Review of Stern

Avoiding the many jobs I have to do, I gave myself the fleeting pleasure of reading the news and blogs over my early morning coffee. The Guardian had a compelling interview with Nicholas Stern, the former UK government climate economist. Here's the full article, and here's an extract:

"Recklessness is the only word. I mean, we have to recognise the scale of the risk. If we go on at anything like business as usual, we'll be at concentration levels by the end of this century which will give us around a 50-50 chance of being above five degrees centigrade relative to, say, the 19th century. We humans are only 100,000 years old. We haven't seen that for 30 to 50 million years. We haven't seen three degrees centigrade for three million years. The idea that humans can easily adapt to conditions like these ..." He lets the proposition tail away, too foolish even for words.

"What will we do? We'll move. People will move. Why? Because much of southern Europe will be desert. Other places will become underwater. Others will be hit by such severe storms with such frequency that they become almost uninhabitable. So hundreds of millions of people will move. You're already seeing people moving in Darfur, where droughts devastated the grazing land of pastoralist people, and they moved, and come into conflict with people in the places they're moving to. We're seeing that already on just a 0.8 degree rise. We're the first generation that has the power to destroy the planet. You're re-writing the planet. So you can only describe as reckless ignoring risks like that."

At the heart of Stern's work is a simple calculation. If the science on climate change is right, the transition costs incurred by switching to a low-carbon economy will - however daunting - be a fraction of what we will save by averting disaster. If the science is wrong, and we incur those costs unnecessarily, they would be "very far from disastrous", and we would still benefit, "because we will have a world that is more energy efficient, with new and cleaner technologies, and is more biodiverse as a result of protecting the forests". The logic of the argument is compelling, but is there any part of Stern that believes the science could be wrong?

"It's very, very remote," he says slowly. Less than one in 100? He looks surprised. "Oh, much, much less." The puzzle must therefore be why anyone would still doubt it. Nigel Lawson, for example, dismissed his review as "fraudulent", and published a book last year disputing the entire scientific premise of climate change.

"As an undergraduate, I did maths and physics. That doesn't make me a scientist," Stern responds, with exaggerated patience. "So I try to read and understand and talk to scientists. I'm staggered by how many people who are lawyers, or politicians ..." Or former chancellors? "For example," he agrees drily. "Taxi drivers. People behind bars. People cutting hair. They all seem to be knowledgeable and expert on the science.

"In public policy we have to understand a little bit about nuclear physics, and biochemistry, and genetics. So what do you do if you want to understand about genetics? You talk to a geneticist. You don't turn to taxi drivers or politicians. Both respectable professions, but you don't go to them for the science of climate change, you go to scientists. And what do you hear? That this is basically simple physics. It's not as if it's something strange or mysterious that people can't explain to you. It's not something outside the experimental. The greenhouse effect is something you can observe experimentally - and most people have observed the greenhouse effect themselves, in greenhouses. Yes?"

Does Stern feel angry with sceptics - or, as he calls them, irrational optimists? "Well, they're marginal now," he says with rather withering indifference. When he finds himself sitting next to one at a dinner party, does he even bother to argue? "I still believe in rational argument and communication. It's our duty to try. But it is an area in which people can be deliberately destructive," he says disdainfully. "There's a kind of yah boo argument: 'Don't believe it, don't believe it, don't believe it.' Or using language that's slightly more colourful, like that Paul Whitehouse character who said bollocks to everything. That's the kind of thing. It's yah boo stuff."

Stern suspects their perversity is ultimately down to political prejudice. He has no patience with those on the right who assume climate change is just a Trojan horse - an excuse for the left to interfere in the market. "This is about trying to help markets work. This isn't anti-market, this is about making markets work well. My position is pro-markets and pro-growth - not anti-growth. Indeed, it's ignoring the problem that will kill off the growth. High carbon growth kills itself. First on very high hydrocarbon prices, but second and, of course, much more fundamentally, on the very hostile physical environment it would create."

But he has even less time for those on the left who think climate change is "an elitist hobby horse"; a distraction from poverty in the developing world. "We will not overcome world poverty unless we manage climate change successfully. I've spent my life as a development economist, and it's crystal clear that we succeed or fail on winning the battle against world poverty and managing climate change together. If we fail on one, we fail on the other."

Bench tests, destructive testing, and design failures

We had a fun-filled hour or two in the shop the other day bench testing the new wind turbine for the Eco-Cottage. This is a small, four bedroom, student dorm equipped with a stand-alone solar/wind system to charge batteries.

The system, intended as a demonstrator, is essentially what you would build if you had a small homestead, cottage, or camp, and were able to use some other form of power than electricity for cooking, refrigeration, and water pumping. These three needs constitute by far the largest drawers of electricity in most houses, and so if you, for example, cook and refrigerate with propane, and install a gravity fed water system that pressurizes with one pump and pumps with another 'trickle pump" to a header tank, then you can reduce the needed KWH by about two thirds. This doesn't save much energy or climate emissions, as you are still cooking and refrigerating with a fossil fuel, but it does save a lot of money in setting up an off-grid home, because solar photovoltaic panels remain very expensive, despite major recent improvements in production efficiency.

A household scale solar PV system capable of cooking, providing refrigeration, pumping water with a regular jet or submersible pump, and the rest of regular household electrical needs of about 600-700 KHW/month, will cost you over $30,000 in the state of Maine. We have one of these larger systems too, also intended as a demonstrator, in the shape of the Unity House. Indeed, the Unity House is so well-insulated and designed, the solar electrical system also heats the home when the passive solar heating system does not, on cold, cloudy days in winter. The house has a connection to the grid, which it uses as a kind of virtual storage battery, but over the course of the year it draws no net power from that grid. The power it borrows in winter, it gives back in summer.

Both houses, and both types of system, the $3,000 minimal battery-powered system, and the $30,000 grid-tied system, would be yet more effective with wind turbines also attached. The nature of household scale wind in Maine is that it tends to be available when solar power is not, on cold stormy days in winter, and so you can downsize a solar array considerably if you have a wind power system too. The economics of this are such that if you have a windy site, you might save $5,000 or $10,000 of photovoltaic resource by fitting $1,000 or $2,000 of small wind turbine.

So we built our own small turbine for the Eco-Cottage, which we ran off-and-on due to various mechanical failures, for about five years. It finally blew itself apart in a gale a few months ago, and I've been trying to find the time to replace it.

To replace the home-built device, we purchased a Southwest Windpower Air X, one of several small wind turbines on the market, although likely the most popular American-made brand. This device is regulated in high winds, up to 120 mph, by a combination of blade flutter and variable generator resistance. It can aslo be remotely shut down by throwing a "stop switch." None of these protections were built in to our homemade device.

The Air X has some standard bench tests detailed by the manufacturer, and recommended before installation. (It's a big pain to fly a wind turbine on a tall, difficult to raise tower, only to find it doesn't want to work!)

I used the bench test opportunity for a lesson on aerodynamics and electricity for some of our first and second year students. I also got a little help from our senior residents of the Eco-Cottage, who have had the same lessons from time to time with the older home-built turbine.

The remnants of the older turbine were also available for inspection, and from these we were able to determine forensically how it died. The blades and hub, which were purchased as a kit from an wind engineering parts store, showed damage, but this was secondary. The primary cause was the failure of the connection between the hub and the generator. This had loosened, and the mild steel hub had worn itself a bigger hole, also wearing out the connecting nut and slightly damaging the generator shaft, and eventually falling off, damaging the blades.

The usual correction for such a problem would be some kind of keyed or slotted connection between the hub and the generator shaft, and indeed the purpose-built Air X has a kind of locking system like this built into the hub. But the home built turbine used a special permanent magnet rotor fitted to the stator from a car alternator (actually a circa 1969 AC Delco model). Car alternators typically do not use keyed shafts.

So the Achilles heel of our Envirothon model turbine is in these off-the-shelf engineering parts, and some more positive connection between the shaft and hub is required for long life. A spot weld, some epoxy glue, split washers, or a machined slot and Woodruff key, any of these or a combination would likely suffice. None would do much to help the cut-in speed of the turbine though, which we found by direct measurement some years ago to be 15 mph, far too high for our site. This home-built device really only produces significant power above 20 mph, at which point it can make quite a bit. But 20 mph winds only occur around 3 per cent of the time on this particular site, on top of this particular tower.

While the generator itself, which we also tested, was undamaged. It seems that the permanent magnet alternators created by modifying this particular car alternator are quite rugged, and might be used in many helpful developing world applications.

I believe the Harris mini-hydroelectric turbine uses a similar concept.

But not for wind turbines. Not without some kind of expensive reduction gear, and probably much larger blades to overcome the increased resistance that would result. An engineering dead end.

However, using the standard anemometry models, the Power Law and the Weibull distribution, to produce this <3% estimate is also a good lesson. So is the forensic work to determine how the old experimental model failed.

I'd like to have better facilities and bigger, better equipment for these students to work with in this fashion, and am working on a scheme to get access to an industrial scale turbine in the locality. We already have pretty good demonstrators for most renewable technologies, scattered between the Unity Campus and the MOFGA campus, where my colleagues CJ, Verne, and John Mac allow us regular access with students and visitors. We have in total two wind installations, four solar PV, one solar air, and one passive solar house between us, all up and running and working well. The Unity House, at 5KW capacity, with all its design lessons built-in, may be one of the 5 or 10 largest PV installations in the state, and certainly is the best combined technology demonstrator in the state. Not to mention various local sites for household retrofit and weatherization. We can also look at the Beaver Ridge turbines from afar, and learn some very interesting lessons from the planning issues and local concerns they raised.

In the meantime we continue our efforts to grow the program. We're looking for bright, dedicated, engaged students interested in solving environmental problems by working with energy, energy policy, engineering, technology, economics, analysis, and management. Our current group of first years include some of the best students Unity College has ever attracted.

The last picture above is me hamming it up for the camera at the Admissions Open House this last Saturday. I displayed the Air X.

Funnily enough, I always spend more time answering questions from parents than from students.

Not that surprising. Parents read the news. 18 year-olds generally don't.

Community Wind Assessment

Most regular readers will know I run a Community Wind Assessment program, which uses donated equipment and training (thanks to NRG Systems, Coastal Enterprises Inc. and Efficiency Maine for the support and encouragement) and students' time to help find answers to science questions about wind for Maine communities.

The primary service we provide is the loan of anemometer equipment, which we erect and maintain, to measure the wind resource at a given site. We also offer help with wind resource analysis using computer models, and with economic analysis of specific turbine installations.

Generally speaking, I try to include students in this work on a regular basis as a co-curricular activity. Students that sign up during pre-registration for the Wind Assessment seminar next fall will get curricular credit. The seminar will include a lot of site visits and field work.

Currently we are planning anemometry field seasons for sites in southern and midcoast Maine. We are writing a final report for the Mount View High School site, for which we have two years of data. (This was our first site.)

We are also providing preliminary advice and site assessments to two other communities who may proceed to the anemometry stage this year.

If you belong to a Maine community, are an individual or group, a selector or a planning board or local environmental group, you can explore or access this service by contacting me at mwomersley@unity.edu

Allow at least 48 hours for me to get back to you.

Times article: Wilderness, nature vs. energy

Photo: my dream home turbine awaits TLC in a North Dakota lot.


Here's an NYT piece with an overview of a major debate taking place all around the country in lots of places where exploration for sites for wind and solar energy farms are controversial with local and regional environmentalists.

This is more or less what we have in Waldo County as the anti-wind power lobby in Jackson and Dixmont gathers steam.

Of course, were we to study the energy needs nationally, and then consider mapping areas based on suitability, with overlays for wildlife and other conservation considerations we might get further faster, but I don't think for a moment that would solve the problem. Ken Salazar, it seems, has proposed just such a process for Interior Department lands.

Good luck with that.

Even when the perfectly rational energy map gave birth to the perfectly rational energy policy, we would have a perfectly irrational scramble as those areas with most money and support got protection, while those with least did not. In Maine, that will likely mean that the debate over wind plants in interior Waldo is nothing compared to the debate that will come when the real opposition gets going, from second-homers down on the coast.

One solution, the one that makes sense to me, is a process whereby localities dip our toes with small scale local projects, however inefficient they may be in comparison with mega-farms, and use the siting work and the eventual turbines themselves to educate ourselves and build awareness of the benefits and downsides of wind. If, at the end of some of that kind of work, the majorities in towns were against wind, then we would at least be experienced in the reasons why.

My guess is, given the chance to vote at a Town Meeting or special Town Meeting that was properly announced, and not at some weird time when the larger number of folks mildly in favor of wind would not be overwhelmed by small numbers of folks dead set against it, the majority of Mainers would vote in favor of properly sited wind turbines right now. But given time and smaller projects, and community owned ones, to get used to the ideas and equipment, we'd be much more educated consumers, less susceptible to misleading propaganda from the national anti-wind blogosphere, or the industrial companies.

Heaven forbid that debate in America NOT be dominated by polarized extremes producing manipulation and misinformation. That would be un-American, wouldn't it?

In the meantime, I have two small turbines to put up, a replacement one at college where there's been a tiny one since students and I made it and put it up several years ago. It's broken, and so we bought a new one that we have to put up. I'd like to take the broken parts of the old one and recycle them into a small turbine for my home back-up power system. However, it looks like I'd better hurry, since if the anti-wind group in Jackson has it's way, I may not be able to put this little turbine up without an elaborate permit process.

In fact the way the proposed Jackson wind ordinance is written seems designed to preclude me doing the sort of experimental/education work I do, where we put up and take down turbines fairly regularly, at home. In particular, I would be required to provide sound data to the codes enforcement officer for all turbines I might wish to put up.

Which means the next time I make a home-built turbine, if I want to put it up in Jackson, not Unity, I may have to spend more hours producing an engineer's acoustical report than I do making the turbine.

All this for a project whose design was used for the Maine Envirothon by several high schools.

(To get a PowerPoint how-to slide show made for the Envirothon, go here: http://www.unity.edu/facultypages/womersley/windturbine.ppt)

Good grief, Charlie Brown.

I guess that privately owned, re-powered Vestas V-15 I was going to get and fix up myself (after I finished all the farm retrofit and insulation, and paid off the credit cards, and bought a new car for Aimee, and did the rest of the honey-do) is out of the question.

Which just makes me sad.

Help for first generation college kids, and others

Many years ago, now, I wrote a argument proposing a fairly elaborate National Service Corps for the US. The essay was published in Philosophy and Public Policy, and then republished in a decadal "best of" anthology from the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. The paper was a response to a previous argument from Bill Galston, an important Democratic party think tank researcher, and Robert K. Fullinwider, an IPPP scholar.

I obviously can't claim that this new program stems from my paper. Several other authors have had the same idea over the years.

But I am glad to see this bill. It will make life much better for students from lower income families who have a good work ethic, but few resources to get through college.

The most important resource is rarely cash.

One thing that volunteering does for you, especially if your parents and grandparents never went to college and don't have much interest in your career or ability to give advice, all of which is often true for first-time college families, is that it exposes you to new situations where you will meet new, more worldly mentors at that crucial time early in your career, people who can help you norm your reasoning about college and about careers to realistic notions. You can get experience, advice, direction, and recommendations.

At age 18 or 19, good advice is better than gold.

Kids from wealthy families take all this help for granted. Kids from first generation college families often have no clue. This is because the parents often have no clue.

My own parents still don't understand what I do for a living, nor are they even really aware that I even have a doctorate. They have no facility to understand, really, what it's all about. They've never been able to give me any helpful or realistic advice. Honestly, I don't think they really care, either. They do care about me, but not about may career. It's just another job to them. I don't blame them for this, neither do I particularly mind. They both failed the UK's former "II-plus exam," a hideous education policy that trash-canned millions of kids at the very early age of eleven and reinforced the terrible UK social class structure. Accordingly they both dropped out of school at age 15, able to read and write and figure a little, but not much else. The consequence for me was, no-one was around to help me figure out how to get on in the world. I had to invent it all for myself. I was never particularly tractable, so this was a messy decade or two for me.

But that means I am extremely concerned about helping my own students who lack these resources.

When I can get them to listen. Students of course, don't always appreciate what you give them!

The money is helpful too.


By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN----NYT
Published: March 18, 2009
WASHINGTON — The House voted Wednesday to approve the largest expansion of government-sponsored service programs since President John F. Kennedy first called for the creation of a national community service corps in 1963.

The legislation, which passed by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 321 to 105, would more than triple the number of service positions by expanding AmeriCorps and creating volunteer programs focused on education, health care, clean energy and veterans. The total number of positions would grow to 250,000 from 75,000 now in AmeriCorps.

The Senate is expected to adopt a nearly identical bill early next week.

The action by the House came three weeks and a day after President Obama in his first speech to a joint session of Congress called for “a renewed spirit of national service for this and future generations,” and lawmakers said they were answering his challenge.

The broad expansion of AmeriCorps, at a cost of nearly $6 billion over the next five years, would establish Mr. Obama as the boldest proponent of service programs since Kennedy exhorted Americans to “ask what you can do for your country.”

Mr. Obama, in a statement, praised the House vote. “At this moment of economic crisis, when so many people are in need of help and so much needs to be done, this could not be more urgent,” he said, adding, “It is up to every one of us to do his or her small part to make the world a better place.”

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, said, “This has been a great day.”

Critics, however, expressed concern about the cost of the measure, and some said the money could be better spent, perhaps on raises for members of the military. A single Democrat joined 104 Republicans in opposing the bill; 251 Democrats and 70 Republicans voted for it.

In addition to expanding the number of positions, the bill would raise the education stipend for volunteers to $5,350 — the same amount as a Pell Grant.

The legislation is a top priority of the first lady, Michelle Obama, who has said public service will be a main focus of hers in the White House. She founded the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program, after leaving her law career.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said Mrs. Obama had pulled him aside at a White House dinner to introduce herself and express her keen interest in the bill moving quickly.

At a lunch with Mr. Obama the next day, Mr. Miller recounted the conversation, aides said, prompting a jovial warning from the president. “Speaking from long-term experience,” he said, “it sounds to me like you better get that bill out of committee.”

Kennedy’s service program, which began after his death, was called Vista, Volunteers in Service to America. The House bill is the GIVE Act, for Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education. The Senate legislation has a simpler name: the Serve America Act.

Mr. Obama’s budget provides $1.2 billion for the expansion of programs in the next fiscal year.

The House bill seeks to encourage middle school and high school students to engage in volunteer activities, allowing them to earn a $500 education credit to be used for college costs. It also establishes “youth engagement zones,” a new service-learning program intended to establish partnerships between community organizations and schools in high-poverty neighborhoods.

The bill seeks to establish Sept. 11 as a national day of service though it would not be a formal holiday.

Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland and a major proponent of the legislation, invoked the nation’s long history of service programs, saying, “This is not about programs; this is about value.”

I'm not sure of the animal's rights aspects of this "extreme sheep-herding" video, but now it's done, you should at least check it out. It's amazing what they were able to do.

Important new modeling report from MIT IGSM

Probabilistic Forecast for 21st Century Climate Based on Uncertainties in Emissions (without Policy) and Climate Parameters

by Sokolov, A.P., P.H. Stone, C.E. Forest, R.G. Prinn, M.C. Sarofim, M. Webster, S. Paltsev, C.A. Schlosser, D. Kicklighter, S. Dutkiewicz, J. Reilly, C. Wang, B. Felzer, H.D. Jacoby (January)
Joint Program Report Series, 44 pages, 2009
Abstract

The MIT Integrated Global System Model is used to make probabilistic projections of climate change from 1861 to 2100. Since the model's first projections were published in 2003 substantial improvements have been made to the model and improved estimates of the probability distributions of uncertain input parameters have become available. The new projections are considerably warmer than the 2003 projections, e.g., the median surface warming in 2091 to 2100 is 5.1°C compared to 2.4°C in the earlier study. Many changes contribute to the stronger warming; among the more important ones are taking into account the cooling in the second half of the 20th century due to volcanic eruptions for input parameter estimation and a more sophisticated method for projecting GDP growth which eliminated many low emission scenarios. However, if recently published data, suggesting stronger 20th century ocean warming, are used to determine the input climate parameters, the median projected warning at the end of the 21st century is only 4.1°C. Nevertheless all our simulations have a very small probability of warming less than 2.4°C, the lower bound of the IPCC AR4 projected likely range for the A1FI scenario, which has forcing very similar to our median projection. The probability distribution for the surface warming produced by our analysis is more symmetric than the distribution assumed by the IPCC due to a different feedback between the climate and the carbon cycle, resulting from a different treatment of the carbon-nitrogen interaction in the terrestrial ecosystem.

Link to full document (1114 kB PDF)