Climate Changed: Our Biggest Challenge?

Credit: NASA

What does climate change mean for you?

Sorry about the break, I've been rather busy over the past month, with astronomy summer school and moving to Warwick. Business as usual will now resume…with any luck.

Yesterday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the first part of their fifth major report, an update on the current state of our knowledge about climate change and global warming. The first document, the Summary for Policymakers, is pretty much what it says on the tin: A brief (35 page) collection of all of the major points, so that anyone who this concerns can get a good idea of the facts without having to read the whole report, due out soon, which I imagine will be rather longer.     

And as it really concerns all of is, I had a read of it, so will talk a little bit about what it says and what I think about it. All the facts below are from the report unless otherwise linked.

The first point it makes is that warming of the climate on a global scale is “unequivocal”. We now have consistent data about changes in clime from the middle of the 19^th Century, and very good data from 1950.

This data shows beyond any doubt that the temperature of the Earth, both land and sea, has increased by 0.65 to 1.06°C from 1880. It shows that the last three decades were each hotter than any since 1850. By analysing ice cores and other palaeographic records, the figure can be extended: The last three decades were the hottest for 1400 years.

That may not seem like a huge temperature rise, but that’s an average temperature. Shift the average even a small amount, and the extremes at both ends change. This temperature rise will cause and is causing warmer and more frequent hot days, more heat waves, worse droughts and increased likelihood of storms.

More details don’t improve the picture. Glaciers are shrinking and the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps have been losing mass substantially in the last coupe of decades. Added to the thermal expansion of the oceans due to the increased temperature (When you heat water it expands: look closely next time you boil a kettle to see this), this has lead to global sea level rises of almost one fifth of a meter over the past 100 years. Not a huge amount, but it’s still going up and the rate is increasing.

And it really is all our fault. The report states: “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century”. As Sarcastic Rover tweeted, this is “science talk for YES I’M CERTAIN!” Emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane by humans have, beyond any reasonable doubt, been the main cause of recent climate change.

This means that predicting how this will carry on depends on what we do in the future. Unchecked, the temperature will continue to rise by 0.3-0.7 degrees by 2035, and then get hotter. Keeping the rise below 2°C before 2050 will be unlikely. Sea levels are going up almost regardless of what we do, with a rise of between 1 and 3 meters before 2300.

Some of these changes are unavoidable, but others aren't. Thomas Stoker, co-chair of the IPCC, put it simply: To limit climate change “will require substantial and sustained reduction of greenhouse gas emission.”

Plot from the IPCC report showing the global temperature since 1850. This is plotted as the difference from the average temperature for that whole time period. The increase is can be clearly seen. The top graph shows the average temperature for each year, the bottom the average temperature for each decade.

This means then that any consideration of the future is almost certainly going to be defined and shaped by climate change. And as that’s vaguely what this blog is about, I probably should talk about climate change a bit.

Climate change has been described many times as our biggest challenge, the biggest threat to human civilisation facing us in the future. I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that.

A while ago I read the Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. I don’t have it to hand so can’t quote it directly, but he argued that we didn't need to worry about climate change as it wouldn't affect human civilisation that much. Coastal areas would be affected and we’d have to adapt to hotter weather, but no drastic action was needed. I remember disagreeing, but not being able to fault his logic. Now I've realised that he was right…for some of us.

I think it’s quite possible that the richer nations in the world could handle climate change quite easily, for the simple reason that every year be become less and less connected with the natural world around us. Not in a spiritual, “connect with nature” sense, but in that we are less reliant on nature to provide our needs. Half of us live in cities, artificial environments that provide most of our needs in a way that is very much disconnected form the world around us. Over the next 50 years this disconnect will only get stronger, as we increase our ability to grow food in vertical farms, produce artificial meat and create oil in labs. Apart from building bigger flood defences, climate change in rich cites may just result in business as usual.

But that will only protect a tiny fraction of the world. The vast majority of the world, who don’t live in super high-tech cities and whose lives are still inextricable tied up in the world around them, will undergo, and are undergoing, huge suffering. According to Christian Aid, which is already working in areas affected by climate change across the world, tens of millions of people will do hungry, hundreds of millions will have to leave their homes as sea levels rise and billions will suffer water shortages.

This doesn’t even touch on all of the other life we share this planet with, which is currently undergoing unprecedented levels of extinction, also partly our fault.

The great irony of climate change is that the people who have cause it are mostly safe, whilst those how had nothing to do with the increase in emissions are the ones who will be most affected.

Instead of “our greatest challenge”, I think climate change contributes to one side of the coin that sums up our challenge for the future. Very roughly, I think our challenges can be summed up as a tension between resources and environment.

Resources, because before very long we will have ten billion people on the planet. And while the small percentage of us living in the most developed countries could take a hit to the amount of stuff we use, for most of the world the right way is increased resource use. We should be aiming to move into a world where everyone has access to food, water, healthcare, education and the chance to live a fulfilling life. Doing that for ten billion will take a huge increase in the amount of resources we need.

But these resources come at a cost to the environment. Digging up the ground for metals, destroying the rainforests to provide land, adapting vast areas of land for farming at the expense of all of the other land. And of course, powering this all by burning fossil fuels and causing global climate change.

The challenge then is this: how do we feed ten billion people without further damage to the environment.  

The IPCC report leaves us in no doubt that human activity has caused and will continue to cause massive detrimental effects on the environment. The people living alive today will be just the first to be affected, but we are the people who can do the most to change the future, to avert the worst predictions of climate change. Even is we feel it doesn't affect us, we have to do it. We have to create a world where our need for resources is in balance with the environment around us. We owe it to all the life on this planet, to our children and grandchildren. And we owe it to the ten billion.

A note on climate scepticism: Much has been made of the “warming slowdown”, the observation that the average temperature has not increase since 1998. This is answered very simply in the IPCC report. 1998 was a particularly hot year, so the average since has been affected. 15 years is way too short a time to say anything meaningful about the climate, as it’s too sensitive to weather like this. 50 years of no warming would be relevant, 15 years isn't. There is an easy way to challenge climate change science: gather data and publish in a respected peer-reviewed journal. A column in a newspaper really doesn’t count.  

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What this blog is all about and why I think the future is going to be good.

As promised, today I’m going to talk a little bit about what I’m going to talk about in this blog (yep, still makes sense to me).

What will Realising we’re in the Future be about? Well just that really. I want to explore the cutting edge of science and technology, to investigate the very latest in what we can do and what we have found out about the universe.

A few months ago I was talking with a friend about a cutting edge technology (vertical farming), which she dismissed as sounding “very futuristic.” But they aren't: There are already vertical farms operating around the world today.  

Those are the technologies I want to look at: those that seem to be outlandish ideas that are decades away, but are actually being build and designed in labs and factories around the world today. Things like robots, spacecraft, amazing medical technologies and computers that are more powerful than ever.

I also want to look at technologies that are getting dated, and about what’s going to replace them. The first blog on the Hyperloop was along these lines. I’ll talks about how the decades old technologies in our cars, trains and planes (among other things), is beginning to be replaced.

I’m about to start a PhD in astronomy at the University of Warwick and that’s where my main interests lie. So I’ll also be talking about the latest ideas in science, some that will tie into the ways in which the future is going to look, and others that just show more about how interesting our universe is. Being in a university will mean I’ll hopefully be able to try and track down people who actually work on what I’m talking about and get their views on the subject.  

So that’s what this blog will be about. Hopefully it will be interesting, enlightening and amusing, or one of the three at least.

For this week, rather than doing a specific piece of science or technology, I thought I’d talk about a more overall theme, which is how I feel about the future.

Yesterday (20^th of August) was World Overshot Day. It wasn’t a day to celebrate. World Overshoot Day is the estimated point in each year that the human race uses more recourses than the Earth can restore in a year. From now until the end of the year our uses of resources becomes unsustainable. We are borrowing, or rather stealing, from future generations.

With this in mind, as well as other facts about the world such as increasing population, pollution, over farming and climate change, it’s easy to be pessimistic about the future. We appear to be living in a brief period of unsustainable prosperity and abundance- those of us, that is, lucky enough to live in the rich West- and we are sitting on a time-bomb of problems and challenges that will undo everything we’ve achieved.  

This blog will, in part, be about how that might not be the case.

I am optimistic about the future. At the risk of sounding like an old election slogan, I think things are going to get better and better.

Before I start though, I am in no way denying the problems that face us. As Marcus Brigstocke says: “There are people who deny climate change is happening, and people who can read.” The problems facing us in the future are huge. By the end of the century, human population growth will have levelled off at roughly 10 billion people. Simply feeding everyone, without irrevocably damaging the environment, is perhaps the biggest challenge, even without the fact of a messed up climate getting in the way. Non-renewable resources that are essential to our lives, such as oil, helium and rare-earth metals, are running out or becoming increasingly inaccessible. And that’s just our problems. The wider ecosphere of the planet may suffer even more, with the rate of species extinction at around 1000 to 10000 times higher than if humans were not around.

No, I’m not optimistic because I think those challenges don’t exist. They do. I’m optimistic because I, as well as an increasing number of people, think that we can overcome them.

All of the challenges we face, those I’ve mentioned above and more, the ways in which the world appears to be getting worse, have to be compared with the ways in which the world is getting better.

A couple of plots from Gapminder showing how life expectancy and GDP per capita have increased across the whole world between 1950 and 2012. Note the correlation. 

A quick look at Gapminder, where you can look at various statistics about the world in easy to read plots, shows that pretty much everything good is going up and everything bad is going down. We are living longer, better off, and have better access to what we need to live than ever before. I recommend (all of) the videos on Gapminder if you need convincing. Not only that, but we’re also more peaceful. In fact we’re living in the most peaceful time in history- you are less likely to die a violent death today than ever.

Yes, there are a billion people who are still living in horrendous poverty, but it’s important to see poverty for what it is: Not a step back, but the remnant of what life was like for everyone not two hundred years ago. This was highlighted by the IF Campaign this year, which had the objective of ending hunger for everyone. Even ten years ago that would have seemed impossible, but now it’s reasonable to expect that everyone might be living above the poverty line by the end of the century. And some of the things I’m going to talk about in this blog will help us get there even faster.

(As I was writing this I got an email from Christian Aid. A line in it read “We want to achieve an end to poverty in the swiftest and smartest ways we can”. Pretty much sums up what the next paragraph was going to be, so I’ll leave it there!)

There are many reasons behind these changes for the better, and for optimism about the future, and I’m not going to try and cover all of them at all. I’m going to stick to what I know about, the massive increase in the knowledge and capabilities of science and technology.

I want to explore how our new technological capabilities and the latest discoveries about the world we live in will help us overcome the challenges I’ve talked about and lead to a world of abundance for everyone.

So here’s a challenge for anyone who reads this. Name an issue or challenge that makes you feel pessimistic about the future, and I’ll try (when I get round to it) to find some developments in science and technology that might help address it. Hopefully I can convince you to be optimistic about the future as well!

Next week, Moore’s Law! Unless I find something else interesting, which is always possible.

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High Speed 2? I want a Hyperloop.

Hello! Following up from the critically acclaimed (by my Nan) blog A Welshman in America and inspired by a few friends who are making much better use of social media than me, I have decided to start filling up the internet with ramblings again. This blog will try focus on science and technology, with inevitable diversions as I start my astronomy PhD in September. I’ll talk a bit more about some of the wide themes I want to cover, but it will basically be “what do I find interesting today?”

And today has seen the release of something very interesting indeed: The Hyperloop.

Described by inventor Elon Musk as “a fifth form of transportation” (The other four being road, rail, water and air travel) this design promises journeys between cites at almost the speed of sound. It will cost less than driving by car and have almost no environmental impact.

Best of all, the whole thing has been given away for free. The details are all on the websites of SpaceX and Tesla, two of Musk’s current ventures, so you can just download them, have a read, then go and try and build one yourself. (And check out the rest of those websites while you’re at it, I’ll almost certainly becoming back to both those companies at some point.)

For those of you who don’t want to read the paper, a journey on the hyperloop is roughly as follows. You and 23 other passengers would climb into a roughly 1.5m diameter pod or capsule, sitting in reclined seats with on board entertainment screens in front of you. Your luggage, roughly as much as you can take on a plane, is stowed in a separate compartment behind you.

Once everyone is in, the Back to the Future style gull-wing doors close and the capsule moves through a large airlock. The airlock quickly pumps out most of the air around the capsule, bringing the atmospheric pressure down to  100Pa, or about 1/6^th that of Mars. (Musk uses the comparison with the Martian atmosphere, rather than that of Earth, throughout the paper: His ambitions regarding the fourth planet from the Sun are well known).

From the airlock the capsule moves into the main element of the system: A tube connecting you and your destination, held 30m above the ground on a series of pylons and covered in solar panels. The hyperloop generates much more power than it needs, so your transport is also a power station.

The capsule then passes over a series of impellers, which use electromagnets to accelerate the capsule up to speed. In an identical tube next to you those same impellers are being used to slow down a capsule coming the other way. The remaining air in the tube is sucked into the front of the capsule and forced out of the sides, allowing the capsule to float in a similar way to a hovercraft. With almost no friction, the capsule can then be accelerated to up to 1120 kilometres per hour, or 760 miles per hour.

The case study route, a 350 mile route joining Los Angeles with San Francisco, would take roughly 35 minutes.    

That’s over twice as fast as a plane making the same journey. Nearly 5 times faster than high speed rail. And ten times faster than a car.

(All of these comparisons are for actual day to day journey times, not a “if a train, a plane, a car and a hyperloop had a race, which would get there first?” sort of thing. Which incidentally would make a very good episode of Top Gear.)

Although it sounds very science-fictiony, there’s actually no new technology involved. All of the basic elements- vacuum pumps, air cushions, and magnetic impellers- are already around. And anyway, criticising something for being “too futuristic” is a bit silly now that one in seven of us are carrying supercomputers around in our pockets. 

And as the BBC says, no one is betting against it. Elon Musk has a track record of taking things that sound years away and dragging them into the present. He made his fortune with PayPal, then revolutionised spaceflight with rocket company SpaceX. Another company, Tesla Motors, is doing rather well in the electric car business.

With Musk’s track record, the use of proven technology and the fact that anyone can have a go, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least someone, somewhere has a go at building one. In fact, I suggest we build one here in Britain.

Musk says that his interest in the hyperloop was sparked when he saw the plans for the high speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles. This plan has the dubious honour of being both one of the slowest and, at estimated costs of over $60 billion, one of the most expensive high speed rail links in the world. According to Musk and his engineers at SpaceX and Tesla, the hyperloop would cost a tenth of that price and have a journey time five times as fast.

This raises the obvious question about whether a hyperloop could replace Britain’s very own uninspiring high speed rail project, HS2. Although it’s not quite the same situation as California, as there isn’t a convenient long, straight road to put the thing next too, I’m sure that I can make some rough comparisons. (One of the advantages of a hyperloop is that you can site it alongside existing infrastructure instead of having to build railways. As it’s up on towers it’s pretty much just like putting another set of electricity pylons in.)

First let’s have a look at the competition. HS2 will be 192km long (the first phase to Birmingham, as the second phase is so far in the future it’s probably not worth talking about), and will take roughly 50 minutes to get from London to Birmingham, a saving of about 30 minutes on current times (wow). The projected costs are roughly £16 billion.

Now let’s see if a hyperloop can do better. This will be a rough estimate as no one is paying me to do it properly (Hi, people who pay people to do it properly…). Let’s put our hyperloop along the side of the M40, which is vaguely straight from London to Birmingham. That makes it about 150km, rounding up a bit for any extra length needed to go round corners less quickly than the motorway. The West Coast Main Line would be another option, but it’s not as straight so I’ll stick with the motorway. Perhaps the solar panels on the hyperloop could be used to run charging stations for electric cars along the way.

As most of the cost of the hyperloop is in the tube, I can estimate the cost by comparing the length of this tube to the Californian one. This makes it about a 3^rd of the length of the Californian one, so it’ll be roughly a third of the cost (all of these are overestimates to account for the fact it might be more expensive per mile due to the difference in location.) The more expensive version of the hyperloop (carrying cars as well as passengers), costs $7.5 billion. A third of that is $2.5billion, or roughly £1.7 billion rounding up. Let’s call it £2 billion, or an eighth the cost of HS2. So far so good.

Journey time won’t be quite as straightforward, as a greater portion of the distance will be spent speeding up and slowing down at each end. So let’s say we only get about 2/3rds of the journey time of the California system rather than the third our distance suggests. The California route takes 35 minutes, so I’ll say roughly 20 minutes. That’s 2.5 times faster than HS2 and saves over an hour on current journey times.

That’s much cheaper, much faster, better for the environment, generating free electricity, not digging up farmland, and not making a new eyesore. In fact as it’s next to the motorway it would be making a current eyesore better. Better then in every way than HS2.

I think we should build a hyperloop. Not just because my simple calculations show it’s better (someone please do a more in-depth analysis), but also because what it represents.

It’s a twenty-first century form of transport, something that makes use of all the developments over the past few decades to build the best possible way of getting people around, not relying on technology that’s been around for fifty years. The plans are open source so anyone can have a go designing one, and all the technology already exists. Giving the county a project like this would help to inspire a new generation of scientist and engineers, who would be able to see the future not hidden away in a phone in a pocket, but stretched across the landscape. Why shouldn’t we build one?

Neil Degrasse Tyson has said that “Doing what’s never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical”. The hyper loop certainly looks practical and it’s definitely never been done before. Let’s have some intellectual seduction.

Of course the most important question has yet to be answered: Could a hyperloop do a loop?

Hope you've enjoyed the first post of my new blog. Next time I'll talk a bit more about what I want to talk about (that makes sense). The blog's name was inspired by this xkcd post.

New posts will be posted on my shiny new Twitter page.