The climate from life-itself

Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet by Tom Murphy

Book in the spirit of Without the Hot Air but on broader themes of sustainability. Open Access (sort of: it is cc-by-nc so not open)

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m

Pretty good from a first skim.

Revisions / Corrections to Without the Hot Air

Can start with: https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1wmjjz87t09usoq6jva

Tasks

Fork source to e.g. /v2/ (?? - or do we want to go for patches for now?) (at very least incrementally patch since we are still correcting the raw source markdown formatting)
Implement some trial revisions e.g. https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1wmjjz87t09usoq6jva
Particularly discuss solar (as key, has changed a lot and mackay punted on it a bit)

Mackay / DECC 2050 pathways calculator

David Mackay and a team at DECC (including @tamc) created an f/oss pathways to 2050 calculator whilst at DECC in ~2011/2013. This was updated in 2020 at BEIS.

This looks very interesting. Would like to know how up to date this is, what the source code/model looks like ad whether it can be reused.

NB: this is a UK calculator which led to many other countries doing this. Plus a global calculator http://www.globalcalculator.org (last updated 2015)

Tasks

Find out the status of this DONE. See notes below. Key point is there is an updated version of this from 2020
- Find the source code (not just excel file) for the 2020 model
Analyse the model / source code (the excel file?)
...

Research

McKay carbon calculator (latest version, published 2020): https://www.gov.uk/guidance/carbon-calculator

The MacKay Carbon Calculator provides a model of the UK energy system that allows you to explore pathways to decarbonisation, including net zero by 2050.

Using the MacKay Carbon Calculator, you can create pathways to find out how we might reduce the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 and beyond. You choose your ‘levels of ambition’ for decarbonising different parts of the energy system, and the calculator then shows how your choices affect UK emissions expressed as ‘carbon dioxide equivalent’ (CO2e).

...

There are 2 online versions of the calculator, a universal version called My2050 and a detailed version.

open My2050

open the detailed version of the calculator

Both versions contain levers of decarbonisation, 15 in My2050 and 45 in the detailed version. You select your level of ambition of decarbonisation effort using the levers, ranging from Level 1 - minimal effort, to Level 4 - maximum effort. Popup descriptions explain what the levels represent in terms of behavioural change or infrastructure investment. We will publish a user guide for the detailed version here shortly.

The calculator results are based on scientific data. This Excel spreadsheet provides more information about the model used by the online versions of the calculator:

MacKay carbon calculator (Excel version) (XLSM, 13.4MB)

Old stuff

Official gov page: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/2050-pathways-analysis

This guidance was withdrawn on 29 April 2021

This page relates to the original UK 2050 calculator launched in 2010, when the UK target was for an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

In 2020, BEIS launched an updated 2050 calculator, the MacKay Carbon Calculator, which can be used to create pathways to net zero

Old app and code

App (old one from 2013 i think): http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk/#/home
https://github.com/decc/twenty-fifty - old repo
https://github.com/decc/twenty-fifty-new-look - new repo (last updated in 2015). "The source code for the new look version of the 2050 calculator"

[research] Climate related Visualizations

What good visualizations have been done already?

Meta lists:

https://visme.co/blog/climate-change-facts/

Temperature

Scarf of warming temperature

https://gizmodo.com/this-climate-visualization-belongs-in-a-damn-museum-1826307536

Tree rings showing growing heat

Carbon Budget

National Geographic

To avoid climate catastrophe, humankind must stay within a “carbon budget.” But emissions are still rising, a new report grimly concludes.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/climate-geoengineering-series-intro

Impacts

Sea Level Anomalies

http://www.pierdr.com/filter/Data-visualization/climate-viz

Long form

Beautiful narrative

https://densitydesign.github.io/teaching-dd12/es01/group01/

Tasks

Format math equations properly (using remark-math?)
Proofing
- remove websitetitle stuff e.g. <span class="websitetitle">doi:10.1016/0196-8904(95)00306-1</span> [<span class="websitetitle">www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/01968904/1996/00000037/00000006/art00306</span>](http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/01968904/1996/00000037/00000006/art00306)
- Fix internal chapter links e.g. currently a link to chapter 24 has link https://climate.lifeitself.us/without-hot-air/Text/chap24.xhtml#lithium
Revision / corrections #16
add annotation - see https://h.readthedocs.io/projects/client/en/latest/publishers/
Revised / updated version (v2 - keep source as v1)

Someday maybe

Nicer table of contents e.g. 3 col, color-coded like on https://www.withouthotair.com
- (?) generate table of contents from structured data (e.g. json)

Hard Energy Limits

E.g. how much total energy is available from the sun?

MacKay covers these quite well as does #25 e.g. this chunk:

The sun deposits energy at Earth’s surface at a rate of about 1,000 W/m2(1,000 Watts per square meter; we’ll reach a better understanding for these units in Chapter 5). Ignoring clouds, the projected area intercepting the sun’s rays is justA�πR2⊕, whereR⊕is the radius of the earth, around 6,400 km. Roughly a quarter of the earth’s surface is land, and adding it all up we get about30×1015W hitting land. If we put solar panels on every square meter of land converting sunlight to electrical energy at 20% efficiency we keep 6×1015W. This is a little over 300 times the current global energy usage rate of 18 TW. What an encouraging number! Lots of margin. How long before our growth would get us there? After one century, we’re 10 times higher, and 100 times higher after two centuries. It would take about 2.5 centuries (250 years) to hit this limit. Then no more energy growth

Website v0.2: make it more functional

v0.2 of website. Follow up to #4

Tasks

Front page has more content e.g. the analysis overview DONE. content/home.md now rendered into front page
List key pages on the front page WONTFIX for now. put this in nav instead
Beautiful front page (with rotating images?)
...

Content organization v0.2 (from github repo as presentation to source for website)

When starting this repo we took the KISS and started with the README as main content and github itself as publication platform.

With recent updates (Aug 2021) to have a proper website (see e.g. #4) we want to refactor a bit.

Layout

README.md  # intro to this repo (not published)
content/          # main content folder - files in here are direct published
   notes/              # random notes zettelkasten style, published largely as blog
sewtha/           # special folder for sustainable energy without the hot air
site/                  # website app

Tasks

Decide on structure DONE. See above
Refactor into above structure
Add in root README which is more developer oriented (now original README has moved to home)
Integrate updated climate overview I have been working on (in data literate) into the new home.md (old README)
Fix up website to load content from new location

Limits to Growth

Limits to Growth was a seminal work from the 70s.

Why do people dismiss it?
IIRC (need to dig out reference) actually pretty accurate on main points
I remember some JEL piece about how we'd always dealt with resource scarcity before (boy crying wolf attitude)

Website v0.1: basic website publishing current markdown content

Current just markdown in git repo. Would like to publish this properly plus we need that for better rendering etc.

Suggested url: climate.lifeitself.us

Acceptance

Site is live at climate.lifeitself.us
Auto-publishes all markdown starting from root directory and ignoring "site" directory

Tasks

David MacKay's Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air: markdown-ed, integrated

Integrate and make annotatable David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air (http://withouthotair.com).

Context

David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air (http://withouthotair.com) was a landmark text and still provides an incredible foundation for looking at energy policy and climate change.

However, the book was published in 2008. As David tragically passed away in 2016 the book did not get to updated and is now, as of 2020, becoming a little out of date. See this 2017 article on Carbon Commentary with concrete suggestions https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1wmjjz87t09usoq6jva and associated thread on ycombinator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009057

We are therefore thinking of getting a source markdown version and published copy here for 3 reasons:

A local text we can integrate and reference
Collaborative updating of the text (as per above)
An updated web publication of the text: similarly to the previous point the existing web version of the text could benefit from a more up to date presentation.

Tasks

Misc

shut down https://github.com/life-itself/without-the-hot-air and move issues over

Analysis

Sources

Epub
Tex version (original source) is here: http://www.inference.org.uk/sustainable/book/tex/ Though note that:

It looks like that is the actual working directory and some files were not saved properly. The #BushOnGrass.tex# files with # at the start and end are backups made by Emacs, and usually deleted when the file is saved correctly.
- Data directory: http://www.inference.org.uk/sustainable/book/data/

License

Original text is copyright Professor David JC MacKay FRS (Professor of Natural Philosophy, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge) and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence. See http://withouthotair.com/about.html

This is a free book. I didn't write this book to make money. I wrote it because sustainable energy is important. If you would like to have the book for free for your own use, please help yourself to any of the electronic versions on this website. There's pdf and html versions (thanks to William Sigmund!); we are working on other formats.

This is a free book in a second sense: you are free to use all the material in this book, except for the cartoons and the photos with a named photographer, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence. (The cartoons and photos are excepted because the authors have generally given me permission only to include their work, not to share it under a Creative Commons license.) You are especially welcome to use my materials for educational purposes. This website includes links to separate high-quality files for each of the figures in the book.

Additions and modifications by other authors are dual-licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License v4 (unported) and Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 2.0 UK (as required by the Share-Alike license).

[research] Existing climate / energy related data portals

https://www.theshiftdataportal.org/

Shift Data Portal (French, Open)

[research] Source / sink energy flows examples (Sankey diagrams)

UK (2010)

This looks like a good rigorous one and source data and code is available

http://tom.counsell.org/2050/2010sankey.html

Summary of Without the Hot Air

Summarize key points and pull out key figures.

Especially summarize the energy budgets and availability.
Bonus: apply this to our current situation esp with evolution of solar.
Bonus++: do some economics to work out costs (as well as physical feasability)

Tasks

Identify key figures

Solar capacity installed per year so that we know how fast we are making progress on supply in this area

Capacity (total and installed)
Supply (TWh or millions of KwH)
One answer is here: https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv.

| Year | Generation (TWh) | % of total energy |
|--|--|
|2008|12|
|2009|20|
|2010|32|
|2011|63|
|2012|99|
|2013|139|
|2014|190|
|2015|251|
|2016|329|
|2017|444|
|2018|585|
|2019|720| 2.7 |

Announce without the hot air revision project & Notify Carbon Commentary about this repo and that we intend to incorporate the suggestions

There are some really good suggestions for amendments to the text here:

https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1wmjjz87t09usoq6jva

Wanted to ping in the comments and mention this text is here and that we intend to incorporate those improvements.

Tasks

Blog post on life itself (or at least community site)
update issue on tito repo Done: titojankowski/sustainable_energy_without_the_hot_air#3 (comment)
Post update on carbon commentary Done. See below 31 oct 2021
post on the reddit / hn thread Can't post on old thread from 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009057 as threads close after 2w. Posted a new thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29056343

[inbox] Good overviews of climate crisis and situation (evidence / data heavy)

The hard truths of climate change — by the numbers - 2019 - https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-019-02711-4/index.html (infographic heavy, narrative piece)

[inbox] Research questions and todos

Tasks

Base framework for understanding climate stuff.
- Framework = sink/source
- Framework for effects
- Framework for overall question = an issue tree
How efficient could solar get? (Why? We can calculate amount of energy arriving from sun pretty well and combining that with solar efficiency tells us how energy we can obtain per m2 and hence how much area we need to obtain X amount of energy production)
- What does efficiency mean? There is rate efficiency and actual
- McKay thought 10% was good. today in 2020 we are seeing things in 15-20% range
- See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency. Answer for single layer voltaics is theoretical limit is Shockley-Queiseer limit of ~33%. that is theoretical and given temperature, dust etc my guess is "real" efficiency is going to quite a bit lower so actual "real" efficiency of 20% would be good (?)
how much money is spent on techno stuff (e.g. direct air capture - $100m alone with XPrize funded by Musk) vs social change e.g. better education for women?

Data

Solar capacity installed per year so that we know how fast we are making progress on supply in this area #9
Energy demand (i.e. use) per person per country with breakdown if possible
Wind capacity etc

[research] Climate related Visualizations

What good visualizations have been done already?

Meta lists:

https://visme.co/blog/climate-change-facts/