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...

Carrying the recycling

Now that plastic supermarket bags are banned, and we refuse plastic bags in other shops, there's a slight portability problem with the recycling: we used to take our paper and plastic to the recycling point by putting it all into plastic shopping bags.  But now we don't have any.

I figured I'd have to just put it all in our re-usable shopping bags, and instead of dumping on the counter of the Green Point kiosk as usual, I'd have to hand them over asking for the bags back, and patiently wait for the person behind the counter to bin their contents.  I was packing the bags...

Recyclables in reusables

... and as usual when I got to the milk packets, I started pondering the possible re-uses of so much more-or-less uniform packaging.  You see, in Buenos Aires, milk comes in soft plastic sachets. "Milk in a bag!" as a visiting niece once exclaimed.

Milk in a bag!

Once cut open and washed, these are a neat rectangle of plastic.  We throw out 8 of these each week, and it seems like a shame they can't be put to some better use than going out in the recycling...

...or maybe they can.  It occurred to me that they're so regular-shaped it would be easy to join some together to make a bag, into which I could put the rest of the recycling, and then I can do my usual dump-and-run at the Green Point, leaving them to recycle the milk packet bags after emptying them.

So I whipped out my crafty wife's sewing machine, and in a jiffy, had two recyclable recyclables bags.

Recyclables in recyclables

So off to the Punto Verde we went, and I dumped-and-ran as usual.

Unfortunately I doubt I'll do this every week or so.  When I say "in a jiffy", what I really mean is "after about 15 minutes of asking my patient wife where things are, how to operate her infernally modern sewing machine, running out of bobbin, trying to sew up unexpected holes, and cutting handle holes that immediately break".

I'm frankly too lazy to employ this as an ongoing solution, and will probably follow my wise wife's advice: use reusable bags, and wait patiently. While this puts my laziness in conflict with my impatience, laziness will probably win in this case.