1. AN EXAMINATION OF CLIMATE CHANGE: Introduction

This work began in early August when my son sent me TED Talk on the Sunrise Movement. I was vaguely aware of the Sunrise Movement and a little research blossomed into a detailed examination climate change. I was reasonably cognizant of climate change predictions and science, political parties’ positions on climate change, challenges of large-scale energy production and storage, the economics of electrical generation from wind, solar and gas and the fact that nuclear generation was both being shut down and being vaguely recognized as an integral part of climate change mitigation. Being a long-term believer in the phrase “the devil is in the details,” I dove in. It turned out to be a much longer project than I had envisioned.

Climate change is controversial, complex and involves a lot of uncertainty. There is both significant objective evidence and unsubstantiated and un-substantiable material available on-line. I’ve documented what is written and independently arrived at my own conclusions.

DISCLAIMER: I hold a PhD in Nuclear Engineering and spent my entire career in the civilian nuclear power industry. Both climate change and the use of nuclear power involve a lot of controversy, a lot of complexity, and a lot of uncertainty. To the best of my ability I have kept an open mind, examined the objective evidence and reached conclusions based on this evidence.

1 Introduction

Burning fossil fuels has been and continues to be humanities principle source of energy. Access to energy is a key pillar for human wellbeing, economic development, poverty alleviation and ultimately health outcomes. Ensuring everyone has sufficient access is an ongoing and pressing challenge for global development.

However, our energy systems also have important environmental impacts. Historical and current energy systems are dominated by fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) which produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases– the fundamental driver of global climate change as will be demonstrated in this paper. Balancing the challenge between development and environment therefore provides us with an ultimate goal of ensuring everyone has access to enough sustainable energy to maintain a high standard of living.

1.1 Climate Change

Climate change refers to significant, long-term changes in the global climate. The global climate is the connected system of sun, earth and oceans, wind, rain and snow, forests, deserts and savannas, and everything people do, too. The climate of a place, say New York, can be described as its rainfall, changing temperatures during the year and so on. But the global climate is more than the “average” of the climates of specific places.

A description of the global climate includes how, for example, the rising temperature of the Pacific feeds typhoons which blow harder, drop more rain and cause more damage, but also shifts global ocean currents that melt Antarctica ice which slowly makes sea level rise until New York will be under water. It is this systemic connectedness that makes global climate change so important and so complicated.

1.2 What is Global Warming?

Global warming is the slow increase in the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere because an increased amount of the energy (heat) striking the earth from the sun is being trapped in the atmosphere and not radiated out into space. The earth’s atmosphere has always acted like a greenhouse to capture the sun’s heat, ensuring that the earth has enjoyed temperatures that permitted the emergence of life forms as we know them, including humans. Without our atmospheric greenhouse the earth would be very cold. Global warming, however, is the equivalent of a greenhouse with high efficiency reflective glass installed the wrong way around.

Ionically, the best evidence of this may come from a terrible cooling event that took place some 1,500 years ago. Two massive volcanic eruptions, one year after another placed so much black dust into the upper atmosphere that little sunlight could penetrate. Temperatures plummeted. Crops failed. People died of starvation and one of the greatest disease pandemics in history: the Plague of Justinian started its march. As the dust slowly fell to earth, the sun was again able to warn the world and life returned to normal(https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpv7n/the-dark-ages-were-caused-by-two-enormous-volcanic-eruptions).

1.3 Measurement of the Earth’s Temperature

Highly diverse types of direct measurements made on land, sea, and in the atmosphere over many decades have allowed scientists to conclude with high confidence that global mean temperature is increasing. (https://science2017.globalchange.gov/)

Global annual average temperature has increased by more than 1.2°F (0.7°C) for the period 1986–2016 relative to 1901–1960. The linear regression of changes over the entire period from 1901–2016 is 1.8°F (1.0°C).

Earth has experienced climate change in the past without help from humanity. We know about past climates because of evidence left in tree rings, layers of ice in glaciers, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. For example, bubbles of air in glacial ice trap tiny samples of Earth’s atmosphere, giving scientists a history of greenhouse gases that stretches back more than 800,000 years. The chemical make-up of the ice provides clues to the average global temperature.

Glacial ice and air bubbles trapped in it (top) preserve an 800,000-year record of temperature & carbon dioxide. Earth has cycled between ice ages (low points, large negative anomalies) and warm interglacial (peaks).

Using this ancient evidence, scientists have built a record of Earth’s past climates, or “paleoclimates.” The paleoclimate record combined with global models shows past ice ages as well as periods even warmer than today. But the paleoclimate record also reveals that the current climatic warming is occurring much more rapidly than past warming events. Looking at this pattern, the earth should be heading into another ice age.

As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.

Temperature histories from paleoclimate data (green line) compared to the history based on modern instruments (blue line) suggest that global temperature is warmer now than it has been in the past 1,000 years, and possibly longer. (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page3.php)