Random Thoughts

U.S. DOE EIA versus MAB...2019 and 2024

Evaluation of IEA and U.S. EIA fossil fuel use projections to 2050

Roger Pielke Jr. posted an analysis of the International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook (WEO) predictions of global use of fossil fuels from 2023-2050, versus the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) International Energy Outlook (IEO) for the same time period. The fossil fuels under consideration were coal, oil, and natural gas, and the units of use are exajoules.

The IEA WEO 2023 predicted global use of each of the three fossil fuels would peak before 2030, and the IEA WEO 2023 predicted that global coal use in particular would decline significantly by 2050, to a value of approximately 60 percent (i.e., 0.60 times) the value in 2023.

In contrast, the U.S. EIA IEO 2023 predicted that global use of all three fossil fuels would increase to 2050. For example, if the values for EIA IEO 2023 values for coal, oil, and natural gas are taken as a value of 1.00 in 2050, the values for coal, oil, and natural gas in 2023 would be 0.96, 0.85, and 0.79, respectively.

I decided to develop my own predictions for global use of coal, oil, and natural gas from 2023 to 2050, and compare them to the IEA WEO 2023 and the EIA IEO 2023.

With respect to coal, I also think global use will "peak" prior to 2030, but I think global use during the entire period will be essentially flat, so it will be difficult until very near the end of the period to determine whether a peak has truly occurred. I predict the "peak" coal will occur in 2029, but if that peak has a value of 1.00, I predict that the value in 2023

 

 

GDPs with and without climate change

Ed Dolan posted at the Niskanen Center blog on the question of what GDPs would be in 2099 with and without climate change. His graph of GDPs "with" climate change was based on the work of Burke et al. (Nature, 2015), and data published on their website. However, the data published on their website was based on the SSP5 scenario, which is similar to the RCP 8.5 scenario, which has extremely unrealistic (incredibly high) projections of coal usage in the 21st century. Anyway, Ed Dolan's figure looked like the one I recreated below (Ed Dolan's figure appears as an insert in the top-right of my graph).

 

The question is, what would the graph look like for a more realistic scenario, like RCP 4.5? To find out, I performed the following analysis:

1) I obtained the global average temperature increase for the RCP 8.5 scenario and the RCP 4.5 scenario from wonderful Wikipedia. The mean temperature increase is 3.7 degrees Celsius for RCP 8.5 and 1.8 degrees Celsius for RCP 4.5. So the increase in temperature is about half as much for RCP 4.5 as for RCP 8.5. The response of GDP to temperature, from the Burke et al. analysis, indicates an inverted "U" shape, peaking at about 15 degrees Celsius, and sloping away more and more quickly farther from the peak. I therefore assumed that a temperature change of half as much for RCP 4.5 versus RCP 8.5 would have about one-quarter of the effect on GDP for each country as the RCP 8.5 (/SSP5) scenario. The resultant graph looks like this (once again, the original Ed Dolan graph is in the top-right):

I welcome any more-refined analysis based on the work of Burke et al. (Nature, 2015). However, I think my analysis is probably pretty close to what they'd get. Unsurprisingly there is much less effect on GDPs for a global average temperature increase of 1.8 degrees Celsius than a global average temperature increase of 3.7 degrees Celsius.

JULY 27TH UPDATE

I realized I made errors in how I should translate the idea that half the temperature change results in one-quarter of the effect. Here is my new graph for what the GDPs would look like without and with climate change of the magnitude in the RCP 4.5 scenario.

 JULY 28TH UPDATE

I realized I was still making errors in my July 27th analysis and that the "one-quarter effect for one-half temperature change" rule was a bit crude. So I did a more sophisticated analysis. If anyone is interested in the details, contact me. Here are the results of the more sophisticated analysis:

 

 

Here's a table for some selected countries, spanning varying initial temperatures, initial GDPs, and growth rates without climate change.

The "money" columns here are the "Ratio 2099/2010 without CC (climate change)" and the column that shows the ratio of 2099/2010 GDPs for the RCP 4.5 scenario (as calculated by me, based on "more sophisticated analysis." For example, for the United Arab Emirates (one of the hottest countries in the world, and already rich) the ratio of GDP in 2099 to GDP in 2010 is 4.6 without climate change, and 0.3 with climate change at the RCP 8.5 level (both per Burke et al. in Nature 2015). My calculated ratio with climate change at the RCP 4.5 ratio is 2.6. In contrast, for the Russian Federation (a cold relatively poor country) the ratio is 10 without climate change, 50 with climate change at the RCP 8.5 level, and 32 with climate change at the RCP 4.5 level.

Overall, according to my analysis, climate change at the RCP 4.5 level has very little effect on GDPs when compared to no climate change (see the figure directly above).

Mark Bahner vs Wigley and Raper (Science 2001) vs IPCC RCPs

These are comparisons of cumulative global industrial CO2 emissions in the 21st century from three sources:

1) A Wigley and Raper paper in Science in 2001,

2) My response to the Wigley and Raper paper, with my (much better) predictions, published on my blog in 2006, and

3) The IPCC Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios, including the "business as usual (see page 43)" RCP 8.5 scenario.

The meaning of the "5%", "50%", and "95%" designations is that there is a 5% chance, a 50% chance, and a 95% chance that the cumulative emissions in the 21st century will be less than the values given.

My 50% probability value was 712 GtC. The Wigley and Raper 50% probability value is 1385 GtC, and the RCP 8.5 "business as usual" is 1932 GtC. Current emissions are about 10GtC per year. If they plateau at this value for the next 10 years, then fall linearly to zero emissions in 2100, the total emissions for this century will be about 600 GtC...very close to my 712 GtC value, and miles away from the Wigley and Raper 1385 GtC value and the RCP 8.5 "business as usual value" of 1932 GtC.

In other words, I'm basically right, and they are way, way wrong. No surprise there. 

P.S. What is surprising to me is that the Wigley and Raper paper was published in Science magazine, and it predicts that there is less than 1 in 20 chance (i.e., a 5% probability) that emissions in the 21st century will be more than 713 GtC. Why was this obviously wrong analysis never corrected? Isn't Science interested in...I don't know...science? Perhaps even more surprising is how in 2009 the RCP 8.5 scenario, with emissions of 1932 GtC, was labeled as "business as usual" and the so-called "scientific community" has never corrected that obvious nonsense.

A bet offer to Anders (of "ATTP")

I was having a discussion with Anders of the blog And Then There's Physics. He claims that the statement "that future anthropogenic emissions would need to be eliminated in order to stabilize global-mean temperatures" is true.

I'm challenging him to put his money where his mouth is. I bet him the equivalent of 30 U.S. dollars that I can honestly answer the following multiple choice question, and he cannot:

Which of the following statements must be true, in order for global temperatures to be stabilized:

1) Anthropogenic emissions must be eliminated.
2) If anthropogenic emissions are not eliminated, then we must somehow remove as much CO2 from the atmosphere, and sequester it somewhere, as we’re emitting into the atmosphere.
3) Both of the above.

My honest answer to this question is "#2."

If Anders can honestly answer this multiple choice question, I will give him $30.

"Citizen Scientists" of the world: Seriously, the emperor is naked

Most folks know the story of The Emperor's New Clothes. It ends when the innocent little boy says the truth, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!" Then all the people are no longer scared to admit the truth, and they acknowledge the emperor is indeed naked, and everyone lives happily ever after. (Except the emperor's two weavers, who die mysteriously of radiation poisoning a few months later.)

But I propose a different, "Fractured Fairy Tales" ending, in which the people shout down the boy: "You don't know what you're talking about! Look at the weave! It's extraordinary!" The boy then tries several more times to demonstrate why the emperor is indeed naked (such as describing moles in private places). The people then shout that the boy is a Clothing Denier. And the boy eventually shrugs and gives up.

I've had a similar experience recently, trying to point out John Cook's (and others') misrepresentation of the paper, "Quantifying the Consensus on Global Warming." Specifically John Cook wrote, in a later published paper, "Of the 4,014 abstracts that expressed a position on the issue of human-induced climate change, Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97% endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause."

This is an absolutely blatant misrepresentation of the paper. To put it more bluntly, John Cook is lying. There is simply no way on earth that, "Of the 4,014 abstracts that expressed a position on the issue of human-induced climate change, Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97% endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause."

To get into details, the paper has 7 categories, and here are the number of abstracts in the various categories:

(1) Explicit endorsement with quantification = 64 abstracts.

(2) Explicit endorsement without quantification = 922 abstracts.

(3) Implicit endorsement = 2910 abstracts.

(5) Implicit rejection = 54 abstracts.

(6) Explicit rejection without quantification = 15 abstracts.

(7) Explicit rejection with quantification = 9 abstracts.

Category (4) isn't presented above, because only Categories 1-3 and 5-7 are important to the paper. There are 3896 abstracts in Categories 1-3 and 78 abstracts in Categories 5-7, adding up to a total of 3974 abstracts. Then there were 40 abstracts rated as "uncertain" with respect to anthropogenic global warming ("AGW").

The main point is that Cook et al. get the "over 97%" of abstracts by summing all the papers in Categories 1 to 3. However, of those first 3 categories, only "Category 1" truly fits the characterization as "...the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause." So only 64 out of the 4,014 abstracts meet that characterization.

To see how much abstracts in Category 3 do not meet the characterization of, "...the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause" one simply needs to read a few abstracts in Category 3. For example, there's the abstract: Is the extent of glaciation limited by marine gas-hydrates?

"Methane may have been released to the atmosphere during the Quaternary from Arctic shelf gas-hydrates as a result of thermal decomposition caused by climatic warming and rising sea-level; this release of methane (a greenhouse gas) may represent a positive feedback on global warming [Revelle, 1983; Kvenvolden, 1988a; Nisbet, 1990]. We consider the response to sea-level changes by the immense amount of gas-hydrate that exists in continental rise sediments, and suggest that the reverse situation may apply—that release of methane trapped in the deep-sea sediments as gas-hydrates may provide a negative feedback to advancing glaciation. Methane is likely to be released from deep-sea gas-hydrates as sea-level falls because methane gas-hydrates decompose with pressure decrease. Methane would be released to sediment pore space at shallow sub-bottom depths (100's of meters beneath the seafloor, commonly at water depths of 500 to 4,000 m) producing zones of markedly decreased sediment strength, leading to slumping [Carpenter, 1981; Kayen, 1988] and abrupt release of the gas. Methane is likely to be released to the atmosphere in spikes that become larger and more frequent as glaciation progresses. Because addition of methane to the atmosphere warms the planet, this process provides a negative feedback to glaciation, and could trigger deglaciation."

There is nothing in this abstract that says, "The earth is warming up"...let alone that "human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause." The whole abstract (and paper) are about events that happened long before the Industrial Revolution!

Similarly, there is the abstract: On the nature of methane gas-hydrate dissociation during the Toarcian and Aptian Oceanic anoxic events.

The magnitude and timing of a major rapid negative carbon-isotope excursion recorded in marine and terrestrial matter through the Early Toarcian (Early Jurassic) and Early Aptian (Early Cretaceous) oceanic anoxic events (OAEs) have been proposed to be the result of large methane gas-hydrate dissociation events. Here, we develop and evaluate a global carbon-isotope mass-balance approach for determining the responses of each component of the exogenic carbon cycle (terrestrial biosphere, atmosphere and ocean). The approach includes a dynamic response of the terrestrial carbon cycle to methane-related CO₂ increases and climatic warming. Our analyses support the idea that both the Early Toarcian and Early Aptian isotopic curves were indicative of large episodic methane releases (∼5000 and ∼3000 Gt respectively) promoting warm ‘greenhouse’ conditions in the Mesozoic. These events are calculated to have increased the atmospheric CO₂ concentration by ∼900 and ∼600 ppmv respectively and land surface temperatures by 2.5° to 3.0°C. However, we show that much of the methane released from oceanic sediments is rapidly sequestered by terrestrial and marine components in the global carbon cycle, and this effect strongly attenuated the potential for ancient methane gas-hydrate dissociation events to act as major amplifiers in global warming. An increase in oceanic carbon sequestration is consistent with the deposition of globally distributed black shales during these OAEs. Our analyses point to the urgent need for high-resolution marine and terrestrial carbon-isotope records to better characterize the nature of the Toarcian and Aptian events and improve our interpretation of their consequences for the global carbon cycle.

Not only is this abstract about times before the Industrial Revolution, it's about times long before humanity even existed! But somehow, according to John Cook (and others), this abstract demonstrates that, "the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause." On the blog, "And Then There's Physics," I attempted to explain how the Cook et al. "Consensus" paper is being misrepresented by Cook et al. But the crowd there simply would not believe that the emperor had no clothes. They insisted they could see the clothes. Eventually, a boy has to say, "Whatever."

But the emperor is still naked, and John Cook et al. are still misrepresenting the results of their paper. Their paper most emphatically did not find that, "Of the 4,014 abstracts that expressed a position on the issue of human-induced climate change, ...over 97% endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause."

Do people of 2100 have a "right" to be "pretty angry" about global warming?

I made some comments about a post by Kerry Emanuel at the National Climate Change Forum. Andrew Dessler first commented:

John: here’s how I would look at the issue. Imagine you’re a citizen year 2100. If it turns out that the climate sensitivity is high and human society does nothing about it, then you would rightfully be pretty angry.

I responded as follows:

Andrew Dessler writes: “John: here’s how I would look at the issue. Imagine you’re a citizen year 2100.”

OK. Let’s imagine that. In the 20th century, worldwide GDP/income growth averaged about 2.3% per year. Let’s assume that continues. Therefore, as a citizen of the world in 2100, my income is approximately 7 times what it was for the citizens of the world in 2014. Let’s further assume that there are 10 billion of us in 2100 (a nice round and reasonable number). Therefore, our global income/GDP in 2100 is approximately 10 times higher than at present (7 times more GDP/income per person, and approximately 1.4 times as many people). Therefore, our global annual GDP is about $900 trillion (~10 times the 2014 value of $90, purchasing power parity basis), and our global income is about 80% of that, or $720 trillion.

Let’s further ...suppose that the global CO2 concentration is about 700 ppm, and this has resulted in a warming of 5 degrees Celsius relative to the year 2014. (Note that such warming seems extremely improbable, because *average* warming rate over the next 8 decades that’s more than 3 times the current rate.) Let’s further suppose that this warming of 5 degrees Celsius cuts the income/GDP-per-person for the citizen of 2100 from 7 times the value of the citizen of 2014 to 6 times the value of the citizen of 2014 (i.e., about a 14% reduction in income).

Suppose we citizens of 2100, suffering from a 14% reduction in our income due to global warming, decide to spend 20% our income on pulling CO2 from the atmosphere and injecting it underground (ambient air capture and sequestration). That 20% of our income would be $720 trillion times 0.86 (from a 14 percent reduction caused by the hypothesized 5 degrees Celsius global warming) times 0.20 (20 percent) = $124 trillion a year. One (pessimistic) estimate of the cost of ambient air capture and sequestration in 2012 was $1000 per metric ton of CO2 (http://www.pnas.org/content/108/51/20428.long). (Note that this paper also mentions other estimates for the current cost at “no more than a few hundred dollars per tonne of CO2 avoided.”) Since there are 2.13 gigatonnes of carbon per ppm of CO2 in the air, and 3.67 tonnnes of CO2 per tonne of carbon, the total cost to remove 1 ppm of CO2 from the atmosphere at $1000 per metric ton would be $7.8 trillion. So if we citizens of 2100 spent 20% of our income (i.e., $124 trillion per year) on ambient air CO2 removal and sequestration, we could remove about 16 ppm per year. Let’s say were adding 2 ppm a year at the time; therefore, we could only lower CO2 by 14 ppm per year. So how many years would it take us to get from 700 ppm down to the pre-industrial concentration of 280 ppm? It would take us (700 – 280)/14 = 30 years.

At the end of that 30 years, assuming that GDP per capita continued to grow at 2.3% per year, and even assuming that we continued to lose 14% of our income to climate change damage and 20% of our income was spent on ambient CO2 removal and sequestration, our income would still be 6.8 times the income of the average citizen of 2014 (i.e. 1.4 times the average income of the citizen of 2100, which was 4.8 times the average income of the citizen of 2014).

Dr. Dessler continues, “If it turns out that the climate sensitivity is high and human society does nothing about it, then you would rightfully be pretty angry.”

How do we citizens of 2100 have any “right” to be “pretty angry?” We have an income that is 4.8 times higher than the average citizen of 2014. And that’s even *assuming* that there is 5 degrees Celsius of warming between now and 2100 (which is very unlikely to happen) and that such warming causes a 14% loss in income from climate damage, AND that we citizens of 2100 spend 20% of our incomes removing CO2 from the ambient air and sequestering it. Furthermore, by 2130, we average citizens will have an incomes that are 6.8 times higher than the average citizen of 2014, and will have lowered the ambient air CO2 concentration to the pre-industrial value of 280 ppm.

My comments are essentially a follow-up on posts I've made here on my blog that question the morality of sacrificing for the benefit of the people of 2100, since I think they'll be so much better off than the people of 2014. (Or they'll be waging and likely losing a war to super-intelligent terminators, and so will have much bigger worries than global warming.)

Related articles

Global warming is not "irreversible"

What is the Morality of the Less-Well-Off Sacrificing for the Better-Off?

 

Global warming is not "irreversible"

Science Magazine has a paper recently claiming that global warming was "Irreversible". It's an indication of how strongly global warming alarmism is a religious matter that the paper was published with such a title.

Global warming is of course not "irreversible." If CO2 is removed from the atmosphere, temperature will go down. And there is no magic behind removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Plenty of people have studied it. The question is one of cost/affordability.

Below is an analysis of the cost/;affordability removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. What I did was to obtain global GDP and atmospheric CO2 projections for four IPCC scenarios. Then I took the GDP for the years 2080 to 2100, and projected that growth rate out to 2200 for each scenario (since GDP projections to 2200 were not readily available). I did the same thing for projections for CO2 emissions.

Then I calculated what would happen if the world spent 10 percent of its GDP on removing CO2 from ambient air in the year 2100, and continued to do that until the ambient CO2 concentration reached the pre-industrial level of about 300 ppm. My assumption was of a cost for CO2 removal of $1000 per metric ton. That works out to about $7.8 trillion per ppm of CO2 removed. 

The results below indicate that for all scenarios but one, the CO2 is reduced to the pre-industrial concentration of about 300 ppm before the year 2200. I'll probably modify this post a bit as I have time. But the bottom line is that global warming, contrary to what you may have read in Science magazine, is clearly not "irreversible."

Some notes:

1)  Global GDP values can be found at this site: SRES scenarios.

2)  Atmospheric CO2 concentrations can be found here: CO2 concentrations and emissions

  

What is the Morality of the Less-Well-Off Sacrificing for the Better-Off?

Technology Review recently had an editorial addressed to President Obama (Dear Mr. President: Time to Deal with Climate Change) asking him to make global warming his top priority. They acknowledge: "It means immediate spending and economic sacrifice by present-day voters in order to achieve benefits that will be realized decades from now." 

I don't understand the morality of "immediate spending and economic sacrifice by present-day voters in order to achieve benefits that will be realized decades from now." I wrote to Jason Pontin at Technology Review (who seems like a nice fellow) and told him that I thought that the people of 2050 and 2100 will be better off than the people of the present "under any realistic scenario of global warming." He questioned whether this would indeed be the case. So I put some potential "quality of life" indicators in a table, with my estimates for their values circa 2012, and my estimates for what they would be in 2050 and 2100.

I'd be happy for him or any other Technology Review (TR) author of that letter to present their estimates. I'd also be happy for him, them, or anyone else to provide some potential other parameters that should be on the list.

 

U.S. patents cause global weather-related disasters!

Roger Pielke Jr. found a figure in the latest IPCC report that he calls"just embarrassing."

However, I've found an even more remarkable IPCC figure:  it's Figure S&M-XXX (it's really buried, so you'll have to really dig down to find it).

It compares normalized global weather-related losses with U.S. patents issued.  There is a clear correlation.  It's obvious that increasing the number of U.S. patents issued causes normalized global weather-related losses to increase.  When will the U.S. Patent Office start behaving responsibly, and stop issuing patents???!  (Will it only be when G.W. Bush leaves the Whitehouse?)

 

A method for achieving honest climate predictions

I’ve written (repeatedly) that the “projections” in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report are pseudoscientific nonsense.  I haven’t seen the Fourth Assessment Report, but I’m so confident (or would that be depressed?) that they will be nonsense too, that I propose a better way.

The fundamental problem is that the IPCC has no incentive to tell the truth in its projections.  But they do have an incentive to lie...to exaggerate the amount of warming that’s likely to occur.  So that’s what they do...they lie.  I propose the following solution:

The U.S. government should set up a prize fund totaling $400 million, payable in 2031.  The prize fund would be open to any U.S. university with accredited science or engineering programs.  The fund would be awarded as $200 million for first place, $100 million for second, $50 million for third, $25 million for fourth, $12 million for fifth, $6 million for sixth, $3 million for seventh…and $1 million until we run out of money.

Prizes would be awarded for most closely predicting the following parameters:

1)    globally averaged surface temperature anomaly for 2029-2031, relative to 1990;
2)    globally averaged lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for 2029-2031, relative to 1990;
3)    Atlantic hurricane basin sea surface temperature anomaly for 2029-2031, relative to 1990;
4)    average insured U.S. hurricane losses for 2029-2031,
5)    global sea level rise for 2029-2031, relative to 1990;
6)    CO2 atmospheric concentration;
7)    anthropogenic (industrial) CO2 emissions;
8)    methane atmospheric concentration,
9)    anthropogenic methane emissions,
10)  anthropogenic black carbon emissions,

The ten parameters listed above would be weighted such that the first 5 parameters are twice as important as the bottom 5.  Let’s say 100 universities enter the contest, with #1 given to the best prediction for each parameter, and #100 given to the worst prediction for each parameter. 

Let’s take hypothetical University X (not Xavier!).:  Suppose its rankings on the first 5 predictions are:  #3, #4, #10, #20, #60.  Since all those are multiplied by 2, its score would be:  (3+4+10+20+60)*2 = 194.  Suppose its rankings for the bottom 5 predictions are #20, #6, #70, #10, #8.  Its score on the second 5 would be 114.  So the total score would be 194 + 114 = 308.  The university with the LOWEST score would get the $200 million first prize, the university with the next lowest score would get $100 million, and so on.

For a total investment of $400 million, the U.S. government would get far better predictions than it currently gets from the IPCC.  (In fact, it’s not possible to get poorer predictions than from the IPCC…but that’s another story.)

In fact, Exxon-Mobil (to choose just one company at random ;-)) could get a similarly good deal by offering a prize fund of only $4 million (i.e. the proposed U.S. government prize to universities, divided by 100).  But this would be payable to INDIVIDUALS (or their heirs).  Exxon could restrict the prize fund to 100 scientists of its choosing.  The top prize of $2 million in 2031 would certainly be enough incentive to make truthful predictions!