The Impossible Burger isn't good enough. The Beyond Burger is better (also, Beyond Sausage)

So I liked the hype, but after five or six attempts, I'm just not sold on the Impossible Burger. Maybe I need to try it well done, but every patty I've had ends up a thin gooey red mess in the center. I'm guessing it might be okay as a crumbled addition to a entree, like in omelettes or tacos, but not as a burger.

I've blogged before about Beyond Burger as a vegetarian alternative, and I think it's better. No clue why it sits in the grocery stores while Impossible Burgers command a premium at restaurants. Well, one clue - my wife can't stand coconuts, and it has a mild coconut smell and taste..

Anyway, not a burger substitute but far better than any vegetarian dogs I've had is Beyond Sausage, now showing up in my Safeway store. No coconut smell or taste btw. It wasn't so great on an electric grill, but sliced and fried up on a stove, it easily matches regular sausage.

Convenience marches on. Contra David Roberts, I think to the extent environmentally aware people can easily do something more, we should do so.

Please please please not Bernie or Biden (also, think carefully about Klobuchar)

There are ten thousand horrifying gifts regarding Trump's manifest unfitness for office. High up in the ranks of unfitness, because it's objective, is his age as the oldest president ever to assume office tied with his concealment of his health and mental health status. Why then would Democrats choose to nominate someone who is even older? Bernie and Biden are four and three years older than Trump respectively, and at that age that difference counts.

It's easy for me to say this in part because I'm not big fan of either men. Elizabeth Warren is three years younger than Trump. She's also at a point where her age counts somewhat against her - not against Trump, it's in her favor, but against the real chance that Mike Pence (10 years younger) or someone else will be the Republican candidate.

The first main point is that there's a wide range of Dems to choose from - why give up a huge advantage by choosing Biden or Bernie? Warren's age counts moderately against her too in my opinion but not as a disqualifying blow.

A similar analysis relates to Klobuchar - the current evidence seems to pretty closely tilt her from demanding to abusive. I'm not sure it's disqualifying yet, and apparently there's some smoke surrounding Bernie too and other male candidates that should be investigated, but we Democrats have the luxury of a wide range of choices. We can be picky.

The second main point, maybe one for another post, is that Trump's awfulness doesn't guarantee he's going to lose. The most important thing is to beat him, not to get the Democratic candidate that exactly matches our personal political preferences. Time to be picky regarding some political disadvantages among the candidates.

Last point - all Dem candidates, but especially the older ones, should undergo public reviews of their physical and mental health fitness for office. It is now a great time to establish this precedent, one that works against Trump and will be helpful in future elections.


UPDATE: For a contrary opinion, read Everett's multi-part diatribe against my evident ageism and stupidity in the comments. YMMV. FWIW, I'm hitting the age at which I'm just starting to get concerned about ageism as my career progresses, so I obviously don't like ageism. OTOH, despite Bernie's conclusory statement against ageism, I bet that if forced to do it, he'd acknowledge that if a candidate were 10 or 20 years older than him, that candidate's age should be considered as a factor. So should Bernie's.

There he goes again v.93 p.1221....

On his last visit, but before leaving Ethon described a wonderful piece of misdirection from our friend in Colorado, who asks for advice on improving this:

No emissions reduction policy currently under discussion – from changes in personal behavior to those proposed under the Framework Convention on Climate Change – even if successfully implemented will have a discernible effect on the global climate system for at least 50 years.

and points to a statement

NCAR's Jim Hurrell observes, "... it should be recognized that mitigation actions taken now mainly have benefits 50 years and beyond now."

as support for the "scientific accuracy of the first sentence.

Now Ms. Rabett Sr. was school teacher and the first thing Eli noted was the difference between "mainly have benefits" and "no emisions policy will have a discernible effect on the global climate system".

So at a minimum Hurrell says that MOST OF THE BENEFIT will come later, but there will be some earlier than 50 years. He who must not be named twists this into NO DISCERNIBLE EFFECT. Several of the comments point out that policies implimented today will take time to establish, economic systems do not stop on a dime, and that even after the policies are implimented it will take time for the climate system to respond. However, let us look and see if

CA HSR, RIP (kind of)

So just as high speed rail gets a political lift via the Green New Deal, the one active effort bites the dust in California. Read the link though, it's not entirely dead - Newsom committed to a strange little stretch in Central Valley from Merced to Bakersfield that's already partly constructed, and put off the rest for another (undefined) time. Some Amtrak connection to Central Valley could end up making a mixed HSR/normal line run from the Bay Area to LA.

Still, it's depressing if not surprising (I've been hesitant about it for a while). Vox tries to explain why HSR has done poorly, a combination of cost overruns, delays, and political overrides of logic, but that's at best a first-level explanation. Why are cost overruns, delays and politics so much worse for American HSR than in other countries?

Maybe our love affair with cars means that everything else gets second-best efforts. There was also some argument making its way around several years ago that English-speaking advanced economies have far more expensive public infrastructure than in comparable non-English speaking countries (couldn't find a good link on a quick search). The reasons given that I recall were stubborn labor unions, which I find a doubtful distinction, and greater legal costs, which also seem overblown to me. The real cause isn't clear.

Anyway I view the HSR failure as a similar disappointment to each carbon-capture project that bites the dust, usually for the same reason of cost overruns and delays. We need these programs to work.

Still, HSR isn't entirely dead, and alternatives like high-speed autonomous EVs in dedicated lanes could provide similar benefits. And people keep trying CCS, maybe it will eventually work as something we desperately need in order to generate large amounts of negative carbon emissions.



UPDATE - some good analysis from Scott Lemieux:

The crucial underlying problem here is America’s fractured and extraordinarily high-veto-point system, which inevitably leads to substantial inefficiencies and inequities unless (as with roads) the support for them is extremely broad-based and the opposition very weak. Any remotely rational plan would have started with a San Diego-to-LA or an LA-Bakersfield-SF line and proceeded from there, but instead so many local interests had to be bought off that it became white elephant done in a completely irrational sequence, and collapsed. And that’s in one of the most favorable political contexts for such a project.

Another related problem is that NIMBYISM has a serious presence on the left, which can be seen in the fact that the Green New Deal completely ignores the critical need for upzoning and increased housing density. These are both very serious issues.

Eli Rabett's: Dividend and Fee Carbon Taxes

Eli has an idea.  Usual disclaimers.

Let's have a dividend and fee carbon tax. Let's pay the first year dividend and only start to collect the fee in the second, and let's even give bonus' for good deeds, like riding public transport, not using neonicotinoids, giving more carrots to the bunnies and your suggestion goes here.

The Overton window on this is being shoved too and fro.  On the one hand in the US there is a real shift in public opinion toward reality on climate change to it is real, and we must do something about it.  The Green New Deal has a bunch of momentum going for it.  On the other hand the French gilets jaunes have been raising holy hell in the streets of Paris. 

Thus Eli Rabett's simple plan: Pay the first year dividend without collecting the tax.  Institute the tax in the second year.  Where will the money come from the bunnies ask.  Well, think of it as the infrastructure week that the US did not have.  It's an investment, and more will be needed for supporting research and new infrastructure like new nuclear plants and electrical distribution networks.   

So back to the beginning.  Fee and dividend was an idea popularized by Jim Hansen, the idea being that there would be a revenue neutral carbon tax with the revenue being returned to citizens.  In the US this has been taken up by the Citizens Climate Lobby among others including a whole bunch of economists who argue for a carbon fee and dividend plan.  CCL calls for a 100% monthly per person dividend and a border adjustment which would cover the carbon generated in the production and transport of imports. (Eli notes he was one of the first bunnies to talk about the border adjustment feature in the 2007 Eli Rabett's Simple Plan to Save the World).

Now one can argue about the correct costing for a carbon tax, but the general idea is clear and the point of the dividend is to capture the advantages of eliminating CO2 emissions while returning the fee to the public.  Why return the fee, well, some high fees will be needed to get to zero emission, and people will not be happy with paying them (Pay no attention to the folks selling free beer).  Thus pay the dividend up front, tax the carbon later.  Everybody wins

Making Tracks in the US

So with the Green New Deal on the street there is considerable talk about improving railroad travel.  Eli has a couple of perhaps odd points to make.

First high density is NOT something that is needed for fast trains, as a matter of fact it is a hinderance.  It doesn't matter how fast a train is if it has to make a lot of stops and every stop includes significant time decelerating as well as accelerating.  Moreover close to stations a high speed train travels slowly over normal tracks into the station rather than over a high speed right of way.

Ideally the time between stations should be of the order of one to two hours.  For high speed trains this is somewhere between 200 and 400 km (in disgraced units between 120 and 240 miles).  Thus, the East Coast Corridor between Boston and DC might not be a very good place to start as can be seen from the marginal reduction of travel time between the faster trains (Acela Express) and the normal ones on the NY - DC route, much of which is due to additional stops for the slower trains.

So where would be a good place to start.  There are a couple which suggest themselves.  Eli might point to a route linking Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

On Twitter, Paul Farrar, pointed out that Texas might be a good place to start.  Houston to Dallas  has been suggested, but such a route could be built out to include Oklahoma City, Kansas City, St, Louis and Chicago from Dallas, and to New Orleans and Austin from Houston.

So there are many possibilities for high speed rail in the US given the political will.

Which brings the blog to Eli's second point.  Railroads in the US are not electrified.  Even for freight there are places where considerable gains in decreased emissions and efficiency could be made by electrification of freight routes. One of the bedevilments limiting high speed rail passenger travel in the US has been that both freight and passenger trains travel on the same route.  Eli would propose that the lowest hanging fruit is electrification of the major freight routes, followed by building out a separate really high speed passenger rail network, starting in the middle of the country, where the land is mostly flat and population density outside of major cities is low.
   

It's perfectly fine to talk on a cell phone in an elevator

I have climate-related tabs piling up on my browser that I wanted to blog about, but felt I had to start with the important and pressing issue in the headline, first.

Mainly, the time spent in an elevator is brief and wasted, so why not continue a cell phone conversation? Should you really hang up for the 30-60 seconds that the elevator ride takes, and then call the person back, all so you could join the other people standing there facing a door (or possibly stare at your phone but without saying anything).

I don't see a point in not talking. On the train or bus, or maybe in a restroom, it's a longer time period where the other people are stuck with your conversation, so I'd understand a rule of courtesy there, but blab away on a brief elevator ride.

Glad to get that settled.

The left imitating Republicans

I probably should prove something beyond just my sense that it's happening, but I feel that the left side of the political spectrum, a little or a lot closer to where I belong than the other side, is becoming more like Republicans. We believe what we want to believe. Deficits suddenly don't matter any more. We don't like nuclear power and are suspicious of biomass so they're off the table instead of reasoned through. The Republicans careened into office with a president with zero political qualifications for any office, so the Democrats should nominate Oprah Winfrey. A weird and nuanced confrontation between (mostly) white teenagers, a weird cult, and a (not-Vietnam) Native American vet can only be thought of in a single way, and those who rethink it are the liberal version of cucks.

The big advantage America has over say, the UK, is that only one of our two major parties has gone bat-guano insane. We need to keep it that way and hopefully reduce that number over time. It's possible - here in California, Republicans are questionable as a major party (no statewide office in several election cycles, have only about 25% representation in the legislature), and maybe something reasonable will eventually overtake them.

I'm overplaying this a bit. The Oprah boomlet has mostly gone away, and the other issues get pushback. The left seems to be getting over the idea that race is a purely cultural construction but also has complex and nuanced relationship to genetics, one that doesn't fit simplistic racist constructions either.

It's a problem though, and reasonable people need to push back.

Horn tooting

In today's San Jose Mercury News (moderately climate-related):

Opinion: Follow the will of voters and protect San Jose’s Coyote Valley

The 7,400-acre valley stretching from San Jose to Morgan Hill feeds our foothills and provides crucial drinking water

By BRIAN SCHMIDT
 

As the rains come and go through San Jose’s winter sky, the rainwater flows as both a blessing and a curse.

What we overlook is the natural function of the rain. One-third of our drinking water comes from local rains — not the distant Sierra — and offers  a blessing for the working farmland that is an easy bike ride from San Jose’s southern edge. The water feeds the city’s green foothills and the animals in our habitat. It makes the streams navigated by our local fish and countless birds. The curse comes from human mismanagement that exacerbates floods, contaminates drinking water and changes the climate globally so we have either too much rain or too little.

Still, we control the curse, or at least the extent of it, and Tuesday San Jose’s leaders have the chance to act locally to protect land in Coyote Valley as a blessing for our community and the entire region.

This 7,400 acre valley, exactly south of South San Jose, is a gem of farmland and natural habitat that has so far stopped the Bay Area’s sprawl. In it lies the critical area where much of the rainwater as it is shed down from the hills – literally, the watershed – collects into Coyote Creek before being funneled into urban San Jose. In the confined stretches around urban streams, the San Jose floods of February 2017 had nowhere to go but into people’s homes. This tragedy could be compounded by mismanagement in the future, because Coyote Valley has long been slated for conversion from farmland and wetland to pavement, funneling still more flooding into San Jose.

The San Jose City Council on Tuesday afternoon will study Coyote Valley. San Jose’s voters set aside up to $50 million in the recently approved Measure T to buy and improve land for purposes of “water supply, flood control, open space and environmental protection of lands such as Coyote Valley.” Whether the council follows the will of 71 percent of the voters is at question, but clearly this valley is a natural sponge that shouldn’t be paved over.

Nor should councilmembers overlook the other reasons to protect Coyote Valley. The one-third of our drinking water from local rains ends up in our underground aquifer, including the valley. No other large area of that aquifer is so close and unprotected as Coyote Valley. The water ponded at the valley’s surface just this last weekend shows how the shallow depths to bedrock keep water near to the surface or even at the surface. We would never build a factory or an industrial warehouse in the middle of a drinking water reservoir, so why would we do that where the groundwater we drink touches the sky?

Still, this valley is under threat, from misguided ideas to replace undeveloped open land between San Jose and Morgan Hill with sprawl. The latest version of that threat would build vast warehouses, replacing Coyote Valley’s life with storage, all for a child’s handful of jobs and not the economic nirvana we were previously promised. This is not what San Jose needs or how the people voted.

The farmland and natural habitat come together here: bobcats, badgers, even mountain lions cross at the valley where mountain ranges come so close they almost kiss. San Jose’s ambitious climate plans mean developing up, not sprawling out.

The blessing that the rains bring, and the curse of our mishandling them, come together at Coyote Valley. San Jose can avoid that curse and create something beautiful by protecting Coyote Valley.


 

Brian Schmidt is the program director for the Greenbelt Alliance.
 

Gavin Explains It All

Well, Eli is retired so he is outsourcing to Gavin Schmidt who,explained it all in a series of tweets with the BlackPhysicists Tweeter.  They actually, between them had a real conversation of value, which Eli here unrolls.  Below the BlackPhysicists are in italic.  Gavin does the rest.  The sequence started with.

 @BlackPhysicists  Today our #iteachphysics topic is tools and pedagogy for teaching #weather and #climate physics. One goal of today's #iteachphysics chat is how do physics teachers include in the usual #physics curriculum, absent a specialized course, enough background and foundational knowledge to make our students better consumers of, explainers of #weather and #climate physics

I’d say to start with thermodynamics. Heat, density, convection and then Clausius-clapyeron. Condensation/evaporation and conservation of mass/energy, you have most of the principles. Coriolis rounds it off.

@BlackPhysicists In general #physics we do not spend a whole lot of time on classical #thermodynamics, but thermodynamics is essential in understanding #weather phenomena. See hurricanes described as a Carnot cycle in @PhysicsToday 

 It doesn’t need to be all-in thermo, more just the concepts. PV=nRT, buoyancy, condensation...




@BlackPhysicists  In almost every broadcast meteorologist's report we hear the term "weather model." What are weather models, exactly, and how do they work?




Here is another great animation of a weather model that includes atmospheric composition of aerosols (particulates): 

And here is an excellent primer for climate models

@BlackPhysicists There are enough wildfires and volcano eruptions happening at one time to effect #weather on a large scale?

Good Q. Small volcanoes and fires add to the background climate for sure. Impacts on weather forecasts are more subtle, but by changing where solar/IR energy is absorbed/reflected they can affect temp gradients and hence dynamics.

@BlackPhysicists What do you think re: best practices to teach probability & stochasticity, parameterization & estimation, error and bias?

 More Chaos theory/Lorentz attractor etc. Parameterisation and emergence are trickier but there are some @TEDTalks on that. 

I generally don’t find that numerical analysis as taught is particularly useful though.

 Dust can affect hurricane development (at least it has been hypothesized to). And smoke/aerosols impact air quality directly - something weather models are increasingly predicting as well.

@BlackPhysicists  In fact the group at @NCASNews led by @vernon_morris is expert on dust from the Sahel leading to African Easterly Waves and Western Hemisphere hurricanes. I think in this presentation there a slide showing North American hurricane tracks emanating from the Senegal, Gambia area.

 @BlackPhysicists Switching gears to #climate physics, in your experience do students have difficulty understanding the difference between weather and climate? This seems to be a major problem in TV punditry and probably most public discourse on weather and climate.

Actually no. Once explained - lots of good metaphors available - ppl generally get it. The ‘confusion’ one sees in punditry is fake - a position taken for rhetorical effect rather than any real misunderstanding.

Here’s a good metaphor. Climate is the clothes in your closet, weather is what you are wearing right now. The weather is constrained by the climate (you can’t wear clothes you don’t have), and the closet can change over time (new purchases/gifts), sometimes abruptly!

 @BlackPhysicists What are the basic equations from #physics of a good climate model? What are the dichotomies (false or otherwise) between ‘weather’ models and ‘climate’ models?

Atmospheric physics is basically the same - slightly different levels of truncation (spatial resolution etc) since climate models have to run longer and with more components (oceans, sea ice, composition, biosphere (to some extent)). But major difference in conservation properties and ingestion of observations.

For a weather model, continual updating with observations means small businesses imbalances don’t matter much. But climate models don’t ingest obs like this so small biases can build (model ‘drift’). Conservation is key.  Other issues are the diagnostics one is interested in. With weather, you want the specific trajectory of storms/fronts etc, with climate you want the statistical description (how many storms/what tracks) because that is where the skill is.

Actually, understanding the notion of skill is key for both kinds of model - how can you judge if a model is useful despite it not being perfect?

 @BlackPhysicists  @RogerAPielkeSr offers a lot of great resources in both #weather and #climate. One defn he's offered: Definition 1:Weather is separated by climate just by averaging time period; e.g. a 30 year time average temperature we call "climate" 

That’s been true historically, but that’s a little arbitrary and not fundamental. I would prefer a distinction based on forecasts of specific trajectories vs statistics of trajectories. An example might help.

@BlackPhysicists Right, it is possible, even necessary, to draw a distinction between a time average and more detailed statistics, even as basic as the meaning of standard deviation. That is an important point I think that's lost in a lot intro measurement in #physics 

Take Mt Pinatubo eruption. A very large forcing on the climate system, which had detectable impacts on rainfall, temperature, wind patterns. It didn’t extend the predictability of weather forecasts, however the statistical impacts were predicted skillfully by climate models.

Those climate forecasts were for 1, 2, 3 years out. Much shorter than the ‘30 year’ period you mentioned. The issue is one of signal and noise. For slow changes in forcings (or none), 30 years is a good period to average out a lot of internal variability. But for a big signal (like Pinatubo), the climate impacts easily exceed the ‘noise’ of the weather. Same with the seasons! (Note ‘noise’ here isn’t pejorative- one person’s noise is another’s signal after all). Bottom line, there is no longer single time period that separates weather and climate.

@BlackPhysicists I think a key bridge to build in the #physics curriculum is micro- meso- scale physics of how these things, aerosols, dust, etc affect #weather and #climate. That and the spectral decomposition of light and its effects 

How do you bridge weather models' that are built on 1st principle physics (continuity, Navier-Stokes, advection-diffusion of energy) to climate models? The latter isn't just long-time simulations of the former on meaningful grids and timesteps?

This is of course intended to be a counter-positional question 🤓 #

They aren’t different in principle. But all these models need to have a scale (in time/space) below which they are not resolving the ‘true’ equations. For weather models that scale is a little smaller than for climate models, but for both it’s getting smaller over time.

@BlackPhysicists And that is an important point that I think a lot of people don't get about computational physics, i.e., that pushing computational limits possibly/likely will reveal new physics just like increasing resolution, repetition rate etc of measurement does 

@BlackPhysicists Jan 12 More #iteachphysics @ClimateOfGavin you've been a great help today. Before we end, there are 2 related concepts sea surface temperature and ocean heat content. How can we best explain to students the difference between the two?

More Sea surface temperature is a diagnostic of what’s happening at the surface (duh!). It’s the field that has the direct connection to the atmosphere (via radiation, evap etc.). It is changes in SST that allow for the planet to requilibirate to any change in radiative forcing.

But ocean heat content changes writ large are tied to the planetary imbalance (how much more energy are we bringing in than losing to space). It was predicted in the 1980s that if the predictions of global warming were right for the right reasons, the signal would be in the OHC

Some discussions of that here in the light of recent updates and discussions:

@BlackPhysicists If you have time, could you give your take home message from the @NatureClimate paper that was in the news this week.

@BlackPhysicists I think I meant this report, which is more from an IPCC report at not the @NatureClimate paper. 

It's kind of covered in the @RealClimate piece I tweeted earlier. As non-climatic artifacts are removed from the OHC analyses and more data is being ingested from Argo etc, the predictions from GCMs are being nicely validated.

Eli Explains It All: Or Why Just About Everybunny Gets Energy Thermal Energy Transfer Between the Surface and the Atmosphere Wrong

Everybunny who has been hanging about the Climateball Court for the Christmas Dinner Playoffs has heard the bit about how heat transfer from the surface to the atmosphere by radiation is small compared to that by convection.

Eli posted an elegant explanation of why that was, well to be nice, complete bollocks, but thinking about it again the Bunny has come up with a simple one that you could explain even to your obstreperous uncle next big family dinner.  Well.....maybe.

Perhaps we start with the usual figure

and the usual argument, that the heat flow into the atmosphere by evaporation and sensible heat is 104 W/m² is massive while radiation only accounts for 398 - 342 W/m² which is a minuscule 56 W/m².  Limited sarcasm about minuscule.

There is a major problem with this.

It assumes that there is a difference between thermal energy that has entered the atmosphere from evaporation and sensible heat and thermal energy that entered the atmosphere by radiation.  

Nope

Let Eli reduce this to jelly beans.

If three bunnies put black jelly beans into a well shaken jar can anybunny tell Eli which one donated the black jelly bean he took out and is munching on?

I'll take Bashkirtsev's can't-lose side of the bet with James Annan

James Annan is low-key:

The bet - final outcome

You may be wondering what had happened with this. As you will recall, some time ago I arranged a bet with two Russian solar scientists who had predicted that the world was going to cool down. The terms of the bet were very simple, we would compare the global mean average surface temperature between 1998-2003 and 2012-17 (according to NCDC), and if the latter period was warmer, I would win $10,000 from them, and if it was cooler, they would win the same amount. See here and here for some of the news coverage at the time.

The results were in a while ago, and of course I won easily.....

So this should be the point at which I ask my blog readers for ideas as to what to spend the $10,000 on. I was hoping to do something that would be climatically and environmentally beneficial, perhaps something that might garner a bit of publicity and make a larger contribution. But they are refusing to pay. More precisely, Bashkirtsev is refusing to pay, and Mashnich is refusing to even reply to email. With impressive chutzpah, Bashkirtsev proposed we should arrange a follow-up bet which he would promise to honour. Of course I'd be happy to consider such a thing, once the first bet is settled. But it looks unlikely that this is going to happen.

Clearly, James was out-maneuvered, and that's why I prefer Bashkirtsev's position. You make a bet with someone honorable, and if he loses, he pays, while if terms come out wrong for you, then you refuse to pay and instead offer him a new chance to lose his money. Repeat as needed.

I'll take a bet that gives me a one-in-a-million chance of winning and zero chance of losing. Bashkirtsev, I salute you!

More seriously, Nature magazine covered the original bet and should cover the resolution. Better yet, they should fly James to Russia and do an ambush video of the two Russians. Or fly ME there, I'll pretend to be James and scream WHERE'S MY MONEY, DENIALISTS??? WHERE'S MY MONEY?!!!

As a side note, I've criticized my own bets with David Evans as being over-complicated, but we did address this issue via an escalating series of bet amounts over three time periods, so there's that. And David seems honorable to me, however wrong wrong wrong, dangerously wrong, he may be on climate.

Another side note, here's a blog on climate betting: http://ohbwaa.blogspot.com/. I kind of think the moment has passed due to denialists being mostly unwilling to pony up (I've probably challenged over a dozen, and I know many others have done the same), but good for this blogger for publicizing it.

My take - The Carbon Tax Is Dead, Long Live the Carbon Tax?

While I'm inventing traditions, how about a new one that a blog post riffing off another blog post should directly steal the headline?

So I'm riffing off of William's post regarding the lab experiment in Washington State, with a revenue-neutral carbon tax in 2016 failing (William appears to obliquely refer to this one), and now a revenue-generating carbon tax in 2018 also failing.

For the audience of climate bloggers and their readers, I'll put the most relevant-to-them point first rather than bury it like I usually do: scientists and engineers seem to treat scientific and engineering challenges as legitimate while political challenges are somehow illegitimate combinations of incompetence and corruption. As a once (and apparently, now again) small-pond politician, I'll just say the political challenges of climate change would be easy if you could provide perfect long term and short term localized forecasts, and provide a no-cost engineering solution to the problem. These are all human problems.

Political challenges are as mind-bendingly difficult. Neither William nor Tyler Cowen are announcing magic solutions that will win political contests, so maybe that's a recognition on their part that the challenge is real.

Not that I have a magic solution either. I think Churchill's sayings about democracy being the worst government type except for all the other types, and that Americans can be counted on to do the right thing after exhausting all other options, might apply to Washingtonians. Maybe third time's the charm for Washington State, and some impure compromise between the two prior initiatives can succeed.

And speaking of impurity, there's the fossil fuel companies. Yes, the public has moral agency and protecting democracy is ultimately up to them, but fossil fuel companies throwing sand in their eyes and buying out their representatives isn't helping. They more than deserve their share of blame, especially as they hypocritically claim to support a carbon tax and then do their best to stop one from happening.

I'll end with a only half-joking suggestion: "Tax Carbon, Not Trucks, Beer, or Harleys". Set up a carbon tax, and stop taxing cars, trucks, beer, and motorcycles. The government gets to keep the extra tax revenue after making up for the lost tax revenue from those other sources.

Eli Explains It All: No Atmospheric CO2 Is Not Saturated

One of the evergreens, besides the one that more CO2 is needed to grow more lettuce, is that the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere is saturated.

Part of the TL:DR to this is actually interesting and in the optional reading below, but the short of it is that the role CO2 plays in the atmosphere is to radiate a considerable amount of energy to space.  This is needed to balance the energy coming in from the sun.

In the atmosphere the higher you go the colder it gets till you hit the tropopause.

The amount of energy that can be radiated to space by CO2 depends on the fourth power of the temperature at the level it is radiated to space from

The effective level the CO2 can radiate to space from rises linearly with the increase in concentration. 

Until the effective radiative level is above the tropopause, adding more CO2 slows the emission to space and thus the surface has to warm in response.

Eli has written on this before.  If you look at the emission spectrum from way up high the sharp spike in the middle of the CO2 band is where the concentration is so high that radiation cannot be emitted to space except high up in the stratosphere.

Everywhere else in the CO2 band emission is occurring in the troposphere (you can tell by looking at the temperatures, and you can tell by looking at the emission) and adding CO2 will decrease the amount of emission in the CO2 band.

Now the interesting stuff.  The optical density in the CO2 band below the effective radiative altitude is so high that any emission in that region is absorbed, at the surface in the first kilometer, on line center in the first 10 m.  The temperature in the first 10 m is essentially that at the surface.  That means emission from collisionally excited CO2 will be strong, with roughly half going back to the ground.  Increase CO2 and the backradiation will increase proportionally because there is more CO2.

That means by definition that much of the greenhouse gas effect on surface temperature is local to a few meters above the surface.

Worse, the stronger low lying backradiation slows down convection although it will speed up evaporation.

This is actually all buried in the computer code outputs from radiation transfer models, less so from gcms which don't slice and dice the layers so finely, but it is something to think about

Call it Our Party Housecleaning. Or just somewhat-moderating our hypocrisy. Take your pick

I'd like to suggest a new tradition in the period immediately following an election - to choose this time to go after the ugly flaws on one's own side of the political house.

I've written in the past that - during a campaign - I'm not going to highlight the flaws in the candidate I support. I wouldn't deny those flaws if pressed, but I'm not going to bring them up. In this increased partisan environment, I've extended that to the Democratic Party in general, although particular bad guys among the Democrats can overcome that bar.

Now that it's over though, time to at least acknowledge that cleanup is needed. A good example of an ugly flaw is Bob Menendez, the re-elected Democratic Senator in New Jersey and a likely corruption magnet. Keeping that seat Democratic to increase the odds of a Senate takeover was worth it to me. So once you're sworn in, Senator, please resign, and let the Democratic governor appoint an ethical Democratic replacement.

The chance of that request being listened to is pitiful, but we should make it regardless, and be prepared to support a Democratic primary challenger six years from now.

Another example of ugliness on the Democratic side:

The Planetary Society is correct, this is a Democratic Party War on Science campaign ad. I almost blogged about Culberson during the campaign - like him, I'm a space science nut, and very little of the political support for space extends far beyond the scientifically dubious boondoggle of government-supported, human spaceflight. My attitude was that I wanted Culberson to win if Rs kept control of the House, but if it made a difference in control of the House then I didn't. Had I known about this ad then I probably would have (should have) said something.

Fletcher didn't make this ad, it was by Michael Bloomberg's Independence USA PAC, and they should be ashamed for attacking science. Stick to attacking Culberson on earth-bound issues issues instead.

And then there's the gray area which is Keith Ellison and the domestic violence allegations against him that came up around the same time as the Kavanaugh disaster. There are two ex-girlfriends who say he abused them, which is a hell of a lot of smoke, although it's not 19 women either. The more recent accuser pretty much destroyed her credibility IMO by repeatedly talking about a video of the abuse and then refused to produce it, even in edited form or even for a private viewing by investigators. The earlier one appeared to have credibility problems too.

Personally, if I were in Minnesota I would've voted against Ellison in the Democratic primary and, with the limited information I had, voted for him in the general. I don't need to be certain beyond a reasonable doubt that Ellison was an abuser in order to support the Republican, but I'd want more than I had, given the damage the Republican Attorney General would do. And we need to watch Ellison very carefully moving forward.

As for Bill Clinton, please go away.

Where I stopped resisiting Vox's call to resist - it's a matter of distance

I wasn't thrilled reading the title and intro to Yglesias' article, "House Democrats must resist Trump’s infrastructure trap":

President Donald Trump’s infrastructure trap is back, and for the new House Democratic majority to succeed, they need to escape it.

It’s forgotten now, but in the transition winter of 2016-’17, a shockingly large and diverse set of congressional Democrats — from both the progressive and moderate wings of the party and including some key leaders — spent enormous time and energy making friendly noises toward Trump and suggesting that the result of his election should be some kind of bipartisan infrastructure deal.

....Trump rapidly fell into the clutches of congressional Republicans’ hard-right agenda. He continued to tout vaporware infrastructure plans, only to eventually come up with a scheme to make grants stingier and privatize some airports, which went nowhere.

But with Democrats now running the House of Representatives, infrastructure is back. And Trumpworld figures, looking at the polls, maybe Trump and the Democrats should come together around a random debt-financed increase in infrastructure spending that lets Trump regain his reputation as a dealmaker and lets Democrats say they accomplished something.

....Since Trump is not very subtle, his team even explicitly told a group of Washington Post reporters that the infrastructure dangle is a trap designed to weaken Democrats’ political position. But in case anyone doesn’t get the message: This is a trap designed to weaken Democrats’ political position.

....Democrats of course can’t categorically rule out the possibility of doing a legislative deal with him. But you also don't trade away the rule of law and the basic integrity of the American government for the sake of some pork barrel spending.

Then it got better:

....Democrats also can’t afford to let Trump tour the country complaining that all Democrats want to do is investigate him while he is trying to fix the country’s infrastructure.

....This requires Democrats to come up with a plan that is striking and visionary enough that normal people stand a chance of actually hearing about and understanding it. But it needs to also be genuinely transformative in a way that would make it legitimately worth doing on the off-chance that Trump somehow decides to agree to it. ....[T]he country (and the world) really does need a transformative infrastructure plan. If Trump is desperate enough for a deal, maybe he’d go for it.

But the key is to put ideas on the table that would genuinely alarm the conservative movement — and, more important, the corporate interests who stand behind it — and force Trump to make a serious choice about breaking with the plutocrats who prop up his regime or clearly standing in the way of an infrastructure transformation.

That means massive investments in clean energy generation and transmission, municipal broadband, a serious revival of airline competition, and competitive grants to states for carbon-cutting transportation programs.

....priority No. 1 for that congressional resistance should be developing a strategy to counter Trump on infrastructure.

The key here is long distance power transmission. Yglesias argues for forcing Trump to break with his backers. I'm all in favor of forcing bad people to reveal the vile positions through symbolic votes,  but I don't think forcing Trump to break with plutocrats is a realistic path to get actual policy change. OTOH, long distance transmission puts jobs in red and purple states and helps expand the market renewable energy sources in those states, and the less-ideological/more-pragmatic conservatives in those states kind of like that profit motive. Given that power transmission could even theoretically be used by massive nuclear power plants, that constituency could also provide a minor amount of support.

Clean transportation is another potential area of cooperation - there are some advantages to purple areas and profit-seeking corporate interests, but long distance transmission is a real opportunity and a very important need.

Final note - while a deal may help Trump's image, it won't improve the economic fundamentals in time for the November 2020 election. Speaking as someone involved in receipt of the Obama stimulus for water projects, it will take more than two years for real expenditures to happen, and a deal is months away from happening.

Eli Explains It All: How Back Radiation Warms the Oceans

There appears to be a limited but vital audience for this newish series, Eli Explains It All, so once more the Bunny Brings Enlightenment.  An everygreen amongst the ignorati is that backradiation can't heat the ocean because it is all absorbed in the first millimeter or less.

And indeed this is true, the distance that IR light radiated from greenhouse molecules penetrates into water is a few wavelengths.  That distance is called the skin depth and it is not without consequence in some interesting and amusing ways as St. Jackson has taught us (well some of us).

Yet, as Einstein teaches us, the world is not malicious, but it is subtle, and the reason why heating the surface warms the ocean is closely related to why increasing greenhouse gases warm the Earth.

Eli will now explain.  Others have done so, Real Climate for one, but the Bunny has another simple picture that USAns can use on their uncs in a couple of weeks.

Start with the observation that sunlight is absorbed in the first few meters of the oceans.  How deep depends, of course, on what other kind of crap is there, bio and anthro, but for arguments sake a few meters.  That warms the top few meters, but the surface, that skin layer cools by evaporation.  Heat from the mixing layer will move by convection to the cooler skin layer.

Now comes the elegant part, back radiation warms the skin layer.  That means back radiation decreases the temperature difference between the skin layer and the mixing layer, Since convection depends on temperature difference, the rate of heat loss from the mixing layer decreases.  Thus the mixing layer will be warmer than it would be without back radiation and the extra warmth will be carried into the deeper ocean by conduction and currents.

Greenhouse gas warming of the surface thus acts as a control valve regulating the heating of the oceans by the sun.  The same thought about how greenhouse gases regulate the emission of heat from the Earth into space was expressed many years ago by John Tyndall

[T]he atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat, but checks its exit; and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.

To which Eli would add

The ocean surface  admits of the entrance of the solar heat, but infrared surface warming checks its exit; and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat in the oceans.

Conversations With Exelon

Eli sat in on an interesting conversation last week at the Brookings Institution involving Chris Crane the Exelon CEO.  Exelon is a large electricity generator and supplier in the US with over $30 billion in revenue and a large fleet of nuclear plants as well as natural gas and oil but not much coal.  Crane's first words were

The impacts of climate change are irrefutable

Bunnies can view the video if they have an hour or so.  IEHO it is worth it.

Eli visited the Brookings Bunny and live tweeted the discussion into the ether where it vanished.but  the talk is worth listening to because it goes considerably beyond the usual.

Eli is visiting for a talk given by the CEO of Exelon. Starts by saying that impacts of climate change are irrefutable.

— eli rabett (@EthonRaptor) October 22, 2018

What the utilities have is a century long record of outages and service calls many of which they can increasingly trace back to climate change (as well as various critters with sharp teeth chewing on wires and such).  It would be worth asking if they would share these, or already have, much in the spirit of the US Navy, with urging from Al Gore, making public the records of undersea observations of the Arctic ice pack.

Crane, of course, favors market driven choices with elimination of all subsidies but emphasizes the Golden triangle of safety, reliability and cost.  The first two are key going into the future because saving costs today leaves business, and generators subject to enormous procrastination penalties if generation and distribution are not hardened to deal with a 1.5 C world, let alone a 2 C one.  It's the nature of Golden triangles that you mostly get to pick two of three or at best trade off current costs against future disasters.  

He sees efficiency as the least expensive renewable energy cost, but as interestingly, does not foresee future nuclear plant builds because of the cost and time. Natural gas is too cheap to afford building new ones.  Between the lines you can sense that he is not a real believer in modular nuclear.  He would be pleasantly surprised, but mostly is not betting Exelon's bottom $30 billion on it either.  As Eli has been pointing out this means that the ONLY way of building lots of conventional nuclear plants is for governments to do it (Russia and China) or finance it (France) to absorb the up front capital costs and long build times.  The government could lease the plants back to operators for annual payments to finance continuing new construction.  One of the few new technologies Crane is optimistic about is  using high pressure hydrogen to cover the times when renewables are not producing.  Eli would point out that for some applications heat from burning the hydrogen could be used directly and yes Crane knows about embrittlement.  He is a very sharp cookie.

Perhaps the most interesting take away is how Exelon views carbon capture, not as a way of reducing carbon in the atmosphere, but as an enabling technology for expanded natural gas generation.  Eli sees the sense of this because natural gas after scrubbing is a clean fuel with essentially a single component, methane, whose combustion produces a stream of almost 100% carbon dioxide and water vapor.  The two components are relatively easy to physically separate which makes carbon capture easier, and the CO2 could at least in principle be re-injected into the natural gas wells.  

As far as the political side of the coin Crane sees customer and state demand for zero emissions and federal resistance.  He sees no point in trying to make believe that coal or oil is coming back to appease folk in WV, TX and various luckwarmer and denier think tanks.  The current US government may be bypassed, if for no other reason that utilities are state regulated.  While the prospects for a national carbon tax (much better than regulating emissions in his opinion) are grim, state or regional ones could happen.  

As an operator of utilities he sees that the climate is changing and this has already become a huge cost.  Exelon in the immediate future will close its older and expensive to operate nuclear generating plants, but closing all of them is dumb.  Germany has shown that the major effect of that is to increase the burning of dirt, aka lignite.  Clearly, according to Crane, the US has lost its base for building new nuclear plants which absent a new capital allocation mechanism will not improve, leaving the capacity for new nuclear builds worldwide mostly for China, Russia and Japan who have the technology.  

Which brought the conversation to what will be needed to go carbon free, or at least carbon less.  Networks and resistance to network expansion are keys.  New England is hanging by a thread in winter because loss of a single natural gas pipeline would put them in deficit but there is considerable resistance to new ones.  Expanding the electrical distribution network faces the same issues.  Grid reliability requires network expansion both for fuel and electrons.  If nuclear is not benefited for emissions reduction as renewable energy is then fossil fuel use will increase. 

Utilities in the US have to allocate capital in a 30 year time frame.  Rebuilding the network for two way flows  (e.g. for rooftop solar) will be expensive and, if it is to be done start soon.  Simpler technologies like smart meters can make a contribution and have a surprising to Eli benefit of immediately notifying operators of outages and speeding up response before troubles spread and the carrots in the fridge go bad.

As such things go worth a listen to understand climate change issues from the point of view of the utilities.

Note:  Edited to spell Exelon the way the SEC prefers it.

Seneca almost hits the mark on technological change

I saw a reference to Seneca while reading Let It Shine, a history of solar energy (more on the book later). The reference was intriguing, and here's the full quote:

24. Reason did indeed devise all these things, but it was not right reason. It was man, but not the wise man, that discovered them; just as they invented ships, in which we cross rivers and seas – ships fitted with sails for the purpose of catching the force of the winds, ships with rudders added at the stern in order to turn the vessel's course in one direction or another. The model followed was the fish, which steers itself by its tail, and by its slightest motion on this side or on that bends its swift course. 25. "But," says Posidonius, "the wise man did indeed discover all these things; they were, however, too petty for him to deal with himself and so he entrusted them to his meaner assistants." Not so; these early inventions were thought out by no other class of men than those who have them in charge to-day. We know that certain devices have come to light only within our own memory – such as the use of windows which admit the clear light through transparent tiles,[16] and such as the vaulted baths, with pipes let into their walls for the purpose of diffusing the heat which maintains an even temperature in their lowest as well as in their highest spaces. Why need I mention the marble with which our temples and our private houses are resplendent? Or the rounded and polished masses of stone by means of which we erect colonnades and buildings roomy enough for nations? Or our signs[17] for whole words, which enable us to take down a speech, however rapidly uttered, matching speed of tongue by speed of hand? All this sort of thing has been devised by the lowest grade of slaves. 26. Wisdom's seat is higher; she trains not the hands, but is mistress of our minds.

(Emphasis added - this is a reference to the invention and first use of glass windows.)

Any learned person of the time would have understood that different cultures have different levels of technology, and even that their own culture had simpler technologies in the distant past. Here, Seneca takes that understanding to the next level, that technological change has happened recently. He's so close but doesn't quite get there to realizing that technological change will keep happening. It would have been interesting to see what he or others might have anticipated, two thousand years ago.

He doesn't get there AFAICT because he's not interested in technology but rather in the nature of true wisdom, and in concluding that wisdom does not concern itself with practicalities.

Too bad - if Seneca and others like him had been more concerned with practicalities, maybe Roman technological improvements could've moved faster than they did.

Eli's Thermo Class Is In Session

Lately Eli has been playing Clarissa, explaining all the thermochaff thrown up against the wall by his friends the confused.  First it was the Green Plate Effect showing how the presence of a colder third body decreases the cooling rate of an externally hotter one.  Then Eli pointed out that all of the heat flows between the sun, the surface, the atmosphere and space balance.  These are, Eli hopes useful cites to others.

Now comes the bunny to deal with a related everygreen, but let Ned Nikolov who is well rated as both confused and certain, state the issue

By focusing exclusively on radiation and assuming that it drives ALL climate processes, the "Greenhouse" theory runs into a big problem with the Energy Conservation Law in trying to explain the fact that Earth's atmosphere emits down 42% MORE energy than absorbed from the Sun! pic.twitter.com/QVaUVdkUuX

— Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. (@NikolovScience) October 8, 2018

Somehow, Ned missed the latent heat and convection in his diagram, but let us be generous.  Eli can simplify that diagram

showing the flows into and out of the Surface and the Atmosphere.  Solar irradiation is shown in yellow, IR emission to space in green and the flow between the surface and the atmosphere are shown in brown and red.

Since William Nordhaus has won the Economics Nobel today, let's think of an economic model. Eli has a Savings and a Checking account, and each month he deposits $160 into the Savings account and $80 into the Checking.  He also takes out some percentage (40%) of what is in the checking account to pay Ms. Rabett's yarn bill, and puts another 45% of the Checking balance into the Savings account.  To settle things up at the end of the month the Rabett transfers 6% of the Savings account into the Checking account.  The flows of $ are

If we plot the outflow to expenses, and the interchange between the Savings and Checking accounts as a function of time, what happens?

The flows between the Savings and Checking account reach equilibrium in about 12 years as does the monthly outflow.  The numbers are pretty close to those in the energy balance diagram, but not exact because Eli has simplified stuff.  The percentages were adjusted so the equilibrium outflow is $240 but that was just for giggles. Also interesting is that the Savings and Checking accounts both reach equilibrium.  

Just like the Green Plate Effect, this is not a mystery, simply the result of counting.  The inflow cannot be compared to the flow between the two accounts (reservoir) which is what the Ned's of the world try to do. 

Conservation of dollars only requires that the flow into the two accounts (reservoirs) be the same as the flow out when a steady state is established.  Until then the flow out is lower, but in the case of the earth that happened millions of years ago.