Understanding climate change, sometimes, needs 'backward reasoning'

George Monbiot.

The psychological challenges of understanding why we misunderstand climate change are even more confusing and problematic than the difficulty itself.

Guardian columnist and outspoken advocate of taking action to mitigate the conditions the breed climate change, George Monbiot, has put forward the thesis that “fracking” could in fact change the views of many.

It’s a complex argument and can be best explained by Monbiot himself, so read his latest column, “Backwards Reasoning” and you too can work your way through some backwards reasoning.

The ice melts and like Nero we fiddle

by Robert McLean

 



Gustave Flaubert who said: “To
be stupid, selfish and have
good health are the
three requirements for
happiness. Though if stupidity
 is lacking, all is lost”.

Several Beneath the Wisteria supporters have read one of the latest pieces from George Monbiot and one asked “What are we doing about it?”

Sadly and pessimistically, I would suggest “very little” even though many corporations, organizations, companies and individuals claim they are “green”, the melting of the Arctic ice and a the warming of the world suggests we are doing nought.

Although individual efforts are honourable and warrant applause and even though pressure from the bottom is critical and essential to the achievement of a lasting change, what the world needs, urgently, is a top down driven change to our way of life.

The true realities of our changing climate will settle upon humanity this century and what are mostly hollow claims of being green will play no role in enabling us to cope with the emerging difficulties.

The world needs, right now, courageous and charismatic leaders able to illustrate to the business as usual boosters that our present way of life is not only unsustainable, but seriously worsening the state of the world.

Some argue the technology will provide the answers and while that may be a comforting thought and within that be a wonderful endorsement of science; the same science the climate change skeptics not only question, but mostly disbelieve.

The question is not really simply about an agreement or otherwise with science for it seems to be for deeper, stretching to be an ideological battle; a polarization that has a religious-like energy in which there is only right or wrong and seemingly no neutral ground on which people can gather, an isthmus from which they can reach down to save the world, from its own stupidity.

Sitting here writing, I look up at a Gustave Flaubert quote I have on the wall that says: “To be stupid, selfish and have good health are the three requirements for happiness. Though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost”.  

Humanity seems to put hedonistic happiness ahead of all else and in doing so allow its stupidity to bolt free, selfishly disabling the acclaimed good sense of humans and so risking the near ideal atmospheric conditions that have allowed humans for flourish.

Monbiot’s article, The Heat of the Moment, is frightening reading, but something we must contemplate and act on, quickly.  

 

Complexities of climate change demand a 'war footing'

The challenges arising from human-induced climate change confronting humanity are so extreme and yet so little understood, that Australia, and the world, should immediately adopt a war footing – Robert McLean.

Australia, along with all other countries in the world, should be on a war footing.

However, that is not to confront each other, rather to gather our resources and build resilience into our communities for what will be the biggest single challenge humanity has ever faced.

A decade-long drought for south-eastern Australia followed by record rainfalls of which many Goulburn Valley people felt the impact of both were little more than an entrée to the main event.

The resolute skeptics of human-induced climate change continue their doubt-mongering even though conclusive findings by some of Australia’s most respected organizations, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the Bureau of Meteorology, point to significant and dangerous changes in our climate.

Both those organizations have considered what is happening to earth’s atmosphere and by implication our climate and subsequently our weather, is unquestionable attributably to human activities.

Honourary president of the United Kingdom’s Campaign Against Climate Change, George Monbiot, said: "Climate change is perhaps the gravest calamity our species has ever encountered. Its impact dwarfs that of any war, any plague, and any famine we have confronted so far. It makes genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering".

This is what being on a "war footing"
 looked like in World War One - we now
 need something of similar intensity,
but to sustain our offense against
climae change.

Considering what Monbiot’s observations what we are facing is as grim, if not worse, that what the world experienced at the beginning of World War Two.

It was then that all the great powers of the world took control of their economies and directed industry to make as many weapons as possible, as fast as possible, to kill as many people as possible and win the war.

Right now, the call to action is equally urgent.

When the US entered World War Two in December 1941, government expenditure exploded and GDP (now understood to be an inadequate measurement of a nation’s wellbeing) doubled in three years.

The Soviet Union, Germany and Britain all did the same. This rearmament boom did not bankrupt the governments. Instead, it created jobs and lifted the whole world out of the Great Depression.

That sweeping activity energized the people of the world to kill and destroy and now we need to do the same thing, but contrarily to save lives and protect property.

Individual efforts are honourable and need to be acknowledged, but only a society-wide, government backed initiative will create sufficient societal movement to help us endure.
That is alarming and catastrophic-like talk, but it is real and climate change being human-induced demands we behave differently and trust the science; the same science that puts froth on our beer.

Our lives of froth and bubble are about to end and although unhappy about that as I am, we should, unquestionably, prepare as if it is for war.

 

Nuclear vs Nuclear vs Nuclear

Guardian columnist George Monbiot was once opposed to nuclear power, but having learned about integral fast reactors (IFR), he is now an advocate of this energy source –in his latest column he said:

We can’t wish nuclear waste away: we must choose one of three options for dealing with it.

George Monbiot

Duncan Clark’s article in the Guardian today should cause even the most determined anti-nuclear campaigner to think long and hard about the choices that confront us. He reveals that David McKay, chief scientific adviser to the government’s energy department and author of Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, has endorsed a remarkable estimate. The UK’s stockpile of nuclear waste could be used to generate enough low-carbon energy to run this country for 500 years.

If the material we have seen until now as waste is instead seen as fuel, it has the potential to solve three problems at once: the UK’s contribution to climate change, possible future energy shortfalls and a significant component of the massive bill – and massive headache – associated with cleaning up the current nuclear mess.

The technology with the potential to solve these problems is the fast reactor, ideally the integral fast reactor (IFR) about which I wrote in December.  It exploits the fact that conventional nuclear power plants use just 0.6% of the energy contained in the uranium that fuels them. IFRs, once loaded with nuclear waste, can, in principle, keep recycling it until only a small fraction remains, producing energy as they do so.

The remaining waste is both unusable for anyone who might hope to make a weapon from it and presents much less of a long-term management problem, as its components have half-lives of tens, not millions, of years. An IFR plant could melt down only by breaking the laws of physics: if the fuel pins begin to overheat, they expand, stopping the fission reaction.

GE Hitachi has offered to build a fast reactor to consume the plutonium stockpile at Sellafield, though not yet the whole kit (the integral fast reactor). It has offered to do it within five years, and to carry the cost if it doesn’t work out. This is the proposal the government is now considering. I would like to see it go further and examine the case for the full works: an integral fast reactor (incorporating a reprocessing plant) that generates much more energy from the waste pile.

We are confronted not just with a choice between nuclear power and gas or coal – whose consequences I have explained elsewhere, but also with a choice between different nuclear technologies. This is a choice that has to be made, because we have a monstrous pile of nuclear waste, a legacy of both the irresponsible short-termism of those who ran previous generations of nuclear power plants and of the nuclear weapons industry. We cannot wish this waste away. It exists and something must be done about it.

There are currently three serious options on the table. The first is to bury it. We get nothing from this except a bloody great hole in the ground and a bill to match. The second is currently the government’s favoured option: mixed oxide processing (Mox).

This has already proved to be an expensive fiasco. It produces (when it works at all) fuel that hardly anyone wants, at great cost, and more waste plutonium than we possess already. Its contribution to the electricity supply is feeble, raising the energy extracted from nuclear fuel from 0.6% to 0.8%. Most importantly, it can deal only with plutonium waste, whereas IFRs also consume depleted uranium. Even the government admits that “the value of the fuel to reactor operators is significantly less than the cost of its manufacture”.

The third option is fast reactors, ideally integral fast reactors. This is the one I favour, and unless you can provide me with a powerful reason why it should not receive serious consideration, it is the option I will continue to promote.

Whichever of the three choices we make, we will be choosing a nuclear technology – and a major contract for a nuclear operator. We will be favouring one branch of the nuclear industry at the expense of two others.

If, for example, we prevail on the government to develop IFRs, not Mox, Areva, which hopes to profit from mixed oxide processing, will be sorely disappointed. The same goes for whichever company might have secured the contract for burying the waste.

So which of these options do you support? None of the above is not an answer. Something has to be done with the waste, and unless you have invented a novel solution, one of these three options will need to be deployed (or, conceivably, a different nuclear power technology, such as thorium or travelling wave reactors). But it is a choice that opponents of nuclear power are refusing to make – and that is not good enough.

Let me give you an example. After I first wrote about integral fast reactors, Dr Ruth Balogh, the nuclear issues campaigner for West Cumbria & North Lakes Friends of the Earth, sent a furious letter to the Guardian. She accused me of “proposing a technical fix for nuclear waste.” Yes, that is exactly what I’m proposing. Does she have an alternative in mind? A non-technical fix perhaps? No fix at all?

She went on to lambast both deep disposal for nuclear waste, the design for which, she claims, has “more than 100 flaws” and the Mox plant, whose evident drawbacks she lists. She then goes on the propose … a grand total of nothing. Her solution is to attack the people suggesting an alternative to both the treatments she abhors – without suggesting one herself. That’s not just irresponsible. It’s dumb.

She then suggests that IFRs could cause a “nuclear catastrophe at Sellafield” big enough to cause the “ruination of the western Lake District”. If she can propose a mechanism which does not break the laws of physics by which an IFR plant could achieve this, I will ask the Guardian to provide space for her on this site to explain it to our readers.

But all of us, if we have a serious interest in doing something about nuclear waste, should make this choice. What do you want to see done with it and why? Simply shouting down other people’s suggestions won’t make it go away.