Transcript powerpoint for dr. schwartzman`s upcoming lectures

Patterns in Environmental Math
Fall 2015
David Schwartzman
[email protected]
SOLAR SPECTRUM
The challenge from climate
science
How far are we from
Irreversible Catastrophic
Climate Change (C3)?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructureclimate-change
World headed for irreversible
climate change in five years,
IEA warns
If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the
world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous
climate change.
Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, November 9, 2011
Specifically, the peak of global C emissions to the
atmosphere must come by 2016-17, and then
progressively decline…
Is a 2 deg C rise from the preindustrial climate now inevitable?
A 2 deg C rise is a “prescription for disaster”
(Hansen et al., 2011)
“scenarios with 2 oC or more global warming
[are] far more dangerous; so dangerous, we
suggest, that aiming for the 2 oC pathway would
be foolhardy.” (Hansen et al., 2013)
Note: Already 0.8 oC warming with another 0.8 oC
in the pipeline (heat stored in the ocean)…
Assessment of Target CO2
Phenomenon
Target CO2 (ppm)
1. Arctic Sea Ice
300-325
2. Ice Sheets/Sea Level
300-350
3. Shifting Climatic Zones
300-350
4. Alpine Water Supplies
300-350
5. Avoid Ocean Acidification 300-350
 Initial Target CO2 = 350* ppm
*assumes CH4, O3, Black Soot decrease
Reference: Hansen et al. Target Atmospheric CO2, Open Atmos. Sci., 2008
Giss analysis of global surface temperature change (Hansen, 2009)
CO2,CH4 and
estimated global
temperature
(Antarctic ΔT/2
in ice core era)
0 = 1880-1899
mean.
Source: Hansen, Clim.
Change, 68, 269, 2005.
Is the rise of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial (280 ppm)
to the present level of 400 ppm anthropogenic (i.e., produced
by human technological activity)?
YES!
Evidence:
1) Dilution of C14 level in atmosphere by introduction of “dead” carbon
from burning fossil fuels (tree ring record).
2) Inventory of fossil fuel consumption since 1880s:
roughly 40% released remains in atmosphere (see Tyler Volk, “CO2
Rising”, 2008, MIT Press)
(More on this subject: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-weknow-that-recent-cosub2sub-increases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated )
5 Meters (18 Feet) Sea Level Rise
Source: Jim Hansen, TED talk, 2012
35
1992
2007
30
Total Melt Area (106 km2)
2005
1998
25
1987
2002
2008
1991
1995
1999
1984
20
1985
1981
1980
1993
1989
15
1979
2007
2004
2003
2006
1988 1990
1997
1994
1982
2001
2000
1986
1983
1996
10
1992
5
1978
1983
1988
1993
1998
2003
2008
Year
Area on Greenland with snowmelt.
Graph credit: Konrad
Our global climate is nearing tipping points.
“Changes are beginning to appear, and there is a
potential for explosive changes with effects that would
be irreversible – if we do not rapidly slow fossil fuel
emissions over the next few decades. Tipping points
are fed by amplifying feedbacks. As Arctic sea ice
melts, the darker ocean absorbs more sunlight and
speeds melting. As tundra melts, methane a strong
greenhouse gas, is released, causing more warming.
As species are pressured and exterminated by shifting
climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying
more species.”
(Jim Hansen, Feb. 15, 2009: The Sword of Damocles, op-ed submitted to The Observer)
Severe global warming will render half of world's
inhabited areas unliveable, expert warns. Parts of
China, India and the eastern US could all become
too warm in summer for people to lose heat by
sweating, expert warns
David Adam in Copenhagen guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 March 2009 15.35 GMT
Severe global warming could make half the world's inhabited areas literally too hot to live in, a US scientist warned
today. Parts of China, India and the eastern US could all become too warm in summer for people to lose heat by sweating
- rendering such areas effectively uninhabitable. Steven Sherwood, a climate expert at Yale University, told
a global warming conference in Copenhagen that people will not be able to adapt to a much warmer climate as well as
previously thought. The physiological limits of the human body will begin to render places impossible to support human
life if the average global temperature rises by 7C on pre-industrial levels, he said. "There will be some places on Earth
where it would simply be impossible to lose heat," Sherwood said. "This is quite imaginable if we continue
burning fossil fuels. I don't see any reason why we wouldn't end up there.” The 2007 report from the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that average temperatures could rise by 6C this century if greenhouse gas
emissions continue to rise at current rates. Scientists at the Copenhagen Climate Congress this week said the IPCC may
have underestimated the scale of the problem, and that emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than expected.
Sherwood told the conference: "Seven degrees would begin to create zones of uninhabitability due to unsurvivable peak
heat stresses and 10C would expand such zones far enough to encompass a majority of today's population.” He said air
temperature measurements were a poor guide to the true impact of global warming on people. A better assessment is
"wet bulb" temperature, which combines temperature and humidity. "A warming of only a few degrees will cause large
parts of the globe to experience peak wetbulb temperatures that never occur today."
Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere
Barnosky et al., NATURE 486: 52-58 (JUNE 7, 2012)
“Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and
irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across
critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global
ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching
a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence.
The plausibility of a planetary-scale ‘tipping point’ highlights the
need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning
signs of critical transitions on global as well as local scales, and by
detecting feedbacks that promote such transitions. It is also
necessary to address root causes of how humans are forcing
biological changes.”
Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity
Cardinale et al. NATURE 486:59-67 (JUNE 7, 2012)
“The most unique feature of Earth is the existence of life, and the
most extraordinary feature of life is its diversity. Approximately 9
million types of plants, animals, protists and fungi inhabit the
Earth. So, too, do 7 billion people. Two decades ago, at the first
Earth Summit, the vast majority of the world’s nations declared
that human actions were dismantling the Earth’s ecosystems,
eliminating genes, species and biological traits at an alarming rate.
This observation led to the question of how such loss of biological
diversity will alter the functioning of ecosystems and their ability
to provide society with the goods and services needed to prosper.”
Scientists say we are entering
Earth’s 6th mass extinction
http://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-we-re-on-the-brink-of-earth-s-sixth-mass-extinction
Air pollution and carbon
emissions driving global
warming:
Same dominant source in Metro
DC and most U.S. cities:
Fossil fuel burning from
transportation and power plants
Air pollution: produces negative
and widely felt impacts
on health,
Measures to reduce
air pollution
will simultaneously reduce
carbon emissions contributing to
global warming
DC’s Air Pollution and Asthma
“Pollution from mobile sources (cars, trucks, vans, etc) is the leading cause of ozone and
smog in the District of Columbia, dangerous compounds that cause respiratory illness and
childhood asthma. According to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation, one in ten adults and
children suffer from asthma in DC. The American Lung Association has rated
Washington, DC as one of the top five most challenging places for people with asthma
to live, particularly in the summer months. A typical summer in DC sends 2,400 people
with respiratory related diseases to the hospital and causes 130,000 asthma attacks.
The American Lung Association has rated DC's air quality as an “F.” Pollution related
to transportation (including cars and SUVs) can account for up to 70 percent of
pollution during poor air quality days In the summer. While some pollution is obvious,
ozone and other dangerous pollutants float unseen. The DC metro area is in violation of
Clean Air Act standards for ozone and other pollutants, putting residents at higher risk
for asthma, respiratory illness, and code-red smog days in the summer.”
Source: A fact sheet from the DC Clean Cars Program, Capital Climate Coalition,
Chesapeake Climate Action Network. http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/.
Other health impacts from air pollution
Urban air pollution is now linked to a wide variety of negative health impacts
affecting both the unborn, children and adults. Besides increasing asthma
attacks, these impacts include:
 Damage to children's lungs, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder*
*http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/childrens-attention-deficit-linked-to-air-pollution/?WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20141112
Birth defects affecting heart, harm to the fetus linked to low birthweights and
cancer later in life and damage to the cardiovascular system,
Increasing the risk of heart attacks.
Driving to work in the Metro DC area’s heavy congestion is especially hazardous to one’s
health because of exposure to ultrafine particulates. “The Washington area has some of the
worst traffic and longest drive times in the nation.”
(Source: Marc Kaufman , Drive Time Raises Health Risk, Science Notebook, Monday,
November 5, 2007; A10, Washington Post, study published in Atmospheric Environment. )
The Global Human Costs of Fossil Fuels
The burning of fossil fuels (and wood especially in the global South)
drives air pollution and carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Here is a
snapshot of their effects:
1) A WHO study found that 7 million people died from air pollution in
2012, approximately one-eighth of the global total. Recent study finds
1.6 million deaths/year in China caused by air pollution.
2) A 2012 study found that 400,000 deaths per year caused by climate
change, with the toll rising if mitigation of global warming is not
implemented in the near future.
Sources:
1 http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/; Rohde, R.A. and R. A. Muller. in
press. Air Pollution in China: Mapping of Concentrations and Sources. PLOS One.
2 http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/mark-hertsgaard.html
The state of energy poverty for
most of humanity living in the
global South,
conversely the wasteful
consumption of energy in much
of the global North, especially
the U.S.
Smil (2003, 2008) estimates a minimum requirement of 3.5 kilowatt per capita for high HDI
Energy Poverty in Africa
Life Expectancy kilowatt/person
(years)
consumption
Libya
74
South Africa 49.3
Nigeria
46.9
Ethiopia
52.9
Mozambique 39.2
For comparison:
Cuba
78.3
United States 78.2
Gini
index
4.3
3.9
0.9
0.6
0.6
0.36
0.65
0.44
0.30
0.46
1.4
9.4
0.30
0.45
3.5 kilowatt/person
Necessary but not sufficient
Income Inequality drives bad health!
Wilkinson R & Pickett K (2009) The Spirit Level
Why Equality is Better for Everyone.
Penguin Books. London.
Kawachi I & Kennedy BP (2006) The Health of
Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health.
The New Press. New York.
The 1st Industrial Revolution:
from biomass (plant power) to coal
History
Steam Engine invented to remove
water from coal mines (subsurface,
below water table), with coal replacing
charcoal/wood as forests of Great
Britain were depleted.
Steam engines
1698 Savery
1712 Newcomen
1776 James Watt
Mid 1700s: British Canal System
(U.S.: early 1800s, The C&O canal,
e.g., Great Falls MD)
1815 William Smith’s
Geologic Map of Britain
Industrial Revolution 19th Century
Coal the fuel, Steam Engines as source
of power for Factories and Locomotives
Birth of Thermodynamics as a Science
Laws of Thermodynamics
2nd Law:
Carnot (1824) “Reflections on the Motive Power
Of Fire”: what is the maximum efficiency of heat
(steam) engines?”
1st Law:
The Mechanical Equivalent of Heat: Conservation of
Energy (After Einstein, Mass and Energy)
2nd Law: Concept of Entropy
The distribution of energy changes in an irreversible manner,
measured by the production of entropy.
There are several different ways of expressing the second law:
1) Work can be totally converted into heat but the reverse is impossible.
2) Entropy is defined as the heat supplied to a system divided by its absolute
temperature (e.g., 0 deg Celsius, the freezing point of water, equals 273 deg Kelvin
on the absolute temperature scale). Temperature is a measure of the intensity of
thermal vibrations in any material system, its kinetic energy.
3) Heat cannot flow from a cooler to a hotter reservoir without any other change
(i.e., work must be done). The increase of entropy is equivalent to the increased
inability of an isolated system to do work, resulting from the degradation of low
entropy energy into waste heat (an isolated system is defined as being closed to
both energy and matter transfers in or out, while a closed system is only closed to
matter transfers).
Georgescu-Roegen, Father of
Ecological Economics
My paper Solar Communism critiqued
fallacious arguments derived from the
influential writings of Georgescu
Roegen regarding so-called entropy
limitations to a solarized economy.
Georgescu-Roegen's fallacy was his
conflation of isolated and closed
systems: “ A closed system (i.e., a
system that cannot exchange matter
with the environment) cannot perform
work indefinitely at a constant rate”
(1989). But the biosphere is
essentially closed to transfer of
matter, but not isolated with respect
to energy flux, particularly solar
energy.
Some examples of the uses of
G-R’s Entropy Law
Attarian, John 2005, 'The Steady-State Economy: What it is, why we need It', NPG Forum,
NPG-103, March, 1-8.
http://www.npg.org/forum_series/steadystate.html
(Note: NPG is Negative Population Growth)
“ Daly draws on Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
(1971), which explained the economic significance of the second law of thermodynamics
(entropy law): in an energetically closed system (no energy enters or leaves), the availability of
useful energy always declines. The economic process transforms matter-energy from a state of
low entropy to a state of high entropy. The entropy law implies that matter can be recycled only
partially, and that energy cannot be recycled at all and can be used only once. It also implies that
creating order through producing manmade capital entails creating greater disorder elsewhere in
the environment--too much of which will make the environment unable to support human life.
The entropy law thus severely limits what we can do, and implies limits to growth.”11
11. Daly, Steady-State Economics, pp. 8, 16, 24-25.
" No so-called "renewable" energy system has the potential to generate more than a tiny fraction
of the power now being generated by fossil fuels! "
Hanson, Jay 2001, Die-off Energy Synopsis: http://www.dieoff.com/synopsis.htm
The Limits to Entropy: the Continuing
Misuse of Thermodynamics in
Environmental and Marxist theory
(Schwartzman, D. 2008. Science & Society. 72 (1): 43-62 )
(http://www.redandgreen.org/Documents/Limits%20to%20entropy%20final.htm)
(In part a reply to Paul Burkett 2005 'Entropy in Ecological Economics: A
Marxist Intervention', Historical Materialism, 13, 1: 117-52.)
What is the ultimate limit to global energy consumption?
The global anthropogenic (human-created) energy flux =
0.03% of solar flux to land. Or, to put it another way,
humanity currently uses an amount of energy, mostly from
fossil fuels, equivalent to 0.03% of the solar energy
reaching the land surface of earth. Hence tapping this solar
flux has a huge potential as the energy basis of a solar
utopia, with much smaller impacts on global ecology than
the present unsustainable reliance on fossil fuels and
nuclear power. For a solar energy source, the waste heat
flux back into space is to a very good first
approximation not incremental to the natural infrared
flux from the Earth’s surface, at least until such time as
human energy demand increases many hundreds of
times.
The 3rd Industrial Revolution:
from fossil fuels/nuclear energy
to high efficiency collection of
wind/solar energy
The material resources and land area needed for global
solarization are already within reach…..
If 15 percent of present world rooftop area were to be used to site photovoltaics
with an assumed conversion efficiency of 20 percent, the current global electricity
power capacity would be created.
(An estimate of global rooftop area is 3.8 × 1011 m2: Hashem Akbari, Surabi Menon, and Arthur Rosenfeld, “Global
Cooling: Increasing World-wide Urban Albedos to Offset CO2,” Climatic Change, Vol. 94, 2009, pp. 275-286. )
A global wind turbine infrastructure could deliver several times the present global
energy consumption while not closing off most of the land where it is sited to other
uses (e.g., farming).
(Xi Lu, Michael B. McElroy, and Juha Kiviluoma, “Global Potential for Wind-generated Electricity,” Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 27, 2009, pp. 10933–10938.)
Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) in the Sahara could supply the current global electricity
consumption on less than 6 percent of the Saharan land area (not that CSP should be only
sited in the Sahara of course!).
(The Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) Project, published online at:
http://www.trecers.net/index.html.)
Peer-reviewed, Initially posted at: http://iprd.org.uk
(Institute for Policy Research & Development)
This Report and more at: SOLARUTOPIA.ORG
Modeling the Global Solar Transition
d(PRE)/dt = [(M/L)(f)(PRE)] + [(M/L)(fFF)(PFF)]
PRE : Renewable Power (“RE”); t: time in years;
PFF : Current power delivery (85% Fossil fuels)
f : fraction of PRE used to make more PRE
fFF : fraction of PFF used to make more PRE
L: lifespan of any RE source
M (= EROI or EROEI): Energy return over energy invested for RE
(M/L) x instantaneous energy invested = instantaneous RE created
Solution of this equation is
programmed at
our Solar Calculator at:
http://solarutopia.org/solarcalculator/
Compare to Compound Interest Growth
Xt = Xnow ( 1 + % growth as decimal)n
n = number of periods
For example,
If there was an interest rate in bank deposits that was
greater than zero:
More at: http://math2.org/math/general/interest.htm
Modeling Results
Assuming present wind/solar technological
capacities, using 1 to 2% of current annual
consumption of energy (85% derived from fossil
fuels) for wind/solar power creation per year:
A global-scale transition can be achieved in no more
than 30 years, ending with zero anthropogenic
carbon emissions, providing the rough minimum of
3.5 kilowatt/person energy consumption for all of
humanity.
p
Future Renewable Energy Capacity with different assumed Energy Return Over Energy
Invested values (“EROEI”) = M for wind/solar technologies
(Modeling Study of Solar Transition, Peter and David Schwartzman)
R* is the ratio of future global renewable power capacity to existing fossil fuel power generation,
thus represents the energy capacity available relative to the current fossil fuel demand.
Assumed Lifetime of installed wind/solar =20 yrs, with 10% of wind/solar energy produced being
reinvested in making more of the same, and with 1% of fossil fuel energy being used to
continuously create wind/solar power (this fossil fuel energy consumption is assumed in this
model calculation to be equal to the present rate).
State of the Science values of EROEI: Wind turbines: 20 to 75; Photovoltaics: >10; CSP: 30
Improvements in wind/solar
technologies will make this transition
easier and faster, specifically boosts
in the Energy Return/Energy Invested
Ratio (“EROEI”), requiring less
fossil fuel input