Energie und Umwelt!

Frau Bundesrätin Simonetta Sommaruga und viele andere Politiker*innen haben sich vor zwei Jahren von der Klimajugend beeindruckt gezeigt. Das ist schön und gut, aber eigentlich sind es die gewählten Politiker*innen, die sich um die Zukunftsstrategie der Nation kümmern sollten, und nicht die Schulkinder.

Ich bin auch von der Klimajugend und ihrem Climate Action Plan begeistert. Sorgen macht mir eher die Nicht-Klimajugend. Wir dürfen nicht vergessen, dass die grosse Mehrheit der Jugendlichen sich anscheinend gar nicht für ihre eigene Zukunft interessiert. Wenn Studierende unserer Hochschule eine Nachhaltigkeitswoche organisieren, sind leider nur einige Studiengänge vertreten. Die grosse Mehrheit der Studierenden scheint nicht verstanden zu haben, dass die Welt sich verändert hat. Das ist übrigens an der ETH nicht anders. Ich finde dieses Verhalten merkwürdig. Der Generalsekretär der UNO nennt es selbstmörderisch. Wer nicht bereit ist, auf einem sinkenden Schiff mit dem Pumpen auszuhelfen, ist nicht besonders schlau.

Die Studiengänge für Enerige- und Umwelttechnik aus der ganzen Schweiz haben ein Video gedreht, um auf die spannende Karrieremöglichkeiten in diesem Bereich aufmerksam zum machen. Wenn wir in diesem Tempo weiter ausbilden, schaffen wir die Energiewende nie.

Wir stehen vor gigantischen Herausforderungen. Ein Teil der Lösung wird sicher der komplette Umbau der globalen Energieinfrastruktur sein. Die Frage ist nur, wer die ganze Arbeit machen soll. Wer heute Energie und Umwelttechnik studiert, erwirbt nicht nur das richtige Wissen für die Zukunft, sondern hat bereits am Ende des Studiums das richtige Netzwerk für eine erfolgreiche und sinnstiftende Karriere.

Die Generalversammlung und der Frühlingsanlass von swisscleantech vom 3. Mai hat wieder gezeigt, wie schnell sich die Wirtschaft verändert. Die Mitglieder dieses Wirtschaftsverbandes haben mehr als 400’000 Angestellte und das Netzwerk wächst schnell. Die grösste Sorge dieser Firmen ist inzwischen, dass sie nicht genug qualifizierte Arbeitskräfte finden werden.

Übrigens, es lohnt sich, die Agenda 2030 von swisscleantech zu lesen. Sie fasst sehr gut zusammen, was wir tun müssen.

„Wenn der Wind der Veränderung weht, bauen die einen Mauern und die anderen Windmühlen.“

Truth is Incontrovertible

United wishes and good will cannot overcome brute facts. Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.
Winston Churchill

Here is an interesting graph from September 2020 to start the new year.

https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-emissions-gaps

Obviously, the world is not even close to having an idea about a plan for preventing catastrophic climate change. It is a bit worrying when the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases are either “highly” or “critically” insufficient in meeting their climate protection goals.

There are two reasons for this sad state of affairs:

By sticking to the idea of economic growth, governments have essentially been trying to square the circle by accomplishing something which is physically impossible.
There is no incentive for politicians to admit their own inadequacy. When was the last time you heard about a politician who resigned because he realized that he was not up to the job?

This leaves us in a precarious situation, where the people entrusted with climate policy are either unable or unwilling to do what is required to prevent catastrophic climate change. Instead, they put on a charade of pretending to be concerned to appease the masses. If the last four years have taught us anything, it is that “telling the people the lies they want to hear” can be a successful and dangerous strategy.

The incontrovertible fact is that our current approach to tackling the climate crisis has failed and that the people in charge have no idea what to do next. It is therefore not enough to demand that our politicians do something. We need to tell them what to do!

Global Climate Compensation (GCC) offers a simple solution based on the idea that the people responsible for destroying the climate should pay for the damage done. It will not solve all our problems, but it would be a huge step in the direction. It is also completely risk-free and could be implemented immediately. It is a lot better than doing nothing

I am actively trying to promote GCC. Please let me know if you like the idea and believe that you can help.

The Flaw in the Plan

One of my favorite moments after the financial crisis in 2008 was when Alan Greenspan, the legendary chairman of the Federal Reserve, had to admit that he did not understand how the economy works. Here is a part of a transcript from a congressional hearing on October 23, 2008:

ALAN GREENSPAN:
Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to — to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.
And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN:
You found a flaw in the reality…
ALAN GREENSPAN:
Flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN:
In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?
ALAN GREENSPAN:
That is — precisely. No, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE ROLE OF FEDERAL REGULATORS, October 23, 2008. The full transcript is available here.

Oops! To misquote Mike Tyson slightly, everybody has a world view until he gets punched in the face. Unfortunately, with great power comes great responsibility, and mistakes made by generals, presidents, CEOs, or the chairmen of the FED have consequences.

It is dangerous when people base their thinking on a flawed understanding of the world. People who believe in UFOs, witches, or weird conspiracy theories should not be allowed to run things. Before the scientific revolution and the discovery of microbes, people used to believe in the spontaneous generation of life. The proof was simple: if you left a piece of meat out in the sun for a while, it would soon be crawling with maggots and worms.

Today, a majority of people, including a large fraction of the ruling class, seems to believe in the spontaneous generation of money. Generations of school children have been taught how to calculate compound interest, but nobody asked where the money was supposed to come from.

In a stunningly absurd “press conference”, which lasted for approximately 90 seconds, the soon to be ex-president of the USA revealed to the world the limits of his mental abilities.

The White House, November 24, 2020

Never mind the 270’000 dead from COVID-19, the fact that millions of Americans have lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and the melting polar caps. As long as the Ponzi-Scheme commonly referred to as the stock market continues to rise, everything is fine.

One of my first textbooks in physics contained an poignant warning: “Never mistake the model for reality!” The illustration was a person devouring the menu in a restaurant. Mainstream economics is a theory about a model. Unfortunately, reality seems to have moved on so that the model does not apply anymore.

Vorhersagen sind schwierig

Im Auftrag des Bundesamts für Umwelt (BAFU) durfte ich einen kurzen Artikel zu «COVID-19 & Umwelt» verfassen. Herausgekommen ist etwas anderes als ich ursprünglich geplant hatte, was meine Hauptthese bestätigt. Denn die Zukunft lässt sich nicht vorhersagen.

1/1 – © BAFU | Giancarlo Mino, collectif Marie-Louise

Hier der Link zum Artikel: https://umwelt-schweiz.ch/de/innovationen/henrik-nordborg

In der gleichen Reihe sind viele spannende Artikel erschienen. Eine vollständige Liste ist hier zu finden: https://umwelt-schweiz.ch/de/innovationen/covid-19-umwelt.

Climate Plots

The challenge of climate change can be explained with a small number of plots. I use them in my lectures and update them regularly. As a public service, I also make them available here. Please not that none of the plots below is based on modeling. These are observed and well documented changes to our planet.

The Keeling Curve

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) has been measured since 1958 by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. The data are available on the their webpage and is plotted below.

A number of important observations can be made:

The concentration is currently above 410 ppm, which is higher than any time before during the last 3 million years. Our species has never experienced anything like this, and neither had any of our ancestors, since the genus Homo did not arrive until 2 million years ago. The Neanderthals would have been very surprised by what we have done to the planet in less than 200 years.
The oscillations are due to the vegetation cycles of the Earth. They have an amplitude of roughly ±4 ppm, which is a useful number to know. There is a limit to the amount of biomass the Earth can produce.
The CO₂-concentration is not only increasing but it is actually accelerating. It rose by roughly 0.8 ppm per year in the 60s and is increasing approximately three times as fast today.
If we want to stay below 1.5 °C of global warming, we need to keep the concentration below 435 ppm. Unfortunately, we are going to cross this line in less than 10 years. Note also that it does not matter if we use 450 ppm as the limit. At the current rate of emissions, it would buy us less than seven more years.
The carbon concentration can be fitted surprisingly well using a second-order polynomial. I have added the dates for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992), the Paris Agreement (2015), and the climate strikes initiated by Greta Thunberg in in 2018. During the last 30 years, we have not done anything to change this trend.

Carbon Emissions

Data for global CO₂-emissions can be obtained from the Global Carbon Project. Plotting these data against the annual rise in CO₂ concentration from the Keeling curve above, one obtains the following diagram.

The good news is that we know where the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is coming from: the emission of 17 Gt of CO₂ increases the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ by roughly 1 ppm. If we want to stay below 435 ppm, we only have approximately 20 ppm left to go and therefore cannot emit more than

20 ppm × 17 Gt/ppm ≈ 340 Gt

This is the carbon budget. The only way to stop the CO₂-concentration from rising is to stop burning fossil fuel.

Global Average Temperature

The best source for the average temperature of the Earth is from NASA and the data are available on this webpage, which also provides the necessary references. I use the following dataset:

Combined Land-Surface Air and Sea-Surface Water Temperature Anomalies (Land-Ocean Temperature Index, LOTI)

The anomaly is calculated with respect to a reference period of 30 years. It is customary to use the period 1951-1980 but the planet had already seen some warming by then. I have therefore decided to use the years 1880-1909 as reference, which shifts the curves upward by 0.25 °C. After all, we want to compare with preindustrial temperatures.

The plot below shows annual and 11-year averages. It is obvious that the planet started heating up in the 80s and that the warming seems to be accelerating. We are very close to the 1.5°C target.

Currently, our planet is warming by slightly more than +0.2 °C per decade or +1.6°C-2.0°C during a human life span. Things do not look good for our children.

The Culpability of Big Oil

As reported elsewhere, Big Oil knew about the dangers of climate change already in the 70s. It is interesting to compare the predictions of their models with actual measurements. Apparently, even simple models are good enough to predict climate change, as thermodynamics cannot be fooled!

It is acually not surprising that the oil companies could predict the temperature. The biggest uncertainty in climate models is the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. As the Big Oil controls this parameter, they effectly also control the climate of our planet.