Tag: co2

El Niño Is Coming – and the World Isn’t Prepared

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That’s the title of this Wired article, and it makes scary reading.

I have no doubt that climate change is a very real thing, but I have often commented that I am regularly unimpressed by the hyperbole and drama with which the news stories around it are presented.

This one seems a little different.

Current forecasts suggest that La Niña will continue into early 2023, making it – fortuitously for us – one of the longest on record (it began in Spring 2020). Then, the equatorial Pacific will begin to warm again. Whether or not it becomes hot enough for a fully fledged El Niño to develop, 2023 has a very good chance – without the cooling influence of La Niña – of being the hottest year on record.

Sure, there are predictions of hurricanes and crop failure, of food shortages and economic impacts, of power outages and ever increasing temperatures, but there’s no embellishment: just facts and indications of what we might expect.

It still doesn’t sound good.

I was less sure about climate change 15 years ago. I was put off by the constantly incorrect predictions and yes, probably swayed by peer pressure when it came to believing (or not believing) what was going on. But if I hadn’t changed my mind about climate change before 2020 (I had, but…) then Covid sealed the deal for me. Not because I believe that the latter was due to the former, but because I watched experts being experts and sharing their expert knowledge, and it being shot down because of poor reporting or just sheer bloody ignorance.

Now I know how those climatologists felt.

The worst bit about knowing that this is happening is not being able to do anything about it. Because it really doesn’t matter how much good stuff like recycling and switching off our geysers that you or I do, when (e.g.) China is building another 15GW-worth of coal-fired power stations in the first six months of 2023 and (e.g.) India is reopening more than 100 coal mines to make more electricity. While collective effort at a local level probably assisted with some degree of relief during our awful drought in Cape Town, it’s absolutely laughable to try to get consumers to behave more responsibly when it comes to climate change when Jinping and Modi are chucking out more CO2 than ever before.

We don’t even have enough electricity to go around, but we’re being told (and paid) by Europe to shut down our 18 coal-fired plants, which at full capacity (ha!) amount to about 45GW of generation capacity. Meanwhile, China is operating over 1,100 coal-fired stations for 1,110GW. And all the emissions that come with them.

Until that sort of dichotomy is rectified, (and I understand how depressing and pessimistic this sounds) it feels utterly pointless to try and “do our bit” on a personal level.

Still in the dark about Earth Hour?

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Yes yes, I’ve been told that Earth Hour is all about “raising awareness” about “climate change”. I’ve also commented that I really don’t think it’s necessary to raise any more awareness about something we can’t get through a single Pistorius-free day without having rammed down our collective gullet.

In addition, I may also have mentioned that Earth Hour gives slacktivists the perfect opportunity to enjoy their favourite pastime, namely thinking that they’re making a difference without actually making a difference at all. In fact, as that article on Slate pointed out, lighting an inefficient candle (which most bunny-huggers and pseudo bunny-huggers will do this evening) is actually more harmful to our precious environment than using a fat incandescent light bulb for an hour (or, by extrapolation, any given period of time). But how much more harmful?

Well, I’ve found someone who has done some rudimentary calculations to find out exactly how much:

I know candles are nice and romantic – but you’re taking paraffin wax, in the form of a candle, and burning it, very inefficiently, at a low temperature. This stuff is pure hydrocarbon – it’s a heavy alkane fraction distilled straight off crude oil. This stuff is getting so scarce that nations are prepared to go to war just to secure it, remember?

A candle flame burns at a low temperature – so it’s a thermodynamically very inefficient source of energy – and most of the energy released in a candle is wasted as heat, anyway.

Even if 80% of your electricity comes from coal and fossil fuel fired power stations, as it does in Australia, burning candles is very polluting and certainly very greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions intensive, even more so than electric lighting.

Luke Weston then spoon feeds us through his calculations, just so that there can be no confusion as to how he reaches his conclusion. I’m not going to reproduce all those calculations here, but suffice to say that the results (standardised for the amount of light produced – apples with apples and all that) are as follows:

A incandescent bulb produces 1.11g CO2 for each hour that it is burned.
A candle produces 10.69g  for each hour that it is burned.

Therefore, for every candle that is burned to replace electric lighting during Earth Hour, greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the one hour are increased by 9.6 g of carbon dioxide.
If the light output from a 40 W light bulb was to be completely replaced by candles, this will lead to the emission of an extra 295 grams of carbon dioxide per over simply using the electric lights – if the equivalent of one thousand 40 W bulbs are replaced by candles, that’s an extra 295 kilograms of CO2 emitted.

I don’t know about you, but I can feel it getting warmer already.

Thus, if you really want to “make a difference” this evening (a positive difference, that is), you’ll be far better off sitting in the dark for an hour. And, if you want to DOUBLE the your contribution to saving the planet, you could do it for two.

But then we have to remember that there’s football and rugby in Cape Town tonight which you’ll want to watch on your dirty, still not ever so energy efficient flatscreen TV, dwarfing any potential benefits of switching off your lights and (not) firing up a candle.

Fortunately, this darkness and/or watching sport will (possibly) restrict the amount of “other activities” that some people have been suggesting might be an enjoyable and romantic by-product of an environment-destroying candlelit evening. I say “fortunately” because my wife is away this evening because each baby produced from those “other activities” will add so much to your household carbon footprint that you might as well stop washing out those Marmite jars and begin weeping right now:

Take, for example, a hypothetical American woman who switches to a more fuel-efficient car, drives less, recycles, installs more efficient light bulbs, and replaces her refrigerator and windows with energy-saving models. If she had two children, the researchers found, her carbon legacy would eventually rise to nearly 40 times what she had saved by those actions.

So. Please spend your Earth Hour in the dark. No lights, no candles, certainly no TV and ABSOLUTELY NO HANKY PANKY!

And even then, please don’t pretend that you’re actually making a difference.

Slate: Earth Hour is all wrong

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Ah yes. Another annual opportunity for slacktivism approaches. If you’re all done with clicking LIKE to cure some Indian child with a facial abscess and you’ve signed that online petition against whales (or Wales), you too can switch your lights off for an hour and save the planet.

Or… er… not:

If switching off the lights for one hour per year really were beneficial, why would we not do it for the other 8,759?
Hypothetically, switching off the lights for an hour would cut CO2 emissions from power plants around the world. But, even if everyone in the entire world cut all residential lighting, and this translated entirely into CO2 reduction, it would be the equivalent of China pausing its CO2 emissions for less than four minutes.

Well worth it then? No.

As the United Kingdom’s National Grid operators have found, a small decline in electricity consumption does not translate into less energy being pumped into the grid, and therefore will not reduce emissions. Moreover, during Earth Hour, any significant drop in electricity demand will entail a reduction in CO2 emissions during the hour, but it will be offset by the surge from firing up coal or gas stations to restore electricity supplies afterward.

But if you do still decide to continue with switching the lights off, then don’t even think about lighting a candle:

[They] are still fossil fuels—and almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light bulbs. Using one candle for each switched-off bulb cancels out even the theoretical CO2 reduction; using two candles means that you emit more CO2.

That won’t bother anyone taking part though, because they will feel that they are doing their bit, making a difference. And while a little bit of me wants to correct them on that fact, it’ll only upset them. And the only thing worse than a misinformed tree-hugger is a sad tree-hugger.

But, if you are one of those people who thinks that they can absolve themselves of all their environmental misdeeds simply by clicking a switch on Saturday, perhaps you should consider a better way of reducing your impact on the planet, because what you are planning is a complete waste of time – and electricity.