17%

The Durban conference on climate change began this past Monday with a whimper, not a bang. After the let-down of the Copenhagen conference in 2009, expectations are pretty low this time around. As near as I can figure it, the boffins of the international community spent years hammering out an approach that everyone - from coal-devouring China to nearly-seafloor Seychelles - thought was equitable. All that remained were some signatures. With a bit of brinksmanship at Copenhagen, a deal was in the offing. Then Obama flew in and started making side-deals that circumvented the tortuous UN process. Chaos ensued, a face-saving compromise statement was issued, and the subsequent IPCC conference in Cancun was devoted to patching up the feelings of the aforementioned boffins who had just wasted a decade of their lives.

At this point I have no idea what the background story for Durban is. There's someting about rich countries and poor countries and extending Kyoto. Complicating matters is that when all of this jibber-jabber started twenty years ago, it was very clear who was rich and who was poor. Now China has TGV trains and a manned space program, wheras a major chunk of Canada's greenhouse gas emmissions are generated not from first-world economic activity but from distilling petroleum from the wastelands of Alberta.

So Canada is not seen as a leader in this debate. Be that as it may, let us consider what the conservative goverment of Canada did promise to do some time ago, independently of any agreement. Regardless of the outcome of the current conference in Durban, Harper's Junta (trust me; it rhymes) has pledged to reduce the CO2 emissions of the Great White North by 17% BELOW those of 2005 by 2020. This is a good start. And because it is the official policy of the Government, we should all be preparing today for the not-too-distant future when the various policies kick in and we all have to reduce our fossil-fuel use by 17% below what we used 7 years ago.

I was going to calculate what that looks like, but a relevant article by the Pembina Institute beat me to it. Here is Canada's (purported) future:

And this is the future the Conservatives have reluctantly agreed to

Of course, no such thing will happen. Canada will be nowhere near the target of 607 megatonnes per annum in 2020 because we have not even begun to think about how to live on 25% less than we do now. As I have said before, the longer the world stalls for time, the harder it will be to bring this runaway train under control.

Which is why today's column by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail is so infuriating. Instead of moving the debate forward so that we actually do something to achieve our goal for 2020, we get a  dismissal of climate research that wears the guise of a defense of the scientific process. She actuallly sounds like she thinks she is so clever to be doubting climate change.

No one knows with any certainty the exact impact of carbon dioxide emissions, what long-term climate trends will be or the effect of other factors, such as the sun.

For more of this cleverness, I dare you to read the hundreds of comments that follow this article. As with any piece of journalism on climate change, most commentators have a bizarre world view in which climate scientists have conspired to engineer a ponzi scheme of fake data in order to award each other taxpayers' money. Their objections are a mixed salad of conservative invective against anything the government does and a litany of the same urban myths regarding climate change that have been debunked many times before ("It's the sun spots.", "They said it was cooling in the 1970s").

Her statement is correct in one sense: Nobody knows anything with certainty. The beauty of science is that it can be expressed mathematically, allowing us to know very precicely the probability of the impacts of carbon dioxide emissions. This comes after she (unbelievably) brings up the "re-hacked" emails from the original Climategate that were recently released in an effort to undermine the Durban talks. Nine separate investigations have exonerated the climate scientists who were targeted in the Climategate affair. Yet for Wente, that these re-heated emails have not suddenly undermined decades of peer-reviewed research is somehow proof that something is wrong with science. Smarmingly, she wraps up with:

The suppression of legitimate debate is a catastrophe for climate science. It’s also a catastrophe for science, period.

Would Wente write such an article about the debates within proteomics, or graphite photoreactor research? The catastrophe for science is that everybody thinks of themselves as an expert on the weather and politics.

Lesson at Humbolt University

Last Friday and today I gave a presentation (along with my colleague Jasmin Schmidt) at Humboldt University. The director of the iFQ is a professor of Sociology there and he asked us to give a gentle introduction to the field of Bibliometrics for his students.

Note that while the pictures of Humboldt Univ. online are of a grand neo-classical building covered in statues, the place where I was 'teaching' was a mid-century, dirty building next to some train tracks. It was actually more dilapidated than Concordia University (where I did my undergrad), which is saying something.

It was great to be able to talk about my field and I hope I inspired some of the students to try a bibliometric analysis in their studies. The students didn't fall asleep (a good sign) and Prof. Hornbostel remarked afterwards that he liked the presentation, so it was a successful day.

Wissenschaftler ausser Atem

Here are some pictures of me and my running team from the relay-marathon. Here we are before the start of the race. Clemens (far right) ran 12K in a good time. Patricia (red coat) was our team leader and as "coach" was there to make sure we didn't wimp out.

Wissenschaftler ausser Atem

A nice bonus is that I now Ihave a running shirt emblazoned with my running nick-name: Speed Weasel.

Marathon Staffel at Tempelhof Flughaven

I ran another race this past Sunday (the 20th of November). I ran a 10K leg in a marathon relay at the old Tempelhof airport. My team was called Wissenschaft ausser Atem (meaning "science out of breath") and consisted of a motley assortment of academics who are in some way connected to Patricia Schulz, one of my colleagues here at the iFQ. As often happens, somebody pulled out last week and Patricia needed someone to fill in, so I got on board. Then she had some emergency dental work last Wednesday and had to pull out herself.

It was a fairly warm day for November, and the coldest part was just waiting around in the airplane hangar. This is a pretty big event and there were over 7000 people participating. I ran a pretty good time of 49:01, although I could tell that I was not in top shape and was just plodding along. Our team (Clemens, Jesse, Nadja, myself, and Sergiu) came in 602nd in our category (there were 1043 mixed teams) with a total time of 3:35, which is pretty good for a marathon. Running on the concrete infield and runways was hard on the legs, as that surface has absolutely no "give" (one doesn't want any of that when landing a big airplane!).

A nice touch was to be cheered on by Christine just as I turned the corner for the last few hundred meters to the finish. Thanks, Chweee!

3:57 - what a bunch of slowpokes!

The German Character

Let's compare national stereotypes. Canadians must endure the perception that we are lumberjacks who live in harmony with the bears. Germans get all misty-eyed at the mention of the word Canada, which for them represents a magical land of open spaces and mountain vistas. It's really just a big version of Austria. Germans associate Canada with the Rocky Mountains and Vancouver is the only Canadian city that Air Berlin flies to, as the nine provinces to the east are irrelevant.

The reverse holds true as well. While I don't think the German landscape brings anything to mind for most people, the German character is a well-known cliché. The stereotype of Germans is that they are gruff if not downright rude. They are always portrayed in the movies as shouting commands. This is because “Germans” in movies are invariably the bad guys in uniform. The ones that are not barking orders are stuffy and cerebral and play the role of psychiatrists. Another stereotype is that German men all wear lederhosen and drink beer from huge mugs while listening to oom-pah-pah music. In summary; a nation of very organized, but rude and impersonal beer-swilling soldiers.

But Germans of my age and younger, and certainly those who are educated and cosmopolitan (like my colleagues at iFQ), are in fact very pleasant. They have modern, international cultural traits that make them almost indistingushable from the same cohort found in Calgary or Halifax. But I have noticed that older people tend to exhibit some of the negative aspects of the stereotypical German, and that leads me to believe that a cultural change is taking place, with younger urbane Germans being more like Canadians or Americans (of the same age) than previous generations.

This dynamic is also expressed in terms of geography. There are actually a fair bit of regional differences within Germany, and my colleagues have remarked on this as well. We have noticed that people in North-Rhine Westphalia (the state in the west that holds Koln and Bonn) are nicer and more easy-going than Germans from the south and/or east. And this is regardless of age. My German teacher, a born-and-bred citizen of Bonn (Bonnizen?) recounted how he and his wife move to Bavaria when he retired. After two years they moved back to Bonn because they couldn't stand the stuffy loudmouths in the mountains. So there is some truth to the stereotype, but it varies from region to region, and is too broad a brush to describe all Germans.

In the lead-up to the move from Bonn to Berlin my colleagues warned me that Berliners are known (within Germany) for their grumpiness. It's called the “Berlin snout”. I actually haven't noticed anything like that. That is not to say that Berliners are cheery folks: this is a big city and people are busily going about their business, so it's naturally a more impersonal place than the small-town feel of Bonn.

So the German character is actually a range of personality types. Younger people from the cities of North-Rhine Westphalia would be the most friendly and international, wheras old folks in rural Bavaria would tend toward the old stereotype of grumpy, hide-bound Germans. Though this country is never going to have the extroverted national culture of (say) Spain, the “new” Germany is increasingly a land of nice, friendly people.

Wildlife in the city

Walking home last night from the train station, I spotted a furry creature out of the corner of my eye. I instantly recognized this as not your average city pooch. I followed it around the corner to a grassy area behind an apartment building, where it eyed me from a distance. Sure enough it was a fox, with a white chin and chest.

I don't think I have ever seen a fox in the wild before (although this one was not very wild, as it was eating leftover scraps). Amazingly, this was just across the street from my apartment in a fairly heavily-populated area of a big city.

On a completely different topic, I (along with Christine) will be running a race this evening. It's part of the Berlin Festival of Lights, and goes along Kurfurstendamm street, one of the big boulevards. I think that we are supposed to pass by various colourfully-lit attractions. I am doing the 10K and for her very first race Christine is doing the 5K. Then we race home to get some sleep before She Who Must Be Entertained starts a wonderful new day of discovery and Sesame Street.

The most important protest of our times

Over the past month or so there have been some public protests in the U.S. concerning the pivotal issues of our times. I have been meaning to bring one of these to your attention for some time, and have been waiting for the opportunity to bring all the complexities of this topic together. This protest garnered some coverage in the media, but is not on the radar screen of most people. At the end of September a protest against the pipeline took place on Parliament Hill, but the most impressive popular action was a sit-in in Washington D.C. where people (including James Hanson, who needs no introduction because I have blogged about him before) were been willing to get arrested in order to voice their opposition to this project.

On the surface, the proposed KeystoneXL pipeline would simply carry tar sands from Alberta to refineries in Texas. What could be wrong with that?

From a nationalistic perspective, this is a short-sighted move. Canadians have always been the "drawers of water and hewers of wood" for the British, and then for the Americans. It is always easier to just ship the raw material south to make a quick buck than to add value to it in Canada and then export the resulting product. Even Peter Lougheed, the former premier of "Saudi Alberta" thinks that the tar sands should be refined in the province and not pumped all the way to Texas to be upgraded there. Heck, for the cost of such a pipeline you could build a new refinery in Alberta and see more profit on the first day of operation than by pumping the "black gold" to Texas.

In defending the need for such an arrangement, the proponents of the pipeline claim that this will (parroting a phrase that every American President since Jimmy Carter has repeated) "reduce America's dependence on foreign oil". This worn-out meme is doubly irrational. First of all, in case I missed the memo, Canada is still a separate country and therefore the oil from Alberta is necessarily foreign oil. Secondly, the reason Texas is the destination is that it is a large port from where the refined tar-sand-gasoline can be shipped by boat to the highest payer. Proponents claim that building the pipeline will lower the price of gasoline in the United States. It is fascinating to watch people delude themselves into thinking that it is a good idea to pump petroleum 2,673 kilometers to Texas so that a different form of petroleum can be shipped a similar distance to gas stations in Chicago and Boston - at a below-market rate. For all the jingoism of "jobs for America" and "FREEDOM" nobody seems to have realized that by seeking assurances that the tar-sands oil will only be used within the lower 48 states, these politicans are effectively cornering themsleves into a socialization of the oil industry. You can be sure that the minute the Chinese want to pay 1 cent more per gallon, the oil companies who own the refineries in Texas are going to want a publically-funded subsidy if they must only sell their product domestically.

However, all the above is merely incidental to the real reason why this pipeline must never be built. If the Keystone XL project is approved, it is game over for our climate.

The significance of the Keystone XL pipeline in terms of confronting climate change is hard to overstate. If society cannot draw the line here, against a form of energy that is so inefficient to extract that it is only profitable when natural gas prices are low enough to make boiling the bitumen out of the sand worthwhile*, then there is no limit to the rationalizations and justifications we will come up with in order to keep the status quo going. We will burn every last drop of oil we can get our hands on even if we have to run the drilling rigs in Antarctica with solar panels.

There is so much oil in Alberta's tar sands that its consumption will put a vast amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, increasing its concentration past the 450 ppm that is generally considered to be the point at which irreversible feedback effects will be triggered. To be absolutely clear, the benign term "irreversible feedback effects" is actually a terrifying prospect. It means that we will have lost the battle against climate change and that there will soon be place on this planet for much fewer than 7 billion people. Agriculture in the southern U.S. and Europe will cease, the tropics and oceans will be a dead zone, and coastal cities will be abandoned. Once the feedbacks start, no amount of recycling or electric cars will stop the Earth from becoming too toasty for us. Consider that Venus, our "sister planet" has an atmosphere that is 96% CO2 and its surface temperature is 467 degrees Celcius. Nobody is saying that is what will happen here, but it is an example of what a really nasty greenhouse effect can do.

So the protests against Keystone are not a NIMBY complaint arising from vague personal values ("I don't like how windmills look"): they are a fundammental test of what we as a society consider to be progress. If the pipeline gets built it will be as a result of the inability of our political and economic processes to factor in anything beyond short-term gain. The actions on the ground will overwhelm any efforts to stop the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations because no amount of legislation will be able to reverse the effects of burning the oil held in the tar sands. We will lock ourselves into a retrograde version of the future by creating an environment over which we will have lost control. An environment that is so hostile to modern society that the future will be very Hobbesian (a lifestyle that is "solitary, nasty, brutish, and short").

Finally, the protest against the Keystone XL pipeline is related to the Occupy Wall Street movement that is receiving a lot of media attention. Both are expressions of popular frustration at the bias in our society towards short-term gains at the expense of the common good. While Occupy Wall Street protests against (among other things) the bailout of the banks (which puts their debt on the backs of citizens), the protest against the Keystone pipeline is against the offloading of the risk and damages associated with unrestrained climate change onto future generations. A gross simplification is that corporatist power sees the common good as something to be exploited (or at best ignored) in order to achieve short term monetary gains (by transferring bad debts onto taxpayers in the case of Wall Street, and by externalizing the societal costs burning all that oil).

We have to change the dialog from more vs. less to how to all lead rich lives without mortgaging the future.
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* = The "return on energy invested" or ROEI of the tar sands is only 3 or 4 times, which is about the same energy intensity as cabbage. Sure the resulting gasoline goes boom in your car's engine, but the amount of energy used to create that gasoline is almost as great as the energy in it. So the net amount of energy is a wash. The tar sands are in many ways an arbitrage business that simply trades one form of energy for another.