Can a Refrigerant Be "Natural"?

 

The other evening my wife and I went to a new ice-cream shop in town, and while I was having my usual cup of vanilla I happened to glance at a refrigerated glass-front cabinet where the employees kept decorated cakes for sale.  Way down on the lower left corner of the front was a green label that read "NATURAL [followed by a leaf symbol] Refrigerant." 

 

That got me curious.  I knew the "natural" label has great consumer appeal these days when applied to food and maybe clothing, but refrigerants?  So I did some digging and discovered that there is quite a history behind the various refrigerants that have been used since mechanical refrigeration was developed in the nineteenth century.

 

For readers who need a review of how mechanical refrigeration works, here's the brief version.  When you compress a gas, it gets hotter, and that heat comes from the work you expend in compressing it.  If you then remove the heat somehow (that's what the condenser unit does outside every air-conditioned building), and the gas is suitable for use as a refrigerant in the system designed for it, it will turn into a liquid when it's cooled down enough.  If you then send the liquid through a small opening into a place where the pressure is lower, it will evaporate back into a gas, and get a lot cooler than it was before.  That's what happens in the evaporator inside an air-conditioned building.  It's the same basic principle that makes you feel cooler when you're sweating on a hot day and a breeze comes up:  water evaporates from your skin and takes some heat with it.  Run this process around and around again with the same substance, and you have a mechanical refrigerator. 

 

All right.  When large-scale mechanical refrigeration systems operated by steam power became available in first Europe and then the U. S. in the 1880s, they used ammonia gas.  The bottled liquid we call ammonia is just a solution of pure ammonia gas (NH₃) in water.  The gas itself condenses to a liquid at atmospheric pressure at a temperature of -28 F (-33 C), but under moderate pressure it can be persuaded to condense at or above room temperature, and it carries a good amount of heat away when it re-evaporates at lower pressure. 

 

Nineteenth-century ammonia was about as natural and organic as you could get.  It was obtained mainly from the waste urine from packing houses, by distillation, and it was therefore fairly expensive.  It got a lot cheaper when the Haber-Bosch process for making it from hydrogen (obtained from natural gas) and nitrogen (obtained from air) was perfected in the early 20th century.  But leaks in refrigeration machinery were common and ammonia gas is nothing you want to get loose around customers.  So the industry sought a non-toxic, non-corrosive substitute, and along came a General Motors chemist named Thomas Midgely Jr.

 

Midgely was largely responsible for the development of leaded gasoline, which in the 1920s was viewed as vital to the efficient operation of gasoline-powered vehicles.  Fresh from this first long-term environmental disaster, Midgely devised a new chemical that used carbon, hydrogen, and fluorine to make what at the time appeared to be the ideal refrigerant, which was trade-named Freon.  It became wildly popular, but in the 1970s, just when we were phasing out Midgely's first brainchild, leaded gas, it was discovered that the original type of Freon destroyed ozone in the atmosphere, at a rate that promised to leave us unshielded from the harmful ultraviolet rays that are normally absorbed by the naturally-occurring ozone layer. 

 

Somehow, the world's engineers cooperated in 1987 to agree to the Montreal Protocol, which committed the signatories to replace ozone-destroying refrigerants with some that are less harmful to the atmosphere.  Since then, the overarching question asked about new refrigerants is whether they hurt the atmosphere, and if so, by how much?  So it turns out "natural" in the context we're talking about means "less harmful to the atmosphere," and not necessarily something that occurs only in nature.

 

For example, on a website that sells restaurant equipment, I found an article that rates many current types of refrigerant with red (Not Eco-Friendly), yellow (Somewhat Eco-Friendly) and green (Eco-Friendly) labels.  Something called R-450A has a green label, and may be what's keeping the ice-cream shop's cakes cool.  It's made of a chemical called hydrofluoroolefin (HFO), which is anything but natural in the sense that it's a highly engineered artificial compound.  But if it gets loose in the air, the nature of its chemical bonds makes it turn into a reactive acid that gloms onto something or other fairly quickly and leaves the air, never making it into the stratosphere where it could bother the ozone layer. 

 

If you want "natural" to mean "naturally occurring," there is the old standby ammonia, which is still used in large-scale industrial refrigeration where its toxicity and flammability can be kept safely under control.  Propane and isobutane, which are distilled from natural gas, can also be used as refrigerants, but they can burn and have to be used in carefully sealed systems for consumer applications.  And the bad boy of the climate-change movement itself, carbon dioxide, can also be used as a refrigerant, although it doesn't condense unless the pressure is raised to over sixty times atmospheric pressure, necessitating very sturdy compressors and containment pipes. 

 

As historian Jacques Barzun pointed out in his monumental From Dawn to Decadence, the notion that nature knows best about a wide variety of things has a life of its own, and was one reason the "natural" tribes discovered in North America were of such interest to the Europeans who eventually overwhelmed them.  In the context of refrigeration, it looks like a more accurate label than "natural" would be "eco-friendly," but the PR people know what words look good in public view, and they picked "natural." 

 

It's only pedants like me who would even think to quibble with what the word actually means.  Without rolling the cabinet out from the wall and looking at the nameplate, I couldn't tell exactly what refrigerant was being called natural.  And my curiosity has its limits—it was good ice cream, and I didn't want to cause a scene and get barred from the shop forever.  I'm just glad that once we found problems with the refrigerant that at first glance looked ideal, we changed course and developed a whole spectrum of other ones.  That's the way engineering should work, and in this case, it has.

 

Sources:  I referred to the website https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/474/refrigerant-types.html?srsltid=AfmBOorPfBjgu4ChyoyuSMDiNc9uETNLojxoiL_gL91XRkUgPKAPtlym

for the list of eco-friendly-graded refrigerants, and to the Wikipedia articles on HFOs and Thomas Midgely Jr. 

Climate Bait and Switch: Why Fossil Fuels are "Not Essential"

 

Writing in December's Scientific American, Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes has penned an essay with the title "Fossil Fuels Are Not Essential:  The industry argues that we can't live without its deadly products.  It is wrong."  How so?

 

She begins with a litany of climate bad news:  record high temperatures, floods, and Hurricane Helene.  All floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and indeed just about every adverse weather event except maybe blizzards and fog are now recruited as evidence for global warming.  Then she quotes a couple of fossil-fuel companies saying things like, "oil and natural gas remain vital" and that there is a "need for fossil fuels that will continue to play a central role in our lives."  That is the bait.  We are primed to learn how fossil fuels are in fact not essential, and we can live without its "deadly" products.

 

Then comes the switch.  Having told us that what these bad-guy corporate fossil-fuel behemoths are saying is wrong, she admits that a transition to renewables will take time, and then accuses them of working for decades to delay it.  In one sentence, the topic has changed from whether or not fossil fuels are essential (present tense) to whether fossil-fuel companies have tried to delay "the transition."  Then she spends the rest of her column summarizing the story of the gasoline additive tetraethyllead, abstracted from a new book with the heartwarming title Building the Worlds That Kill Us:  Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History.  From the 1920s until it began to be banned for health reasons in the U. S. in the 1970s, this toxic anti-knock compound was used in making "ethyl" gasoline.  Yes, General Motors and the oil companies said in 1925 that adding tetraethyllead to gasoline was "essential" because otherwise, the automobile engines of the time could not have used as high a compression ratio without knocking, leading to poorer fuel efficiency and less power. 

 

Admittedly, their use of the word "essential" was biased by their strong economic motives to shift an externality (a low level of lead poisoning in the entire populace) to the public at large in order to prosper the automotive and oil industries.  In 1925, there were 0.17 automobiles per person in the U. S.  One could have argued that autos were not essential in 1925, but they soon came to be, fueled by that nasty ethyl gasoline.  Except for some regrettable and avoidable industrial accidents, we will never know the specifics of how the widespread levels of lead affected public health in general.  If our culture in 1925 had decided the right way according to Oreskes, refused to consider using tetraethyllead, and sent the engineers back to the drawing board, we probably would have muddled through somehow, but with unknown consequences for both public health and the growth of the automotive industry.

 

But what of the assertion that fossil fuels are not essential?  All we get at the end of her essay is this:  "Leaded gas was not essential to civilization, and neither are fossil fuels.  What is essential to civilization is that we dramatically reduce our use of coal, oil and gas—the largest contributors to the existential threat of global climate change—and thereby set our planet on a path toward a safer future."

 

For a historian, Oreskes shows a remarkable lack of consciousness regarding the element of time, which is of course the only reason the discipline of history exists.  She clearly wants us to carry away the message that because the fossil-fuel industry and its allies exaggerated/lied about the essential nature of tetraethyllead in 1925, they are also exaggerating/lying about the essential nature of fossil fuels today.  She also wants us to believe that the two cases are parallel enough to validate her rhetorical point. 

 

Tetraethyllead did not make the automotive industry possible, it only improved its efficiency.  The world could have done without it.  Can the world do without fossil fuels today?  Can it do without them in five years, or ten years, or fifty years?  I call to the stand Vaclav Smil, an engineer and thinker who has studied the problem extensively and is well-versed in facts on the ground.

 

In How the World Really Works and essays derived from it, Smil agrees that global warming is real, bad things will happen if we do nothing to decrease it, and we ought to start doing something now.  So far he is at one with Oreskes.  But in contrast to Oreskes, who I suspect would simply ban or put a prohibitive tax on nearly all fossil fuels tomorrow, Smil's advice as to what we should do right now sounds a little odd.  The two most significant things we could do to abate global warming, he thinks, are to change building codes in cold-weather countries so that more insulation is required, and shift the automotive market away from SUVs toward smaller cars.  That's it.

 

Modern civilization, by which Smil means living in comfortable houses, buying your food instead of killing it, and having a good chance of living to see your grandchildren, is based on four material pillars:  cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia (the essential ingredient of fertilizer).  There is currently no practical way to make any of these materials at scale without using lots of fossil fuels and emitting carbon thereby.  Getting rid of fossil fuels right now means getting rid of cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia. If we quit producing all these things tomorrow, we'd have a disaster, all right:  a global depression that would make the one in the 1930s look like a blip.

 

Consequently, he believes that a realistic path to actually doing something about climate change involves small things like building codes and SUV discouragement now, moving toward renewables as they become economically feasible without punitive government intervention, and mitigating such harm as global warming causes in the future. 

 

Maybe some day modern civilization will do without significant amounts of fossil fuels, just as it was hard for the GM engineers in 1925 to imagine making good cars that didn't need ethyl gas. But the facts on the ground are that if we let Oreskes become global energy czar, we would be consigning billions of people to continued poverty rather than allowing them to benefit from the blessings of energy use that people in Cambridge, Massachusetts enjoy every day.  That alone is a reason to favor a more nuanced path than the one that Oreskes tries to get us to believe in by ignoring the passage of time that we will need to get there—which is an odd thing for a historian to do.   

 

Sources:  Naomi Oreskes' article appeared on pp. 84-85 of the December 2024 Scientific American.  Vaclav Smil's article "Beyond Magical Thinking:  Time to Get Real on Climate Change" appeared at https://e360.yale.edu/features/beyond-magical-thinking-time-to-get-real-about-climate-change in May of 2022.  The statistic on 1925 car ownership is from https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-the-USA-population-had-an-automobile-in-1925-What-is-that-number-now.  The book Building the Worlds That Kill Us:  Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz was just published by Columbia University Press.  Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works was published by Viking in 2022.

Carbon Indulgences: The South Pole Scandal

 

Repentance is hard.  Obtaining true forgiveness is even harder.  So it is no surprise that over the ages, people have tried to find shortcuts around the difficult chores of changing one's ways and being forgiven for going astray.  This week's New Yorker carries the story of one such effort:  the activities of the world's largest carbon-offsetting firm, South Pole, turn out to have been something of a shell game.

 

Carbon offsetting is based on the notion, accepted as gospel in many circles, that by using fossil fuels, humans are committing slow mass suicide that can be averted only by striving toward "net zero"—that is, not adding any more CO₂ to the atmosphere than we take out.  A logical consequence of this notion is that doing anything that produces CO₂ is the secular equivalent of a sin in Christian theology.  Unfortunately, this type of sinning is extremely hard to avoid, because ordinary things like turning on the lights, driving a car, flying, or running a business—especially a manufacturing business—necessitate committing manifold sins of this kind. 

 

As in the days of old when people sought out Catholic priests to get their sins absolved, people and corporations today want to get the same feeling of being washed clean of their carbon misdeeds, but without facing the hard tasks of doing without fossil fuels altogether.

 

Enter South Pole, and smaller outfits like them.  South Pole sells "carbon offsets."  The basic idea is simple:  if you want to make up for your carbon sins, conveniently measured in millions of tons of CO₂, you simply pay South Pole the going rate, which has varied widely over the years like any other commodity.  And voila!—South Pole promises to preserve a Zimbabwean forest that would otherwise be cut down, and those precious trees will absorb not only your carbon sins, but those of all the other companies paying millions for carbon offsets.

 

Deforestation is another secular sin we've heard a lot about, so it makes a certain amount of sense to pay villagers not to cut down trees.  That's fine as long as the villagers really do refrain from destroying the forest, and also if it was certain that they would have cut it down otherwise.  You can already see a potential problem here, involving long-term hypotheticals.  How sure are we that the forest in question would have been destroyed if the offset money wasn't paid?  And how sure can we be that most of the money is really getting to the villagers whose behavior has to change?

 

Not so sure, it turns out.  Heidi Blake's article describes in great detail the dubious accounting of one Steve Wentzel, who was South Pole's man in Zimbabwe charged with actually implementing the forest preservation.  According to Blake, Wentzel promised a great deal more than he delivered.  While he still claims to have prevented the requisite amount of deforestation, he has no paper trail to prove it, and says that the erratic Zimbabwean economy and currency forced him to do what amounted to money-laundering in order to get U. S. currency with which to pay the villagers. 

 

Blake describes how one employee after another of South Pole left the organization once they realized that the firm was taking money mainly to make its customers feel better, not because they were doing anything objectively to improve the world's climate crisis.    In addition, the price of carbon offsets has gyrated wildly in recent years, affected by such things as the failure of the Kyoto Protocol agreement to commit most major carbon-emitting countries to substantial reductions. 

 

This situation reminds me of an episode in the Protestant Reformation that involved what are called indulgences.  In order to be fair to the Catholic side, I'm going to quote directly from the Catholic Encyclopedia (published around 1914) as to what an indulgence is:  "An indulgence is the extra-sacramental remission of the temporal punishment due, in God's justice, to sin that has been forgiven, which remission is granted by the Church in the exercise of the power of the keys, through the application of the superabundant merits of Christ and of the saints, and for some just and reasonable motive."  Preceding that is a definition of what an indulgence is not, which includes the following:  "It is not a permission to commit sin, nor a pardon of future sin; . . . [i]t is not the forgiveness of the guilt of sin . . . . "

 

The basic idea, as this Protestant understands it, is this.  Only God through Jesus Christ's atonement really forgives sins.  But even if a sin is forgiven, there remains "temporal punishment," meaning that souls who have died without being fully cleansed of their venial sins have to undergo some suffering in Purgatory before going to Heaven.  And, according to Catholic doctrine, prayers and good works by the living on behalf of those suffering in Purgatory can help them get out sooner than otherwise.

 

In the 16th century, someone (it isn't clear who) came up with the following jingle in Germany:  "Sobald der Pfenning im Kasten klingt, die Selle aus dem Fegfeuer springt."  In English:  "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul out of purgatory springs."  In other words, if you give me money, I can guarantee your Aunt Bertha will get out of Purgatory.  It was associated with one Johann Tetzel, who apparently preached in the spirit of such a saying without using the actual words. 

 

The misuse of indulgences was one of the inspirations for the Protestant Reformation, and although the Church still offers indulgences, it no longer puts a price on them. 

 

South Pole appears to be a modern-day secular equivalent of Johann Tetzel, promising more than it can possibly deliver.  But in a free market, the price of forgiveness can soar, and those who trade in it can profit mightily.  What they do with the money is another question.  The carbon-offset concept seems so inherently open to abuse that I, for one, think it should be abandoned for more practical short-term efforts to deal with the consequences of climate change.  But there will always be those seeking secular forgiveness, and those willing to sell it for a good price.

 

Sources:  Heidi Blake's article "Hot Air" appears on pp. 42-55 of the Oct. 23, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.  I found the German version of Tetzel's non-quote at James Swan's blog https://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com/2012/01/did-tetzel-really-say-as-soon-as-coin.html, and referred to the online Catholic Encyclopedia definition of indulgence at https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07783a.htm.

Unintended Consequences: The California Electric Truck Mandate

 

If you own a trucking company that picks up shipments from California ports, you now have to deal with the consequences of a new law designed to reduce your carbon footprint.

 

Trucking is one of the vital ingredients in our infrastructure that virtually all parts of the economy rely on.  About two-fifths of all containerized imports to the U. S. come through one of California's twelve commercial ports.  According to a recent report in National Review, beginning January 1, any trucker doing "drayage" (the technical term for transporting stuff to or from a seaport) in California can only buy zero-emission vehicles, although they can hang on to their existing diesel fleet for a while.

 

Trucks don't last forever, however, and evidently the court of wisdom otherwise known as the California legislature decided this was the best way to get truckers used to the additional coming mandate that in 2035, all trucks entering California seaports and intermodal rail yards (where the containers are loaded onto trains) must be zero-emission types. 

 

The ostensible motivation for these laws is to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, of course.  And careful analyses do show that over the lifetime of an electric vehicle, even if you include the fossil fuels used in the different types of manufacturing (electric versus internal-combustion) and in producing the electricity for the vehicle, less carbon dioxide results from using electric vehicles.  That's the intended consequence, and unless the law is later modified, it will be achieved.

 

But the devil is in the details, and some truckers interviewed about the mandate pointed out several unintended consequences that may follow from these laws.  For one thing, the number of electric trucks in California will have to go from about 300, where it is today, to around 500,000, and some way will have to be found to charge all those trucks, and to keep them running farther than the alleged 60 miles that the California regulators said was the typical drayage daily mileage.  A lot of truckers drive a lot farther than that every day, and if you add several hours a day to charge the trucks, it turns a normal workday into a 20-hour day. 

 

And then there's the cost.  Even if you can find a zero-emission truck that will do the job, it will cost three or four times what a diesel vehicle costs.  And one trucker asked what bank will finance such a purchase if you can't show where you're going to charge it and how you will work out a schedule that will let you stay in business. 

 

So if California doubles down on enforcement, we can anticipate something like a gradual strangling of commerce flowing through its ports as the few truckers who manage to jump through the hoops of regulation are all that's left.  And maybe that was what the lawmakers really wanted anyway.  If the idealist dream of a zero-emission society were to come to pass in the next couple of years, millions would die of starvation and cold, and those few who are left would be reduced to living a life that would be familiar to a denizen of 1880. 

 

At the very least, essentially shutting down 40% of containerized imports to the U. S. would cause massive supply-chain disruptions that would make what happened during COVID look like a hiccup.  If you say no one would let things get that bad, well, we did let things get that bad during COVID, and it can happen again.

 

I recently came across a true story that should become the paradigm cautionary tale for those who close their eyes to the unintended consequences of legislation. 

 

In England in the mid-1800s, dogs were quite commonly used for transportation.  Poor people who couldn't afford a horse and wagon to carry their goods to market could nevertheless use a dog and a "dog-cart" (not to be confused with the horse-drawn carriage referred to in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales).  But in 1841, the recently founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) successfully lobbied to pass a law prohibiting the use of dogs for transportation.  In urging this measure, the SPCA cited a few highly publicized instances of cruelty to transport dogs, although it appears that many if not most of the dogs were well-treated.  For good measure, a dog tax was also passed around the same time, further discouraging the use of dogs for business purposes.

 

I can't be positive, but I suspect that the SPCA members were largely upper-class types who, if they thought ahead at all, imagined all the dogs formerly used for transport would revert to being beloved pets.  Think again.  According to Stanley Coren, a dog psychologist and historian, when the law took effect it led to something close to a dog holocaust:  

 

"Dreadful massacres of dogs took place all over England when they could no longer legally be used for cartage but were now taxable.  In Birmingham, more than a thousand were slaughtered, and similar carnage took place in Liverpool.  In Cambridge, the streets were littered with dead dogs.  Because these bodies were becoming a health hazard, the high constable of Cambridge arranged a mass burial of four hundred dogs."

 

So much for good intentions.  The SPCA survived this debacle somehow, and so did the use of dogs for transportation in other parts of the world, but no longer in England.

 

No one can be certain of exactly what will happen if California enforces their zero-emission truck mandate.  But they are meddling with a piece of infrastructure that is crucial to the entire U. S. economy, and if the law has the unintended consequence of disrupting commerce in ways that harm millions of U. S. citizens, those harms should be weighed against whatever essentially unmeasurable good that may eventually come a century or so after California's greenhouse-gas emissions go down by a few percent as a result of this law.  In my view, the law will do a lot more harm than good, and most of the California truckers think so too.

 

Sources:  National Review's website carried the article "California EV Rules 'Totally Impractical,' Truckers Say; Might as Well 'Build a Spaceship and Go to Mars'" at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-ev-rules-totally-impractical-truckers-say-may-as-well-build-a-spaceship-and-go-to-mars/.  I also referred to https://historum.com/t/dog-carts-as-a-form-of-transport.196441/, https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-help-to-tackle-climate-change/, and Stanley Coren's The Intelligence of Dogs:  Canine Consciousness and Capabilities (Macmillan, 1994), pp. 155-156. 

Is Attribution Science Really Science?

 

A recent issue of Physics Today described a new field called "attribution science" which endeavors to attribute certain extreme weather events to human-caused climate change.  I'm not going to get into the specifics of the particular examples it cites, because they are many and varied.  But I will note that this kind of activity is becoming quite popular, not only in the physics community, but in geosciences as well.  I have read several papers in which the authors make statements like "This Japanese heat wave is virtually certain to have been caused by human-induced climate change."

 

What I would like to examine is the philosophical bona fides of this type of activity.  That is, what is the logical chain, assuming there is one, from the starting premises of such a statement's argument that leads to such disturbing and definite conclusions?

 

To say A is caused by B with some degree of confidence, we can do one of a number of things.  One way to verify such a statement is to take B away and see if A still happens.  Unfortunately, we can't just take another identical Earth, remove most of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and then see how it runs after that.  The experiment we are running with this planet is unique, as far as we know, and so our ability to fiddle with the variables in different experimental runs is nil. 

 

Another way to verify causality is to show that when A happens, B happens shortly afterwards and not when A doesn't happen.  The Physics Today article calls this kind of causality "Granger causality" and says there are statistical methods to predict B happening based on statistics concerning A and B, whatever they might be.  But, as the article points out, this kind of test is subject to the post hoc, propter hoc fallacy (meaning roughly "afterwards, therefore because of").  That is, just because the New York City blackout of 1965 happened right after a kid hit a light pole with a stick doesn't mean that the kid caused the blackout—despite what the terror-stricken kid confessed to his mother when he got home.

 

What the attributionists typically do is to gin up some atmospheric models that produce probabilities of this or that event that they are trying to blame on people.  Then they tinker with the atmosphere's CO₂ levels, or concentration of aerosols, or something that is pretty clearly due to human activity.  And then they run their models again to see if they get the same disastrous weather that happened before, or whether leaving the human activity out makes it less likely.

 

The logical problem with this game is that no climate model I know of includes absolutely everything that affects the climate.  They all approximate or ignore certain factors.  So anything claimed for these models can be answered by asking, "Sez who?  And how do you know that something you ignored wouldn't give you different results than you got?"  Logically speaking, there is no defensible reply to that question.

 

I have done some very simple modeling of physical systems, and let me tell you:  it's very easy to get almost anything you want, and the more variables there are, the easier it is to do that.  And I'm not necessarily accusing the parties involved of fraud.  They may be honestly trying to make their models work better, not make them produce the results they want.  But the dividing line between "work better" and "get the results we want" is a thin and permeable one. 

 

After reading several such articles, I start to get the feeling that all pretense of what used to be called objective science has been abandoned.  Everybody knows that if you write a paper using a model that shows Hurricane X was conclusively not caused by HICC, the chances of getting it published are small, to say the least.  All the media, all the funding, and all the scientists, nearly, are predisposed to hear the bad news that we humans are the problem that causes every single bad thing that happens weather-wise. 

 

Was it Mark Twain who said there are lies, damned lies, and statistics?  If so, he was writing at a time when the discipline of statistics was just beginning to be recognized as a new and powerful way of understanding the world.  And don't get me wrong—statistical study is a vitally necessary part of doing big-data science.  It can't be done any other way. 

 

But when sophisticated mathematics, not comprehensible to anyone except a few experts, is brought to bear on the question of whether HICC "caused" a particular adverse weather event—a flood, a fire, a drought, a tornado, a hurricane, you name it—the average layperson is placed at an unfair disadvantage.  If he denies that this is the case, then the scientist will say the layman doesn't know what he's talking about.  And in a sense, that's true.  But even laypeople can understand that the kind of certainty we can have about the sun coming up tomorrow morning is not obtainable when it's a question of complicated and incomplete climate models and highly localized and specific weather events.

 

The Physics Today article said as much, if one bothered to read between the lines, or just the lines themselves.  They addressed several types of attribution science and showed there were serious flaws in each one, although not so severe as to render the enterprise completely worthless.  But I wonder.

 

 Everybody agrees that even if we shut off all fossil-fuel burning tomorrow, we would be stuck with whatever effects our present CO₂ levels have for the better part of a century.  It seems to me that scientists would be better employed by looking for ways to mitigate the climate changes we are going to have, rather than disrupting or destroying the world's economy in a fruitless attempt to shut the barn door after the CO₂ horse has escaped.

 

Sources:  The September 2023 issue of Physics Today carried the article "Connecting Extreme Weather Events to Climate Change" by Michael Wehner on pp. 40-46.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Granger causality.

Greenhouse Gas Abatement that Makes Some Sense: Methane-Sniffing Drones

 

Bad old carbon dioxide is not the only gas that contributes to the earth's net heat balance by trapping heat in the atmosphere.  Another commonly used gas—methane, the chief constituent of natural gas—is more than 25 times as effective as CO2 in trapping heat.  Fortunately, methane's lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter:  about 12 years as opposed to the hundreds of years it takes for CO2 to go away.  So doing something about methane emissions promises to have much more of a near-term effect than anything we do with CO2. 

 

Enter Percepto, a company founded in Israel which recently moved to Austin, Texas to market their services of sniffing out emissions of methane and 14 other gases using artificial-intelligence (AI)-equipped drones.  Their target market is refineries and petrochemical plants, where methane and other hydrocarbon gases can escape in leaks that can take days or weeks to find by technicians walking around with hand-held detectors.

 

Percepto's system, as outlined in an article that appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, consists of a drone equipped with a wavelength-selective camera.  Most hydrocarbon gases emit and absorb characteristic infrared wavelengths, and a cleverly-designed imaging spectrometer can present the user with a photograph showing a cloud of methane made as visible as a cloud of red smoke from a cherry-bomb firework. 

 

Finding and fixing such a leak is not only good safety practice.  In 2024, the Biden administration will begin to implement the Methane Emissions Reduction Program, a combination of over a billion dollars of funding to pay for programs like Percepto's, combined with steeply increasing fines for emitting methane and other greenhouse gases.  Ariel Avitan, co-founder of Percepto, saw a business opportunity in providing large firms with a means of tracking leaks that is faster and more comprehensive than the older methods.  So now, his firm is poised to help track down leaks and other sources of methane that have previously gone undetected.

 

Percepto is to be congratulated for seeing a market niche and exploiting it.  Methane itself is not a particularly valuable gas.  When the cost of transporting it from a wellhead to the market exceeds what it can be sold for, producers typically flare it by burning it at the source.  The government is coming down hard on flares, too, which may lead to other expensive issues, as even flares don't burn 100% of the gas they consume. 

 

In an ideal world we wouldn't waste or release any methane at all through oil and gas operations.  But even if we had a magic wand to do that, it would decrease the world's budget of methane release by only 14%.

 

According to the International Energy Agency in Paris, France, the most profligate source of methane emissions worldwide is a natural one.  Methane is emitted in wetlands by natural decomposition, and unless we are willing to drain all the wetlands, there's nothing we can do about the 32% that nature produces.  The next largest source is agriculture, at 23%—think flatulent cows (there aren't any other kind).  Oil and gas come next at 14%, then coal operations and something labeled as "waste," which probably means methane produced by landfills. 

 

If anyone thinks that we're going to stop global warming by fixing all our methane leaks, this means that there is a disappointment in store.  But in the current state of climate rhetoric, few people are going to think beyond the one step that can be summarized as "Greenhouse gases bad—must stop at any cost." 

 

As I have mentioned elsewhere, the climate has slowly been warming and the ocean levels slowly rising (we're talking millimeters here) since the early 1800s.  And now that CO2 levels have risen as much as they have, whatever effect that's going to have on the climate will be with us for the next couple of hundred years, even if we stopped 100% of all human activity that emits CO2, including breathing.  And stopping the breath of the 8 billion or so humans on the planet is exactly what some "deep ecologists" would like us to do—the folks who regard humanity as some kind of evil infestation of an otherwise pristine Earth.

 

The sensible thing to do—the thing that would let most of those 8 billion people enjoy some of the benefits of modern technology that we in the U. S. have enjoyed for many decades—is to figure out how to adapt to the relatively minor and certainly gradual changes that global warming is going to make, while picking low-hanging fruit with regard to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.  If there's a six-foot hole in a dike in one place and a three-inch crack in another, the only reasonable thing to do is go after the six-foot hole first.  And if you can more easily deal with the water over the dike than fix the dike, maybe that's the best thing to do.

 

Unfortunately, the debate—or more accurately, accepted doctrine—about global warming has left such notions behind.  Most world leaders and their cadres of experts have bought into the easily-propagated notion that if we don't do really drastic and painful things about greenhouse gas emissions right now, we're all going to die horrible deaths as the globe imitates an egg in a frying pan.  The fact that highly reputable people such as Steven Koonin have shown this oversimplification to be mostly false has no effect on something that has become the mass-psychology equivalent of a kind of hypochondria.  It's like a patient that comes to a doctor with a pimple on his nose and says it's cancer and he's sure it's going to kill him.

 

We would try to talk reason to such a person, but it's easier than trying to talk sense to an international community that has bought into a severely distorted picture wholesale, and created huge institutional incentives to keep the delusion going. 

 

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Percepto saw their opportunity and took it.  People have a right to profit from laws that, however misconceived, do some incremental good.  And it's certainly a good thing to stop methane leaks, even if it costs millions of dollars to do so.  But one can still question the reasoning behind the laws, and wonder whether succeeding generations (if there are any) will scratch their heads over the strange panic about climate change that we are currently enduring.

 

Sources:  The article titled "Company using AI to detect gas leaks" appeared on page 1F of the Sunday, Aug. 27, 2023 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.  The International Energy Agency's website https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/methane-and-climate-change provided me with statistics about methane lifetime and sources.  Physicist Steven E. Koonin's book Unsettled? was published in 2021 by BenBella Books, Dallas.

American Geophysical Union, Heal Thyself

 

The American Geophysical Union (AGU), founded in 1919, is possibly the world's premier association of earth scientists, and numbers among its members many leading climate experts.  I had the privilege of attending its annual Fall Meeting last December, held in Chicago, and I have never seen such a large concentration of scientific expertise in one place before. 

 

The AGU publishes a science-newsmagazine called EOS, which summarizes technical and political developments of interest to the 65,000 or so members of the organization.  I mention "political" because of the many scholarly publications I receive, EOS seems to be one of the most "woke." 

 

A good case in point is the article in the May 2023 issue of EOS with the title "The Mental Toll of Climate Change."  A notice at the head of the article reads, "Content Warning:  This article discusses suicide and potential risk factors of suicide."  The author Katherine Kornei, a science writer, interviewed mental-health providers and an "environmental psychologist" to explore the stresses brought on by both acute weather events (such as floods, tornadoes, and wildfires) and chronic issues (such as droughts and heat waves).  And all these things are directly linked by the author to climate change.  The few hard-science citations in the article referred to reports and papers that reinforce the notion that basically, anything that happens weather-wise that we don't like is due to climate change.

 

Lest you think that an exaggeration, consider the first such citation.  "In July 2018, an unprecedented heat wave in Japan killed more than a thousand people; researchers later showed that the event could not have happened without climate change."  This is a bold assertion, so I looked up the paper in question.  It was authored by several meteorological researchers in Japan, who used statistical distributions based on a climate model which they admit (in another paper, which I had to track down) ignores atmosphere-ocean interactions and is useful only for modeling periods of up to a few years. 

 

But to a science writer, their paper title ("The July 2018 High Temperature Event in Japan Could Not Have Happened without Human-Induced Global Warming") was too tempting to resist.  Here are a bunch of credentialed scientists saying that this deadly heat wave was the direct result of human activity.  Only when one digs down into the details, as I did, does one find that the model they use leaves out essential features.  Pretending the atmosphere doesn't interact with the ocean may simplify a model, but it ignores well-known phenomena that can completely transform a model's behavior.  And as Steven Koonin pointed out in a book I mentioned recently (Unsettled:  What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters), to say anything meaningful about climate means that you need to take at least 30-year averages of data.  A program that can only look at five years' worth of data is useless for predicting climate events,  although I'm sure it has enough free parameters to allow the researchers to obtain the results they wanted, namely, that the heat wave couldn't have happened without climate change.

 

The rest of Kornei's mental-health piece describes how "angry, baffled, and horrified" many people are when they hear that (a) climate change is soon going to bring civilization to a horrible end as we bake, freeze, drown, and/or blow away, and (b) there's nothing we can do about it, or if we do we'll have to go back to subsistence farming with mules and give up electricity and driving. 

 

Well, if I really believed both of those statements, I'd be angry, baffled, and horrified too.  Unfortunately, as Koonin points out in his book, climate scientists have joined forces with government leaders, commercial interests, and science journalists to paint this dismal picture, which Koonin, as an insider, says is highly distorted, to say the least.

 

Tackling the worst problem first, there is no logical way that any statistical model, even a good one (which the Japanese model is not) can "prove" a given weather event would not have happened without global warming.  The only way you can do that is to have two identical Earths going exactly the same way till about 1800 A. D. and then let one exploit fossil fuels and keep the other one from doing so, and see what differences arise in the weather patterns.  This experiment is impossible to do, and while essentially perfect climate and weather models could simulate such a thing, we are probably decades away from having such models, if indeed they can ever be made. 

 

This leads to the second and more serious problem, which is that experts have irresponsibly given in to the temptation to go with the politically-favorable climate-catastrophe narrative in flagrant violation of the principle of not venturing beyond your data.  The Japanese report is a case in point, but there are hundreds of similar publications from all over the world that join the doom-crying chorus.

 

The members of the AGU who have encouraged this sort of thing bear the most responsibility for average citizens who are depressed because of climate change.  Causing the problem, and then hiring a science writer to write about the problem, is the height of something—hypocrisy, irony, stupidity, take your choice. 

 

The AGU should first clean up its own act by not exaggerating and fabricating claims of certain disaster that awaits us unless we voluntarily throw ourselves back to the Stone Age by giving up industrialized energy use.  If as much effort was expended on adapting and mitigating whatever climate-change effects come our way, as there is now on showing how bad it's going to be and developing punitive policies that thwart human flourishing, we'd be a lot better off. 

 

And the AGU wouldn't have to run articles on how depressed people are about the climate-change crisis that the AGU has played a large role in creating.

 

Sources:  The article by Katherine Kornei "The Mental Toll of Climate Change" appears on pp. 28-33 of the May 2023 issue of EOS.  The two papers I referred to as asserting the connection between climate change and the Japanese heat wave are Imada et al., SOLA, 15A, 8-12 (2019), and Shiogama et al., SOLA, 12, 225-231 (2016).

Magic Two-Thirds: The Proposed EPA Electric-Car Mandate

 

On Apr. 12, the Biden administration announced a new set of proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rulings that would require by 2032 two-thirds (67%) of passenger vehicles sold in the U. S. to be "zero-tailpipe emission" types.  In practice, that means electric cars.  Lower fractions of service and transport trucks would also have to be electric by then.  As reported in National Review, both automakers and consumer advocates criticized the move, saying that the industry is not ready for such a radical shift, and that the result will be higher prices for consumers and shortages of largely foreign-produced materials such as lithium and cobalt. 

 

These proposed rules would be in addition to the Department of Transportation's so-called CAFE standards, a set of fuel-economy requirements that have had the unintended consequence of making U. S. automakers rely mainly on production of larger vehicles (e. g. pickups and SUVs), because of the perverse incentives put in place by the standards.  Unintended consequences always follow mandates like this, and unless the EPA changes its collective mind, there are sure to be problems we can only dream of now caused by such an extreme requirement.

 

For one thing, we are already seeing stresses on the electric grid caused by the rather exotic requirements of rapid-charge stations for electric cars.  The most powerful stations, the "direct-current fast charging" (DCFC) ones, can draw up to 350 kW and charge an all-electric (battery-only) passenger car in as little as 20 minutes.  In doing so, however, it uses as much energy as an average household uses in three days.  Multiply this high-peaking intermittent demand by several million, and you can understand why Californians have already had requests from their state leaders to restrict charging of EVs on hot days when the grid is stressed already.  Mandating that two-thirds of new car sales must be electric will only make this problem worse.

 

More generally, this proposed ruling is a good example of the kind of thing that I mentioned in last week's blog:  the tendency of government leaders to propose progressive-sounding climate-change-prevention measures to go into effect long after they are out of office.  By doing this kind of thing, they try to have their political cake and eat it too.  They get kudos from their supporters for being on the right side of history, but avoid the all-too-real negative and unintended consequences of their proposals, which may never see the light of day in any case.

 

The public is not stupid, on average, and there are signs that outside of Washington and certain elite enclaves, anyway, the constant hyperventilating about climate change is losing its luster for the average voter.  In Vaclav Smil's book How the World Really Works, Smil points out the huge gaps between the aspirational goals set by international meetings such as the Paris Climate Accords and the realities on the ground of how the world's economy relies on giant systems that must use fossil fuels both now and in the immediately foreseeable future. 

 

No one to my knowledge has proposed a battery-electric cargo ship, for example.  The reason is that so much space and weight would have to be occupied by the batteries that the negligible amount of freight transported would be unprofitable.  The only non-fossil-fuel power that is practical for large ocean-going vessels is nuclear energy.  There are only about 160 nuclear-powered ocean vessels in the world, and the majority of those are nuclear submarines operated by the military.  While nuclear energy is a viable option for ships, many ports prohibit nuclear-powered vessels from entering out of safety concerns, and so a sea change (so to speak) would have to occur for nuclear energy to make a dent in shipping.

 

And nuclear energy is simply not an option for air transport, so until much better battery technology is developed, airliners are going to be burning fossil fuels.

 

None of this is to deny that the emission of carbon dioxide by human activity contributes to changes in the climate.  But the uncertainty and variation in how climate is going to change, and how much our burning of fossil fuels will affect that change, make it unreasonable to impose mandates that produce undue burdens on the majority of a population.

 

Suppose that tomorrow, all new internal-combustion-engine passenger vehicle sales in the u. S. were banned.  In a few years, our transportation infrastructure would go a long way toward resembling that of Cuba, where a very few favored individuals can buy new cars, but everyone else gets by with ancient patched-up vehicles that are many decades old.  As my wife and I have learned, today's well-made cars (most of which tend to be Japanese) with care can last twelve or fifteen years, so as long as we could buy gasoline we could deal with such a mandate.  But I can easily imagine the government leveraging the self-driving capability of new electric vehicles to ban older non-self-driving types from certain areas, beginning with urban regions and spreading gradually to the suburbs.  So you would have an even greater divide between rural and urban than we do now:  urbanites zooming around drinking their lattés and reading their smart phones in their self-driving cars, and impoverished rural citizens driving their gas-guzzlers and hunting down bootleg gas stations in small towns in the countryside.

 

It is a weird and unsatisfactory picture, to say the least.  But something like this would result if the Biden administration had the courage of its convictions and imposed rules soon enough to deal with some of the adverse consequences they generate.  And putting off the rules won't make them any better.  It will simply delay the inevitable disruptions that unreasonable government mandates cause, without visiting the consequences on those whose bad idea it was.

 

Perhaps sanity will prevail, and the outcries over the proposed EPA rulings will persuade the unelected bureaucrats in that agency to modify their demands.  That already seems to be happening with previous climate-change commitments that are "honored more in the breach than in the observance."  But sometimes that's a good thing.

 

Sources:  I referred to these articles on the National Review website:  https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-unveils-strictest-ever-emissions-standards-in-bid-to-remake-auto-industry/ and https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/bidens-draconian-electric-car-mandate/.  I also referred to the websites https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/transport/nuclear-powered-ships.aspx and https://www.statista.com/statistics/198227/forecast-for-global-number-of-containerships-from-2011 for shipping statistics.