Katrina caused by global warming?
Here’s an exchange from Question Time back on 21 March:
Jeanette Fitzsimons: When the Prime Minister said that New Zealand needed coal-fired power plants because the weather did not always come to the party, was she meaning the recent droughts in Canterbury and yesterday’s Cyclone Larry in Queensland; and will she be advising her new Minister responsible for Climate Change Issues that changes in the weather mean we should reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and take climate change more seriously?
Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I would love to see us reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, but frankly, if it is a choice between New Zealanders going without power and having a coal-fired power station to give it to them, I know what I am going to choose.
Hon Dr Michael Cullen: Is there any evidence that periods in New Zealand of low rainfall and lack of wind can be entirely be ascribed to climate change?
Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: No, I would not have thought so.
Putting aside the fact that Dr Cullen’s question missed the point - that catastrophic weather events like Cyclone Larry, not just low rainfall and lack of wind, could already be happening because of global warming - Helen Clark’s response is indicative of the predominant tendency to view climate change as an academic idea, removed from real manifestations like tangible changes to the weather, or as something which might happen in the future, not something that is happening now.
In fact, more and more scientists are beginning to conclude that the extreme weather events we are now seeing so often - witness yesterday’s floods - can be attributed to global warming.
Yesterday, addressing the American Meteorological Society’s 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology, Greg Holland, a division director at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded that “The hurricanes we are seeing are indeed a direct result of climate change and it’s no longer something we’ll see in the future, it’s happening now.”
You can’t get much more emphatic than that. The conference will debate Greg Holland’s contention this week, and others will present opposing opinions. So, climate change seems doomed to remain a contentious science for now, but the growing body of scientists prepared to link it to today’s weather events is encouraging - not for the planet maybe, but for getting ordinary people affected by these catastrophic events to start asking questions of their governments about whether more could be done to prevent them.
April 27th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
The GOM (that’s the Gulf of Mexico, not Grumpy Old Man) still has not recovered 100% of oil and gas output after Katrina and co. And there’s just over a month until the start of the next Atlantic hurricane season. Crikey !
Cummulative production losses in the period since last August are 27% for oil and 20% for NG. And these figures are compared to ANNUAL production. If we get a repeat of the last hurricane season, say hello to $100 crude.
And on a related note, Allstate insurance is reducing exposure to the high risk East Coast of the US. They’ve pulled out of Florida completely, and are now in the process of pulling out of New York.
If you don’t want to believe the scientists, then follow the money. The smart money is on the move, away from the risks of climate change.
April 27th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
I understand Helen’s POV, politicians who tell us bad news don’t generally get elected (see Jimmy Carter.)
But I also wonder what the alternatives are short term, given that windfarms are unpopular, all our rivers are dammed, geothermal is already being expanded. Mass installs of solar water heating would be a good idea, but difficult to retrofit.
As long as the coal plant is situated near the demand, it will be fine. Heck we already export coal, there is no difference in CO2 if it gets burned here or elsewhere.
There are no easy answers in the energy debate, and climate change is seemingly unstoppable.
April 28th, 2006 at 11:01 am
uk_kiwi
Even in a densely populated country like the UK, there are many measures to make the economy less carbon intensive and more energy efficient.
FOE UK has produced a guide that highlights a number of alternative solutions that could generate cleaner energy and help cut energy waste. Some alternatives:
And in NZ, the Greens have just released their Turn Down the Heat proposals.
Given the alternatives, we have to get started now.
April 28th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
I’d like to see a program that forces insulation improvements and double glazing into the rental housing somehow. The fact that a lot of us are renting and CAN’T do anything about the efficiency of our housing is one of the failings of the way NZ treats its housing market.
respectfully
BJ
April 29th, 2006 at 1:50 am
Fastbike: While the FOE UK proposals are interesting, they also come with a price tag that would make your eyes water. I mean, forcing all cars to be hybrids? Thats going to cost a fortune. I hope FOE is volunteering to pay.
Many of their ideas are also practically impossible: community gas-fired electricity and heat, well you would have to retro-fit this to millions of Victorian terrace houses somehow? Who’s going to pay for that! And given that gas is so short in Europe and the UK, any new generation capacity is likely to be obsolete within a decade due to gas costs.
The amount of biomass needed to produce those kinds of numbers would be massive and displace local food crops, and the UK doesn’t have that much arable farmland anyway, so I don’t think thats a solution either.
In short, the UK has some much tougher choices coming than NZ.
“I’d like to see a program that forces insulation improvements and double glazing into the rental housing somehow. ”
I agree, but this is not a guarantee that energy usage will go down. It may just mean that people wear T-shirts instead of jumpers indoors.
In the end, I the biggest thing that will work is simple price signals. If petrol is $10 a litre, you will get a lot more walking, cycling and trains. If domestic gas costs $200 a month, people will use less gas.
April 29th, 2006 at 10:16 am
It seems rather defeatist to say simply that something can’t be done, without doing the sums, and also looking at what the long term cost is of NOT acting (in terms of environmental damage, but also in economic terms) I agree there are difficulties, but they are political not economic. We could quite easily afford the FOE UK measures and fund them by levies on petrol, gas, electiricty and cars. Those using those services will then be paying the full cost of using these goods and services, including cost to the environment. Helen is making a false dichotomy when she sees the choice as either no power or coal. But perhaps she just thinks it will be too hard to get people to cut down on fossil fuels, and that is where the real difficulty lies.
April 30th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Without getting into a tit-for-tat rebuttal.
Hybrid cars - useful technology but no silver bullet - still in it’s infancy. Under our normal technological price/performance experience it would be reasonable to assume production prices to fall. Note the waiting length for a Prius, no serious competition in the market place yet (Honda is a different class - and issues such shortage of component parts etc) and I’d be surprised if it wasn’t one of the most profitable models Toyota have ever produced.
None of these technologies (hybrids, wind pwer, biofuels, etc) ON ITS OWN will get us out of the hole. A mix is required.
Yes, I agree the UK has more of a problem than NZ - I have family members with young children there too !! I won’t be surprised to see significant emigration from the UK over the next decade. It has happened before and will happen again.
Price signals - can be useful but unfortunately often come too late to move the market - instead just causing pain at one end and profiteeering at the other.
I.e. the pensioner who can’t afford to move or insulate suffers - the oil company is spending no more to produce that $75 barrell of oil but is making a kiliing. Look at the profit figures for the major IOCs, formerly nicknamed the ‘Seven Sisters’ but now shrunk to 5 Anxious Dwarfs. (Thanks to Andrew McKillop for that moniker).
April 30th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Real Climate covered this conference too. I found the
following very informative.
The contrarian denialists are still out there, running flat out. This is an article well worth taking the time to read so you can trot out the main points next time a climate change denier makes a pronouncement.
May 1st, 2006 at 9:46 am
“climate change seems doomed to remain a contentious science for now”
All science is contentious. It works partly by co-operation and consensus, and partly by skepticism and contention. There will always be a few scientists in any field holding extremist positions and claiming that the mainstream view is wrong. For science that’s usually a good thing: it means that alternative lines of research are explored and that alternative positions are considered. Having some critics from outside the mainstream acting as critics helps the mainstream get things right.
It can get a bit bizarre when you get the few conservatives who are way outside the mainstream. There was a US professors of geology publishing textbooks right into the 1970s that were simply denying the existence of continental drift. How could something as heavy as a continent float around, for god’s sake? The entire field had moved on - but not them.
The problem is when outsiders look in and assume that all views within a field are equal. Imagine a reporter interviewing a geology professor in the 1970s who denied the existence of continental drift, and writing a story claiming that continental drift was all a conspiracy of mindless consensus by geophysicists trying to get funding. How absurd. Yet how similar to claims we see today regards global warming.