A hated airport

With the possible exception of the Bastille in July 1789, Heathrow Airport appears to have become the most loathed building in history. An extraordinarily wide range of people seem to have nothing but contempt for it. This coalition stretches from City types who condemn the time it takes to pass through check-in and security, more humble folk who find their flights delayed because the place is operating at well above capacity, almost anyone in West London whose life is blighted by aircraft noise to environmentalists who have fingered it as the single largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the country and who are targeting the place with "direct action" reminiscent of Greenham Common in the 1980s.

And at least some of this criticism is fair. It cannot be said that any of the terminals there are exemplars of architectural beauty (incidentally, when so many people are frightened of flying, was it such a smart idea to call an airline hub a "terminal"?). The security measures are tiresome and open to the charge that they are designed to prevent methods employed in past terrorist attacks being duplicated, rather than to anticipate the techniques that might be devised in future.

The advent of the smoking ban has led to the surreal spectacle of those addicted to the weed not merely being condemned to stand outside but also directed to a ludicrous small white box painted on the pavement which is the only spot where they are allowed to indulge their habit.

Heathrow seems, therefore, to be the only place in Britain which investment bankers, al-Qaeda sympathisers and Friends of the Earth have all decided for various reasons that they would like to be shot of. There is a consensus that the airport and what it represents -- inexpensive flying -- is "unsustainable". Who would be mad enough to defend it and, indeed, the aviation industry more broadly?

I would. For this airport is the victim of an unappealing mixture of hypocrisy and hyperbole. The analogy with Greenham Common is more appropriate than merely the appearance of the professional protesters who turned out then as now. The essential argument of those who set up camp in Berkshire in the early 1980s was that the deployment of cruise missiles on British soil made nuclear war, and with it the destruction of mankind, more probable. This, as history would illustrate, proved to be precisely the wrong thesis. The willingness of the West to match Russian rearmament would actually be the undoing of the Soviet Union. The Camp for Climate Action is similarly aiming its fire at what is a false villain.

There can be fewer hypocrisies greater than the rising percentage of people who claim to agree with the statement that there should be "less flying" and the surging proportion of the public who turn to the websites of easyJet and Ryanair in the hope of finding a seat to Venice for less than the price of a tank of petrol.

When most commentators demand less unnecessary flying, what they really mean is that other people should fly less, or that those poorer than themselves should be forced to fund the "full" cost of their travel through the imposition of new taxation on aviation fuel. It used to be said (correctly) that travel broadened the mind. It has become fashionable instead to portray it as a wanton act of rape and pillage upon the planet. Yet is it? Most serious analysts concede that flying is not at present a significant factor in overall carbon emissions, though they warn darkly that it might well become so at some unspecified moment in the future, with estimates ranging as high as a quarter of the British total of emissions in perhaps no more than two decades.

A sense of proportion here would be helpful. Airline emissions now account for 5.5 per cent of the 2 per cent of global carbon dioxide output for which the United Kingdom is responsible (which is to say, a rather small amount). To ratchet up the 5.5 to a prediction of 25 per cent in 2025 (by which time the UK's percentage of the entire carbon stock is forecast to fall) demands extrapolation that Malthus at his most apocalyptic could not have managed. It involves assuming that the phenomenal increase in passenger numbers of the past 50 years will be maintained at an equivalent rate (which is incredible) and takes little account of technological innovation by the industry. This innovation has already been substantial and there is every incentive for the airlines to continue to clean up further and faster.

So the charge that the present pattern of air travel is "unsustainable" is both true and immaterial. It is true in the sense that low-cost travel of the sort that has become familiar in the past decade will not be reinvented every decade hence, and so will not be sustained. It is immaterial because, even if the Camp for Climate Action were awarded its wish and flying priced out of existence, the effect on the environment would be meagre. It is convenient to pick on a big airport and those who own it, but the reality is that most of us are responsible for more carbon emissions through our lax attitudes to energy efficiency in the home, and more pollution because most of our car journeys are trips of two miles or less.

Heathrow will become a much less hellish experience when Terminal 5 is opened in March and the third runway is finally constructed. It will never rival the Taj Mahal as a visual landmark, nor will standing in line at security ever be enjoyable. But to treat Heathrow as if it were the Bastille and besiege it is crazy. "Let them eat cake" was the wrong response to events in France in the 18th century. "Stop them flying" is scarcely more rational now.

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EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES JOIN FORCES AGAINST EU CO2 EMISSION CAPS

The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is under increasing pressure as eight of the bloc's 27 member states are threatening the Commission with legal action, following its decision to slash the amount of carbon allowances allocated to companies. The governments of Lithuania and Malta have announced they could join Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia and Latvia in challenging the EU's emissions-trading scheme, after the Commission ordered the two states to lower their proposed limits on national industrial carbon-dioxide emissions by 30% and 46% respectively. The eight Eastern European countries argue that the strict limits imposed by the EU executive are too low and will hurt their economies at a time when they are still playing 'catch-up' with the rest of the Union. They hope that the European Court of Justice will overrule the decision.

Latvian MEP and former Finance Minister Valdis Dombrovskis has accused the Commission of "bullying" new member states into taking on the larger part of the burden in the battle against climate change. In a letter to the Guardian on 20 August, he claims that most of the 12 new member states already meet their individual Kyoto target of cutting emissions by 8% from 1990 levels by 2010, whereas the 15 older member states are projected to achieve only a 4.6% reduction by that date. Yet, while new members have seen their requested quotas slashed by up to 55%, almost all of the older members received more than 90% of their requested pollution permits.

Dombrovskis said: "The Commission is shifting what should be a shared burden on to its newest members, which are already the most environmentally efficient in the European Union. In doing so, the Commission is rewarding inefficiency and reducing the effectiveness of its commitments to clean up the environment. [New members] need rapid economic growth to catch up with the rest of the EU. But their ability to grow is being impaired because they lack the resources to confront the massive business lobbies of the EU's most developed and richest countries. Making the union's newest members carry a disproportionate share of the burden of reducing the EU's total amount of pollution is both unjust and foolish."

The wave of challenges come at a time when the EU's ETS is already under sharp criticism for its failure to achieve real cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions after governments grossly overestimated the amount of pollution credits required by their industries during the first phase of the scheme, from 2005 to 2007, sending carbon prices crashing. A recent study by the UK-based think-tank Open Europe accuses the ETS of being an "embarrassing failure" and says that the second phase of the scheme, which will run from 2008 to 2012, "will see important new problems emerging", such as the possibility for companies to import permits from developing countries in order to offset their needs, making it unlikely that the ETS will reduce emissions or spur low carbon investment, and potentially depressing prices in the same way that the EU's own over-allocation did the first time around.

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Feedback Uncertainties

Feedbacks are at the heart of most disagreements over how serious man-induced global warming and climate change will be. To the climate community, a feedback is by definition a RESULT of surface temperature change. For instance, low cloud cover decreasing with surface warming would be a positive feedback on the temperature change by letting more shortwave solar radiation in.

But what never seems to be addressed is the question: What caused the temperature change in the first place? How do we know that the low cloud cover decreased as a response to the surface warming, rather than the other way around? ......

I think it is time to provoke some serious discussion and reconsideration regarding what we think we know about feedbacks in the real climate system, and therefore about climate sensitivity. While I've used the example of low cloud SW feedback, the potential problem exists with any kind of feedback.

For instance, everyone believes that water vapor feedback is positive, and conceptually justifies this by saying that a warmer surface causes more water to evaporate. But evaporation is only half the story in explaining the equilibrium concentration of atmospheric water vapor; precipitation is the other half. What if a decrease in precipitation efficiency is, instead, the cause of the surface warming, by not removing as much water vapor from the atmosphere? Then, it would be the water vapor increase driving the surface temperature change, and this would push the (unknown) diagnosed water vapor feedback in the positive direction.

Of course, researchers still have no clue about what control precipitation efficiency, although our new GRL paper suggests that, at least in the case of tropical intraseasonal oscillations, it increases with tropospheric warming.

What I fear is that we have been fooling ourselves with what we thought was positive cloud feedback in observational data, when in fact what we have been seeing was mostly non-feedback cloud "forcing" of surface temperature. In order to have any hope of ferreting out feedback signals, we must stop averaging observational data to long time scales, and instead examine short time-scale behavior. This is why our GRL paper addressed daily variability.

Will this guarantee that we will be able to observationally estimate feedbacks? No. It all depends upon how strong they are relative to other non-feedback forcings.

It seems like this whole issue should have been explored by someone else that I'm not aware of, and maybe someone here can point me in that direction. But I think that a simple model demonstration, like the one I've briefly presented, is the only way to convincingly demonstrate, in a quantitative fashion, how much of a problem this issue might be to the observational determination of climate sensitivity.

Much more here





CUTTING THE GORDIAN KNOT

A market solution to climate uncertainty

The emerging policy consensus that we ought to do something to limit carbon emissions faces two fundamental challenges. First, it remains difficult to measure the impact of any policy on the actual level of emissions. Second, these policies may impose substantial economic harms, which are also hard to measure.

An ideal policy response to the danger of global warming would both monitor the degree to which human activities are leading to warming, and adjust the incentives so that once the desired level of emissions reduction is reached, no further harm is imposed on the economy. Fortunately, economist Ross McKitrick has found a way to do just that with a very innovative twist on the carbon tax idea. McKitrick argues that for each country, the dollar rate of the carbon tax be pegged to the three-year average change in global tropical temperatures. The tax would be assessed per ton of carbon dioxide emissions, and updated annually. It would be administered for all domestic carbon dioxide emissions, be matched with income tax cuts and would come with no cap on emissions.

Implementing a carbon tax that is tied to warming and a futures market are ideas whose time has come. Currently, according to McKitrick, the tax would come out to $4.70 per ton, which is rather low. But if global warming forecasts are correct, the tax would eventually climb at a rate of between $4 and $24 per decade, according to McKitrick's findings. He calculates that if the current upper end of forecasts hold, the tax could reach $200 per ton by 2100, which would necessitate a move to non-carbon energy sources and an effort to cut carbon emissions.

Of course, it is possible that the current models will not hold, which would mean that the tax would increase very little, if at all. As McKitrick points out, it is even possible-according to some scientists-that we might experience global cooling, in which case we could end up subsidizing carbon emissions. These two scenarios-and all of the scenarios in between-highlight the uncertainty in our climate future. McKitrick's proposed carbon tax allows us to measure the degree to which human activity is contributing to global warming by looking at the tax rate. If increases in the tax rate lead to decreases in warming, then the alarmists are right about our impact on climate-if it doesn't, they are not. As McKitrick himself says, with this tax, "the regulator gets to call everyone's bluff at once, without gambling in advance on who is right."

Moreover, the structure of the tax will encourage both public and private sector forecasting that will take global warming into account and will decrease the lag between the effects of climate change and the design and implementation of policy options to address that change. We can add to or amend McKitrick's proposal by taking into account economist Arnold Kling's idea of having a futures market in the temperature indicator, where the tax is tied to the futures price.

I'm a big fan of futures markets; the Iowa Electronics Market has an excellent reputation for correctly predicting the outcome of Presidential elections and futures markets would even help forecast-and prevent-terrorist attacks if only people got over some of their squeamishness. Tying a futures market to the carbon tax McKitrick envisions would go a long way towards making the tax rational.

Implementing a carbon tax that is tied to warming and a futures market are ideas whose time has come. Both the tax and the futures market will help lend greater certainty to the climate debate. Intellectual checks and balances will be imposed on each side. And since no particular liberty principle is at issue, the taxation of externalities is certainly something free market types like me can get behind. It is better than the taxation of income, after all. Or as Bill Murray put it in Ghostbusters, "I like this plan! I'm proud to be a part of it!"

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More Greenie foot-shooting in Australia: Must wash clothes in cold water

But you would probably have to use more detergent in that case and we know how evil that is. And to get the extra detergent out afterwards you would probably have to use more water and we know how evil that is! The usual Greenie lose-lose situation

THE Victorian Government has launched a new campaign encouraging people to wash clothes in cold water to help cut household energy use. Minister for Climate Change Gavin Jennings today said it was important to encourage cold water washing, as water heating accounts for about 20 per cent of the average home's greenhouse gas emissions.

"It's small and simple actions like washing full loads of clothes in cold water that can make a big collective difference to our environment," Mr Jennings said. "Energy used for heating water for showers, washing and other household tasks costs the average household about $300 each year. "People need hot water to have a shower, but not necessarily to clean their clothes," he said. "By switching to a cold wash, you can cut 80-90 per cent off the running costs of doing a load of washing, and reduce your water heating by almost 10 per cent."

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowleging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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