The BOM got caught this week auto-adjusting cold extremes to be less cold. Lance Pidgeon of the unofficial BOM audit team noticed that the thermometer at Goulburn airport recorded – 10.4°C at 6.17am on Sunday morning, but the official BOM climate records said it was -10.0°C. (What’s the point of that decimal place?) This was a new record for Goulburn in July. (The previous coldest ever July morning was -9.1°C. Though there had been a colder day in Goulburn in August 1994 when it reached -10.9°C). Since colder temperatures have already been recorded in Goulburn, who thought it was a good idea to trim all future minus 10s as if they were automatically “spurious”?
Yesterday, the BOM have acknowledged the error and at first deleted the -10.0 figure, replacing it with a blank space. Then today, after Jennifer Marohasy’s post, they’ve corrected it.
You might think a half degree between friends is not that significant, but this opens a whole can of worms in so many ways — what are these “limits”, do they apply equally to the high side records, who set them, how long has this being going on, and where are they published? Are the limits on […]
Book Review: Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction by Chris Thomas
Humans haven’t destroyed the planet. This biologist argues that our presence has boosted biodiversity, says Matt Ridley
If human beings were to vanish from the Earth, what would their effect on wildlife have been? A rash of extinctions, a lot of mixing up so that wallabies and parakeets live in England and rabbits and sparrows in Australia, but also — according to Chris Thomas — an eventual doubling in the number of species on the planet: a “sixth genesis”, as he calls it in reference to the five previous times that biodiversity has expanded rapidly after a mass extinction. We are causing a mass speciation.
At a local scale diversity has increased a lot: “The number of species living in virtually every country or island has already increased during the period of human influence, and numbers continue to increase.” The fauna and flora of Britain are much richer today than 10,000 years ago as a result of farming, towns, gardening, climate change and the deliberate introduction of exotic species. Thomas finds the same to be true in tropical forests in Cameroon, Costa Rica and Brazil: the net effect of some human disturbance can be more biodiversity.
You can resent some of the exotic species (I do) but you should pause to recognise that in terms of the functioning of ecosystems, there has been mostly improvement. In an extreme case, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic rock with a few ferns on its summit. It is now a semi-green island capturing more moisture from the wind, thanks to a deliberate effort, begun by Charles Darwin, to enrich its ecosystem.
Professor Thomas, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist from York University, has produced an immensely significant book. It is fluently written, carefully thought through, ruthlessly argued, neatly illustrated with case studies — and shockingly contrarian. He shows the upside for wildlife in the Anthropocene. He does not deny that human beings also cause problems for wildlife, far from it, but he does think we have almost entirely overlooked the gains for wildlife that our presence is also creating.
I have for some time been thinking that while human beings have caused many species extinctions, they must also be causing many speciations. I have not quite had the courage to say so, for fear of being accused by the green thought police of going too far. While watching sparrows on a recent trip to Hawaii, it occurred to me that, though they were little different from the ones I see in London, they must, through isolation, be on the way to becoming a new species of sparrow. Just as a flock of Asian rosefinches shipwrecked on one of the Hawaiian islands six million years ago have turned into scores of species of honeycreeper, half of which are now sadly extinct.
Thomas has the courage I lack. He begins his book with sparrows, as it happens. Sparrows are not native to Britain at all. They spread from central Asia with people, the first of many birds to exploit the urban habitat. In Italy they hybridised with Spanish sparrows to produce a new true-breeding species, the Italian sparrow, already almost reproductively isolated from its parent species. Add one to the list of bird species. Sparrows are persecuted in America for stealing nest sites from native bluebirds, but protected and encouraged in Britain, where a short-lived (and now reversed) decline in the 1980s and 1990s led to concern that we might lose them. This contradictory attitude makes no sense: they are man-assisted exotics in both places.
Thomas documents the way new species are evolving. There is an ex-Australian cricket on a Hawaiian island that has fallen silent in the past few decades because of a mutation. This has been caused by the predation of a parasitic fly from North America that hunts down its mating call. And there is a species of fly that eats hawthorn berries, some of whose members have switched to eating apples. They are evolving towards a distinct species, together with their three species of parasite wasp — turning four species into eight.
The old idea that evolution happens only very slowly is being cast aside. “The biological processes of evolutionary divergence and speciation have not been broken in the Anthropocene. They have gone into overdrive. We have created a global archipelago, a species generator.”
And then there is hybridisation. In America a blueberry fly and a snowberry fly, separate species, have hybridised to form a honeysuckle fly to eat non-native honeysuckle, itself a hybrid of various Asian species. In the city of York, growing on a roundabout, there is a unique species of flower called Yorkwort, recently rescued from extinction by using saved seeds. But Yorkwort was only born as a species in 1979 when the railways allowed Oxford ragwort — itself a natural hybrid from Mount Etna, collected by a botanist in the 18th century — to spread around the country and hybridise with groundsel in, for some reason, York.
“More new plant species have come into hybrid existence in Britain in the last 300 years than are listed as having died out in the whole of Europe,” writes Thomas. If you are sniffy about hybrids, remember you probably are one: all people with any non-African ancestry have genes from Neanderthals (Europeans) or Denisovans (Asians) in them.
Thomas’s argument is that “humans must adapt and help direct change, rather than attempt to preserve the world in aspic”. Nature is much more dynamic than we generally admit. Species move about, become rare, become common again. In time and space nature is constantly on the move. In Ice Age deposits in Britain you find frequent remains of a dung beetle species today known only from the high Tibetan plateau — how did that happen? The Monterey pine is barely clinging on to a few tiny refuges on the California coast, but is the mainstay of a vast timber industry in New Zealand, Chile, Australia and elsewhere. Blue gums from Australia are found throughout California, thickets of Chinese palms blanket the shores of Lake Maggiore in the Alps and Himalayan balsam invades British river valleys.
It is only here that I begin to part company with Thomas. While he accepts that the eradication of rats from South Georgia, to save the seabirds, was a good thing, he is not convinced that New Zealand should, let alone could, eradicate its mammals — none of which is native — for the sake of its birds. Just let them evolve instead. He is right that not all non-natives are bad, but in conceding that human beings should actively manage the process of natural change, he should perhaps look on pest eradication more favourably as an example of just such management.
For instance, I cannot stand idly by and watch three species disappear from my farm, all as a result of American invasive species: the water vole (eradicated by mink); the native crayfish (eradicated by signal crayfish); and the red squirrel (being eradicated by grey squirrels). So I trap mink, signal crayfish and grey squirrels whenever possible. It may be a futile, Sisyphean task for the moment, but in the long run new genetic techniques may make it easier. Invasive species are by far the greatest cause of local and global extinction, not habitat loss or hunting.
Thomas briefly blames the extinction of harlequin frogs in Central America partly on climate change before correcting himself later to agree that the cause was a fungus spread around the world from Africa, partly in pregnancy-testing kits. He is far more balanced than most academics on the topic of global warming, conceding, for example, that “the basic expectation of a warmer and slightly wetter world is that the diversity of many – and perhaps most – regions in the world will increase”.
This is certainly true in Britain, where more warm-loving species are arriving than cold-loving species are leaving. Oddly, he omits any mention of global greening, the phenomenon by which the global vegetation has grown greener over 33 years by the equivalent of a continent twice the size of the United States, 70 per cent of the cause of which is extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That surely rates a mention in a book celebrating the gains from man-made interference with nature.
When he writes that “it is difficult to understand why any particular moment in the continuous passage of time should have special significance”, this surely applies to climate change too. The world was much warmer than today in times past and much colder at others. The rate of change was much faster at the end of the last Ice Age.
We think of human beings as unnatural, as separate from nature, and a “separation myth” permeates our writing about the natural world, but it is nonsense. Thomas writes: “We may not be happy about some of the changes that are taking place as a consequence of our existence, but they are still natural.” We caused many extinctions, especially of large mammals and birds, when we were hunter-gatherers fully embedded in natural ecosystems. Wherever human beings appeared 50,000 years ago, there followed a disappearance of mammoths and rhinos, of diprotodons and giant kangaroos, of moas and rocs, of giant elks and great auks. Modern technology is not the problem: we caused twice as many extinctions of birds and mammals before 1700 as we have caused since.
China has promised to make its skies blue again, but having some of the world’s most-expensive natural gas isn’t helping.
The biggest energy consumer on earth wants to use more of the cleaner-burning fuel in place of the coal that’s choking its skies and causing pollution far exceeding the World Health Organization’s daily recommended limit. China has the ability to increase imports and is seeking to raise domestic production, but high prices risk suppressing demand growth and jeopardizing the country’s ambitious targets.
The challenge is that producers, importers and distributors in China need the government-controlled prices to be high enough to make money. By cutting them too much, the state risks hurting their margins, threatening investment in future production and the country’s energy security. But be too generous to the industry, and the nation’s health is at stake.
“It’s a balancing act for the government that requires on one side stimulating gas demand to increase the percentage of clean fuels,” said Miaoru Huang, a Beijing-based energy analyst for Wood Mackenzie Ltd. “On the other hand, it needs to ensure reasonable returns for upstream players and transmission and distribution companies that are needed to ensure sustained investment so China can maintain its growth in domestic gas production.”
The Chinese government has set a goal of getting as much as 10 percent of its energy from gas by 2020 and 15 percent by 2030, up from 6 percent in 2015. To achieve this, demand will have to grow by about 15 percent a year through the rest of the decade, according to UBS Group AG.
After consumption growth slowed to well below that pace for the past few years, it is once again booming, increasing at a rate of 13.2 percent so far this year. These graphics tell the story of how that’s happening and what the future may hold.
The world’s sixth-biggest producer of gas, China gets about 64 percent of what it needs domestically, according to Bloomberg calculations based on government data. It imports the rest by pipelines from Central Asia and Myanmar, as well as on seaborne tankers as liquefied natural gas.
The Ordos Basin in Shaanxi Province is the largest gas-producing area in the country, according to Sino Gas & Energy Holdings Ltd. It’s where China drilled its first oil well more than 100 years ago. The nation’s experience with petroleum dates back 900 years, when the scientist Shen Kuo found near the Yan River oil seeping out of the rocks, which he noted could be used for lighting, according to China National Petroleum Corp.
In the modern era, the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planner, traditionally set gas prices at the well, making sure they were high enough to cover drilling costs and a small profit for the companies.
Even as production exploded over the last decade, China couldn’t keep up with booming demand, so the nation’s big three energy companies — CNPC, China Petrochemical Corp., known as Sinopec, and China National Offshore Oil Corp. — became gas importers. CNPC built a pipeline connecting gas fields in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to western China, while a link from Myanmar started in 2013. CNPC signed a deal Tuesday to start receiving gas from Russia on a Siberian pipeline in 2019. The country also has more than a dozen terminals on its eastern and southern coasts to receive LNG cargoes.
But buying the gas overseas proved costly. The companies inked supply deals at prices linked to the cost of oil, so when crude rose into the $100-a-barrel range, the cost of importing ballooned to levels higher than the energy giants were allowed to sell domestically. PetroChina, the country’s largest listed energy firm, has lost money on gas imports every year going back to at least 2013, according to company filings.
The NDRC responded in 2013 and 2014 by raising prices to a level that was high enough to encourage production and help cover the cost of imports. But that increase had an immediate impact on demand, snapping the run of double-digit percentage growth every year from 2003 to 2013.
In 2015, the government cut wholesale prices. By December 2016, gas was cheaper on a wholesale basis than other fuel sources such as fuel oil or propane, a liquefied petroleum gas typically used for heating and cooking, according to UBS analysts including Ken Liu. However, the final cost to industrial users was still higher because of large margins for distribution companies.
So now the government is taking a knife to the middlemen companies that transport the gas from the state-run giants and sell it to individual users, firms like ENN Energy Holdings Ltd., China Gas Holdings Ltd. and China Resources Gas Group Ltd. The NDRC last month capped investment returns for natural gas distributors at 7 percent.
In January, China’s latest five-year plan called for using gas instead of coal in industrial boilers throughout four major urban areas: the greater Beijing region, northeast China, the Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province. Local governments are supporting the efforts with measures including subsidized gas connections and boiler replacements, as well as price caps, according to Morgan Stanley.
The NDRC issued guidelines Tuesday aimed at increasing use of the fuel, including encouraging the participation by private companies in overseas gas investments, expanding LNG import terminals and doubling underground gas storage capacity from the end of the decade to 2030.
While lowering prices further may spur more demand, China runs the risk of suppressing production and imports, Meidan said.
Output goals are already going to be difficult to meet because of high costs and difficult geology, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. The government expects most gas production growth to come from unconventional resources, such as shale and coal-bed methane, with production targeted to reach as much as 100 billion cubic meters a year by 2030.
At stake in all of this is the health of the world’s most populous nation. Poor air quality has been a source of social unrest and China had more pollution-related deaths than any other country in 2012, according to World Health Organization data.
Coal still accounts for about two thirds of China’s total energy consumption. Natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide and just a fraction of the sulfur dioxides and particulates of coal when it’s burned, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Premier Li Keqiang in March pledged to make China’s skies blue again, three years after the country declared a “war on pollution.”
Dr Birol is as tactful and accomplished an energy politician as he is an excellent analyst. Asked by a member of the audience which branch of the energy sector was the best bet for a young person beginning their career, Dr Birol replied, firstly that speaking for himself he had always wanted to be a footballer, and that energy was his second choice, but he loved his job, and as for which branch of this wonderful field was to be preferred, it was entirely up to you, and that one had to follow one’s heart. He himself, apart from the footballing, had always done this and it seemed to work. No one could possibly be offended, or positively informed.
The lecture itself was not dissimilar. All bases were covered; all the technologies were mentioned, the major concerns were touched upon, climate change prominent amongst them, and everybody could take comfort, all were winners, all won prizes, or had a future. If a listener drew inferences, following their intuitions, that would be entirely their own affair. Nothing could be attributed to Dr Birol beyond the innocuous content of his slides, and yet this listener, at least, stepped out into the warm summer evening of Albemarle Street thinking that while there had been nothing so definite as an oblique whisper, an important overview had somehow been encouraged to coalesce in the air. I cannot say this was Dr Birol’s view, much less that that of the IEA; and yet I don’t think it was entirely a fantasy of my own making.
In trying to reproduce this unattributable impression I can do no better than begin with the lecture’s final slide and its five conclusions, with I summarise.
The IEA, founded by Henry Kissinger in response to the first oil shock, had its roots in concerns about oil security, but gas security, and electricity security were now of equal importance.
US shale oil, the growth in which was staggering by historical standards, will “trigger a deep transformation of oil industry dynamics”.
Major increases in Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) supply would “catalyse a second Natural Gas revolution, with far reaching implications for gas pricing and contracts”.
Renewables were doing well, but work was now needed on “system integration”.
Keeping within the 2 degree limit would “require an energy transformation of exception scope, depth and speed.”
Elsewhere in his talk, Dr Birol reminded us that fossil fuels had been providing about 80% of world energy demand for decades, adding that without firm policy intervention that was likely to continue, and in response to a question he certainly said, my notebook records it, that renewables were “policy dependent”. That brought into sharper focus an earlier chart showing, as Dr Birol emphasised, that renewables accounted for about 1/3 of growth in world energy demand in the last five years or so, which was a major increase on previous decades. On reflection I realised that it also showed that oil and gas together accounted for well over half of growth in energy demand, and both had enlarged their share at the expense of coal.
Dr Birol did, of course and tactfully, say that wind and solar were transforming the electricity sector, but he didn’t say (omissions are important) that cost reductions were both significant and responsible for this impact. The unstated implication as that policy pressure was still responsible. That seems prudent. The Times reported earlier this week [http://ift.tt/2tPKgXC] that Hywind, a five turbine, 30 MW offshore wind farm of a new type, would shortly be installed, at a cost of £200 million. Using this information, Capell Aris, whose publications on this subject I have discussed before [http://ift.tt/2uoDUeU], updated his chart of offshore wind capital cost per megawatt installed and kindly sent me the result:
Figure 1: Capital cost per MW for offshore, 2000 to to 2017. Black dots constructed or under construction; red dots awaiting construction. Source: Personal Communication, Capell Aris.
It would be interesting to know if the IEA’s data miners have different views on this matter, but assuming that the information collected by Dr Aris gives an accurate picture, it would seem that the policy pressure projected as necessary by Dr Birol is of no minor order. Renewables have grown, but only with vigorous policy support, and the integration costs still remain unresolved. They now face fierce competition from two spontaneous, uncoerced, explosive market transformations in fossil fuels, namely from shale oil and LNG.
Walking down Albermarle Street and through the thronging crowds and frantic traffic of Piccadilly I had the strong impression that if climate policy were to continue on its present track it would have to rely on an increasingly coercive, even authoritarian policy environment. Dr Birol didn’t say anything of the kind, of course. That was just my heart speaking.
Iowa Climate Science Education 