The Inexact Science of Carbon Neutrality 302
snydeq writes "Sustainable IT's Ted Samson raises questions regarding the purchasing of carbon offsets, a practice growing in popularity among tech companies such as Dell, Yahoo, and Google in an attempt to achieve 'carbon neutrality.' Essentially financial instruments, carbon offsets enable companies to invest money in sustainable endeavors in an attempt to counteract the carbon footprint they incur conducting their business. But as a recent article in the Wall Street Journal shows, measuring the value of these carbon offsets is tricky business, as some recipients of offsets say the results of their sustainable efforts would be achieved regardless of any one company's investment. 'The question of whether carbon offsets hold value just scratches the surface of the overall carbon-neutrality question,' Samson writes. 'For the time being, there isn't even a consistent approach to measuring an organization's carbon footprint in the first place. And if you don't know how much CO2 you're responsible for, how do you know how much offsetting is necessary to become neutral?'"
Carbon neutrality is a joke anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole concept is junk science. It's basically saying that you can urinate in someone's swimming pool if you filter an equal amount of salt out of the ocean.
The real world doesn't work that way. In the real world, local effects are just as bad as global effects, and there's no guarantee that opposite local effects in two places will ever actually cancel each other out. It's a nice way to help people feel good about themselves, but in the grand scheme of things, it is naive to think that carbon offsets, no matter how large, can undo the damage of the carbon you shouldn't have emitted in the first place....
Modern day Indulgences (Score:4, Insightful)
And nothing more.
Spend the money by planing some trees.
Offsets are marketing tools (Score:5, Insightful)
Bought by companies who want a good image. That's about all they are good for.
Not a fix (Score:2, Insightful)
Buying "carbon credits" is ridiculous. It's a bit like a company using all the water in one river in the U.S. then paying other companies to drill wells for villages in Africa (i.e., being "water neutral"). It's great for the Africans but doesn't solve the problem of destroying a whole river ecosystem in the U.S.
I'm all for reducing noxious emissions and conserving energy but buying carbon credits does not solve the problem.
Re:Carbon neutrality is a joke anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We put up solar panels (Score:3, Insightful)
I am curious, is there a way to calculate the carbon emissions created by the manufacturing, transportation and installation of the panels or have you only done the financial cost/benefit analysis for the project? And if there is a way to calculate it, what are the benefits, if any?
This is a serious question btw.
More of a scam, not so much a fix. (Score:4, Insightful)
If it were just a volunteer program, that might be one thing. Giving money is another thing. I have heard that they like building rainforests with the money, too, which I have also heard are NOT the best thing for producing oxygen and eating CO2...
FTA: (Score:3, Insightful)
as some recipients of offsets say the results of their sustainable efforts would be achieved regardless of any one company's investment.
That's not true, those recipients wouldn't get filthy rich without company investments!
Re:Carbon neutrality is a joke anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
From wikipedia:
Although contributing to many other physical and chemical reactions, the major atmospheric constituents, nitrogen (N2), oxygen (O2), and argon (Ar), are not greenhouse gases. This is because homonuclear diatomic molecules such as N2 and O2 and monatomic molecules such as Ar have no net change in their dipole moment when they vibrate and hence are almost totally unaffected by infrared light.
Oh yes, the old Catholic model. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Carbon neutrality is a joke anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that easy (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry to piss on someone's cult of the hunter-gatherer utopia parrade, but it didn't work that way.
Pre-historic hunter-gatherers caused the extinction of thousands of species and, for example, all the mega-fauna in the Americas. There are whole species, e.g., the mammoth, for which you can trace its shrinking habitat historically and it looks damn suspiciously like the opposite of the pattern of human spread. Yes, there were environment factors too, which probably were already making it harder for them to thrive, but nevertheless, wherever the humans went, the mammoths soon went extinct.
That's just one species out of _thousands_.
Hunter-gatherers in North America used "buffalo jumps" to herd whole herds of buffalo off cliffs and then eat the resulting mess of meat. They only got all in touch with nature when that source of food started to not be enough.
(And even then, an animist's idea of harmony with nature is giving back to the _spirits_, not to nature itself. If you hunt bears, you give offerings and prayers to the great bear spirits, whose job is to make sure you get plenty of bears to hunt. It was a pretty damn human-centric view of the world. And if they get to be scarce, then you just need to pray more and appease the spirits better, not, say, give the bears a fucking chance to repopulate.)
Humans are a pretty scary predator. Most other predator have 1-2 species of prey they depend on, creating equilibrium cycles. When the rabbits depopulate, some of the foxes starve too and don't breed as much either, giving the rabbits a chance to rebound. And viceversa. Humans have no such balancing factors. If the population of dodos drops, the humans still survive on fruits and other animals, and keep on hunting the dodos into extinction. And sometimes keep on hunting them just for fun, trophies, proof of manhood, or whatever. The hunter-gatherers did exactly the same too. Why do you think they had those feather headdresses, or wolf skins, or whatnot? To show how great hunters they are, even if they didn't actually need to eat that animal.
So measuring the ecological impact just in carbon is misleading at best, and freaking stupid at worst. Hunter-gatherers caused mass extinctions.
Get fat and sequester carbon... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now THAT is how the real world works. Congratulations on making a sound investment. Carbon trading is so obviously a useless bullshit scam. The real damage done is in the fact that people think it actually works and hence ignore other actually beneficial measures.
I'd love to do a parody website about the environmental benefits of obesity. After all, human fat is a fairly dense hydrocarbon. The fatter you become, the more carbon is sequestered. Imagine the environmental benefits if everyone in the US gained 30 lbs! A billion pounds of carbon sequestered! Woo-hoo!
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Overthinking anything (Score:3, Insightful)
Is what will cause the over intelligent person to fail. No matter how much time you spend analyzing some decision, there will be even more to consider. You will never know for sure what the best option is.
It comes down to "stupid" and seemingly "irrational" reasons that make us finally decide.
This:
These Corn Pops are cheaper... but I get more Oz. per Dollar if I buy the more expensive ones... but I may not finish the bigger box... but if I get the small box, I might have a surplus of milk. Oh.. I could buy the smaller milk. Oh wow. The value of the quart-sized milk drops dramatically from that of the Gallon size. Ok. I will rule out milk as a deciding factor...
Or this:
These corn pops look good. Big box or small? I'm not that hungry now, which has nothing to do with anything... but small box it is.
I guess it's a matter of choosing your battles. In general, I believe that if we mean well and make honest decisions, on average we will do better. Not always, but it will tend towards better. Do try.. but do not kill yourself. The returns on worrying will likely diminish as you sit there.
If everyone TRIED to be conscious of energy waste, I feel pretty confident that the net payoff would be worth it. Again, only go as far as is reasonable. Yes. That's a subjective thing. That's one thing "Humans" are skilled at. Subjectivity. It's an important part of what makes us intelligence. Call it your heart or your gut. It's smarter than the credit we give it.
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Re:The next step is obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
The problem with making fun of treehugging hippies for supporting carbon offset indulgences is that no treehugging hippies think that carbon offset is a good idea. treehugging hippies think that riding a bike instead of driving, fixing things and making them yourself, and growing your own food are the best ways to reduce global carbon levels. then they do those things. then they get made fun of for being hippies.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
No more than I think that the ones paid by governments and environmental cultists will be.
So to evaluate the arguments one must go further than looking at the fact that research takes money and the provenance of a researchers budget tends to correlate with their opinion on the issue. You have to take a look at the actual scientific merits of the work done.
One doesnt need any particular knowledge of a given field to check whether or not fundamentals of scientific method are being applied and whether arguments are logical and supported or not.
The endless repetition of fallacious arguments such as those referencing 'scientific consensus' (which, even if it did exist on this issue which it clearly does not, is still an entity with precisely ZERO place in the scientific method) by those on one side in particular stands out like a sore thumb. So does the way that political control of funding is exploited to silence skeptical scientists. It is certainly true that most funding for skeptical scientific research on the subject comes from organisations that have a clear vested interest in minimising the issue - but equally clear this is a natural consequence when public funding is provisioned only to those researchers who play ball with the envirocultists. A real scientist in such a situation has no option but to go to the private corporations for funding or retire from the field entirely.
This doesnt mean either side is wrong. If you have multiple funding sources with multiple agendas, each is naturally going to tend to fund researchers that tend to support their agenda. The researchers themselves, if they are good scientists, will simply do the research properly and if it displeases their funding source they'll go to a different source who DID like their results for their next grant - this is much easier said than done, it's inconvenient at best, and runs the risk of failing and leaving the scientist and her family in deep difficulty, but still, if you want to be a scientist that's what you have to do.
If they're NOT good scientists, they'll just play ball and make sure that their reports favour the right side to avoid the issue. To see which one is happening in any individual case, there's no substitute for a critical review of the work itself. Simply correlating results with funding sources doesnt mean anything.
Frankly I dont doubt that human pollution is having and will continue to have consequences on the climate of the planet - I cant think of anyone that does. But that fact tells us nothing about whether the affect is large or small, beneficial or damaging, let alone what, if any, actions would actually moderate or reverse the affects (assuming that doing so is desirable.) Despite that global warming enthusiasts are constantly making policy prescriptions which, just coincidentally, always wind up being that we should do what environmental cultists have always wanted to do for their own religious reasons.
The logical conclusion is that these people are full of %*!&, particularly when they claim to be scientists (to be a scientist is to understand and implement the scientific method, not to wear a lab coat and have a 'sciencey' job title,) and if they happen to be getting anything right in their predictions at all, it's an accident.
The inexact science of everything (Score:4, Insightful)
(Kind of an off-topic rant, mostly because I'm seeing a lot of responses saying "See?!? Global warming is clearly crap because it has holes, now leave my diesel-powered hummer alone")
When did people start thinking science was easy and could ever provide a simple answer to anything? At best you get vague general theories, and usually know at least a few big exceptions prior to the theory being written down. And that's when the theory applies to something that is entirely academic. When it has serious economic implications, how clear a picture do you think is going to develop?
Maybe we do need to start adding "just a theory" to evolution taught in high school, and add it to everything else taught in science as well.
It's important to point out the holes in any theory, to critique buisness practices and government regulations, and avoid the harms that global warming could bring about, but resist the temptation to think in terms of black and white on such complex issues.
Re:Bullshit (Score:1, Insightful)
BTW: Consensus is an integral part of science, it's implied every time you hear the phrase "scientists say". Now go and use your skepticisim to find out what the overwhelming majority of scientists actually say on the subject and get back to us when you can scientifically refute one or more of the three claims that are made by EVERY national science body on the planet.
Carbon-Credits are not all a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Carbon neutrality is a joke anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Get fat and sequester carbon... (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that in the "real world" of which you speak, the reason it was economical for GPP to put up solar panels was because of the tax writeoff -- i.e., governments setting environmental policy. Imagine that.
Re:The Indulgence of Global Warming Religion (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, because "sin" is "all the elements of religion". On that logic you could pretty much call scientists proclaiming the dangers of lung cancer as a religious cult.
Equating decades of scientific research to a story tale about a Jewish carpenter and his drinking buddies is ridiculous.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
One doesnt need any particular knowledge of a given field to check whether or not fundamentals of scientific method are being applied and whether arguments are logical and supported or not.
Oh really? Are you competent to evaluate controversial issues in high-energy physics? Synthetic organic chemistry? Structural bioinformatics? Or is it only in regards to climatology where you think you have some magical insight which people who have worked and studied in the field for years lack?
'scientific consensus' (which, even if it did exist on this issue which it clearly does not,
A vast majority of the world's working climatologists isn't a consensus? I'm curious as to what you would consider constituting a consensus. 99%? 99.9%? Would you insist that there is no consensus so long as there is one dissenting voice, no matter how much of a crank that dissenter might be?
is still an entity with precisely ZERO place in the scientific method)
With regard to the methods of science, you're partly right -- obviously it's true that science isn't done by consensus, else no new science would ever be done at all. (I say "partly" because all scientists in the modern world build on the knowledge gained by their predecessors, and that knowledge is passed on by, yes, consensus in the field.) But with regard to the body of knowledge we call "science," you're dead wrong. Politicians aren't scientists. Lobbyists aren't scientists. Activists, as a rule, aren't scientists. Hell, when it comes to dealing with fields outside their expertise, scientists aren't scientists; my opinion as a bioinformatician is of absolutely no more import to the climatological debate than any other reasonably well-informed layman's, which is to say, not much. Which means that when it comes to setting policy based on science, it is the responsibility of those who do not work in the field to shut up and listen to those who do -- and when scientists in a particular field overwhelmingly agree, those outside the field have absolutely no credibility arguing with them.
So does the way that political control of funding is exploited to silence skeptical scientists. It is certainly true that most funding for skeptical scientific research on the subject comes from organisations that have a clear vested interest in minimising the issue - but equally clear this is a natural consequence when public funding is provisioned only to those researchers who play ball with the envirocultists.
Do you have any evidence for these statements? At all?
to be a scientist is to understand and implement the scientific method, not to wear a lab coat and have a 'sciencey' job title
To refer to "the scientific method" as though it were a single thing is to show that one's understanding of science is limited to half-remembered lessons from high-school "science class." And to imply, as you strongly do, that working scientists aren't really scientists because their results disagree with your politics is to show that you are an ideologue with no interest in science beyond how it can serve your agenda.
Re:Carbon neutrality is a joke anyway (Score:2, Insightful)
If he'd shown any logic or science in his post at all, maybe you'd have a point.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
No it isnt.
Which is why that phrase is one which only tends to come out of the mouths of people who can't distinguish between 'scientific' and 'sciencey.'
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Only to the extent of being able to spot certain grosser errors. I'm sure there would be many errors that could be made in the more obscure corners of the field that would fly right by me. So this means that if I see a clear logical error that is NOT over my head, I'm supposed to just trust the supposed expert that made it? I dont think so. Quite the opposite. If he makes a mistake I can catch that's just more reason to think he's making plenty of others I can't.
I didnt claim any such 'magical insight' and you know it.
Are you really claiming that only someone with specialised experience in physics is qualified to point out errors in the arithmetic in a physics paper? So if A is a physicist and B is a mathematician, and B says A's paper makes an error in a given calculation, you're going to stick your fingers in your ears and ignore him until a qualified physicist makes the same observation? That's the modus operandi of a priesthood or a beaureacracy, not of a scientist.
A fundamental characteristic of science is that it relies on logic. Logical errors in ANY field can be fatal to claims which rely on them.
If the body of 'knowledge' you call science is characterised by testing propositions for truth by polling workers in a certain field on their opinion, rather than by rigorously testing the logical consequences of those propositions against empirical data, it is neither scientific nor is it knowledge.
Not just a very unscientific statement, but in fact an actively anti-scientific statement. Just because you get paid to work in a field clearly does not ensure that you do that work in a scientifically valid and meaningful way. In fact, if anything, the opposite argument can be made, and clearly applies in some cases. Funding sources may not, quite often do not, understand, or care, about scientific rigor.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do people continue to link to the IPCC? When the scientists themselves continue to leave because data is being rubber stamped instead of being peer reviewed. My personal favorite is when scientists from different fields do research on non-specific areas and it's rubber stamped. Well I suppose it makes for good money, well that and it's lovely circus effect. We all love a good circus.
Lets not forget that global warming is an industry now, don't support it? You're not going to get tenure, funding and you're just going to be a broke sucker working out of your garage if you're lucky.
You want sources do your own research. It's out there, stop looking for the rubber stamps.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
I can easily ignore the global warming is caused by man fanatics by looking at average temperature charts by simply going back a thousand years. I can also ignore them for the last ten or so years as average temperatures have gone down. Yet if I bring it up I am bound to get shouted down or told I am ignorant of some previously not mentioned study that has a bullshit agency behind it with an official sounding name.
The fact is, temperatures do matter regardless of how isolated the locale is. Why? Because it goes to show that any measurement that does not take into fact changes which fall outside the accepted model are invalid themselves. Sorry, but we cannot ignore data about temperature spikes on either side. It just doesn't work that way.
It really comes down to one thing, whom does it benefit if one side is right versus the other? Who is making the real money on this? I will answer that, the environmentalist have been essentially taken over by big money. It wasn't too long ago when most corporations ignored "green" or offsets or whatever, but once they found how to make money on it they were more willing to play ball. Go look at the majority of people pontificating we are the cause then look to where they make their money, either direct or indirect, I am quite sure you will find out that their view is what it is because it supports their lifestyle, which usually expends so much resources to be contrary to everything they preach but damn if they don't have one thousand exceptions as to why "they" are allowed such. (then throw in the thousands of supporters who don't know the difference between Celsius an Fahrenheit and you get cult like followings and logic)
Scam (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this issue is that a great number of people fundamentally misunderstand the methodology of Science. The fact that so many have referenced "The Scientific Method" as if it is some sort of hard-and-fast rule that applies to the daily lives and work of research scientists in any field is quite telling. That notion is naive and absurd. The Scientific Method is merely a grade school-level thinking exercise meant to exemplify a systematic approach to understanding the world. Saying you can't trust the work of a scientist who doesn't follow the Scientific Method would be like saying "You can't run a football without an I formation." Neither of those statements makes any sense. The only difference is that most Americans know a thing or two about football and would laugh off the latter as sheer ignorance but, when it comes to the former, because they themselves are ignorant, they silently nod their heads in agreement.
This is the essence of the problem, the modern form of anti-intellectualism at its most narcissistic. To the poster, the "Scientific Body of Knowledge" is just an informal opinion poll of eggheads, so where should his opinion come in? And what do eggheads know anyway? Why, the problem is probably in their arithmetic somewhere... If only someone with commonsense, such as himself, were to look at it, they would spot error immediately, but he has better things to do. Climatologists should just go back to chasing butterflies in fields or whatever is they do and leave him and his way of life the hell alone.
-Grym
Re:Bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
Great point, but where are all these simple arithmetic errors that you've spotted?
Oh, you haven't found any? All you have are vague accusations that the scientific method isn't being followed?
--Jeremy
Re:Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no consensus: just plain wrong
An interesting link but your second link contains a substantial list of names who do not agree with the majority opinion. I would make a clear distinction between majority and consensus. As a non-expert it concerns me that there is such a long list of apparent experts who disagree with the majority opinion. Looking at my own field you would certainly not be able to find such a list of people who disagreed with the existence of, say, quarks. Perhaps a concensus is forming but it seems premature to say that there is one.
...and if you can explain these issues convincingly why do you let the media get away with not covering the counter argument?
In addition these people are not making crazy-sounding arguments. For example I understood that the CO2-temperature relationship from ice samples now showed that the temperature rose BEFORE the CO2 level rose. I've yet to hear of any explanation as to why it is this way around (from either camp). There also needs to be some explanation of the causes of past sudden drops in temperature e.g. the little ice age in Europe that caused famine, froze the Thames etc. in medieval times. If we cannot explain that, before there was any industrial pollution, then how can we claim to know what is causing the current rise?
You are right that the problem is my lack of expertise but producing a plot showing forcings or other model derived data is not convincing unless you can first convince me that you really can model the climate accurately....and given the apparent huge variation in models from different experts that seems unlikely.
In summary I would say that, on a balance of probability, it seems more likely that we are significantly affecting the climate than not. So I would mark it as cause for concern and something we should certain aim to avoid where possible. However the current proposed action is that we need to spend billions and billions of dollars, completely rearrange our economy etc. etc. To argue for that much upheaval you need a rock solid argument not a balance of probability argument, much like you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt to send someone to prison...and as long as there are a reasonable number of experts making (to the non-expert) logical, reasoned arguments against the majority opinion there will probably always be reasonable doubt, at least for non-experts.