Future of the World Water and Energy

Future of the World-Water and Energy Future of the World – Water and Energy Brief introduction Professor Burton Richter - Nobel Prize in Physics 1976 I’m going to talk to you briefly about energy, environment and economics in the 21st Century. The energy issue is important to all of the societies in the world – where do you get your energy from? How do you use it? – it’s a major problem for everybody. Energy use is very tightly coupled to economic development and the present patterns of energy use are unsustainable for two reasons. If you are an environmentalist you’re worried about global climate change and if you’re an economist you have to worry about the availability and price of energy as we move on ahead. What I want to talk to you about today is mostly what Edward de Bono would call a white hat talk – I want to give you some information. How do we project demand for energy and should you believe it? Climate change - is the greenhouse effect real? How do we know? Why should we worry? What are our energy options and what can we do to fix the problems? So let’s look at the first issue. Here’s a projection of energy demand for the rest of the century – made by the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis. It’s a so called mid-growth project and what it says is energy demand is going to double by 2050 and almost double again by the end of this century and if you look at this you see that where the energy demand is coming from is from the developing countries of the world. The presently industrialized nations are almost flat in their projected energy demand and the developing countries are where all of the action is. This is a pretty simple equation – it says you can get a forecast of energy demand by getting three factors and multiplying them. Take the population, take the per capita income and take energy intensity – how much energy does it take to produce a given level of income. Multiple them all together this is obviously an identity. f e s t i v a l o f t h i n k e r s . c o m 92 Festival of Thinkers: 26th-30th March 2005 Population – the latest UN prediction for population growth says the world population will reach about nine billion by the middle of this century and it will stay there. It is not going to grow significantly by the end of this century and will probably start to fall. This goes with the fact that as poor countries become rich the birth rate drops and so all the UN forecasts of population growth tend to give a lower number every time there is a new forecast. Per capita income – what the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis tells us is that there is historic rates of growth for the developing countries and the developing nations and this projects them forward in the future. If you compare what’s happening to their energy growth scenario, what you find is the growth in the developing world is larger than growth here. And as far as the energy intensity issue goes, this has been falling by 1% per year for the last hundred years. And that is also built in to the forecast of energy demand. It’s falling because systems become more efficient and shift away from energy intensive industries towards less energy intensive industries. So for a hundred years we have been going down for about 1% per year. It is true that in whatever society you look at that is part of the long term forecast. So that’s how you calculate the projections of energy use. Should you believe it? I think you should believe that if anything it may be a bit on the conservative side. The green house effect. This is the earth from Apollo 17 on its way to the moon. And if you ask where does the earth get all of its heat energy from – it comes from the sun. The centre of the earth is a molten ball of iron. The rock is a very bad conductor of heat, so by the time you get to the surface only about one tenth of a percent of the energy reaching the surface comes from the energy in the interior. 99.9% comes from the sun. Is there a green house effect; you bet there is. You can do a very simple calculation and say if the earth had no atmosphere and just radiated its heat energy into space, what would the surface temperature be? It would be 20 degrees centigrade below zero. It would be very cold in Abu Dhabi, oceans would be frozen etc. But that’s not what the average temperature is, its 15 degrees above zero. So something is trapping heat and the biggest trapper of heat is water vapour. So it is water vapour in the atmosphere that creates the dominant factor of the green house effect and what we’re talking about in climate change is a perturbation on the main green house effect. We add a little bit more of heat trapping gas and the temperature goes up a little bit. If we take some of the heat trapping gases away the temperature goes down a little bit. But CO2 which comes from the burning of fossil fuels increases the green house effect. Now here we have the records of 1000 years of global temperatures and 1000 years of global CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. And on the bottom one you find 1000 93 inspire-innovate-invent Future of the World-Water and Energy years of CO2 emissions from human activities. There’s a huge amount of CO2 that’s emitted into the atmosphere naturally from volcanos, growth and decay of plants and all sorts of things. What you see is human activity is on top of all of that. So if you look at what has happened to the temperature you see it’s a pretty steady temperature with little glitches around and then you see in the 20th century the start of a rather remarkable rise and that is coincident with a rapid rise of CO2 concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere. If you go back to pre-industrial times I look at the CO2 concentration – it’s 270 parts per million and now it’s about 370 parts per million and back for the last 400,000 years it’s never been higher than 300 parts per million. So how much of this is anthropogenic? Here’s the facts -what we do, here’s the consequences, here’s the temperature change and the question is should you worry about it. Now the science community has been worried about this since 1970 when they first began to see continuous increases in CO2 concentration and governments got worried about this in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit. The inter-government panel on climate change got some of this – this is their projection of what is going to happen in the future. These predictions are full of uncertainties and there is a lot of uncertainty about how the economy is going to develop. This as a usual projection gives you a temperature increase something between two degrees and five degrees by the end of the century. If I can go back to what’s called the little ice age in the 14th century the temperature dropped by one degree . And here is the historic record, you have the years without summer, you had crop failures in Europe, the Thames river froze there was starvation in the area and that was one degree. Now some people would say that warm is good and cold is bad, the temperature is going to go up so that is going to be better – what is the problem? Here’s a problem – if we change our mind and say we want to fix it, how long does it take? So suppose I say I don’t like the present CO2 concentrations and I want to bring it down, I’m going to stop burning fossil fuels today. It is going to take 100 years to get the CO2 concentration down. So when you think about climate change, global warming, think about the following. If you get a slow steady change the society can adapt. In the historic record there are all kinds of climate instabilities which we don’t understand. If you reach the threshold for those climate instabilities something is going to happen. Once it happens it’s going to take you 100 years to get the CO2 concentration back down. Energy. 80 percent of the earth’s current energy use is based on fossil fuels and carbon. The biggest is coal. Demand for oil. We are in Abu Dhabi so we should talk about oil, the world system is currently using 80 million barrels of oil per day worldwide and demand f e s t i v a l o f t h i n k e r s . c o m 94 Festival of Thinkers: 26th-30th March 2005 is increasing by one and a half million barrels per day per year. So every eight to ten years you need another Saudi Arabia. That is also driven by the economies of the developing countries. So natural gas, nobody is even sure how much there is, but it’s hard to move around the world so natural gas is limited by transport constraints. Maybe we can get more efficient transport but that’s not clear. Coal is a big energy source. There is enough coal in the world to last for another three or four hundred years easily at the present increases but coal is the dirtiest of all fuels; pollution, besides CO2, gives serious health problems. If you could learn to sequester the gas, that is take the fumes from when it is burnt and store it underground and then maybe you could use it. There’s a lot of talk about renewables – wind, solar. They can’t make a big contribution now. Maybe in the future? The big issue is energy storage. The wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t shine all the time and you want what is called base load power, something you can rely on continuously. You’re not ready to do it now. So the large energy sources that are available without emissions today are conservation and efficiency. I’ve said that energy consumption has been going down by 1% per year and there have been periods of time when it went down by 2% at a time, particularly during the oil shocks during the 70s and 80s. If we could make energy intensity drop by 2% per year for the next 50 years we will avoid a huge amount of the increased energy demand and if the energy you use doesn’t create any pollution you will help to solve the CO2 problem. Nuclear power is the other energy source that’s available now on a large scale and at the present moment there are 30 nuclear power plants being built in the world – twenty in Asia and two in Europe. I was asked this morning about fusion power. You’re not going to know if fusion power is a workable solution until this experiment is done. It will take 10 years to build the facility, 10 years to know if it works, 20 years to get the first demonstration power plant and if that works perhaps then you could start to deploy it. So in conclusion, energy use is going to expand. There is no magic quick fix. You have to approach this by approaching each segment of the economy that uses energy and work on it. Driving down energy intensity should be the first on anybody’s list of actions. If you can improve efficiency you can save a lot of money as you are not going to have to buy as much and there are things waiting to be used, for example in the private transport sector hybrid automobiles double the fuel mileage of an automobile and should be used. Nuclear power should be used and CO2 sequestration should be pursued and the renewables funded to maturity. Most importantly, I am not a big fan of the Kyoto treaty, 95 inspire-innovate-invent Future of the World-Water and Energy because the Kyoto treaty ignored the biggest problem which was the developing countries which had the biggest demand. We need a successor to the Kyoto treaty and we need to bring the developing world into the planning from the beginning. So what do we want to do? We want to develop a system where energy use is going to increase but carbon based energy use is going to decrease. We can do this by taking all sorts of steps. This is a paper which appeared in Science Magazine a few months ago. Part of this is increased fuel economy in cars. Another piece would be conservation and more efficient air conditioners and on and on until we come up with a system where we can bring CO2 in the atmosphere down and attack this problem. Professor Paul Crutzen - Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995 Ladies and gentlemen. I have changed a lot over my lifetime, but I’m not the only thing that has changed during my lifetime. Over the past 3 centuries human population has grown tenfold and has now reached 6,000 million which means an increase in the human population by a factor of four during the last century alone. Cattle population increased to 1,400 million by a factor of four in the last century. There is about one cow for every family in the world and that’s a big army of cows that provide us with lots of milk and cheese and steaks. They produce lots of methane and their activity is noticed in the composition of the atmosphere. Urbanization has grown more than tenfold in the past century and almost half the population live in cities and mega-cities. Industrial output increased 40 times and energy use 16 times. Almost 50% of the land surface has been transformed by human action. Water use increased nine-fold during the past century to 800 cubic metres per capita, 65% of which is used for irrigation, 25% for industry and 10% for households. Fish catch increased 40 times. The release of SO2 into the atmosphere is about 160 million tonnes per year. Coal and oil burning is at least twice the sum of all natural emissions. Over land, the increase has been seven-fold causing acid rain, health effects, poor visibility and climate change due to sulphate aerosol. Releases of NO from fossil fuel and biomass burning is larger than it’s natural inputs causing high ozone levels over extensive regions of the world. Several climatically important green house gases have increased substantially over the last century - CO2 by 30% and methane by more than 100%. Humanity is also responsible for the presence of many toxic substances in the environment even some which are not toxic at all but have nevertheless lead to the ozone hole – these are the so-called CFC gases. f e s t i v a l o f t h i n k e r s . c o m 96 Festival of Thinkers: 26th-30th March 2005 The use of nitrogen fertilizer over the earth with time has grown substantially so now days with growing tendency the growing fixation with nitrogen fertilizer has outraced the input of nitrogen fertilizer natural processes. Man the eroder. There is natural erosion of course, but man-made erosion due to crop pillage, land conversion for crop land and construction, the erosion rate for the world is 50 times the natural level. That means current anthropogenic soil erosion could fill the Grand Canyon in 50 years. And then there’s the question of species extinction, compared to natural conditions between 10 and 110,000 times more has been made extinct. This is about 1000 times more than the average level. In an article titled, ‘Humans as the World’s Greatest Evolutionary Force’, the author states that mankind also affects evolutionary changes in other species especially the commercially important pest and disease organisms through antibiotic pesticides. There have been huge changes in the composition of the atmosphere and other things around us and since the beginning of the 19th century, because our own activities have created a new geological era and I call that the ‘anthropacy’ - so no longer in the holocy. Here we see two examples of changes that have taken place in our environment. In the upper part of this projection you see the rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which was first measured in the early 60s. You see the general trend of CO2 increase in the atmosphere and the seasonal variations – the ups and downs which are overlaying this. You also see in the lower parts of this graph, the ozone hole. You see in the left part that the total ozone during spring time over Antarctica has decreased to two-thirds to one half of the natural level. And fortunately we don’t have the CFC gases emitted in the atmosphere anymore but we have to live with the ozone hole for many years to come. And what was very surprising for us and what was only discovered by measurements and was not modeled in any way, was what is shown in the left part of the curve, is that ozone depletion takes place in an altitude region between about 12 and 22 kilometers. This was a huge surprise and can only be explained by a number of positive feedbacks, reinforcing feedbacks about five which makes this phenomenon possible. I will not go into further discussion as the time is too short. We had this huge surprise in the environment and the climate and the chemistry of the atmosphere and I don’t preclude the possibility that we will have major surprises in the future one way or the other. Now the greenhouse gases are not the only factors which affect the climate of the earth, we have also the CO2, methane, NO2 and hydrocarbons. That’s not the whole story because in the atmosphere we have particles which can absorb and especially can scatter radiation and have a cooling effect on the earth and affect the amount and 97 inspire-innovate-invent Future of the World-Water and Energy reflectivity of clouds. Clouds have a huge effect on the radiation balance of the atmosphere. Climate modeling. Our climate is very complex, with many feedbacks especially regard how we treat clouds. These models are in their infancy. That’s where we have to work. Our climate is not stable, we’ve had ice ages. We have been in a very stable climate period for the last 10,000 years, which was very favorable for mankind, that’s how we could grow in numbers so fast. The best summary of our knowledge has been supplied by an inter-governmental panel on climate change from every five years or so and they make a summary of our advancement in knowledge of the chemistry and also the climate of the earth. And what they said in 1995 is that the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate. Then they strengthened their arguments when their next report came out in 2001 and they said there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities. And that has lead to estimates of possible increases in temperatures globally and we are somewhere in the range, according to these studies, of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees celcius by the end of this century in the additional heating of the earth. This would bring us into temperature regime which the earth, during the presence of human activity, has not encountered at all. So the question is how do the ecological systems adapt to this? This is a new situation and we have no ways of knowing by looking into the past. Sea level rise is of considerable concern. It can be upwards of a metre by the end of this century but we have to look in very long terms. By the year 3000 we may have a much higher sea level rise. Especially the Greenland ice, we don’t know how fast it will be melting but it would imply a sea level rise in metres. There will be re-distribution of precipitation. There will be enhanced risk of extreme weather, but how we are not certain. Increases in heat waves in Europe has been claimed to be increasing in the future. Too rapid changes so that the ecosystem cannot adapt to it is the problem. How do we get out of this? Well we have to burn less fossil fuels and to give you an indication it means if you want to stabilize the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere you have to reduce the present input by more than 60%, only comparing to present use. This does not consider the increasing use in developing countries. Methane we have reached a plateau. It is not increasing at the moment and if it stays like that it will be a very positive indication. But we don’t know how long it will last with increasing temperatures in the region perhaps the permafrost regions might melt with more CO2 and especially methane will enter the atmosphere. The success story has been the reduction of CFC gases into the atmosphere. They are no f e s t i v a l o f t h i n k e r s . c o m 98 Festival of Thinkers: 26th-30th March 2005 longer produced but the ozone hole will be with us for another 50 years as it takes a very long time for nature to get rid of these gases simply by destruction in the stratosphere. What to do about it? Some countries burn much more fossil fuels than other countries and developing countries have only just started. We shouldn’t believe that nature in some way might help us out. You might think that temperature will go up in some way and greenhouse gases will go down to compensate. In fact the opposite is happening. From the data in the ice cores in Antarctica we know that any time the temperatures were going up, CO2 and methane were going up. Nature is not helping us. We don’t really know how stable our climate is and even the best models cannot predict anything in the future. We are not in an unstable case but we are not stable either. We are somewhere in between. The most sensitive regions are the polar regions likely to experience the highest increases of up to five or six degrees. These are big changes as there is a lot of ice there. New studies show the Arctic Ocean ice cover is about 40% thinner than 40 years ago and there is a dramatic climate change happening in the Arctic – about two to three times the rate of the globe. Finally the tropics. You should not believe that air pollution is something that is a problem just in the cities. In the tropics we have air pollution, mostly to do with burning of biomass and forest fires. We see the effects of air pollution everywhere. The climate of the future will largely depend on what is happening in Asia. Thankyou HRH Prince Fritz Von Saxe Lauenberg, Dr Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart and Professor Jisong Wu 99 inspire-innovate-invent