Nemo the Climate Refugee

Posted on August 30, 2013 by amyhuva

If you collected all the recent research on marine species and climate change, could you see a pattern of fish and marine species migration?

WHO: Elvira S. Poloczanska, Climate Adaptation Flagship, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Christopher J. Brown, Climate Adaptation Flagship, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Australia
William J. Sydeman, Sarah Ann Thompson, Farallon Institute for Advanced Ecosystem Research, Petaluma, California, USA
Wolfgang Kiessling, Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity, Berlin, Germany, GeoZentrum Nordbayern, Paläoumwelt, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany
David S. Schoeman, Faculty of Science, Health and Education, University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore, Queensland, Australia, Department of Zoology, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
Pippa J. Moore, Centre for Marine Ecosystems Research, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth UK
Keith Brander, DTU Aqua—Centre for Ocean Life, Technical University of Denmark, Charlottenlund Slot, Denmark
John F. Bruno, Lauren B. Buckley, Department of Biology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Michael T. Burrows, Scottish Association for Marine Science, Scottish Marine Institute, Oban, UK
Johnna Holding, Department of Global Change Research, IMEDEA (UIB-CSIC), Instituto Mediterráneo de Estudios Avanzados, Esporles, Mallorca, Spain
Carlos M. Duarte, Department of Global Change Research, IMEDEA (UIB-CSIC), Instituto Mediterráneo de Estudios Avanzados, Esporles, Mallorca, Spain, The UWA Oceans Institute, University of Western Australia,
Benjamin S. Halpern, Carrie V. Kappel, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara, California, USA
Mary I. O’Connor, University of British Columbia, Department of Zoology, Vancouver, Canada
John M. Pandolfi, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Australia
Camille Parmesan, Integrative Biology, Patterson Laboratories 141, University of Texas, Austin, Texas Marine Institute, A425 Portland Square, Drake Circus, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK
Franklin Schwing, Office of Sustainable Fisheries, NOAA Fisheries Service, Maryland, USA
Anthony J. Richardson, Climate Adaptation Flagship, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia Centre for Applications in Natural Resource Mathematics (CARM), School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Queensland, Australia

WHAT: A review and synthesis of all available peer reviewed studies of marine species changing under climate change.

WHEN: 4 August 2013

WHERE: Nature Climate Change, August 2013

TITLE: Global imprint of climate change on marine life subs req.

This paper, with its laundry list of collaborative authors must have had an awesome ‘we got published’ party. However, when you think about what they did – all that data would have taken forever to number crunch, so it’s a good thing it was all hands on deck.

So what were they looking at? They were trying to work out if you can see the fingerprint of climate change in the distribution changes of marine species. And to do that, they looked at all the available studies in the peer reviewed literature that were looking at expected changes for fish and other species in the ocean with climate change. Then, they lined up the predictions with the observed results to see what happened, and it turns out we’ve got some frequent travelling fish.

After getting all the studies together, the researchers had 1,735 different observations for everything from phytoplankton to zooplankton to fish and seabirds from 208 studies of 857 different species. They used all of the data they had which included the changes that lined up with climate change projections, the ones that had no changes and the ones that had unexpected changes.

Global marine migration (from paper)

Ocean currents make it easier for species to travel longer distances than plants and animals on land. There’s only so far a seed can travel from the tree with the wind, after all. However in this research they found that the average distance of expansion for marine species was 72km/decade (±13.5km). This doesn’t sound like a lot to a human, but it’s an order of magnitude further than land based migration averages, and it’s a long way for a mollusc or a starfish to go.

The species chalking up the most frequent flier points were phytoplankton which have been moving 469.9km/decade (±115km) followed by the fish who have been moving 227.5km/decade (±76.9km). Of the 1,735 observations, a whopping 1,092 were moving in the directions expected by climate change.

For each species migration, the researchers looked at what the expected decadal rates of ocean temperature change would have been in the area and found that some groups move early, some wait longer, others are falling behind.

For example, in the Bering Sea (where the Discovery Channel show ‘The Deadliest Catch’ was set), many species rely on the really cold water that is less than 2^oC and separates the Arctic and subarctic animals. This cold pool of water has been moving further north as the Arctic ice sheet melts, but the responses by species are varied. Some are at the leading edge and move early, others don’t. The researchers think this is related to issues around population size, ability to migrate, dependence on habitat (remember how Nemo’s dad didn’t want to leave the reef?), competition for food and others.

Clownfish (Wikimedia commons)

I guess it’s similar to when a natural disaster happens in a human area and some families leave, others rebuild and it’s for a whole complicated list of reasons like family, jobs, resources and more. Anyway, back to the fish.

The researchers tested their data for a climate change fingerprint globally. They used a binomial test against 0.5, which is the result you would get if these changes in location were random variability and from their test, 83% of the changes had climate change as a dominant driving force.

If they limited their data only to studies that were multi-species, there were still 81% of the changes that were driven by climate change. They ran the data to exclude every bias they could think of and still they concluded that it provided ‘convincing evidence that climate change is the primary driver behind the observed biological changes’.

Binomial test results – if you get 0.5 it’s a random occurrence – this migration is climate caused (from paper)

So there you have it – climate refugees aren’t just land based. Nemo’s going to have to move too.

100% Australian Renewable

Posted on August 23, 2013 by amyhuva

What does 100% renewable electricity for the whole of Australia look like?

WHO: The Australian Energy Market Operator, commissioned by the Australian Federal Government

WHAT: Modelling for what a 100% renewable national electricity grid for Australia would look like.

WHEN: July 2013

WHERE: Online at the Department of Climate Change website

TITLE: 100 PER CENT RENEWABLES STUDY – MODELLING OUTCOMES (open access)

The Australian Department of Climate Change (yes, they have one!) commissioned the Australian Energy Market Operator in conjunction with CSIRO and ROAM Consulting to model what a national energy market would look like in 2030 and 2050 with 100% renewable electricity. Oh, and when they say ‘national’ they mean the more densely populated East Coast of the country (sorry WA and NT…)

The ‘national’ energy market (from paper)

They looked at two different scenarios – the first one was rapid deployment of renewable technology with moderate electricity demand growth (ie. including energy efficiency gains), and the second one was moderate deployment of renewable technology with high demand growth (no efficiency gains).

They ran both scenarios for getting our act together by 2030 and procrastinating until 2050 to see what might happen.

Given that this is a government document, it comes with many caveats (of course!). There are uncertainties (always); CSIRO says bioenergy is feasible, other groups say it’s not that feasible. The costs don’t include transitional factors (and change over time), the costs of land acquisition or stranded fossil fuel assets and infrastructure. Phew.

They also pointed out the obvious (someone has to say it I guess) that because this is looking at 100% renewable electricity it does not look at nuclear, natural gas or coal with carbon capture and storage. This is a fossil free zone people!

Ok, so what did they look at? They took data from the 2012 Australian Technology Assessment by the Australian Government Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics, and using that looked at what demand might look like in 2030 and 2050, and calculated the approximate costs.

Their findings in a nutshell are that a renewable system needs more storage (you can’t put solar in a pile like coal to burn later), is a more diverse and distributed system, needs an expanded transmission network and will be primarily driven in Australia by solar.

Depending on when Australia does it, it will cost somewhere between $219billion and $332billion dollars to build. No surprises that it’s cheaper to do it now, not to mention the stranded infrastructure and assets you save by starting the transition now. It’s cheaper after all not to build the coal terminal if you’re only going to use it for a short period of time.

Cost calculations for Scenario 1 (rapid deployment) and Scenario 2 (moderate deployment) (from paper)

They included energy consumption by electric vehicles (EVs) as well as the reduction of demand from rooftop solar. Interestingly, rooftop solar will dramatically change the makeup of a national energy grid. Currently the energy grid is summer peaking, which means more power is used in summer (for things like air conditioners when it’s seriously hot outside). With the uptake of rooftop solar, the grid will become winter peaking, because demand decreases in summer when everyone’s solar panels are doing great.

They ran the numbers to make sure a renewable power grid is as reliable as the current power grid, which is 99.998% reliable, and made sure the technologies they picked are either currently commercially available, or projected to be available soon.

They found that the capital costs are the main factor, given that once renewable power is installed; it costs almost nothing to run, because you don’t have to feed it fossil fuels to go. There are maintenance costs, but all power stations have maintenance costs.

Storage capacity wasn’t found to be economically viable with batteries once scaled up, given that a renewable grid needs 100-130% excess capacity. So storage would be in solar thermal, pumped hydro, biogas or biomass. The paper noted that geothermal (which Australia has a fair bit of) and biomass are similar to current standard baseload power in the way they can be used. Concentrated solar thermal is still a new technology that is being developed, so the scale up potential is not fully known yet, but it’s working well in Spain so far.

The space required to do this (to put the solar panels on and the wind turbines in) is between 2,400 – 5,000km²which is small change in a country that has 7.7mill km² and is mostly desert. So people won’t need to worry about wind turbines being put forcibly in their backyards, unless they want them (can I have one? They’re pretty!).

The most economic spread of renewables for transmission costs was a combination of remote with higher transmission costs and local with lower energy generation capacity.

Transmission possibilities (from paper)

The sticking point was meeting evening demand – when everyone comes home from work and turns the lights on and starts cooking dinner and plugs in their EV in the garage. The paper pointed out that work-based charging stations could promote charging your car during the day, but also ran scenarios where the demand shortfall could be met by biogas. This also applied for weeks where the storage capacity of the renewables was low (a week of low wind or a week of overcast weather).

Meeting demand shortfall by dispatching biogas and biomass (from paper)

Long story short, the future is hybrid renewable systems.

Breakdown of each technology for the different scenarios (from paper)

There is no single technology that can replace the energy density of fossil fuels, but a hybrid grid can. Diversifying both the technology and geography of the power grid will not only allow for 100% renewable generation, it will also build resilience.

As climate change extreme weather events become more common, having a distributed power system will avoid mass blackouts. It will be better for everyone’s health (living near a coal mine or a coal power station is NOT good for your health) and it will slow the rate at which we’re cooking the planet. Sounds good to me.

Vote for last week’s paper!

Posted on August 19, 2013 by amyhuva

Remember how I was excited about the possibilities of scaling up the carbon sequestration process outlined in last week’s post from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA?

Turns out you can vote for it!

I had an email from the lead author of the paper (I send my blog posts to the lead authors when I post them) letting me know that their process has made the finalists of two MIT Climate CoLab ideas. So if you’re excited about the idea of feasibly sequestering carbon dioxide from the oceans being tested out as well, you can vote for them.

The first proposal is for the Geoengineering section called ‘Saving the Planet v2.0‘. The second proposal is for the Electric power sector section called ‘Spontaneous Conversion of Power Plant CO2 to Dissolved Calcium Bicarbonate‘.

Climate CoLab is an online space where people work to try and crowdsource ideas for what to do about climate change. The contest voting closes in 11 days (August 30th) and the winning proposals will be presented at the Crowds & Climate Conference at MIT in November.

So if it takes your fancy, and you’d like to see this project presented at the conference, go forth and vote!

Disclosure: I am not affiliated with either the paper or the MIT CoLab project.

Antacid for our Oceans

Posted on August 15, 2013 by amyhuva

An electrolysis method that removes CO₂ from seawater could be affordably scaled up for commercial carbon sequestration.

WHO: Greg H. Rau, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, Physical and Life Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA
Susan A. Carroll, William L. Bourcier, Michael J. Singleton, Megan M. Smith, and Roger D. Aines, Physical and Life Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA

WHAT: An electrochemical method of sequestering CO₂ from sea water using silicate rocks.

WHEN: June 18, 2013

WHERE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), PNAS vol. 110, no. 25

TITLE: Direct electrolytic dissolution of silicate minerals for air CO₂ mitigation and carbon-negative H₂ production (open access)

This paper was fun – I got to get my chemistry nerd back on thinking in moles per litre and chemical equations! It almost made me miss university chemistry lectures.

No, not those moles per litre! (IFLS facebook page)

So what does chemistry jokes have to do with carbon sequestration? It’s looking increasingly like humanity is going to have to figure out ways to draw carbon out of the atmosphere or the oceans because we’ve procrastinated on reducing our carbon emissions for so long.

There’s two options for this – you can either create a chemical reaction that will draw CO₂ out of the air, or you can create a chemical reaction that will draw CO₂ out of a solution, and given how quickly the oceans are acidifying, using sea water would be a good idea. The good news is; that’s exactly what these researchers did!

Silicate rock (which is mostly basalt rock) is the most common rock type in the Earth’s crust. It also reacts with CO₂ to form stable carbonate and bicarbonate solids (like the bicarbonate soda you bake with). Normally this takes place very slowly through rock weathering, but what if you used it as a process to sequester CO₂?

The researchers created a saline water electrolytic cell to test it out. An electrolytic cell is the one you made in school where you had an anode and a cathode and two different solutions (generally) and when you put an electric current through it you created a chemical reaction. What these researchers did was put silicate minerals, saline water and CO₂ in on one side, and when they added electricity got bicarbonates, hydrogen, chlorine or oxygen, silicates and salts.

A basic schematic of the experiment (from paper)

The researchers used an acid/base reaction (remember those from school?!) to speed up the silicate and CO₂ reaction, which also works well in an ocean because large differences in pH are produced in saline electrolysis. Are you ready to get really nerdy with me? The chemical equation is this:

Chemical equation for the experiment (from paper)

So how did the experiment go? It worked! They got successfully sequestered carbon dioxide with an efficiency of 23-32% that sequestered 0.147g of CO₂ per kilojoule (kJ) of electricity used.

There are issues around the scaling up of the reaction of course – once the bicarbonate has been created, where do you store it? The paper suggested ocean storage as the bicarbonate solids would be inert (un-reactive). I would hope that a re-use option could be found – has anyone looked into using bicarbonate solids as an eco-building material?

There’s also the issue of needing to power the reaction with electricity. If scaled up, this process would have to make sure it was powered by renewable energy, because burning carbon to sequester carbon gives you zero.

Also, if sea water is used, the main by-product is Cl₂ so the researchers point out that while it would be feasible to do this process directly in the ocean, the issue of what to do with all that chlorine would need to be dealt with. The paper suggests using oxygen selective anodes in the electrolysis, or ion-selective membranes around the reaction to keep the chlorine separate from the ocean.

That being said, there are some exciting upsides to this process. The paper points out that the amount of silicate rock in the world ‘dwarf[s] that needed for conversion of all present and future anthropogenic CO₂.’ Also, using sea water is an easier way to sequester CO₂ rather than air-based methods.

Scaling the method up is economically feasible too. The researchers estimated that 1.9 MWh (megawatt hours) of power would be needed per metric tonne of CO₂sequestered. If the waste hydrogen from the process were sold as hydrogen fuel for fuel cells, the price of CO₂ sequestered would be $86/tonne. If the hydrogen fuel wasn’t feasible, it would still only be $154/tonne, which compares very favourably to most current carbon capture and storage feasibility estimates of $600-$1000/tonne of CO₂.

So, like an antacid for the oceans, if this process can be scaled up commercially through research and development, we could have an effective way to not only capture and store carbon, but also reduce ocean acidification. A good-news story indeed – now we just need to stop burning carbon.

Plan B: Saving Political Face Beyond 2 Degrees

Posted on August 9, 2013 by amyhuva

So far the ‘targets and timetables’ approach to keeping climate change below 2^oC has done very little to reduce emissions. What happens when we start thinking about giving up the 2^oC target?

WHO: Oliver Geden, German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik)

WHAT: Looking at the ‘politically possible’ in light of our failures to get anywhere near the emissions reductions needed to keep global warming below 2^oC.

WHEN: June 2013

WHERE: Online at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs

TITLE: Modifying the 2°C Target: Climate Policy Objectives in the Contested Terrain of Scientific Policy Advice, Political Preferences, and Rising Emissions (open access)

This paper is all about the realpolitik. At the outset, it points out that in the 20 years since the UN framework on climate change (UNFCCC) was adopted that progress has been ‘modest at best’. Also, in order to keep global emissions from soaring quickly beyond the 2^oC limit, significant reductions will be needed in the decade between 2010-2020, which is ‘patently unrealistic’.

Ok, so we’ve procrastinated away the most important decades that we had to do something about climate change with minimal impacts on both the economy and the wider environment. What now?

This paper suggests that the best bet might be changing or ‘modifying’ the internationally agreed on 2^oC target. The author points out (quite rightly) that unrealistic targets signal that you can disregard them with few consequences. For instance, I’m not about to say that I’m going to compete in the next Olympic Marathon, because the second I miss a single training session it’s obviously time to give up given I’ve never run a full marathon before.

So if the world is going to fail on our 2^oC training schedule, what will we aim for instead? Should we just aim for redefining ‘safe’ and ‘catastrophic’ climate change? Should we aim for 2.5^oC? Should we aim for short term overshoot in the hopes that future humans will pick up the slack when we’ve kicked the can down the road for them?

The author points out what many people don’t like to notice when their countries are failing on their carbon reduction diets – not only have we already warmed by 0.8^oC, but we’ve already baked in another 0.5^oC from current emissions, so we’re already really close to 2^oC without even starting to give up our fossil fuel habits. Also, those reductions we’ve all been promising to make and failing to make (or withdrawing from completely in Canada’s case)? Yeah, if we met all those targets, we’d still blow ‘significantly’ past 2^oC. Ouch.

The emissions gap (from paper)

Another issue – the current top-down UNFCCC approach assumes that once we reach an agreement, that effective governance structures can be set up and operating within a matter of years, which is highly unlikely given we can’t even reach an agreement yet.

So what does a ‘more pragmatic stance’ for the EU on climate policy look like if we’re going to collectively blow past 2^oC? Will climate policy have any legitimacy?

The author argues that the coming palpable impacts of climate change will soon remove the political possibility of ignoring climate change as an issue while in office (which I for one am looking forward to). He also doesn’t place much faith in the UN process finding a global solution with enough time – if an agreement is reached in 2015, it’s unlikely to be ratified by 2020, at which point the targets from 2015 are obsolete.

One suggestion for the EU is reviewing the numbers for the likelihood of passing 2^oC. Currently, humanity is vaguely aiming to have a 50/50 chance of staying below 2^oC. If we could roll the dice with slightly higher odds of blowing 2^oC, maybe we could buy some time to get our political butts in gear?

That idea puts all the hard work of mitigation on everyone post-2050, at which point we’ll all be dealing with the climate impacts as well as trying to find the time for mitigation.

The other option is to say that 2^oC is a ‘benchmark’ (only slightly better than an ‘aspirational target?’) and put our faith in climate inertia allowing humanity to overshoot on emissions and then increase the amount of sequestration (negative emissions) to pull back from the brink of the next mass extinction.

The paper does acknowledge that this will implicitly approve a temperature overshoot as well as an emissions overshoot, which could possibly kick the can down the road to 2300 before global temperatures are below 2^oC above what we used to call ‘normal’. Apologies to everyone’s great great great great grandchildren for making you responsible for all of that.

Kicking the can down the road to 2300 (from paper)

The author also acknowledges that overshoot policies will only be accepted by the wider public if they’re convinced that this time governments will actually respect them as limits not to be passed. Previous experience with the UNFCCC processes show that any extra time that can be wrangled through carbon accounting is likely to be procrastinated away as well.

The other option could be a target of 2.5^oC or 550ppm of CO₂ in the atmosphere, but as the paper points out, the ‘targets and timetables’ policies haven’t worked yet, and it might be time to look more towards feasible ‘policies and measures’.

The problem for me with this paper is that while it’s practical to look at aiming for what humanity can politically achieve in terms of climate policies, redefining what ‘dangerous climate change’ is to fit with realpolitik rather than physics won’t work. Physics doesn’t negotiate – the first law of thermodynamics doesn’t care that there was an economic downturn in 2008 that has made it harder to pass climate legislation.

So yes, we need to think about what is politically possible in the current ‘we can still procrastinate on this’ climate. But we also need to be planning for the tipping point once all the extreme weather adds up to business as usual no longer being feasible. We may be able to ‘postpone the impending failure of the 2^oC target’, but we won’t be able to ignore the impacts of climate change.

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Monthly Archives: August 2013