Category: Climate Science

Articles about climate science

Reporting on climate science

dchone July 10, 2017

A visit home to Australia is always interesting when it comes to climate change reporting in the media, simply because of the controversy around this issue here. Australia has been trying to implement meaningful policy for nearly a decade and has made little progress.

On this visit, my first perusal of a newspaper highlighted the controversy that exists. The Weekend Australian reported on a recent paper in Nature Geoscience that examined the differences in model and satellite measured tropospheric warming rates. The paper focussed particularly on the early 21st century when model warming exceeded observed warming, raising the possibility of a pause in the warming trend.The Weekend Australian opened the article with the words “Climate models were wrong . . . ” and continued with the words “The admission . . . . “, as if there was guilt attached to the finding. This approach sets the tone of the discussion as being negative towards and sceptical of climate science, even though this isn’t the direction being taken by the Nature paper itself. Rather, the paper is about the divergence in model output and observational data presenting an opportunity to better understand the variability of the climate system and therefore improve modelling science.

On a similar note, but at the other end of the spectrum, The Guardian almost gleefully reports a few days after the Weekend Australian that “Hopes . . . . have been dashed by new research.” that longer term warming will be less than expected if based on the temperature rises seen in recent decades. Rather, it explains that longer term warming will be much higher and likely closer to model expectations based on the findings of the paper that they chose to select and discuss.

Both the research papers in question represent different but equally valid attempts by the science community to better understand the underlying climate sensitivity and the reasons for variability. Both papers help advance that understanding and both have proposed reasons why there is divergence between models and observations. This is important work, but the reporting of it leaves much to be desired.
Picking and choosing particular pieces of work and then amplifying one aspect of those stories with hyperbole isn’t helping inform the public on the reality of the climate issue and the scale of the job in front of society to tackle global emissions. It adds to the divisions that exist rather than attempting to bring the sides together. In both cases, the more informed reporting would have been to tell the reader that the science community is building a better understanding of climate sensitivity and the reasons for variability. But perhaps that’s just a bit too dull for modern reporters!

Out now! A new book on climate change

dchone June 26, 2017

In mid-2008 the head of the Shell media team dropped by my desk with a proposal for the company to take an early step out of the world of traditional corporate communication and into the then new and emerging world of social media. The idea was to set up a regular blog series that discussed issues pertinent to the company and its stakeholders. With climate change a central issue for society, the plan was to start on this subject. As the leading climate change person within the company, I was asked to think about topics to kick off the initiative. A few months later I was up and running with my first posts covering emissions trading, policy development and the energy transition. The opportunity was also a great fit with my role, which requires me to be something of an independent voice internally on climate change.

The blog is now heading towards a decade of posts and somewhat perversely, it has rather outlasted the initial enthusiasm for the idea. There are now some 400 posts, with several hundred thousand words of content covering almost every aspect of the climate issue. I have found that readership is quite wide, mainly through direct feedback from readers who I meet by chance at conferences and even socially.

As a chemical engineer with 37 years’ experience in the oil and gas industry, my goal has always been to tackle the climate issue from an engineering perspective; based on data, built on facts and without the histrionics and emotion that have come to define this subject in many quarters. In 2014, I began work on a series of three short e-books that bought to life some of the ideas from my blog, succinctly covering many of the pertinent issues of climate change today, including carbon trading and the Paris Agreement.

Last year I was approached by Emerald Publishing who have now turned this collection of material into a complete book. The book brings together and builds on my blog and the e-books. It tells the story of the climate change issue and the transition in the energy system that must be implemented to finally address the issue. At its most ambitious, the Paris Agreement implies economic and societal change on a scale that sees carbon dioxide emissions fall rapidly from 40 billion tonnes per annum in 2016, to net-zero by the middle of the century. Yet our fossil fuel based energy system which ushered in the Industrial Revolution nearly 200 years ago continues to grow and evolve even as new sources of energy come into the market and compete.

The principal economic instrument for change is clear and has been for over two decades, but in 2017 only a fraction of the global economy actively employs government led carbon pricing policies and within that none of these systems operate at a level commensurate with the pace of change that is necessary. As deployment of new energy technologies accelerates, can solutions be found to cover the full range of services delivered by fossil fuels and can warming be limited to the agreed global goals? The book explores the climate issue from its very beginnings through to the end of end of the 21st Century and looks in depth at the transition challenge that society faces.

The book is now available from all good bookstores and direct from Emerald Publishing.

Data from the book is sourced from Shell and from the University of Oxford, IEA, NASA, NOAA and CDIAC and all proceeds of the book will go to an NGO working on climate change related issues.

Drawdown, or not?

dchone June 14, 2017

A recent book and associated website discusses the steps necessary to address and even reverse the current warming of the climate system. The project, known as Drawdown, maps, measures, models, and describes the 100 most substantive solutions to global warming. For each solution, the Drawdown team describe its history, the carbon impact it provides, the relative cost and savings, the path to adoption, and how it works. Drawdown is that point in time when the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begins to decline on a year-to-year basis.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide would likely stabilize before the world stops emitting (on a net basis) carbon dioxide from anthropogenic sources. This is because of the action of the oceans and the lag in carbon dioxide uptake that they exhibit. Net carbon dioxide emissions of 6-10 Gt per annum (currently 40 Gt per annum) are possible while atmospheric carbon dioxide plateaus, but emissions must eventually head to net-zero to see atmospheric carbon dioxide fall and for that trend to continue. Even then, the fall will be very slow given the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the rate at which the ocean can absorb it, at least until the surface layers are largely saturated. Further processes which involve fixing the carbon in ocean sediment and absorbing it through mineralization will play out over thousands of years.

‘Drawdown’ is a comprehensive piece of work and covers not just energy solutions such as replacing fossil fuel use with renewables, but also includes social changes such as the need for educating girls in developing countries. Education is linked to infant mortality, birth rates and therefore long term population trends, which in turn impacts energy use and therefore emissions. Within the website is a listing of the approaches, starting with Refrigerant Management at the top of the list. A change in this area is claimed to be the equivalent of 90 Gt CO2, but this is a more complex story as refrigerants are, for the most part, short lived climate pollutants (SLCP). I discussed this in a post last October, shortly after the Parties to the Montreal Protocol had agreed the Kigali Amendment which covers these refrigerants.

While the list covers areas such as electricity generation, land use change and transport, it has very little to offer for industrial processes, but seems to rely on them completely to deliver systemic change. Building wind turbines, developing mass transit, deploying nuclear power stations, manufacturing insulation and automating buildings will require large scale manufacturing and significant production of chemicals and materials. Today, these activities alone account for some 8 Gt of global carbon dioxide emissions, or nearly the same as transport. New activities such as building hundreds of TWhrs of battery storage are likely to exacerbate these emissions. Included within this there are significant emissions from the processes themselves, such as the carbon dioxide from the reduction of iron ore to make iron / steel and the calcination of limestone to make cement.

These activities are amongst the most difficult to decarbonise and lead to the need for carbon capture and storage (CCS). Capturing and geologically storing the emissions from cement manufacture may be far simpler than trying to find substitutes, developing alternative process routes or trying to offset the emissions through reforestation. The one hundred solutions offered on the Drawdown website make no specific mention of geological storage of carbon dioxide, yet venture into areas such as air capture of carbon dioxide. While the latter may provide a useful conduit towards synthetic fuels, it will make no difference at all to atmospheric carbon dioxide if there isn’t large scale storage involved.

‘Drawdown’ is an interesting piece of work, but it doesn’t tackle the real challenge associated with net-zero emissions, let alone actual drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere. These issues are tackled with much greater rigour in the recent Shell publication ‘A Better Life With a Healthy Planet: Pathways to Net-Zero Emissions’ and in my forthcoming book ‘Putting the Genie Back: Solving the Climate and Energy Dilemma’.

Can the Paris Agreement survive?

dchone June 4, 2017

There is an element of déjà vu to the events in the White House Rose Garden last week. Just days into my new job as climate change adviser in Shell, then President George W. Bush announced that the USA was withdrawing completely from the Kyoto Protocol and would follow an alternative path forward in terms of climate action. At the time, he proposed a significant step-up in technology development through the National Climate Change Technology Initiative and a leadership role by the United States to work within the United Nations framework and elsewhere to develop with its friends and allies and nations throughout the world an effective and science-based response to the issue of global warming.

The June 2001 Bush announcement was widely expected and indeed, it helped spell the end for the Kyoto Protocol. The UNFCCC process fractured as a result, with some Parties continuing to pursue the Kyoto Protocol and all Parties brought back to the table to negotiate a new deal that worked for the United States. This gave birth to the Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative Action, which together with the Kyoto Protocol arrangements could have potentially combined into a satisfactory global deal. Unfortunately, they didn’t, with the meltdown in Copenhagen being the outcome. But the pieces were reassembled, in large part led by the United States under President Obama, with the result being the Paris Agreement in December 2015. That process took over 14 years to complete.

Sixteen years on from the Bush announcement and again from the White House lawn, President Trump has now declared that the United Stated will exit the Paris Agreement, once again with the caveat that the Administration would be open to a renegotiation or even an entirely new agreement. The reasons given are largely the same as those of President Bush; unfairness, competitiveness concerns, negative economic impact, layoffs of workers and price increases for consumers. But the circumstances are very different this time around.

Looking 14 years ahead from today we will be in the 2030s. As my own analysis showed, that represents a period when we may start to see years in which the global average temperature rise could equal or exceed 1.5°C above the level in the mid-1800s. There isn’t any grace period remaining to reorganise, negotiate and agree yet another climate deal. Nor should that happen; the Paris Agreement is structured to reflect what countries are prepared to offer, with few requirements other than that successive mitigation offers should improve over time and ratchet towards the end goal of net-zero emissions in the second half of the century. The Agreement isn’t a good or bad deal for anyone; it simply reflects the progression required over time as nations either continue or begin to proactively manage emissions and eventually contain them.

The Paris Agreement is made up of national contributions (NDC), determined by nations per their domestic circumstances. This is the case for all countries, from the United States of America as the world’s largest economy through to Zimbabwe as one of the poorest. Although the Agreement asks for developed countries to continue with economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets, there is an expectation that all countries move in this direction and the Agreement encourages such movement. Several developing countries have structured their national contributions to reflect this and in the time since the negotiations concluded, more have implemented measures to that effect. For example, China is implementing a nationwide emissions trading system and emissions within their economy are now expected to peak well before 2030, ahead of their stated national contribution.

With all countries supposedly on a pathway towards absolute targets and eventually net-zero emissions, there is nothing left to negotiate other than the timeline along which this proceeds. Once again, the Agreement sets out the process for this, rather than Parties having to resort to yet another negotiating process towards an alternative agreement. There is a transparency framework, a stocktake process and a mechanism to facilitate implementation of and promote compliance with the provisions of the Agreement. Although the proposed mechanism is facilitative in nature and should function in a manner that is transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive, it nevertheless offers the opportunity for a country such as the USA to negotiate more rapid convergence of effort.

Both Chancellor Merkel and President Macron, along with UNFCCC Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa made it clear the morning after President Trump’s announcement that there would be no renegotiation of the Paris Agreement. While anything is possible in theory, a renegotiation would put an end to the Agreement and probably not deliver a replacement for a decade or more. They were right to reject the proposal; in any case, it simply isn’t necessary under the structure that exists.

Given all the above, the current Administration may still be concerned about the effort required by the United States to deliver its stated goal of a reduction of 26-28% in emissions by 2025 against a 2005 baseline, particularly when compared to some countries. Although the current surge in US natural gas production and its replacement of coal for power generation, the advance of renewable energy and the roll-out of electric vehicles are all contributing to a fall in US emissions, the target remains ambitious. While the prospect of success is visible within the energy transition that is underway, the United States could simply resubmit its national contribution. Various parts of the Paris Agreement and the accompanying Decision Text open the door to such a step, and former Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the Agreement for the United States, said as much on the BBC shortly after the Trump announcement. Although successive national contributions are required to demonstrate increased ambition under the Agreement, this is the first such submission and therefore can be revised. Take, for example, paragraph 22 of the accompanying Decision Text to the Paris Agreement. It says;

Invites Parties to communicate their first nationally determined contribution no later than when the Party submits its respective instrument of ratification, accession, or approval of the Paris Agreement. If a Party has communicated an intended nationally determined contribution prior to joining the Agreement, that Party shall be considered to have satisfied this provision unless that Party decides otherwise;

It would seem to be the case that the USA has ‘decided otherwise’. By resubmitting its national contribution, some semblance of renegotiation would be achieved, at least in part. A new contribution from the United States would still require an absolute target as this is required of developed countries under Article 4.4, but the number could have a much wider margin, covering the expectation of economic growth that the President alluded to in his speech on June 1^st. Of course, this isn’t an ideal outcome from an emissions perspective, but it would keep the United States in the frame for some time to come and allow them to pursue further equivalency of effort through the implementation mechanism.

Should the USA end up on a path of true departure, this will still take until November 2020 to execute. A Party cannot serve notice of termination until three years after the Agreement enters into force and then there is a period of one year before their participation ends. While such a period does not extend beyond the term of the current Administration, it nevertheless represents a long time in politics.

In the meantime, some 190+ other countries will continue to implement their national contributions through a variety of approaches. The European Union, for example, is pursuing a reduction of 40% by 2030 against a 1990 baseline, utilising a cap-and-trade system for the large emission sources such as power stations. Even within the United States, the current energy transition will continue, with much the same result in terms of emissions in 2020 and possibly even 2025 as would have been the case with the national contribution in place. States and cities will likely see to this. Deactivation of the contribution is unlikely to spur new construction of coal fired power stations given the intense competitive pressure from natural gas and renewables. Even discounting current competition, there remains the prospect of future carbon constraints imposed at some point within the 50+ year lifetime of a new coal fired power station.

But the energy transition is just one element of the Paris Agreement; emissions management is at its core. This will require more than just an energy transition to implement, probably requiring large scale deployment of negative emissions technologies, including geological storage of carbon dioxide. This latter step may be the one that suffers following the US announcement.

The Paris Agreement can and likely will survive the events of last week. But if other nations don’t step up and look beyond their own energy transitions, focussing squarely on the need for a net-zero emissions outcome within the next 50-80 years, then the goal of the Agreement will be at risk.

Invoking uncertainty can be perilous

dchone May 16, 2017

The past couple of weeks have seen something of a storm of protest directed at Bret Stephens of the New York Times, following the publication of his first column for that newspaper which happened to be on climate change. In the article Stephens does note ‘By now I can almost hear the heads exploding’ and that is exactly what happened.

While he could have easily avoided some of the petty criticism by not using words such as ‘modest’ to describe the extent of warming over the last century, his somewhat clumsy venture into the world of probability and uncertainty led many commentators to accuse him of climate denial – in fact they labelled him with the very names that he was cautioning were part of the problem with regards public disinterest in the climate issue itself. Stephens had noted;

Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating sceptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.

While I don’t subscribe to the way in which Stephens put together his story, he was nevertheless correct in his assertion that ‘much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities’. This issue is also a problem when it comes to discussing mitigation strategies.

While it is very clear that the Paris Agreement sets a goal of ‘well below 2°C’ and also challenges society to attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C, the current reality is that the world is not on track for this outcome and none of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) submitted to date are aligned with the ambition that emerged from Paris. Yet there is almost no possibility of discussing the implications of such an outcome for fear in the minds of many that the discussion could become a slippery slope to reduced ambition. So there is a return to the language that Stephens encountered.

In my forthcoming book, Putting the Genie Back: Solving the Climate and Energy Dilemma, I do actually explore this issue. The discussion emerges from the world of climate probability and uncertainty, which is at the heart of the work of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Unfortunately, the use of a 2°C reference point has now become politically rigid, to the extent that it is hardly possible to explore what the number really means, let alone talk of surpassing it. The most common argument is that if 2°C is passed then society must be on a certain pathway to catastrophe. Talk of catastrophe and hopelessness can distance an audience, exactly the point that Stephens is making. Even the IEA 450 Scenario is based on probability; the mitigation pathway it delivers gives a 50% chance of limiting warming to 2°C; it is far from a guarantee of 2°C success.

By contrast, MIT have demonstrated that even a modest attempt to mitigate emissions could profoundly affect the risk profile for equilibrium surface temperature. They looked at five mitigation scenarios (see below), from a ‘do nothing’ approach to a very stringent climate regime (Level 1, akin to a 2ºC case). In the ‘do nothing’ approach, mid-range warming by the end of the century is some 5ºC compared to the late 20th century, but with a wide distribution, which means that there is a small probability of warming up to 8ºC or more – almost certainly a catastrophic outcome even when accounting for the small probability that it might occur. But even modest mitigation efforts, while not shifting the mid-range sufficiently for an outcome close to 2ºC, nevertheless radically changes the shape of the distribution curve such that the spread narrows considerably, with the highest impact outcome dropping by almost 5ºC. As mitigation effort increases and the mid-range approaches 2ºC, the distribution narrows further such that the highest possible outcome is limited to 3ºC (more like the IEA 450 case).

This is not an argument for limiting the global effort to modest mitigation, but recognition that if modest mitigation is the best that can ultimately be achieved, the risk reduction it delivers has very high value to society. It also highlights that a singular focus on a very difficult-to-achieve goal can be counter-productive if it results in a breakdown of the efforts that deliver a less ambitious outcome. Some thought along these lines may be required as the current US Administration ponders the Paris Agreement.

Perhaps a more pragmatic discussion about effort and outcomes would also garner more interest from a broader swathe of society and offer renewed interest in climate change for the 64% of Americans who Stephens notes do not care ‘a great deal‘ about the subject.

Carbon storage or use?

dchone February 16, 2017

Last week I was at a meeting of major industrial emitters and the discussion moved on to the subject of carbon capture. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but one aspect of it did; the context was entirely carbon capture and use (CCU) rather than carbon capture and storage (CCS). One participant did mention CCS, but corrected himself to CCU. These are two very different approaches to managing atmospheric carbon dioxide and don’t behave in the same way or necessarily give the same outcome.

CCS for industrial processes involves geological storage of the carbon dioxide, typically 2-3 km below the surface. The Shell Quest facility in Canada operates in this way. This removes carbon from the biosphere and returns it to the geosphere such that it has no impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration or ocean acidity. It is the basis of a permanent solution to elevated carbon levels in the atmosphere and effectively replicates in a very short space of time what nature would otherwise do over hundreds or thousands of years. Most climate models show that even when a rapid reduction in fossil fuel use is assumed, society will likely still require large scale storage of carbon to limit warming to 1.5°C and probably for the 2°C case as well.

Carbon capture and use operates in a very different way. There are examples in practice today or in the pipeline, including the use of carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), the conversion of carbon dioxide to certain chemicals (e.g. urea) and the production of materials such as polycarbonates. These processes all require carbon dioxide to operate, but are not necessarily designed to store the carbon dioxide permanently (although in most cases this is what happens with EOR). If the carbon is returned to the atmosphere, such as through the degradation of the compound that is made, then the overall impact of the process may be zero in terms of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. However, the impact may be delayed for quite some time, possibly stretching into hundreds of years. CCU may therefore solve a local carbon dioxide emission issue, but does not necessarily address the bigger question of climate change. There are two ways in which CCU could become effective;

CCU might be used to manufacture synthetic hydrocarbon fuels, which could displace the need to extract fossil hydrocarbons. However, the synthetic fuels industry would have to scale very significantly before it could be claimed that this was indeed a reduction. Further, as is always the issue with mitigation analysis, it is even more difficult to claim that the total fossil resource extracted over time diminishes. There is always the possibility that the same amount is eventually extracted, but over a longer period.
CCU could be applied to the manufacture of certain goods, for example building materials. But to act as a mitigation mechanism akin to CCS, CCU has to lead to storage. This would be accomplished by increasing the total stock of the material in use at any one time. Say for example that homes are built with the new material. The starting point would be zero, but in a decade or so there might be 50 million homes constructed. Even if the homes are eventually torn down (and the carbon released), so long as the total number of such homes in use continues to increase, then more and more carbon is stored. The issue here is that the total stock has to be maintained for a very long time (at least a century or more) for CCU to approach CCS equivalence.

As populations grow and development proceeds, the stock of all goods in circulation has generally increased, even as old items are removed and new ones added. We have more buildings than ever before, more stuff in the buildings and more machines such as cars, ships and planes. All of these could be potential carbon stocks for century long storage. But we will need to be aware of the corollary, i.e. winding down the global stock of a certain item will result in the stored carbon being returned to the atmosphere.

In the recent Shell publication, A Better Life with a Healthy Planet, Pathways to Net Zero Emissions, the net zero outcome made use of both CCU and CCS, as shown in the chart below. This a scenario for later in the century so it is important to recognise that not all the technologies are sufficiently developed to fully deliver this. For example, air capture of carbon dioxide is still at pilot-plant stage. Nevertheless, in the scenario the on-going use of some fossil fuels in certain applications is balanced by geological storage of carbon dioxide and embedding carbon in materials, with the assumption that the stock of that material in circulation globally increases over time.

This means that accounting plays a critical role. Assigning a mitigation value to CCS is a relatively simple task; each tonne stored can be counted as permanent mitigation and will contribute to the overall task of reaching net zero emissions. The same cannot be said for CCU yet. While it is clear that carbon can be embedded in urea or polycarbonates, there is no established protocol to define this as permanent mitigation. Work remains to be done in this field.

“The New Lens Scenarios” and “A Better Life with a Healthy Planet” are part of an ongoing process – scenario-building – used in Shell for more than 40 years to challenge executives’ perspectives on the future business environment. We base them on plausible assumptions and quantification, and they are designed to stretch management thinking and even to consider events that may only be remotely possible. Scenarios, therefore, are not intended to be predictions of likely future events or outcomes, and investors should not rely on them when making an investment decision with regard to Royal Dutch Shell plc securities.

It is important to note that Shell’s existing portfolio has been decades in development. While we believe our portfolio is resilient under a wide range of outlooks, including the IEA’s 450 scenario, it includes assets across a spectrum of energy intensities including some with above –average intensity. While we seek to enhance our operations’ average energy intensity through both the development of new projects and divestments, we have no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio over our investment horizon of 10-20 years.

Can climate change be easily explained?

dchone February 3, 2017

When it comes to galvanizing public support, climate change remains an elusive issue. While public polling will show that most people are concerned and agree action should be taken, there are only modest signs of the groundswell of support needed to drive policy makers to take the necessary steps, such as implementing a meaningful carbon price across a broad swathe of the economy. Part of the problem may be a basic understanding of the issues involved and the ramifications of doing nothing.

Many attempts have been made to confront the communications challenge of climate change and doubtless there will be many more, but today we have a new book from HRH The Prince of Wales, climate activist Tony Juniper and scientist Emily Shuckburgh. The explanation they seek to offer has been simplified and shortened such that it matches the requirement of a Ladybird Expert Book. For those who didn’t grow up on English books (rather than books in English), Ladybird is famous for its decades old series of standard sized hardback children’s books, with titles such as Marco Polo and The Story of Music. More recently, the format has been revived to publish a series of both humorous and expert books for adults.

The Climate Change book launches, with little up-front explanation, into ten pages of concern and warnings related to the impacts of warming. These include short discussions on sea level rise, disappearing wildlife, human health, extreme weather events and reduced sea ice cover. While the impacts are undoubtedly important, it’s not until page 20 that the real issue starts to unfold; why all this is happening and therefore what can be done about it. The book ends with the familiar call for two technology solution areas, renewable energy and energy efficiency, although like many recent publications it has mentioned a third, electric vehicles. Realistically, the solution set will be much more complex.

What is new in this publication is that some space is devoted to a number of supporting pieces, such as how carbon dioxide is measured in ice cores, the benefits of a circular economy, farming solutions that can raise the carbon content of soil and the impact of ocean acidification. Even carbon pricing and carbon capture and storage get a fleeting mention.

This is all good stuff and the three authors should be commended for the effort, but I wonder if this will truly inform the reader who is looking to understand a difficult issue. The opening feels like a well-worn path that has not had great success; the call that calamity awaits, akin to the very old children’s fable that starts with the cry of “The sky is falling“. The reaction to this in the world today has arguably been the opposite of that desired; instead of true global collaboration it may have created a sense of passivity which blocks the audience from actions. While the Paris Agreement is a collaboration milestone, we are collectively still far from a desired outcome in terms of emissions and with no guarantee of a pathway forward; instead we have a loose framework within which that pathway might be shaped.

There is a strong case to try a new approach; perhaps to let the audience better understand the science and come to one simple conclusion, i.e., given what we know about its role, we can’t keep adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and expect nothing to change. That conclusion opens up the opportunity to talk about impacts and solutions in a more dispassionate way, rather than appealing for action on the basis of calamity. This is the opportunity that such a book could have grasped.

Finally, there is some discussion on the energy transition that is needed. While the climate science side of the book is backed up by a distinguished list of academics who are leaders in their respective fields of earth science, there is no such support acknowledged with regards energy system transition. This feels like a rushed conclusion, although to be fair to the authors this isn’t the subject they are focussing on. Clearly a second Ladybird book is required!

When history becomes reality

dchone January 5, 2017

In this era of post-truth media and politics, it is often difficult to hold on to long held beliefs and understandings. The very reality that seemingly existed yesterday slips away and is replaced by something quite different, perhaps based on cherry picked data or assertions that have little or no factual basis. This is happening all around us and the subject of climate change has had its fair share of post-truth assertions thrown at it.

Therefore, the opportunity to reach back in time and bring reality to the fore should be encouraged and valued. I was fortunate to have such an experience over Christmas, with the gift from my wife of the original 1896 publication that presented the detailed calculations behind the change in global temperature that would be observed should the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere change. The work in question is the well-known article by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground published in The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. I am now the very proud owner of Vol. XLI – Fifth Series, January-June 1896, which also contains dozens of articles on subjects ranging from glacial geology of Arctic Europe to temperature correction of barometers.

Arrhenius was actually looking for an explanation for the occurrence of Ice Ages, which were known about from the geological record but could not be explained in terms of expected cooling due to orbital fluctuations of the Earth around the Sun. It was clear that another factor was at work, accelerating and amplifying the impact of the small changes in solar radiation. He established that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could do this. During each of the periodic ice ages over the last million years, the amount of solar energy reaching the planet dips due to the orbital variations and, consequently, the ocean / atmosphere system cools slightly. This allows the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean to increase and therefore the atmospheric carbon dioxide level drops. That drop results in further cooling, causing the much bigger shift in temperature than would be expected from a straight radiation balance calculation.

In his paper Arrhenius established a methodology for linking the change in surface temperature with the change in the level of carbon dioxide (carbonic acid as he referred to it as) in the atmosphere. Table VII of the paper showed the results of his calculation for different levels of carbon dioxide ranging from K=0.67 (where K=1 for the level in the atmosphere at the time or ~280 ppm) to K=3.0 (which would equate to 840 ppm) . At the equator he derived the following results;

The Arrhenius paper also discusses the work of a Professor Högblom, another Swedish scientist of the day, who had even calculated how much the burning of coal at that time (500 million tonnes per annum) might change the surface temperature of the planet. The number was very small, but today annual fossil carbon extraction is some twenty to thirty times greater than this and more importantly the cumulative extraction (which we now know is what actually matters) since the late 19^th century is hundreds of times this level. It may well have been this calculation that led to a 1912 story in Popular Mechanics on the impact coal use would have on the climate.

This article was repeated in local newspapers later in 1912 as far away as New Zealand and Australia.

In this post-truth world, let us not forget that there is reality to hold on to. Happy New Year.

Being a climate change adviser

dchone September 6, 2016

Shell is often cited in climate change discussions, sometimes disparagingly simply because it is an oil and gas company, but increasingly as a company that has recognised that major changes in both the provision and use of energy across the globe will be needed to both meet demand and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Following from the Paris Agreement, it is hard to see how this won’t be the case. The leadership in Shell regarding climate change has always come from the top. The first major steps were taken in the period 1997 to 2001 when the foundations for change were established by former Chairman Sir Mark Moody-Stuart. He catalysed the necessary focus on the climate issue and had the foresight to establish a carbon trading desk within Shell Trading, just as the Clean Development Mechanism and the EU Emissions Trading system were in their early design stages. In 2005, then CEO Jeroen van der Veer created our CO2 team and gave it high visibility within the company. This eventually led to developments such as the Quest carbon capture and storage project in Canada. Today, we have a new energies business starting up. Our current CEO Ben van Beurden has also championed our position on issues such as government implemented carbon pricing and Shell has recently published scenario thinking on a net-zero emissions energy system of the future.

Within this journey of change, one question I am often asked is how I came into my job in Shell as Chief Climate Change Adviser and what it is like to perform such a role in the oil and gas industry. Some think that I might be a climate scientist, others picture the role as something of a fig leaf. In reality, neither is the case.

I started in Shell like many others, as a chemical engineering graduate in one of the 30+ refineries that Shell had back in 1980. The year in which I interviewed was one where all new chemical engineers were spoilt for choice – graduating classes had shrunk and demand was booming. But Shell offered a great value proposition – a global company with the very real prospect of a global career. My job offer was as a technologist in Geelong Refinery, a ~100,000 bbl/day facility just outside the city of Geelong, Australia and some 70 kms south-west of Melbourne. It was a complex refinery, with reforming, cracking, lube oil manufacturing, chemicals and various hydrotreating units. In the subsequent decade in the Downstream business I also worked in the global offices in The Hague and at Clyde Refinery in Sydney. Towards the end of this time I moved into the supply side of refining where the crude oil purchasing and refinery operating mode decisions are made based in part on linear programme models of the operation and the market it faces. This in turn led me to Shell Trading in London where I spent a decade trading Middle East crudes and managing the chartering of all the crude oil shipping that Shell required. Trading and shipping are at the very core of Shell, not just in terms of its operation as an oil and gas company, but in its DNA as well. After all, only a few hundred metres from where I live today, Marcus Samuel started his own trading business by procuring shells from sailors in the Port of London and making trinkets for people to buy when they visited English seaside towns such as Brighton and Torquay. This tiny enterprise, along with a similar entrepreneurial company in the Netherlands, eventually became the Royal Dutch Shell plc of today.

So twenty years after graduating I found myself with a solid background in what the company did, how the economics of the industry worked and perhaps most importantly how a critical component of the global energy system actually operated. What should I do with this expertise? I had my eye on the various functions in the Corporate Centre of the company and one in particular came up in mid-2001 which looked interesting. It was the role of Group Climate Change Adviser, a relatively new position that Shell had created in 1998 as it took its first steps to manage the business risk presented by climate change. In my interview for the position, my soon to be boss was pleased to meet someone who had worked in the refining business and had a good knowledge of the energy markets and trading. Even then it was clear that the development of policy would involve markets, and pricing, and present a real challenge to the incumbent businesses.

Like most in the company, I had imagined that this would be another 3-4 year assignment, but 16 years later I remain immersed in the climate change issue at Shell, although the role I originally took and the one I have now are worlds apart. Much has happened in that time externally, culminating in the Paris Agreement last December; internally the journey for the company has similarly progressed, although not without some tough questions along the way. Being part of all this over such a long period has been rewarding, a huge privilege and very challenging. It perhaps isn’t where I expected my career to go, but I can only look back and say that I am glad that it did. Some may think that a large corporation means a very restrictive and bureaucracy bound office life, but this is far from reality. I have a broad mandate and considerable freedom to engage externally on climate change, to publish my thinking on the issues that the world faces as it strives to manage emissions, but also to take all this back to colleagues within the company and challenge them as they try to run their businesses. Over time, I have also had considerable opportunity for travel, which has included every continent (yes, Antarctica as well) and over 30 countries.

From time to time, people considering a career in environmental management ask me where they should start and what steps they might take. I almost never recommend that they start in an environmental role. Rather, building real experience developing new projects, troubleshooting problems in existing facilities and understanding the economics of the energy industry is my steer. My own experience has led me to believe that such a grounding is essential in tackling major issues such as climate change. As a new graduate considering an energy career, these are the sorts of jobs that a company such as Shell will most likely offer. My advice would be to take one, and then look towards the longer journey of change.

Debating the global temperature goal

dchone August 5, 2016

Within the Decision Text supporting the Paris Agreement, paragraph II.21 calls on the IPCC as follows;

21. Invites the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to provide a special report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways;

This has prompted a number of academic institutions and climate scientists to start publishing on the issue of a 1.5°C goal, with much more likely to come in the months ahead. One such paper (Huntingford, C. and Mercado, L. M. High chance that current atmospheric greenhouse concentrations commit to warmings greater than 1.5 °C over land. Sci. Rep. 6, 30294; doi: 10.1038/srep30294 (2016).) was reported on recently by the BBC, under the heading Debate needed on 1.5C temperature target.

In fact the paper was about where we are today in terms of temperature and reaches a similar conclusion to the one that I reported on recently after attending an MIT Joint Program forum. At that meeting, the response to my question about current levels of warming was as follows;

. . . . current warming is around 1.1°C since pre-industrial times, but that there is more to the story than this. The climate system is not at equilibrium, with the oceans still lagging in terms of heat uptake. Therefore, if the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was maintained at some 400 ppm, the surface temperature would rise by another few tenths of a degree before the system reached an equilibrium plateau.

Similarly, the paper reported on by the BBC, argues much the same line;

There is strong evidence that even for current levels of atmospheric GHGs, there is a very high probability that the planet is committed to a mean warming over land greater than 1.5 °C relative to pre-industrial times. Such warming could be greater than 2.0 °C, and in particular for large continental regions away from coastlines.

While a debate about the global goal wasn’t a feature of the paper itself, the BBC interviewed the authors and reported that while they believed it to be a good idea to have an “aspirational” 1.5°C goal in the Paris agreement, that nevertheless if the world is to take 1.5°C seriously, then a serious discussion needs to be held about the implications of that goal. The author of the paper is quoted as saying “I think there needs to be a very thoughtful debate about what’s to be gained at these different temperature levels, if approaching the lower levels meant severely damaging the economy,”.

Such a discussion has been largely absent, replaced with a somewhat myopic focus on 2°C and now “well below 2°C, with a view to 1.5°C”. I discussed this at some length in my first book, drawing on the work of the MIT Joint Program in their 2009 report Analysis of Climate Policy Targets under Uncertainty. In that report the authors demonstrated that even a modest attempt to mitigate emissions could profoundly affect the risk profile for equilibrium surface temperature. This is illustrated below with five mitigation scenarios, from a ‘do nothing’ approach (Level 5) to a very stringent climate regime (Level 1).

An important feature of the results is that the reduction in the tails of the temperature change distributions is greater than the shift in the temperature goal (represented by the median of the distribution). For example, the Level 4 stabilization scenario reduces the median temperature change by the last decade of this century by 1.7 ºC (from 5.1 to 3.4 ºC), but reduces the upper 95% bound by 3.2 ºC (from 8.2 to 5.0 ºC). In addition to being a larger magnitude reduction, there are reasons to believe that the relationship between temperature increase and damages is non-linear, creating increasing marginal damages with increasing temperature (e.g., Schneider et al., 2007). These results illustrate that even relatively loose constraints on emissions reduce greatly the chance of an extreme temperature increase, which is associated with the greatest damage.

But the other focus of the Paris Agreement stands apart from such debate. As previously discussed in several postings, Article 4 calls for a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, i.e. a state of net-zero emissions. In fact such an outcome is eventually required irrespective of the temperature outcome; without it warming continues.

Net-zero emissions arguably brings a more practical focus to the task of emissions mitigation. It defines an end-point and allows a discussion on the pathway there, the types of technologies required and the shape of the energy economy once achieved. All of this features in the new supplement to the Shell New Lens Scenarios, A Better Life with a Healthy Planet: Pathways to Net-Zero Emissions.

Scenarios are part of an ongoing process used in Shell for more than 40 years to challenge executives’ perspectives on the future business environment. They are based on plausible assumptions and quantification, and are designed to stretch management thinking and even to consider events that may only be remotely possible.