Gift Season

It's Xmas time, when suddenly, as good consumers, we're meant to express our love by going out and buying stuff for others.  The list of 'others' is often long, and we often struggle to imagine what they might need or want that we could possibly buy them. We're short of time, and maybe budget, so we end up buying them some object that they might possibly not hate, on a good day. if you squint, in whatever shop we happen to be in when we finally run out of time or patience.

Five years ago, George Monbiot, expressed pretty well that it is essentially The Gift Of Death that we're giving; I suspect he's received one too many talking plastic fish. It's mostly plastic junk that consumes valuable resource in its production, is enjoyed for maybe ten minutes, and then spends ten years in the back of a garage and a thousand years in a landfill.

One of the problems, I realise when someone asks me what I want for my birthday or Xmas, is that our consumer world is filled with abundance.  If I want something, I go out and buy it, frustrating future gift-givers. If I can't afford it, then it's too expensive to put on a gift wish list. Most people I know already have everything they need and want; the only thing they lack is a talking fish...

Since we started this Green thing seriously, almost a year ago, I've come to realise that a huge number of my friends and family have always done the things I now aspire to.

For example, in the case of one of my cheffish friends, when December rolls around, he reserves a weekend or two for baking a huger amount of something simple but delicious, like shortbread, and often 'wraps' it in something nice but also re-usable, like festive tins, and that becomes his Xmas present for every single person he loves (or is otherwise obliged to give to at Xmas time).

He has always done this, for as long as we've been friends (more than three decades). He has never given me a Xmas present I would actually buy; shortbread is delicious, and everything, but not something I've every craved. But his presents are always among the ones I appreciate most, because I know he's spend hours and a lot of thought in their presentation, that he loves doing all the work that goes into it, and they're consistently unique. Not to mention always totally delicious.

So I've always loved these presents, but I'm only now realising that this is something to aspire to - making instead of buying presents. I think it's important to realise that

• the amount of money you spend isn't directly proportional to the amount of love you want to express,
• presents don't have to be specifically chosen for the recipient, but rather
• gifts can express the tastes of the giver rather than the receiver.

Of course, all of this applies to talking fish.

The final key, for me, is that some of the effort and thought of a Xmas present can be spent in achieving a gift that will either be useful for the recipient's entire life, or be immediately eaten.

My hope for this year (although I'm running out of time now) is to manage to make a huge batch of sour dough stollen that I found a recipe for.

Putrifaction News

Summer is coming, the weather is heating up, the sourdough starter is getting smelly, and the compost is getting warmer too.
Today I noticed that the oldest compost bucket is squirming and writhing...

The change in temperature seems to have heralded the return of my wriggly friends, the Black Soldier Fly larvae. Although I probably don't feel quite as affectionate about them as Maria Gaura, who yells "come and get it!" as she tips out her food waste, I'm surprisingly glad to see them back; they feel like a sign that the compost is healthy, and actually that bucket smells more like forest floor than restaurant dumpster, which is presumably good.

In other compost news, although our system is working fairly well at reducing what gets sent to landfill, and is producing an explosion of tomatoes...

...we've noticed that, when we get to the point of using the compost to start a new planter, although the food waste has rotted beyond recognition, it can be fairly sloppy and oozy.

So we've got hold of a few more paint buckets, and have started to experiment with the "bucket in bucket" method: i.e. melt some holes in the bottom of one bucket...

 

...and then slide it into another bucket:

The idea is that the junk juice that forms in the inner bucket can drain into the outer bucket, which stops the compost from getting too slimy, and yields a leachate which, if you dilute it to water plants with, is apparently called "compost tea" which plants love.

Although if you ask me, it looks more like fresh espresso:

Pasta

Back in March I found that I was developing new distaste for plastic packets, even when though they might be tiny sachets. This has since grown, but it's like Catholic Guilt - it's a constant background level of bad feeling in the goldilocks zone: strong enough to allow wallowing, but not so strong that there's danger of being spurred into action.

So it has been for pasta packaging:

The packaging has a recycling number on it, so the guilt as been assuaged enough to prevent a boycott for six months or so. But every time I open a packet, there's a pang of Eco Guilt.

Eventually, these pangs accumulated enough to power up my 'consumer muscle', and I decided to choose a more expensive product, because it comes in a cardboard box.

Yes, paper/cardboard production is also a shitty, contaminating process, but at least once this packet is empty, it's likely to not exist any more in a year's time; we can even compost it ourselves to be sure of it's fate.

Solved!

Right?

But it costs more money, and this is actually the kind of thing that, in the olden days, people didn't buy in a packet, they made it.

I'd assumed it's a complicated, fiddly process to make pasta - people talk about buying a machine for it that sits unused in the cupboard because making pasta is a total pain.

But seeing as I'm married to someone whose Italian father periodically makes his own pasta because it tastes better, I came to know that, far from being relegated to the olden days, people still do this in the 21st century! And I could also see first-hand how much effort it is. And frankly, it didn't seem that bad.

In fact, if you ask me, looks to be what Argentines call a boludéz (or maybe pavada would be more accurate); something that is so quick and easy doesn't require the least effort. You don't even need a machine!

Here's what's involved:

1. Add 2 eggs to 250g flour
2. Mix it up until it looks like yellowish play-dough
3. Fold and squash it for a while
4. Roll it really flat with a rolling pin
5. Cut it into strips or whatever shape you like

That's it! Two ingredients mixed together, flattened, and then cut up!

After my very first attempt turned out to be actually quite convincing, I began to wonder why people spend money on pasta at all.  It's a boludéz to make!

Then my birthday rolled around, and my opportunistic wife bought me the famous pasta machine.  Which makes pasta even more convincingly, and saves my (wife's) rolling pin from wearing out.

Sprung?

Despite my total lack of green thumb, we have started a kind of humble urban rooftop garden; luckily my knowledgeable wife has more idea about these things than I.
In addition to the lime and spinach we started with we've planted pumpkin and tomato, and our planter box has been looking green and increasingly lush.
And now that the weather is turning a bit less wintry, we discovered that Lima María is budding!

And habemus tomatuses!!

This is a miracle! Who knew it could be this easy?!

To Market!

So I was being complainy about how going to the hip 'farmers' market' is all well and good if you live in New York or Matakana. But if you live in a less hoity-toity place where there are no such markets, like Buenos Aires, how can you get you nice, locally grown, organic produce??

But it turns out... well, three things:

Firstly, Buenos Aires actually has green-grocers everywhere, and they sell good, cheap, fresh produce.  It's presumably bathed in pesticides, the bananas are from Ecuador, the kiwifruit from Chile, etc. but much of it is presumably actually grown in Argentine soil (Argentinian? Argent?).  And you can Just Say No to the plastic bags, if you think ahead.

Ginger root bought 100 metres from my front door - mmm... ginger beer...

Secondly, we discovered www.jardinorganico.com.ar, a virtual grocer that delivers organic produce to our very door.

Maybe one day, an electric van?

We've been using them for a while now, and it's generally pretty good - the only complaint so far is their plastic package fetish.

But we're lobbying them annoyingly about this; hopefully we can convince them to switch to cartons at least...

Thirdly, my sharp-eyed wife discovered an actual farmers market! It's organised by Sabe la Tierra, and it runs weekly in various locations in the city.

None of those locations are particularly close to us, unfortunately, but on Wednesdays, it's in the city centre (near Callao and Corrientes), half an hour's subway ride away.

Veges with convincingly organic imperfections

They have local veges and fruit, mushrooms, free-range eggs and chicken, products stolen from bees (including mead!), as well as 'ready made' food for take away or eating in the market's 'picnic zone'.

Bananas from Formosa (3200 food-kilometres closer than Ecuador)

So, as usual, it turns out I'm an ignoramus...

The (possibly alternative) Facts

So now I come to the 'nay sayers' book, to see what they themselves have to say, and whether it's at all convincing. It turns out that some of it is ridiculous ("the developing world are the biggest emitters"), some of it is technically true but irrelevant (CO₂ is necessary for life), some of it is passingly thought provoking (some good things might happen).  And some of it just comes down to disagreeing about basic facts.

The book is a series of essays, each author with a different take on the problems with the climate change question. The result is a book which isn't a package deal, like the 'ay sayers' book, but rather a collection of arguments that sometimes contradict each other ("the climate isn't warming" vs. "the climate is warming, but not because of CO₂").  This is actually probably good, as it means that some of the patently ridiculous things said can be ignored without affecting some of the things that bear thinking about.

The book was published in 2015, and presumably some of the material was written prior to that. Being a few years old, it's actually a little out of date; so for example claims that temperatures are no longer rising now fall firmly in the "ignorable" basket, as the last three years have each been the hottest on record.

Given the variety of authors and arguments, probably the best way to summarise is by author:

Ian Plimer

Unfortunately, the very first chapter is full of ridiculousness and irrelevances. Luckily that doesn't necessarily set the tone for the rest of the book.  Here goes:

• Science is about observed data, not generated data, so climate models prove nothing. [Actually, building models that behave like observations, and then investigating how they behave under various other conditions is pretty standard science.]
• Consensus is not science. [It's true that an individual scientist shouldn't necessarily assume that the consensus view is the truth, and should trust data over opinion. But data often conflicts, and believing the majority of the data while remaining curious about the data that doesn't fit, is pretty much what science is like. And rational non-scientists trying to figure out what science is saying have little choice but to go by what most scientists say. Ignoring 29 experts and believing the 1 expert that disagrees doesn't seem very wise.]
• CO₂ is indeed rising, but "as all farmers know", CO₂ is plant food and thus good for life. "...the carbon gas emitted from industry is CO₂ - a colourless, odourless, non-toxic gas" ['...what you do not smell is iocane powder...'].
• CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, but increases above 400ppm will warm the earth an insignificant amount.
• Global temperature has not increased in the last 17 years [after this was written, though, 2014, 2015, and 2016 were record-breaking years].
• Ice cores show that temperature rises before CO₂ rises [so CO₂ can't be the cause of the higher temperatures].
• CO₂ levels have been higher than this before, and life thrived.
• Historically, humans thrive in warm temperatures, and die in colder temperatures.
• In these previous periods, there were no 'tipping points'.
• Sea levels rise and sink throughout the ages, and land levels rise and sink too; ice covering the land has "pushed the land down", and when the ice melts "there is a rebound". [Is this even true? Is he confusing plate tectonics with climate change?] "Land level rises and falls are far more profound tha[n] long-term sea-level rises and falls".
• Temperature and sea levels have changed for natural reasons before, so it "seems illogical" that the current sea level right is due to human activities".
• Coral reefs rise and fall with sea-level, and they love warm temperatures and high levels of CO₂ [but since then the Great Barrier Reef has had large-scale bleaching two years in a row, which we've never seen happen before].  
• Extinction is normal. [Unfortunately, this is both true-but-irrelevant and precisely-the-problem; the true-but-irrelevant part is that extinction is normal, but the current rate of extinction is extremely high, high enough to call it a mass-extinction, of which there have been several in the history of the earth, and all of them totally changed the face of the earth.  Which brings me to this being precisely-the-problem: mass extinctions are extremely bad news for the species at the time (except maybe cockroaches), and we are a species during this mass extinction - in fact we are Plimer's example of a short-lived species: "Highly adapted terrestrial species (such as humans) have a short life"] [Seperately, he seems to misunderstand how extinction relates to the food chain - dominant species kill others for food, and that's normal. Except that killing them is different from killing them off; death of some individuals is not the same as death of all individuals]
• "Vacated ecologies are quickly filled and life goes on".
  [This relates to a misunderstanding that I think the language environmentalists use generates: they talk about "saving the planet", as if emitting lots of CO₂ will cause the Earth as a whole to disappear.  Of course they don't mean that, but the answer to this hyperbole is that they're exaggerating, which they are. Of course 'the planet' will be fine, it will continue turning and orbiting the sun, it will still be made up of lots of iron with a bunch of water sloshing around the outside and a bunch of nitrogen blanketing it from the void of space. And no doubt life in general will go on even if most species die out, it will just be different life.  This is true but irrelevant; the primary point is that some of the life that dies out could be us.  And a secondary point (pretty closely related to the first, actually), is that a bunch of species that would have happily continued on will, instead, die out; this seems like shame if you're have even a slight conservationist bent, but also they might be species we depend on, like fish.  And there might be (in fact almost definitely are) dependencies that we don't know about yet.]
• And anyway, most species can just move to their ideal climate, if it changes where there currently are.
• Oceans are alkaline, so anybody who talks about 'acidification' "demonstrates a lack of knowledge". [Whatever]
• "There is no such thing as carbon pollution and the carbon gas emitted from industry is CO₂". [He can't mean that CO₂ doesn't contain carbon, so I guess he's taking issue with people calling it 'carbon pollution' instead of 'carbon dioxide pollution'. Whatever.]
• Decreasing alkalinity of the ocean even slightly would involve "monstrous volumes of acid". [or huge amounts of chemicals like CO₂ being emitted into the atmosphere and from there absorbed into the ocean]
• Only research that supports the ideology of global warming receives funding.
• Even if Australia reached its 2020 target of reduced emissions, temperatures would be only 0.0007°C-0.00007°C cooler than if not. [So if Australia was the only country who did something in 5 years, the effect would be small? Yeah, that's why everyone has to do something, not just Australia.]
• The developing world is increasing emissions. [But even so, emit, and have emitted, far less than the developed world - so again, true but irrelevant]
• Taxing the polluter will push the "economically vulnerable" into "fuel poverty", so children and the elderly will die, particularly in the "Third World" [Maybe "fuel poverty" means that we're somehow not allowing poor people to use oil?  I'm not sure anyone is proposing that, but anyway, that's what the big push for renewables is for, so everyone has the energy they need without emitting CO₂].
• Renewables cause loss of ecosystems and destruction of wildlife, and "sterilisation of land" [I'm not sure about the sterilisation thing, but it's true that whatever energy solutions we employ, be they wind or solar farms, or gas rigs and pipelines, they should minimise ecological damage.]
• Renewables can't provide constant energy supply, because the wind dies down and night falls. [This is true, and is an active research area.  But it's not like there are no existing solutions - from keeping a few gas plants around for topping up supply at peak times, to storing energy in chemical batteries, as heat, or by pumping water up hill to later let it run down through a hydro-electric generator.]
• Renewables don't decrease CO₂ emissions. [...erm.  If you use them to replace emitting energy sources, how can they not decreas CO₂ emissions? Or perhaps he means this...] "No CO₂ emitting ... power station has been replaced by a wind farm" [...except that last month, admittedly two years after this book was published, Great Britain had a full day of coal-free power generation for the first time - this isn't technically 'replacing the power plant', because the plants no doubt still exist, but the point is they aren't burning coal]
• Lots of pejorative language like "religious narcissism", "money laundering", "vapid, alarmist", "fraud", and exaggerations like "Wind just doesn't blow. People die." Whatever.

Patrick J. Michaels

This chapter is more sciency, and tries to present an argument that climate-change-avoiding policies, fuelled by hysteria, are no longer justified by the climate science (if they ever were), by showing that more recent climate models project a much lower impact of CO₂ emissions on temperature.

The main points are:

• The 108 climate change models quoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) average a temperature rise of 2.6C per century, but the observed warming was in fact 1.7C per century, a lot less.
• The author compares the range of results from the 108 models, over longer and longer periods running each model, compares them to each other by graphing the average prediction but also the lower and upper ranges of the predictions, and also comparing to the actual measured temperature trends for the last 60 years (well, until 2013).
• The graph shows that the actual temperature trends always fall below the average modelled trend, for all the time periods used.  It creeps pretty much along the bottom of the range of the models, and dips into the range of the bottom 2.5% of the models for the most recent periods.
• This failure of the models to predict what actually happened should lead to the models being disregarded when making policy
• But "tier 1" scientific publications are reluctant to publish these results, which means they languish in obscurity.
• This is because the profession of science resists novel results, preferring to keep the current way of thinking, even though the evidence doesn't support it.
• And funding is only available for research in the mainstream.

On my first reading of this, looking at the graph of temperature trends, my impression (which I think was the intended impression) was that it said the models were goodish at modelling temperature change 60 years ago, but they got progressively worse, and now only the lowest-change models are actually modelling reality.  I thought his claim that this should "spell the end of any onerous climate policy" was a slight stretch; what I saw in the graph was that observed temperature change falls within the range of predicted values, but near the bottom of the range.  To me, that mean that the models more or less working (which is good news) but that reality had so far erred on the low side of what was possible (which is pretty good news too).

However, looking at the graph and the description of it again, I think it actually shows something else.  Michaels says that "calculated the model trends for periods beginning at ten years (i.e. 2004-2013), eleven years (2003-2013), etc. all the way back to 1951-2013 (my emphasis).  So although the graph looks like the passage of time (low, accurate values in the 1950s on the left but high, inaccurate values in the 2000s on the right, it's actually amounts of data fed into the model, with higher amounts on the left and lower amounts on the right.  The x axis of the graph is clearly labelled "Trend length", and the numbers clearly (but unusually) go from high on the left to low on the right.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, it's really saying that if you give the models more data (say 60 years' worth) they do a better job then if you give them less data (say 10 years' worth). In which case, so much the better for the models, and the conclusions drawn from this comparison are unjustified; no wonder nobody will publish them.  Frankly, it sounds like sour grapes from an academic who couldn't get published.

Anyway, pressing on... where were we?  Something about science being unwilling to change its paradigm...

• There is a new paradigm of modelling emerging that shows that the climate's "sensitivity" to CO₂ lower than thought.
• "Sensitivity" is the amount of surface warming that occurs if the amount of CO₂ is doubled from it's 'pre-industrial' level - before the Industrial Revolution there was 300 parts-per-million of CO₂ in the atmosphere, so double that would be 600 parts-per-million - climate "sensitivity" is how many degrees temperature would rise if we got to that level.
• The IPCC says that sensitivity is 3.2C, but other models say it's 2.3C, or 2.2C, or 1.9C, or 1.5C, or 1.3C, or as low as 1C

Overall, the purported result is that the IPCC's models have failed, and that climate policies should be rolled back.  However, looking at the details, I'm inclined to conclude that a) "failure" isn't an accurate way to describe what's going on, b) the more data the models have, the better they work, and c) there's no question that CO₂ makes the temperature go up, but the question is 'by how much', and science is doing its job: trying to get a good prediction, by building models that mostly work for real data, and then seeing where they head.

Richard S. Lindzen

This section is more talk about whether the models are any good.

• The models say that catastrophe is possible - but this is almost impossible to disprove - the real question is how likely?
• It's possible to admit that climate changes, CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, greenhouse gasses cause warming, and man's activities increase greenhouse gasses - to admit all of these things but for there to be still no problem; the question is how much?
• The answers to these questions, so far, come only from computer models, and those models build in feedback effects that are "highly uncertain".
• Is the climate highly sensitive to CO₂ levels? The models the IPCC use (General Circulation Models or GCMs) compute sensitivity themselves, but there are other models Energy Balance Models, with which you can try out a given value for sensitivity, and compare it to what actually happened since the Industrial Revolution.  If you do that, a sensitivity of  about 1C is what reflects reality.
• If you add the effect of major volcanoes into these models, then again, 1C or below looks to be the sensitivity.
• There are also other influences which are hard to model - aerosols, El Niño, solar variation, etc.  
• High sensitivity is associated with slow response time - i.e. when a change in CO₂ (or something else) occurs, the temperature changes slowly rather than quickly.  But volcanic-eruption-related cooling is fast, which indicates low sensitivity.
• It actually looks like sensitivity is small.
• Mild warming is likely to be a good thing anyway
• Current models include the effects of feedbacks, but it's not known that the feedbacks really exist, and some studies indicate that they don't, or even that there is negative feedback
• Extreme weather events have been attributed to global warming, but even the IPCC admits that such connections between weather and climate can't be made
• And actually, extreme weather events are generated by temperature difference between the equator and the poles. In a warmed world, the difference would be lower, so extreme weather would be less likely
• There's no empirical evidence that more evaporation means more extreme weather
• And anyway, there might not be more evaporation, because humidity over the ocean might be higher, preventing evaporation [erm... isn't humidity caused be evaporation? Does that mean the point is that, after more water has evaporated, increasing the humidity, water will stop evaporating? Hmm]

William Soon

• Consensus is one of the founding principles of the IPCC, but consensus is anti-scientific.
• The sun's time in temperature variation is incorrectly minimised by the IPCC.
• They incorrectly assume an eleven year cycle of insolation, but there's no evidence the cycle exists.
• They don't cite or use some data sets and literature that they should, breccias using them would weaken the claim that CO₂ is the main driver of warming.
• In particular they don't cite Soon's own paper reporting that temperature change since 1850 can be largely explained with reference to the sun.
• The IPCC depends on promoting the existence of man made climate change for its existence.

Robert M Carter

• The source of temperature date data for the 20 the century is the HadCRUT data set, which had a lot of possible errors in individual measurements - between 1 and 5 degrees, much higher that the purported average rise of 0.7C [this shows a misunderstanding about how averages work; with a large enough set of data, high errors in a small number of days points will make no important difference]
• Ice core evidence shows that temperatures have been much hotter before, and also much cooler despite rising CO₂ [but the rise he mentions is a mere 20ppm)
• Also, CO₂ levels have been much higher in the past, so representing current levels as unusually high is misleading [I don't think scientists are alarmed about the CO₂ level as such, but rather the rate at which it's rising, which is unprecedented, and leashes little time for species to evolve to cope with the change in environment]
• Burning coal is just returning CO₂ to the atmosphere, from whence it came, "yielding the twin benefits of generation of cheap electricity and the greening of the planet" [similar to Plimer's "colourless, odourless gas" stance above]
• Plants, particularly cereals, need CO₂, and the earth is currently in a CO₂ starved state [I suppose the mention of cereals is meant to imply that more CO₂ means more food crops. The ay sayer's response would presumably be to point out that sea level rise means less arable land, due to coastal population displacement]
• The more CO₂ in the atmosphere, the less effect the extra CO₂ has on temperature, because the relationship between CO₂ and temperature is logarithmic. Everyone agrees that doubling to 560ppm will cause a 1ºC rise. The IPCC claim that feedbacks will amplify that, but that hasn't been proven.
• Language like "radical environmentalists" "global warming bandwagon" "propaganda" "ceaselessly alarmist" "scientific malfeasance" "corruption" "indoctrination of school children", "risible" etc.
• The IPCC is a political, not a scientific, organisation
• The NIPCC on the other hand is non-governmental, and this independent of political bias, and it's conclusions after reviewing climate literature are the opposite of the IPCC
• Many scientists agree than global cooling, sure to sun cycles, is in fact the most likely thing to happen in the coming decades
• Rather than address the purported causes of warming, we should concentrate on mitigating the effects of climate change, be it warming is cooling [i.e. symptomatic relief is better than cure]

John Abbot and Jennifer Marohasy

• GCM based rainfall forecasts aren't accurate
• Old fashioned statistical methods were perfectly good
• Astronomy based forecasts like those of Ken Ring might be more accurate accurate, if only somebody would fund a study to compare them
• Statistical neural network AI methods might be more accurate too, if only there were funding to find out
• Science should be funded by private, apolitical foundations rather than government, who require researchers to sell their research as the solution to a problem
• Anyway, predicting weather is more useful than predicting climate

Nigel Lawson

He starts complaining about how mean people are to him about climate change dissent.

Then poses four questions

1. All things being equal, how much will increased CO₂ increase temperature?
2. Are all things equal?
3. Would warming be bad?
4. If there's a problem, what should be done?

His answer to 1 is that it's not really known yet. But the 'hiatus' may indicate that the effect isn't all that big, and that natural variation is more important (i.e. the answer to 2 is no). His claim is that the answer to 3 is no too, as cold causes more health problems and deaths than warmth does, and people generally choose to move to warmer rather than colder places. Also, the biggest health threat today is poverty. Fossil fuels are the cheapest and most efficient mechanism for providing energy on a large scale, and thus lifting the developing world out of poverty. [That might be an argument for allowing the developing world to continue using fossil fuels, but doesn't let the developed world of the hook.]

Supposedly warming will have a detrimental effect on crops, but actually more CO₂ means healthier crops due to the 'fertilization effect'.

The IPCC itself admits that there has so far been no increase in frequency or severity of extreme weather events. The general impression is that there's more extreme weather, but that's partly because global communications means that people are generally more aware of events in far away places, and there are simply more people now, so more people are affected.

The latest IPCC report admits that moderate warming may be economically beneficial, but what the report doesn't do is study the economic effects of the decarbonising policies they recommend.

The answer to 4 is the same as it ever was for humanity: adapt; take advantage of the good effects, and mitigate the bad ones. Guarding against disease, famine, flood, and fight are things we should be doing anyway.

Decarbonising only makes sense of everyone does it, and a global agreement in Paris in 2015 is very unlikely [of course it's now old news that the Paris agreement was in fact achieved, with only 2 nations refusing to sign, and one of them was because it wasn't strict enough on developed nations. Also, of course, it's new news that Trump's US has just pulled out of it, although many individual states seem Ken today day in it without federal support]

Decarbonisation policies will also does the development of developing nations, which is immoral as it means that many of their inhabitants will remain in poverty.

Alan Moran

This section basically claims that the IPCC's estimations of the cost of global warming are exaggerated, and that the estimated costs of mitigating are way lower than they really are. In particular, the real costs of business as usual are much lower than the real costs of mitigating climate change [which might be true, and would be fine if money was the only important thing]

The IPCC's mitigation costs include assumptions about "mythical technology" that doesn't exist yet, and "horrendously expensive renewables" [except that the cost of solar, at least, has nosedived of late. Maybe that happened after this was written?]. And anyway, who knows what might happen in the future [so best not to try to plan for it, or something].

...


To be honest, this is as far as I could get in the book without actually throwing it out the window. I was hoping this would, at least, be a "I read it so you don't have to" type post (and at a stretch, something that maybe cast a positive light on climate change or the prospects of it not being a calamity for humanity).  All I really found was sour grapes, irrelevancies, and a ridiculously blinkered outlook.  There were more authors that I didn't get to, but I think I've seen enough.

Obviously this is just my opinion, having read much (but not all) of the 'other side' of the argument. But frankly, it just doesn't hold water.  We're in serious trouble, and now is not the time to bicker and nit-pick.

Decay and Renewal

Four months ago, with some trepidation, we started composting on the roof of our apartment. The internet recommends things we can't do, like burying it in the ground, having a large, aerated wooden box, tolerating rats and other vermin, etc. Rather, we're following the "just do it and see what happens" approach, which is actually working ok; we've ended up with 5 paint buckets with no holes, to keep smells in, but left open daily, and stirred up weekly, to keep the putrefaction "aerobic". Food scraps go in the first bucket.  When it gets full, it becomes the second bucket, replaced by an empty one, and so on.

Chain of putrefaction

The main idea is to avoid sending all those organics to landfill. So one of our rubbish outputs has become the compost-bucket-chain input. Yay!

Except that after five buckets' worth, we've got another output.  Compost, which is good. But no garden to put it in...

So my considerate wife, ever attentive to my complaining about the poor supply of limes in Buenos Aires when lemon-lime-and-bitters season rolls around, procured a lime tree and a large wooden crate to plant it in. With the addition of some dirt and two buckets of compost, Lima María arrived:

Lima María, here pictured with her new flatmates, Basil, Rosemary, and Unidentified But Enthusiastic Yuyo

Habemus "garden"!

The months passed, and the buckets filled, and we decided that maybe we could try planting some veggies; if we got to the point of eating them, it would be zero-food-mile produce.  Yes, I know that every household with a veggie garden has been doing this for centuries. But for me personally, this would be an Unprecedented Leap Forward, one which people who know me well may struggle to actually believe.

So my resourceful wife managed more container-procuring, we bought some spinach seeds, and dutifully sowed one neat row with some more dirt and putrefied bucket loads.

Sowing

It was just a matter of time, we thought. So we waited patiently...

...and then waited less patiently...

And just as we we debating what went wrong (old seeds? wrong season? incompetent sowing?) this happened:

Sprouting

I tried to keep my cool, but there was a disproportionate level of elation felt.

Which turned out to be proportionate to the amount of crest that fell the following day, when I found this:

It's a jungle out there

Not visible in this photo is a very small stalk, neatly snipped off where the leaves would have been, presumably by the adept mandible of some industrious ant.  The outdoor ants of Buenos Aires are frighteningly large compared to New Zealand ants, but are generally too busy to be aggressive, never venture indoors, and until this moment I had admired their tireless industriousness.

But now I was starting to share my mother-in-law's indignant disdain for them. Alas!

A few days layer, a few more spinach fronds ventured forth, so I've done my nurturing best to give them a fighting chance in this brutish world:

Greenhouse apartments

(...so I can later eat them myself...)

Meanwhile, a friend suggested maybe starting seedlings off inside, before transferring them to the rooftop planter.  So these started appearing in various locations in our apartment:

...which a couple of weeks later, are looking like this:

More disproportionate elation is swelling inside my urban soul.

Where will it all end?

Winter Sun

One of the things that's become clear from looking into running our house off solar panels is that the most difficult time of year will be winter, when the sun is lower in the sky. Our place is in the midst of much taller buildings, which are going to block out even more of the sun.  Basically, if I can design a system that will get us enough energy in winter, it'll work for all all year round.

So how much sun is blocked out in winter?  Well, my handy app drew this diagram:

...which was not overly encouraging, as the "Winter Soltice" line in blue is rather interrupted by grey building shadows. Even worse, I had a strong suspicion that my prime spot for some panels would be totally overshadowed by our water tank in winter (the water tank is too near to appear in the diagram).

So the only thing to do was to wait until the depths of winter and check out the shadow situation. This is a photo taken every half an hour or so, on 19 June (3 days before the soltice):

My supposedly sweet spot for panels is the area on the bottom right. And sure enough, from about 1:30pm onward, it's completely in the shadow of the water tank - i.e. it only gets morning sun, and even then, until about 10am, it's streaked with shadows of chimneys and antennas - shadows like that reduce the amount of energy generated by panels, because the cells in shadow drag down to performance of sun-bathed cells in the same circuit.

An alternative spot I'd thought about for panels is the wall that can be seen in the background - the top-right of the photos.  This gets quite a lot of sun, but also lots of pointy-thing shadows.

The other thing that's clear is that, from 3:15pm, all of our roof is in shadow.

So this is probably bad news for a regular photovoltaic system with lots of panels in the same circuit.  The only way I can see to get this to work would be to get creative, and have panels on different circuits, optimised for different positions at different times of day.

Tricky...

Real Power

After doing the solar course, I found that we would need a wopping 36 panels on our roof, without even heating or cooling our apartment. Ridiculous!

Part of that calculation involved going around all the power adapters and appliances we use every day, reading or calculating their wattages, and making an educated guess for those that didn't have enough information. But some of the wattages seemed ridiculously high (440W PC?? 200W modem?? Ridiculous!!).

So for the last few weeks, I've been braving the critters in the dank under the stairs, shining my mobile phone light into Edesur's power meter cabinet for our apartment, and laboriously noting down our kWh each day.

It turns out that the 10kWh per day that I had calculated is more than double what we're actually using.  So you can't trust what it has printed on the adapter!  Is that maybe some kind of worst-case thing? Or what it uses if you plug it into a 110V North American socket? Dunno.

For the first half, I carelessly left the PC on all night, and for the second, I diligently shut it down.  But the wiggly lines are not appreciably lower on the right, so my conclusion is that this a waste of effort.  The peaks of consumption were the girls' bath days, and when we ran a fan heater for half an hour or so in the bathroom so they won't turn blue (getting chilly here now).

Our average is actually 4.4kWh per day, and the peak on the longest-bath day was 6.5kWh.

So going back to my solar panel calculations, we would need 14 panels to cover an average day, or 20 to cover the peak.

14 panels isn't so bad - I reckon I already know where we would put 12 panels.  And if I can grow my money-moustache a bit, and cut down our consumption, we might be able to get away with fewer.

So all is not lost!

Selling Green

I've just discovered the Mr. Money Mustache blog, and I'm now burning the candle at both ends because I can't stop reading it.

Mr. Mustache recommends:

1. living close to work, and biking there instead of driving,
2. using a small, fuel efficient car, and driving it efficiently (including not driving it when you don't need to) 
3. using less electricity,
4. buying less stuff for yourself, 
5. buying less stuff for your kids,
6. if you must buy something, get it second hand,
7. eating real food instead of processed, packaged junk,
8. getting rid of your TV, which spends all it's time trying to convince to you buy more stuff,
9. and a bunch of other anti-consumerism, low waste, efficient-living stuff.

Is this a 'green lifestyle' blog?

Nope. It a 'get rich quick' blog.

Or more precisely, it's a blog about how to retire after saving hard for ten years. Yeah, Mr. Mustache occasionally mentions saving the planet etc. But the thing I like so much about it is that it's a sneaky sell for green living, and it might even suck some people in, with so many titles that start "Get rich with..." followed by a green sting in the tail - things like "...bikes", "...craigslist", "...nature", etc.

To be fair, it is actually also about lowering expenses and earning money off the resulting savings.  So this is in fact an answer to a question I wondered about a green lifestyle at the end of my first post: Is it really cheaper? According to this mustache guy, yes!

So as checklists go, we pretty much do all of the above. But not the biking to work, I work at home! And not the small efficient car, I have no car! My much-more-mustachian wife is much better at second-hand buying than me, (and has a black belt in acquiring-for-free, which is why our house is full of 60-year-old furniture from the nooks and crannies of her parents' place, and stuff she nabbed from beside some dumpster) but when it comes to clothes, I at least lean strongly towards just not buying them! (No, I'm not a nudist. I just keep wearing the same clothes)

Why am I not retired already?

Seemingly because there are other ways that the bigote growth is being stunted. However, I am learning:

Although returnable beer bottles and recyclable limoncello bottles are good, today I decided to forego them, dropping 200 pesos from the weekly grocery budget. Instead, my daily delicious you-deserve-a-treat beverage is going to be the delicious, nutritious, and dirt cheap ginger-beer I've been making since the sour-dough thing inspired me about culture-y foods.

This is mustachian to the tune of $1000NZD a year, but I'm also making sure  that Grolsch packaging is really being reused, by using it myself.

What everyone needs to know

This book turns out not to be the 'deep dive' I was hoping for, ostensibly avoiding direct argument about climate change, and instead simply answering a series of loaded questions.
However, in answering them, a bunch of facts I didn't know, or was only hazily aware of, emerge:

• We know that the greenhouse effect traps heat, and that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, but we've also directly measuring the reception of this energy on the surface of the earth, and the (lack of) energy escaping the atmosphere on the wavelengths blocked by CO₂, by measuring it from satellites. So not only is there a theory saying heat gets trapped, we can also see it arriving and not leaving.
• Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas, but it lasts less time in the atmosphere (12 years) than CO₂ (thousands of years).
• CO₂ has been between 180 and 280 parts-per-million for the last 800,000 years (based on layers of Antarctic ice), but since the start of the Industrial Revolution, it's risen to 400ppm. CO₂ can come from a variety of sources, but the source that's changed since the late 18th century is human activity.
• Temperatures correlate with CO₂ levels over those last 800,000 years, i.e. more CO₂ means higher temperatures.
• The last time the earth had this much CO₂ in the atmosphere, 3 million years ago, the temperature was 8° hotter and sea level was 25 meters higher than today.
• The time before that, 15 million years ago, temperatures were 6° to 12° hotter and 25-40m higher.
• 90% of heat retained by the greenhouse effect is actually stored by the oceans (as opposed to in the air).
• Sea level rise is only partly because of melting of land-based ice running into the sea, it's actually mainly because water expands when it's warmer.
• Thawing permafrost releases CO₂ and methane into the atmosphere; so warming causes more warming (The permafrost itself contains more carbon than there currently is in the atmosphere, so there's a lot of potential warming in there).
• Melting ice also leaves dark ocean or land where there was previously white ice, so more energy from the sun is absorbed into the planet rather than reflected back into space; so more warming causes more warming.
• Warmer oceans means more evaporation, and so more moisture in the air, which results in more rain when it rains, and more snow when it snows - i.e. even in winter, weather is more extreme, in terms of how much stuff falls from the sky.
• There aren't more tropical cyclones/hurricanes per year, but they are more intense, because they derive their energy from heat in the ocean; more heat, more energy, and so more intense storms. i.e. the same number of storms, but worse ones.
• Much of the damage caused by storms is from 'storm surge' - i.e. water sloshing further inland than normal - which is worse in more intense storms, and also worse if sea level is higher.
• Ocean warming slows some atmospheric currents, which means storms move more slowly, so they hang around for longer, causing more damage in the same place.
• Wild fire season is now longer than it used to be.
• There are more heat waves per year since 1980 than before then.
• 'Nobody disputes that the climate is warming' [With scare quotes, because frankly, this doesn't seem true - only a few days ago some big oil exec was on US TV claiming it wasn't happening, right in Bill Nye's face.  Maybe he means 'no scientists'? 'no right-minded people'?]

The current trend puts us at 4°C hotter in 2100, on average, although it could be more, and it will be more in some places (and less in others). What effect will this have?

• more dust bowl conditions, in not just currently arid areas,
• sea level rise of more than a meter, making coastal areas wet and flood prone, and salinating fresh water tables,
• extremer weather,
• lots of species extinction, so lower biodiversity,
• food insecurity for humans, as more crops will fail due to extreme weather, and less arable land and fresh water will be available for agriculture,
• scarcity of food drives prices up, and reduces agricultural work opportunities.

The resulting economic crises can generate insecurity and conflict. There is even a claim that the civil war in Syria was triggered by an economic crisis caused by a drought that was, in turn, (partly) caused by global warming (!).

There is no question that regardless of what we do, temperatures will continue to rise in the coming decades. The question is whether it will go all the way to 4°C hotter, or whether we can keep it below 1.5°C or 2°C; if so, the consequences will be merely bad, rather than cataclysmic.

So far so wrist-slittingly depressing.

However, I was surprised to find a sliver of what looked like, if you squint, goodish news: Transport is responsible for quarter of the energy-related emissions of CO₂. These emissions are still rising.  Haven't got to the good news yet.  The good news is that power generation used to generate a similar level of CO₂, but the US and the EU have been able to reduce them, by generating power from water, wind, sun, and geothermal activity. The glint of hope is that change is actually possible.

And changes are afoot in transport, with some success of hybrid vehicles, and batteries for plug-in electric cars getting cheaper and better. The main success with transport has actually been fuel-efficiency - building cars that get further on less petrol. But, gloomily, there's a long way to go, as they still pretty much all use petrol.

So what does he recommend we do?

• Don't buy coastal property.
• Reduce carbon footprint - to help with the problem, but also as practice for what life is going to be like in a few decades. So:
  - become more energy efficient, and install solar panels, as it's clean energy you can generate at home, which will work regardless of problems with grid supply;
  - become a vegetarian, as cow and sheep farming produces a huge amount of green house gasses, and later this century, what with reduced farmland and higher population, we won't be able to spare the land to farm them on anyway;
  - don't drive and fly around so much; ideally work from home;
  - buy less stuff, as "a quarter of the energy we use is just in our crap" (this from Saul Griffith, a physicist who did an in-depth analysis of his own energy consumption),
• Study in warming-related areas, as that's where the jobs will be.  That might be directly in energy engineering, but also in efficient agriculture, in product design, medicine related to tropical diseases and other health issues likely arise in a warmer, more crowded world, etc.

Finally, and despite saying he wasn't going to engage with the 'debate', he talks about how to talk to skeptics.  He goes through various objections often raised, and briefly tries to refute them, which I summarise here:

1. "The climate has changed before" - yes it has, but not usually this fast, and this time we're causing it.
2. "Warming has actually stopped" - no it hasn't.
3. "There's no consensus that we're causing it" - yes there is.
4. "It's because of the sun" - no it isn't.
5. "It won't be that bad" - yes it will.
6. "Models can't be trusted" - yes they can.
7. "Temperature records are wrong" - no they're not.
8. "Antarctica is gaining ice, so there can't be warming" - there is less land ice, but more sea ice, which is puzzling, but there are a few theories to explain it.
9. "Science predicted an ice age in the 70's which never happened, so climate science can't be trusted" - that was a few nutcases in popular media, not 97% of climate scientists publishing peer-reviewed research.

More interestingly (because there's more detail, pretty graphs, etc.) he credits these issues and their refutations as coming from skepticalscience.com, which also has an app.

So anyway, that's the "Yes" book. Next the "No" book...

Alternatives to full solar

While installing a full solar generation system looks to be complicated, expensive, and probably insufficient, there may be more ad-hoc things we can do to reduce our dependence on the evil, 60%-fossil-fuel-burning, unreliable grid.

For example, we could replace our 1.3kWh/day mains-powers fridge with a solar fridge, which is designed to run off a battery charged by one solar panel.  We could keep the milk cool in a power cut, but also cut about 5% off our power bill.

I might be able to make or buy a solar charger, mount a small panel on the roof, and a USB hub inside for daylight charging of phones, tablets, and speakers.

Charging laptops is more problematic, although there are chargers for those too...

During a power cut, water isn't pumped to the tank, so tap water rapidly runs out.  There is a tap to the water-main downstairs, where we can fill up a bottle for cooking, etc. But showering is a problem - unless we install a solar shower on the roof - there are cheap portable camping showers that we could directly fill from the downstairs tap, but also more fancy installed ones.

These are mostly small, independent things that we could try out progressively at relatively low cost. They could be useful for emergencies, but also if they turned out to be generally practical, would reduce our use of the grid and thus our carbon shoe size...

Energizar

My introductory course to solar panel stuff has now finished.

It was really interesting, and a few things became really clear:

• I would need some professionals to do any installation we might do in our house, because a) there are lots of rules and regulations, and permissions required, which I don't know anything about, and b) the voltages and currents involved are potentially dangerous, and so having someone who knows what they're doing involved seems advisable!
• With the handkerchief-sized space we have available, there's no way I can get away without an expensive MTTP regulator.
• They recommend running all appliances at 220V AC, to keep things simple.  But if I follow their method for calculating what's required, to run our house (without heating or cooling) we'd need a wopping 36 panels! And 30 batteries!
• That's ridiculous!
• This is never going to work!
• But it might be because the consumption reported on the adapters isn't the real consumption, so I really need to measure it!
• As previously noted, if I go the AC/DC route, and run computers, internet, and anything that charges via USB on lower DC voltages, the number of panels drops to 14, and the number of batteries, 12 (for three days of battery-only power). That's still more than I have space for, realistically, but I might be able to fudge something to work if need be.
• Far more likely to be actually workable is the power-cut-emergency-supply idea, which would power only the fridge and the water pump, and maybe lights.  That comes to 8 panels and 8 batteries, and doesn't involve breaking my electricity supplier's terms of service.  But I need a special tablero installation, and presumably actually two, because the building's water pump runs on a separate circuit to our fridge!
• Thi$ i$ going to be really expen$ive.

The number of panels comes out higher than my previous calculations mainly because:

• their regulator, battery, and inverter efficiency figures are lower than what I was assuming,
• I had forgotten that battery inefficiency strikes twice - once when energy from the sun is stored, and again when energy is used to boil the kettle,
• I hadn't thought about how, if you have a cloudy day, you need to charge the batteries more in the following sunny days, to get the batteries fully charged again, and
• they include various extra margins just in case.

...although their method doesn't involve taking account of loss because of the shadows of surrounding tall buildings - but I've built that into my calculations.

Anyway, it all feels a bit discouraging, but I'm going to press on with measuring more accurately our actual consumption; maybe it's not as much as the power adapters make it out to be, and it should help discover some effective ways to at least use less electricity.

Shoes made from tyres

http://www.xinca.com.ar/web/

La Tierra

Within a month or so of arriving in Argentina, I'd had a series of alarming clothes-washing experiences.  Frequently, I'd get electric shocks while loading the washing machine.  My Spanish was terrible at the time, so it was with some difficulty that I managed to get an electrician to come and look.  

That difficulty was dwarfed by the challenges of making myself understood once he arrived.  The first thing he asked me I didn't quite understand: "¿something something descalzo?". Seeing my blank expression, he repeated. And I went looking for my Oxford Inglés Minidiccionario:

descalz|ar vt [10] take off <zapatos>. ~o a barefoot

Knowing that he couldn't be asking me about shoes or bare feet, I asked him to repeat, and he started saying things like "something something zapatos something something".

Yes, he was asking me about shoes.  Has I put shoes in the washing machine?  Did the washing machine have shoes? Did I wear shoes while washing clothes?

After quite a lot of repeating, gesticulating, and miming, I managed to convey that I couldn't remember if I was wearing shoes, and I thought I understood that he was saying that I must where shoes while doing the washing.  He also pointed a lot to the house-mat that I'd always been puzzled about being in the kitchen, seemingly saying I needed to wipe my feet before opening the fridge.  He then went away without doing anything (and fortunately without charging me anything either).

When I told this strange story to a local friend, she was puzzled by my puzzlement, and asked me if New Zealand fridges and washing machines don't run on electricity. She then went on to tell me stories about people being electrocuted while getting their midnight snack. It turns out that in Argentina, most electrical installations have no connection to ground! I've since had actual electricians describe the third hole in the socket as 'decorative'.

So when my Solar Handbook highlighted multiple times the importance of grounding the whole installation, I realised that I would need some local knowledge about how solar installations are done in Argentina.

I discovered that there's a foundation here called Energizar, which promotes application of clean energy technologies in Argentina and other Latin American countries.  They run courses on solar energy, so I enrolled in one to get some local perspective.

So far it's been great for reviewing and deepening what I already got from the book, and also picking up some Spanish terminology.  I have discovered the following bits of important information:

• Yes, I need a connection to ground ("puesta a tierra") installed in my house.
  This will probably be at great cost, but has the secondary benefit that I can stop suppressing my terror of my children one day being killed by Patrick.
• As I already have power from the grid, I'm actual not allowed a "grid fallback" system like I want, I can only have a "grid fail over" system,
  i.e. i can't generally use solar but use the grid on cloudy days, but I am allowed to use solar during power cuts.
  To do that, I need permission from the city and from the power company, and a special tablero installed by a certified electrician who will presumably charge like a wounded bull.
• Because the peak performance of a panel is at a higher voltage than a battery, the 'cream on the top' doesn't charge the battery, and lose about 20%. Unless I have a special, expensive regulator (called "MPPT"), which operates the panel side of the circuit at the peak voltage, and on the battery side, at the battery voltage. 
  So in my calculations, I need to either lop off another 20%, or get 20% more panels (and find somewhere to put them!), or save up and get an MPPT regulator that costs five times the price of an ordinary one.

"Great cost" seems to be an emerging theme of this solar thing...

Is global warming really caused by us?

In my first post I said in passing that "global warming is now obviously really a thing (duh)".

The title of the post was "Smug, lazy, and ignorant", which might apply quite well to this throw-away comment.  For a start, the "duh" is a bit smug, I'm now realising, as it turns out that people I know - people with a strong education in science - don't appear to take climate change, or its causes, as obvious a fact as I do.

When I started thinking about what a conversation with them might be like, I realised I don't personally have a lot to back up my opinions. Lazily, I've never actually taken a detailed look at what the evidence is, and if pressed, my explanation of my conviction would come across as hand-wavy and ignorant.  What it currently boils down to is that a bunch of famous people I like and trust (Billy Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Joe Hanson) and much of my social-media bubble believe in it, and a bunch of people I neither like nor trust (Donald Trump, basically all of the politically "right") claim it's not true.

I should probably be able to make a stronger argument than this "tribal" one.  After all I'm considering going all solar to get away from my 60%-fossil-fuel electricity grid - currently I feel like it's futile because it would be a drop in the ocean, but what if the futility is actually due to fossil fuels not even causing warming? Or (less likely, given some obvious evidence) the planet not even really warming?

So I decided that I needed to get some facts straight.

This video seemed like a good start, as it's basically tailored to my problem:

However a six minute video isn't exactly a 'deep dive'. I need to do some proper reading.

So I bought "Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know" by Jospeh Romm as a start. There are lots of books about climate change, why choose this one? Partly because there are so many it's almost impossible to choose, so just picking one seems like a good start; the author looks reputable as far as I can tell, and I trust my BS-detector to go off early if it turns out to be a dud. But also, this one seems to answer a bunch of specific questions I actually have; about what the evidence is and how sure scientists are about it, but also about what the impact might be for the world my girls are going to live in - although that's obviously speculative, a non-fiction book is probably a more realistic source than some of the climate change fiction that's been spook-taining me at night.

I'm sure that this book or others will have some of the counter-arguments the sceptics present, which will give me some inkling about how you could possibly deny climate change or our part in it.  But frankly, there's a pretty high risk that these will be straw-men, set up to be easily knocked down.  What I should really do is read something actually written by sceptics, and see how convincing they are.  So with that in mind, the next book will be Climate Change: The Facts, a series of essays by various experts that pick apart the case for human-caused warming.

So let's have them duke it out, and cure some ignorance along the way; if I'm going to drag my family down a greeny rabbit-hole, I should be surer about why I'm doing it...