Kepler (God rest his soul) discovered this and published his law  in 1619. If the orbiting object is not-too-far from Earth, gravity pulls it back a little, and if the distance is "just right" reduces the orbital speed to keep it stationary relative to the Earth.

Lagrange Points - Source: Montana State University, Department of Physics

L1 is the obviously useful one, the others being most useful if you want to remain a long way from your mother-in-law, though L3 is best to hide from the forces of loranorder. One concept is for a single, large (obviously) "wire mesh" disc at L1, to deflect 1% of the incoming sunlight. Lowell Wood and others have calculated that a screen made of one-millionth of an inch diameter aluminium wire forming a mesh of 1 thousandth spacing would act as a diffraction grating, and "bend" infra-red light away from Earth.

The flies in the ointment are that it must have an area of 1,600,000 sq. km (more than twice the area of Texas) with a diameter of 1427 km, and even with the too-thin-to see wire, with an estimated average mass of 1 gram/sq. metre including "ribs", weigh 1.6 million tons (I'll use the imperial ton,  tonnes are much the same). It's been estimated that using US launch vehicles, the cost of putting anything into Earth orbit is currently $44,000 per kilogram, or $440,000 per ton, and that doesn't include the cost of boosting mirror (parasol or sunshade) parts to the Lagrange point 1.5 m km. further out. Using the space shuttle would cost $175,000 per kilo just to Earth orbit. The mirror would weigh some 1,600,000,000 kilos. Assume the deployment costs reduce tenfold over time and do the sums yourself - I don't think my calculator display is big enough.

Don't employ these guys as fly-swatters because they've missed a few already, as I will show. First, all the diagrams I've seen show the parasol at 90° to the Sun-Earth axis, and the designers and most proponents seem to think it'll stay that way. I have news for them - without giving it a "twist" of one rotation per annum, the parasol would be parallel to the axis in 3 months, having no effect whatever. How it's possible to impart a rotation of exactly 360° per annum to a thinner-than a hair parasol 1427 km across I don't know. Someone suggested a steerable "hub", but hasn't heard of inertia. The parasol might have zero weight but it would have a mass of 1.6 million tons, and it would take some hefty steering jets to shift it. The "ribs" would have to be stiff enough not to flex unduly, adding considerably to the total weight to be lofted from Earth, perhaps doubling it. Brilliant idea, shame about the (lack of) physics. That faint sound is Newton turning in his grave.

There's more (of course there's more!) - the Lagrange points move. The system is not just Sun-Earth, but Sun-Earth-Moon. Objects in space orbit around their centre of mass, not their geometric centres. The centre of mass Sun-Earth is relatively very close to the centre of the sun, but the centre of mass of Earth-Moon (barycentre) is inside the Earth about 1,700 km. below the surface The Earth wobbles slightly therefore, changing the Sun-Earth distance, and also the Moon is either closer to, or further from the Lagrange point as the lunar month progresses. The important L1 and irrelevant L2 are most affected, oscillating by several km a month. In addition, the Earth's orbit ain't a circle but an ellipse, moving closer to, then further away from the parasol, compounding the problem. Our parasol now needs to be moved this way and that constantly to stay close to the elusive Lagrange point L1 and avoid us having to wave goodbye to it, and the trillions of dollars spent getting it up there. Then there's all the inevitable millions of tons of space junk orbiting the Earth at various distances, and the effect of all the CO2 and other gasses emitted during the construction of the parasol, the rockets or shuttles, their fuel, and the burning of that fuel in the atmosphere, none of the aforementioned even hinted at by the rose-tinted spectacle brigade. Unintended consequences, anyone?

The other scheme by astronomer Roger Angel involves 16,000,000,000,000 (16 trillion) pierced transparent 0.6 sq. metre 1-gram discs, forming a cylindrical cloud some 60,000 miles long orbiting in what he calls "L1 orbit". I see several difficulties, quite apart from the obvious, which you should be able to identify for yourselves. First, there's strictly no such thing as "L1 orbit", and even if there was, a 60,000-mile long cylinder oriented towards Earth would leave most of his "flyers" away from that orbit, meaning they'd drift Sunwards or Earthwards, speeding up or slowing down in orbit, and so spreading in all directions. At least he though of the effect of "radiation pressure" which would push the discs earthwards, and introduced a compensating mechanism. The "big parasol" team overlooked this, and also the Solar Wind of atomic particles, which Roger Angel seems to have ignored. Secondly he (Angel) says a 2% reduction in insolation over the entire surface would be "enough to balance the heating of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere". A reduction of 2% averaged over the surface is around 7 W/m², or twice the IPCC AR4 estimate for a doubling of CO2. That 7 W/m² would be, from what I've absorbed from several years of surfing the net and absorbing concepts of radiative forcing like a solar parasol absorbs sunlight, enough to take the Earth into the next ice-age. Oops. Strong on ideas, short on physics and celestial mechanics, and should read more.

Here's my own "Cool It" plan

I reckon it'd be easier and cheaper just to deposit all that dosh in orbit. A dollar bill has an area of 103.4 sq. cm., and weighs a bit less than a gram, so a trillion of them would cover roughly 10,000,000,000 sq.metres or 10,000 sq. km. and weigh a million tons. Assuming each is oriented at 45° to the Sun on average, the effective area would be around 7071 sq. km. They wouldn't need complicated and expensive rockets, but could be blasted there in "super guns" - quite technically feasible (I know my history). The other advantage is that it doesn't actually cost 1$ to print a 1$ bill. Banknotes are paper and ink, and in some cases include a thin thread of metal (about as thin as the thread of logic in the other schemes). Banks wouldn't have to actually issue the notes as currency.

Each country could contribute a special "Cool It" note, with a picture of the incumbent political leader imprinted thereon. Just think - The US would have "Drill, baby, drill!" Obama waving his birth certificate, the UK would have "The NHS is safe with me" Cameron, Australia could have "No carbon tax" Gillard with a long nose, and Russia would have "It's me again!" Putin. I'm certain both democrats and republicans (though maybe not in equal numbers) would like to see Obama blasted into orbit, and citizens of other countries would be happy to contribute to see their beloved leaders actually doing something useful for a change. A side-advantage is that as the notes drift out of orbit they'd never fall fast enough to burn up, would float to the surface, and still be reflecting sunlight, increasing the albedo. Polar explorers would never run short of toilet paper... the list just goes on. Just think of all the thousands of "green-back" jobs Obama could point to as the election draws nigh. The Pentagon would be allocated funds to develop a "super gun" for the army, and the other services would be green with envy.

There's a Nobel Prize, or at least "Climate Crusader of the Year" in this for me, I'm sure. I may even get my handsome visage (He lies - Ed.) on a special edition banknote and join the political elite in orbit. I've changed my mind - geo-engineering is FUN!