The beginning, not the end of the road...

It recently occurred to LibertyCat and I that we had completely failed to blog about the much discussed e-petition on road pricing and Tony Blair's subsequent letter to the signatories. I started blogging about the Social Market Foundation's February paper on road pricing [click to download], and Mr Ladyman's speech at that event. Then it occurred to me... why road pricing?

Vehicle Excise Duty and petrol duty already take into account the emissions of the vehicle and the distance travelled. This approach has problems - petrol tax is unfair to the rural poor and VED discriminates against people who own high emissions vehicles and barely use them. However, the importance of these groups is probably underestimated. Only 20% of the UK population live in rural areas and less than 5% in very sparsely populated rural areas. In addition, people who own and rarely use high emissions cars will pay less in fuel tax than those who use them for their daily commute.

So why road pricing? The SMF report justifies this as follows:

Traditionally taxation mechanisms, such as the fuel tax and the vehicle excise duty (VED), have been the main levers used to constrain growth in traffic levels and emissions. Yet these have had a limited impact. Despite a rise in the real price of
petrol since 1990, road traffic increased by 14% between 1990 and 2000 and is predicted to rise another 25% by 2010. In addition, road transport’s share of total UK carbon emissions is set to rise by just under a third by 2010...

...The limited impact of the fuel tax and VED in reducing traffic and emissions may in part be due to the fact that, despite the real rise in petrol prices, the costs of motoring have fallen relative to the costs of public transport and to the level of average earnings...

...As car travel has become relatively cheap compared to both earnings and alternative modes of transport, more and more people have chosen to travel by car.

Although fuel duty is a form of distance-based road pricing, its primary effect has actually been to encourage fuel efficiency rather than reduce car use...

... There is little political appetite for further increases in fuel duty - which has not risen with inflation since the fuel duty escalator was abandoned in the 1999 Pre-Budget Report. This is unsurprising given public attitudes...

..Since the necessary increases in fuel duty to reduce congestion are unlikely, road pricing is the only feasible alternative mechanism to help motorists face the full cost of their road journeys.

To summarise this long passage "The government are too scared of men in lorries to put up fuel tax enough to change behaviour. So they're going to go for a really complicated, expensive computer system [an approach that has been so much of a success in the past]. This may involve funky futuristic black boxes and satellites, or they may just try scaling up the London congestion charging system from around 42 sq km (double the previous area of 21 sq km ) right across the 244820 sq km of the United Kingdom. Bear in mind that the London system is one of the largest and most complicated congestion charging systems in the world".

This doesn't seem a particularly strong argument for road pricing.

The canyon and the singularity

I've been reading the Meaning of the 21st Century by James Martin. Being a 'realistic' future vision, it discusses and explains many of the old familiars:- soil erosion, world population growth, climate change, genetic engineering and nanotechnology. This will be news if you've never read a 'futures' book before, don't remember school geography and/or would be too embarrassed to loiter in the science fiction section of Borders.

If you have, then I'd recommend this book anyway. Why?

First, it was the first time I'd read about fourth generation 'pebble bed' nuclear reactors. These have the potential to be small, mass-produced and automatically shutdown before they lose containment. In theory, they address some of the concerns about nuclear energy raised by David Howarth MP during a talk I attended late last year in Cambridge. He was concerned that large nuclear reactors would force the UK's electricity to continue to be provided by a centralised grid, excluding microgeneration from the energy mix and incurring maybe a 20% energy loss during transportation between the power station and user. In addition, large conventional reactors tend to have a place-specific design that imposes a high 'first-build' cost. Mass producing small pebble beds would avoid these problems.

Second, his overarching thesis is relatively original even if the individual technologies are not. He claims that today's teenagers, the 'Transition Generation', will have to successfully pass through a 'canyon' of rising environmental problems. If humanity fails to pass through the 'canyon' and create a sustainable society, we will return to a dark age. If we succeed, we will hit the 'singularity', a concept familiar to anyone who has read 'Singularity Sky' or 'Iron Sunrise' by Charles Stross. James Martin (and Charles Stross) identify a macrotrend of accelerating increases in computer power where computer power is a proxy for the ability to manipulate 'bits' of information, non-biological or biological. The 'singularity' is the area on the technological growth curve at which the gradient of the trend line tends to infinity (illustration included for the non-mathmos amongst you). The singularity would be driven by self-evolving computers and other technologies that would develop without direct human input. James Martin's contribution seems to be fleshing out the moments before the singularity; he stops just beyond the canyon. Charles Stross and other science fiction writers imagine the possibilities of a society someway beyond the singularity.

For someone who has everything except fidelity...

An amusing parody on carbon offsetting.

I don't think I agree with them since investing in renewable energy should produce a continued reduction in future emissions (unlike a couple agreeing to be faithful for a set period).

Would you trust your lawyer to fix your car?

The Adam Smith Institute link to this post that makes the point that climate scientists are probably not the best people to comment on economics. This is somewhat self-evident - if I want my hair cutting, I wouldn't ask an architect (well, I might but that's a different story).

This point entirely conceded, I'm somewhat confused why Dr Alister McFarqhur (an agricultural economist) and Dr Madsen Pirie (an ex-professor of logic and philosophy) feel anyone should take them at all seriously when they comment on the science of climate change.

NB: LibertyCat questions Piers Corbyn's credentials as a meteorologist. A little judicious googling suggests Piers Corbyn may fall into that category of experts occupied by Gillian McKeith who has also made millions promoting untestable methods.

Up and down they go, where they stop, we can estimate with various levels of confidence...

I have been meaning to respond to David Duff and his 'hot air' for several months now, not least because of his remark that temperature records go 'up and down like a whore's drawers' [has to be quote of some day or other...].

But I was finally prompted to respond after I belatedly saw 'An Inconvenient Truth' (0r 'What Al Gore Did Next'). In the UK, the idea that human-induced climate change is happening is sufficiently uncontroversial that you forget that there are a whole heap of people over the pond for whom it isn't quite as clear-cut.

So let me lay it out straight. There is consensus within the mainstream of environmental scientists that climate change is happening. In addition, the balance of evidence is that climate warming over the last 50 years is primarily attributable to human activity.

Why do I think this? Well, I've read parts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Third Assessment Report, published in 2001. A new IPCC report is due out early this year. The IPCC report is a consensus document laying out the current state of knowledge as agreed by academics working on climate monitoring and modelling, and related scientific questions. Since it is the 'agreed' current state of understanding, it is doubly conservative in its claims. Conservative because scientists try to draw conclusions only where they are supported by the available evidence rather than going off into unsubstantiated speculation. Doubly conservative because all these scientists have to agree.

The 2001 IPCC report states that:

There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities. Detection and attribution studies consistently find evidence for an anthropogenic signal in the climate record of the last 35 to 50 years.

Sceptics talking about cause-effect relationship between CO2 and temperature are getting confused about what is in contention

The important points are illustrated (sort of) in this diagram. This diagram shows a record of temperatures, atmospheric CO2 and methane concentrations for 400,000 years BP derived from an Antarctic ice core. Similar records can be obtained a variety of sources including trees.

CO2 and temperature broadly rise and fall together over the last 400,000 years BP. It is entirely correct to query a cause-effect relationship here. But there is a well known and entirely uncontroversial mechanism by which greenhouse gas concentrations change the Earth's temperature.

There is debate over the mechanisms through which greenhouse gas concentrations and temperatures interact together, specifically within the context of PREVIOUS INTERGLACIAL AND GLACIAL CYCLES. The trigger of previous glacial/interglacial cycles is the Milankovitch cycles but it is not known precisely how orbital oscillations translate themselves into glacial/interglacials through the Earth system. This is why understanding the relationship between the observed greenhouse gas and temperature rises is interesting for Quaternary scientists. It is, however, irrelevant to contemporary climate where we know that we are emitting greenhouse gases.

'Snowball Earth' is also irrelevant. Changes to the Earth's climate over time periods greater than 400,000 years are triggered by factors acting over geological timescales such as the breakup of continents and related changes in ocean circulation, etc.. These things are, again, not relevant to the contemporary climate change debate.

Given we are confident of the mechanism by which greenhouse gases lead to the retention of long-wave radiation in the Earth's atmosphere:

Sceptics talking about natural variability are also getting confused

The previous diagram shows that over the last 400,000 years, CO2 concentrations have rarely gone above 300 ppmv and certainly not above 325 ppmv. Current CO2 concentrations are 380 ppmv. This runs off the scale of the Antarctica ice core record shown in the IPCC report...

... Food for thought, me thinks. And it really is, well, that easy. It doesn't seem that easy because it requires a grasp of the science. And it's for this reason that Mr 'Dubya' Bush and co have managed to bamboozle and pull the wool over people's eyes.

Cheap shots at marginal figures

This George Monbiot article points me to Melanie Philips latest screed about global warming.

The politics of both these articles is an attack on decisions made under scientific uncertainty. If the results published in Nature are accurate, then planting trees is not a carbon sink. That does not mean that decisions taken while we thought that planting trees was a carbon sink are evil - it certainly does not expose any kind of ideological conspiracy. It just means we made a mistake.

Melanie Phillips' belief that global warming is not real is not based on an appraisal of the scientific evidence - something her claim that "most of the atmosphere consists of water vapour" demonstrates she is manifestly unqualified to do. It is based on a belief that people who claim to care for the environment are in fact motivated by anti-Americanism. Even if the current scientific consensus on global warming turns out to be wrong, this belief will remain throughly bogus.

Similarly, Monbiot's opposition to allowing carbon sinks under Kyoto was not based on science - he makes it clear in his article that his real problem with them is that it "allows us to carry on polluting" and "buy absolution". The political case for allowing other types of sink (offsetting carbon emissions by investing in energy-saving technology in the third world, for example) is no weaker than it was before, despite Monbiot's loud claims of vindication.

Politicians making decisions under scientific uncertainty should make the best possible decision on the basis of the best available scientific evidence. They shouldn't be expected to try and outguess the scientists on future scientific developments. Blaming the politicians when the scientific consensus changes encourages them to do just that.