If you want to see the latest figures for the state of our atmosphere, the Global Monitoring Division of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory is a good place to start. They consolidate data from a huge global network of monitoring stations.

Select your greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide – CO2, methane – CH4, nitrous oxide – N2O) and watch the graphs climb. We’re perhaps used to seeing graphs for carbon dioxide, so for the sake of a little variety in your gloomy global warming news, here’s a graph for increases in nitrous oxide.

Otherwise known as “laughing gas” or “happy gas”, nitrous oxide is somewhat less amusing in increasing concentrations in large swaths of atmosphere. Over a hundred year period, it is 298 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2. At the moment, it apparently accounts for 6% of the human-related warming effect. It’s released by industrial activity, burning coal for example. Also released by tropical soils and from the oceans, human activity has till recently been thought to account for 30% of what’s now in the atmosphere. But it appears releases from nitrogen-based fertilisers may have been greatly underestimated. Overall, atmospheric levels have increased 15% since 1750. It’s also an ozone-depleting gas – in fact, it’s now the key ozone depleting gas.

Though oil companies BP and Shell both acknowledge the reality of climate change, both continue to support industry associations that are lobbying against climate change legislation:

“BP maintains its membership of the API through paying substantial fees based on the large size of BP’s business. It is our concern that these fees are used by the API to undermine US government action on climate change and that BP’s membership of the API contradicts its position on the issue,” writes John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, in a letter to Tony Hayward, the BP boss.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/aug/19/oil-firms-warned-over-us-lobbying

It is difficult to say how much climate change denialism is funded by US industry, but amazingly, the long-term campaign against it seems to have begun as much with the tobacco industry as with big oil.

By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake citizens’ group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It was important, further letters stated, “to ensure that TASSC has a diverse group of contributors”; to “link the tobacco issue with other more ‘politically correct’ products”; and to associate scientific studies that cast smoking in a bad light with “broader questions about government research and regulations” – such as “global warming”, “nuclear waste disposal” and “biotechnology”. APCO would engage in the “intensive recruitment of high-profile representatives from business and industry, scientists, public officials, and other individuals interested in promoting the use of sound science”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2

Exxon Mobil (Engen, in South Africa) has only recently ceased funding groups that seek to cast doubt on climate science.

The ExxonMobil [corporate citizenship] report says: “In 2008 we will discontinue contributions to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”
Nine groups have reportedly lost the company’s support, including the George C Marshall Institute, the Washington DC-based think tank that asserts there is no scientific consensus on climate change, and that changes in the sun, not greenhouse gases, could be responsible for rising temperatures.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/28/climatechange.fossilfuels

So guess how many wind turbines there are in South Africa?

“We cannot afford to put off change any longer,” said Hansen. “We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead.”

Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming.* Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.

A friend has noted that an overwhelming number of the commented responses to the Guardian article deny the existence of climate change, and wonders if the apparently high number of sceptics is reason for those of us who believe urgent action is necessary, to despair. But are there really that many climate sceptics out there?

What do you think? Are climate change denialists just a very noisy minority, or are opinion-leaders seriously out of touch with the feelings of ordinary people on this issue?

UPDATE Tuesday 20 Jan: My goodness, this post has been an interesting experiment. Looking at my stats, 90% of the clickthroughs arriving here have come from what we might call a, um, distinctly climate change sceptical website. Apologies, everyone, btw, I’m going to be offline till Sunday, so won’t be able approve comments till then.

* Runaway global warming refers to secondary warming processes set in play by the primary process of carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere. For example, higher temperatures can increase the number of forest fires, which in turn pour more CO2 into the atmosphere. Another example: the permafrost in the Arctic Circle is beginning to thaw, releasing locked-away CO2 and methane, which is a greenhouse (warming) gas many times more potent than CO2 itself.

This 11MW solar thermal power station in Seville, Spain, is being expanded to 300MW of capacity. Pic: Flickr – Chausinho

A solar thermal plant being developed in Seville, Spain, will produce 300MW of power at a projected cost of E1,200bn, or R11,6 billion. That’s an installed cost of R4-billion per 100MW. A prototype 11MW plant is already up and running; it’s almost a thing of beauty – take a look here or here. (The rays you see in the atmosphere have not been added to the photograph – they’re not illustrated but real, created by the intense illumination of the solar array hitting atmospheric dust and moisture.)

Eskom’s (our parastatal national electricity provider) prototype Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) is likely to cost R25 billion. The projected output is 120MW. By my admittedly rough calculations, that makes the cost of building the PMBR approximately FIVE times more expensive than solar thermal. Even using the figures Eskom prefers to use, which are of course far lower than R25-billion, the PBMR remains much expensive than solar thermal. (The PBMR has also been judged an economic non-starter for South Africa, by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, according to documents Eskom accidentally sent to Earthlife Africa.)

Of course, no organisation is monolithic. Perhaps it is saner folk at Eskom who are working on a proposal for a solar plant for the Northern Cape, where the cost of 100MW of capacity was estimated in 2003 at R2-billion, quite a lot lower than the figure from Seville (but of course, these figures are four years old). No final decision on whether to proceed with this plant has yet been taken.

So how much would it cost to build a solar power station the size of the Medupi greenfield coal-fired station Eskom has begun constructing in Limpopo? Medupi’s projected output is 4500MW. To build a solar thermal plant the same size would cost at least R90-billion (though this estimate ignores likely economies of scale), quite a lot more expensive than Medupi at R70-billion.

But this does not take into account running costs, financial and environmental: Medupi will burn hundreds of thousands of tons of ever-more expensive coal each year, while pouring CO₂ and pollutants into the atmosphere. While at an equivalent solar power station … ? Well, they’ll be kept quite busy cleaning all those mirrors, a rather less costly procedure.

Of course, another incredibly important factor in all this is that both coal and nuclear power are relatively mature technologies. Whereas solar thermal power is in its infancy. There is no reason not to be absolutely certain that as the technology matures, costs will drop, making it far more

But what happens at night?

Of course, a solar plant does not operate at night. The plant in Seville has capacity for storage of heat that allows generation to continue an hour after sunset. Even a modest extention in this capacity would help with Eskom’s second peak period of demand 17h00 to 21h00. but not sufficiently. But solar innovators are determined to crack this problem. One Californian company, Ausra, proposes a steam storage solution that would make solar energy a round-the-clock solution. Another untested solution proposes using daytime electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The two gases are then burnt at night to produce heat for power generation.

Even before a storage solution makes solar power feasible round the clock, it could already help in reducing the daytime use of coal power.

The decision to continue with coal power is absolutely insane. It ignores:

• the costs of global warming
• the finite supply of coal (even if we are at present a long way from running out)
• the direct impacts of other pollutants from coal – sulphur and particulates, and 30 million tons of coal ash
• and the fact that there is already some risk of coal shortages, and coal prices are already rising.

The decision to continue with nuclear also ignores the unsolved problem of nuclear waste storage, and the inherent dangers of the technology (which are often misunderstood, but that’s another post).

This entire discussion, of course, is limited by the fact that it assumes that we should be relying on extremely centralised power generation. This model has considerable limitations – waste of energy in the course of long-distance transmission, high vulnerability to disruption, But there are now a multitude of technologies that could be used for local and domestic power generation, wind, solar and appropriate biomass (Imagine turning all the invasive, water-sucking plant species that have invaded our biome into power – Port Jackson, hakea, black wattle, eucalyptus — and the incredible employment opportunities this would create.)

A very interesting comment amongst the ensuing discussion on this George Monbiot article in the Guardian.

An ex-police officer friend once explained to me how the police operate on this sort of protest. The first few days they have a ‘low key’ presence, they chat to protesters and try to gather as much intelligence they can, where protesters are from, the ‘leaders’ etc, they then take an harder line, test the water by trying to provoke little incidents to see what sort of response they get, before a planned direct action day the police will go through all their intelligence data and pick out their ‘targets’ these people are given names like ‘green hat’ ‘badges’ etc and these they will try an arrest on the day.

On the day of action there will be police within the ranks of the protesters they’re mainly there to pick out ‘green hat’ or ‘badges’, but sometimes they are there to provoke trouble, at a given signal they will start throwing missiles, my friend said a good thing to throw were marbles, they can be throw with reasonable accuracy over the heads of the police cordon, where they can be picked up and used has ‘evidence’.

He also told me how to find out how many people were protesting, you take the ‘official’ police figure and then the number given in a ‘trot paper’ and the real figure is the number between these two.

And here it is: a tornado. Is it thrusting its brute way across the plains of the Midwest, is it rearing from an African plain, is it playinguploaded to YouTube by New Scientist (my first ever credit as a cameraman!).
extreme reality weather in Indonesia? Nope, this is Devon. In an England where even the weather is now less genteel. My brother spotted this from the veranda of our holiday accommodation at Flears Farm, near Goveton (half an hour from Totnes), a week ago, round about 6.30pm in the evening. We dashed about furiously trying to capture it on video and memory card: you can see the results
Other climate havoc — submarine England — somewhat reduced our chances of getting it into the news.