Climate Change

First of all, I hate that this post is tagged “politics”, but it is, because that’s the state of affairs. This post is a bit longer than usual, but hopefully you’ll read it, because it’s important stuff.

Since I’ve been back in CA, I’ve been seeing and hearing more about energy, especially since it’s such a big issue for Google. Today was alternative transportation day (at google), so I walked to work instead of driving. I’ll probably walk again tomorrow and then get a bike this weekend so I can switch to that.

Several weeks ago, I was able to attend a presentation at work by a researcher at Berkeley. He does work in the energy field, and his presentation covered a wide variety of topics, ranging from energy efficiency to technical descriptions of how possible future fuels would work. It was an amazing presentation, and several points he made have left a big impression upon me. Unfortunately the presentation isn’t publicly available right now, so I’ll do my best to share what I took out of it.

The first was the most concise explanation of how scientists attribute climate change to human activity. He showed one graph: a model of world temperatures over time. This does vary not just on cycles, but also natural events like volcanoes can have a very large effect. This model does not take human activities into account. He then overlays the actual temperature on top of the model. The model tracks well with the real temperatures until the end of last century, at which time the model does not see the same increase. He then shows a model that takes both natural and man-made effects into account, and, as you probably figured out, it tracked much more closely with the upswing. If you don’t buy the whole argument… what evidence would sell it for you?

Yes, climate is cyclical, but that doesn’t mean that /all/ changes are.

Moving along a bit, he talked about energy efficiency. Many people (and important industries) believe that energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness are perpetually at odds, but with good engineering this isn’t the case. His illustration of this was the refrigerator industry. He showed three curves:
- Average energy use
- Average cubic feet
- Average price
all plotted over several decades of the last century. As regulations loomed, manufacturers put in effort on efficiency and brought about a huge decrease in energy usage. At the same time, the average price DECREASED! In fact, those two curves correlate pretty well in this example. Meanwhile, instead of getting smaller, square feet actually increased during this time. More space, less energy, for less money. What brought this about? Government regulation. There’s a clear inflection where the regulation went into effect (well, just before it). I wish I had the actual graph, it was beautiful.

Hopefully the political system will catch up with the private sector on this issue. Well, some of the private sector. There’s a lot of work to do, and the results will be really good. Then again, if the Chinese continue to industrialize but don’t learn from any of our mistakes, we’re all in for a really rough ride.

As an aside…
So, when Dick Cheney leaves office, what global cause is he going to take on?