A Disturbing New Model for Global Warming

By Christian Probasco, 12-17-09

	Caption: University of Utah climate scientist Tim Garrett

University of Utah climate scientist Jim Garrett made the national news recently with a new climate model which has disturbing implications for moderates in the global warming debate.

In his paper, “Are there basic physical constraints on future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide?”, published in the journal Climate Change, Garrett calls attention to a “self-perpetuating feedback loop” which would translate economic gains from more efficient or reduced energy consumption in one sector back into the “global economic production” which driving the consumption in the first place--thus negating the planet-saving potential of every Prius and Energy Star appliance in existence.

It’s not a new idea. As Garrett told New West:

“It was first addressed in 1865 in a book called The Coal Question by W. Stanley Jevons who very emphatically argued that the introduction of improved steam engines had led to more rather than less energy consumption, and that this was setting Britain on a trajectory towards ultimate coal exhaustion….Climatologists seem unaware of the issue. From what I can tell I am the first to formulate the concept in thermodynamic terms, and quantify it on the global scale that is relevant to atmospheric concentrations of CO2.”

Let me pause here to commend Garrett for acknowledging that people almost never act the way scientists or politicians would expect them to. And Jevons may have been the first to articulate the principle in scientific literature but I’ll bet somebody first noticed the phenomenon about the time people first gathered into cities.

But, back to Garrett. His model also eliminates two variables which have been standard in most climate change formulas: population and standard of living.

“The reason is that population and standard of living combined increase in response to the rate of increase in energy efficiency,” Garrett said. “They are not drivers of energy consumption and CO2 emissions, only a response to the current efficiency and growth rate of civilization as a whole.”

Garrett has based his model on thermodynamic principles. Systems expand until they reach an equilibrium of heat exchange or exhaust their fuel source. As he puts it in his paper:

“…Changes in population and standard of living might best be considered as only a response to energy efficiency. As part of a heat engine, creating people and their lifestyles requires energy consumption. Doing so efficiently merely serves to bootstrap civilizations into a more consumptive (and productive) state.”

Which does not bode well for the climate, if standard projections are correct.  According to Garrett, we (the population of the earth) would have to switch to renewable energy or nuclear power “to the tune of one new nuclear plant a day, just to stabilize emissions rates at their currently high level.”

Coverage of the theory in the Deseret News left Garrett nonplussed. Author Wendy Leonard quoted him as saying that “current options to potentially avert climate change--a switch to power sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, as well as underground storage of carbon dioxide form fossil fuel burning—are ‘not meaningful.’”

“I never said that, and frankly I am pissed off about that remark, since it is both wrong and I never would state that something is ‘not meaningful,’” Garrett told New West. “I think the Deseret News reporter just strung together a couple of words from the Utah press release and attached them to some arbitrary sentence she made up.”

Garrett was also quoted as saying that he “doesn’t see the major cause of global warming being stabilized any other way than if the increasing flow of carbon-dioxide emissions ultimately collapses the world’s economy…”

“(I) never said that,” Garrett told us, “I did say that the world’s economy, expressed in terms of inflation-adjusted GDP, would have to collapse for CO2 emission rates to stop increasing or stabilize, absent a switch to non-CO2 emitting power sources.”

But what about massive atmospheric “scrubbers” or industrial processes which could transform carbon dioxide into profitable products? He says the subject is outside his area of his expertise. So, too, are the frustrating economics of non-atmospheric polluting nuclear power, which some of us remember was supposed to be “too cheap to meter.” However, Garrett says, “I just lived in France (which gets about 75 percent of its energy from nuclear power plants) and while the electricity wasn’t cheap, I don’t believe it was more expensive than (in) other European countries.”