That doctor’s analogy again

During a web search I came across this page: Climate Change Communication: Taking the Temperature (Part 11) with Dr. Katharine Hayhoe. It seems to be part of a series consisting of interviews with 12 different climate scientists about climate communication. The answer on the second question was really interesting, I recognized immediately the often used, but flawed, doctor analogy:

2. How do you view your role in communicating science?

I see the role of a climate scientist as similar, in some ways, to that of a physician. We might suspect something is wrong with our bodies; but until we go to the doctor, take the tests, and wait for the evidence, we don’t know what is going on for sure. In the same way, we might see something changing in our climate; but until scientists collect the observations, analyze the evidence, and draw conclusions, we don’t know for sure what is happening. As climate scientists, we are the “physicians of the planet.”

With that role comes responsibility: to tell people about what we find. Imagine if you went to the doctor and they found something wrong, but didn’t want to tell you about it – because they were afraid you might react badly to hearing the news, or it would be against your religion or your politics to receive treatment. That scenario may seem far-fetched to us. In the same way, though, I feel that as climate scientists we have a responsibility to tell people: what is happening, why it’s happening, and what the outcome of our choices as a society will be.

In a way I could understand that both doctors and climate scientists are studying complex systems. But even then there are differences that prevent the analogy to fly.

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Multiple lines of solid evidence…

Last November John Holdren, the science czar of Obama, took questions about climate change in “Open for Questions” via social media and answered some on video. After the subject of last post, I found question number 3 a particularly interesting one:

Are people truly affecting the climate, or is this a natural phenomenon that is part of Earth’s climate cycle? What evidence points to a human role, besides the vague explanation that humans have been polluting the atmosphere?

– Chance Salway via Facebook

This is how it got answered:

We know beyond any reasonable doubt that humans are the main cause of the warming of earth’s climate that has been measured over the past few decades. The warming is unequivocal. It is based on thermometer measurements at thousands of locations across the face of the Earth,

Observational science versus Experimental science

We often hear the claim that the debate is over, that human activity (CO₂) is responsible for changing the climate, that there is overwhelming evidence to prove this. But can this level of certainty in attribution really be achieved in climate science? As far as I know climate science is an “observational” science. This kind of science is being done through the observation of nature just taking its course and recording the findings over time. As opposed to the “experimental” sciences that advance via controlled experiments.

There are other observational sciences like geology, social sciences, epidemiology and so on. All those sciences can not perform controlled experiments because it would not be ethical or it would be impossible to do. For example, in astronomy it would not be possible to manipulate stars or galaxies in order to observe what happens when the researcher changes something. Or in medical observational science it would not be ethical to administer one group with a medicine, while another group gets only a placebo.

In climate science there is only one test subject: Earth. We don’t have the luxury of three similar planets in which we extract CO₂ from one, add CO₂ to the other and compare that to our Earth. Therefor there is no other option than to observe what is happening and record the findings.

Observational sciences have their limitations. Observing nature taking its course means there are many variables involved and in the research only one (or a few) are accounted for. To pinpoint one cause, and only one, it is necessary to isolate that factor and change that while keeping other factors the same. Then if there is a change in output, one could be sure that this is because of this one factor that was changed. That is what experimental science does and that is the difference with observational science.

Wind breaking all records … for as long as it takes

Today we got cheering in the Belgian media about a new record of wind energy production. It goes like this: energy production from wind energy reached a new record last Monday. There was a production of 38,8 GWh that day, enough electricity for about 4 million families and about 15% of the total energy demand. The previous record dated from December 11.

One of these media sources even claimed that thanks to the good production of wind energy and the re-opening of nuclear reactor Doel 4, there is no threat of a blackout at this moment.

Yeah right.

As far as I know the risk of a blackout is when the temperature is around -6 °C and during peak at working days. There are no freezing temperatures at the moment and we are at the beginning of a holiday week. Very small risk of a blackout, with or without wind energy. The risk will rise again beginning of January until March-April or so.

That colossal beam in the left’s eye

A couple days ago our government made the decision to keep our two oldest nuclear reactors (Doel 1 and 2) open for the next ten years. Those reactors were planned to be closed in 2015, but will now close in 2025. The government took this decision in order to secure our energy needs in the next years. The decision is not final. First Electrabel and FANC (Federal Agency for Nuclear Control) have to agree.

As expected, the opposition parties, sp.a (Flemish Socialist Party) and the Greens, were not amused. Neither was Bond Beter Leefmilieu (“Federation Better Environment”) and Greenpeace. They accused the government of being the slave of Electrabel (an electricity provider), helping them to reach monopoly again. They also claimed that the solution is inefficient, dangerous, that nuclear is a energy source is a “energy source of the past” anyway and this move would discourage the investors in alternative energy sources? There was also the claim that huge investments will be needed for the check-up additional security costs of the reactors in the wake of Fukushima and the question “who will have to pay for this?”.

What I missed in their objections was some sense of reality or at least an alternative. The fact is that the previous (left wing) governments neglected our power security and only focused on wind and solar, which are now part of the problem because they don’t contribute to our energy security.

Arctic sea ice and “balance” in the media

Screenshot VTM news of December 15, 2014

It was really surprising to watch on Flemish television the “news” that there is more Arctic sea ice. For skeptics this isn’t really news. This fact is known since 2013. In the meanwhile it was staggering to watch the media keep on regurgitating the 2012 Arctic data. Nice they are catching up, it took them a while.

Energy from an island

Yesterday I read about “new” plans of a pumped storage installation in Belgium in the hard copy of the newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws. The plans concern building an energy island before the coast of De Haan. It is also called an energy atoll. It would consist of a huge reservoir that will be emptied by pumps when demand is low and filled via turbines when demand is high. Therefor balancing the load on the grid.

http://kusteilanden.be

“New” between parentheses because I heard about similar plans beginning of 2013. Different politicians, the same location and the same resistance from the people of the village. In The Netherlands there were also similar projects born and later put to rest.

In a way I think it has some merits. If one want to build upon an intermittent energy source, one need a way to “store” the energy that is produced but can’t be used right away, for example at high production and/or at low consumption. In Belgium we currently have such a installation in Coo. It was build as a buffer for the nuclear power plant of Tihange. At night when there was an excess of energy, it is used to pump water to higher elevation and in the morning/evening peak the water flows back through the turbine to generate electricity.

The new plans are brought as a project that could avoid 80% of our electricity shortage, so I was thinking that the island would have a huge capacity. I was a bit disappointed to learn that the pumps have a capacity of only 550 MW, only half that of the Coo installation. The journalists putting it a bit different: they write it has the capacity of a small nuclear power plant. Everybody is comparing power plants with small nuclear plants nowadays. While it is technically true that the turbine has a capacity of a small nuclear power plant, there is of course a big difference here. The pumped storage will only produce this power on the condition that:

1. the reservoir is empty
2. only for a maximum of 4 hours

Do as we tell, not as we do

At beginning of this week, eleven Flemish celebrities wrote an open letter to the Federal and Regional Governments, threatening with legal action when failing to take action on climate change within 30 days. After that, they will proceed to court. They want a reduction of emissions of 40% before 2030 and 85-90% before 2050 to keep global temperature below 2 °C.

As if there is a control knob to influence global temperatures.

It was inspired by the actions of Urgenda, which done the same in The Netherlands last year.

The group behind this action is klimaatzaak (Climate Case). They choose the beginning of this week because it was also the start of the climate top in Lima. The media, as always, uncritically took it over and even whipped it up. We got loads of climate propaganda poured over us in the last days.

The action seemed to backfire. The reaction of the public was devastating. I heard and read things like

• Can’t they act normal for once?
• Don’t they have anything else to do?
• How do they have the guts to sue the government without a political mandate?
• If they want the politics to change, they just have to vote like normal people do!
• They themselves are traveling by planes!
• That is easy to say for them, they themselves have a carbon footprint of a small African country!
• and so on…

I didn’t really expect so many reactions. Apparently, there seems to be a large gap between minds of the public and the minds of the activists/media. It was also striking how many of the public knew about the pause, the lack of debate, the “consensus” and many other subjects the media fails to tell us about.

Minister Schauvliege (Flemish Minister of Environment, Nature and Agriculture) also reacted. She said that this was a matter of us all and asked whether those celebrities could acknowledge their own emissions.

She hit the nail straight on the head.

This seems to be the Achilles heel for those celebrities. Two of those eleven celebs were very vocal in this, but weren’t exactly free of climate sins. They seem to have a huuuuuuuge footprint.

Power shortages because of solar eclipses?

In the newspaper of today (Het Laatste Nieuws of December 4, 2014) I found this tiny article that caught my attention:

Now also power problems because of solar eclipse?
In the morning of March 20, 2015 in Europe a power shortage looms because of a solar eclipse. The sun, the moon and the earth are almost aligned that day, so that 84% of the sun is covered by the moon. Therefor electricity production from solar energy will drop. In Belgium solar panels representing a capacity of 3,000 MW. Which threatens to collapse largely between 09:30 AM and 11:30 AM. Professor Ronnie Belmans KU Leuven considers the probability of sudden power shortages on that day high.

Seems very dramatic, 3,000 MW is a rather large chunk of the energy that is put on the grid. But as much in alternative energy communication this is only part of the story.

Elia: not clear whether the action of Lampiris had an effect

According to Lampiris (a Belgian electricity provider) their “experiment” to find out how a black-out could be prevented by asking people to use as less energy as possible, was a success. They used a graph that showed a small decrease of the total load compared to the most recent intraday forecast. Sure, there was less power put on the grid than was anticipated. I could agree with that, but there are many reasons why less power was put on the grid. Plus, it was not really unusual, as seen in the large decrease in the afternoon, which happened without any action. And most important, it had nothing to do with actual electricity “consumption” of consumers. Wasn’t what they were looking for?.

Luckily, not all the media seem to have swallowed the claim. After going along with the claim earlier, the VRT news came apparently to their senses and asked the net manager Elia to react on the Lampiris claim. They wrote the article “Not clear if the experiment of Lampiris had an impact” which confirmed my impression (translated from Dutch, my emphasis):

“No drastic or sudden drop”
Operator Elia adds some nuance to the results. There was indeed a lower consumption than predicted, but it is not clear whether this was the result of the Lampiris test. “There are more fluctuations in power, this difference is within the normal range,” said spokeswoman Barbara Verhaegen to our editorial staff. “It has not been a drastic or sudden fall.”

The prediction that Elia makes depends on quite a number of factors, including the amount of green energy, and the weather. When it gets warmer than expected, less power will get consumed. It is possible that the action of Lampiris had an effect, but that is not certain, is their conclusion.

“Definitely a positive impact”
It is striking that Elia and Lampiris use the same figures -the supplier bases its estimate on data from the net manager- but does draw very different conclusions. Lampiris spokesman Bruno Vanderschueren does not contradict that the actual impact of their campaign may be less than the 100 to 200 megawatts they claimed. “But it’s still not that bad. There was definitely a positive effect.”

Lampiris will send a questionnaire tomorrow to the participants to know exactly what actions have been taken to reduce their energy consumption. With this information they hope to get a clearer picture of the impact of their test.