East Antarctic ice sheet sits on rivers and lakes
The Science Show reported on a new survey of East Antarctica published in nature.
probably something like the Northern Territory area was actually below 500 metres below sea level, and if you look at the deepest bits, something like the size of Tasmania was more than one kilometre deep.
The implication is that at some stage the sheet will melt faster than previously thought.
The lakes are formed through thermal heat from below.
See also here.
New report on the risk of climate change to Australia’s coasts
Launching the new report Climate Minister Greg Combet says:
“The sea level rise of up to 1.1 metre, which is at the high end of the scenarios that the scientists are suggesting, would have a devastating impact, as much as $266 billion worth of potential damage and loss,” he said.
The report found:
up to 274,000 homes are at risk of inundation and erosion along with over 8,000 commercial buildings, and up to 35,000 kilometres of roads and rail around the country.
I’m not sure about 1.1 metre being “at the high end of the scenarios that the scientists are suggesting”. If you go here it looks more like a midpoint.
Go here to download the report.
The Tyndall Centre in a study for the 2006 Stern Review found that the damage costs for a 1 metre rise are 7 to 12 times greater than for a 50cm rise. They also found that 1m would displace 145m people world-wide.
In case you are wondering, Arctic ice coverage is tracking below 2007 levels.
Swan says we’ll all become wealthier despite the carbon tax
The modelling shows the carbon price only slugs economic growth 0.1 per cent, leaving growth per person at 1.1 per cent.
“Our economy will continue to grow solidly while making deep cuts in carbon pollution,” he told the National Press Club.
He also says that employment will increase by 1.6 million jobs by 2020.
Warwick McKibbin says that’s garbage (“unfortunate” was the actual word he used) because only his model contains unemployment. Other models assume by definition that anyone displaced will get a job.
Food insecurity again
Last week we looked at the Oxfam report. I think someone may have linked to a report mapping global hotspots in the tropics. There is reportage here.
…some of the countries most sensitive to climate change and least able to cope with it, also have among the highest rates of population growth…
Now Joe Romm at Climate Progress has posted on a 4000 word NY Times article. Romm believes it will simply not be possible to double food production by 2050
in a world of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions, where the temperature rise of 10°F by centuries end is not even the worst case, but just business as usual.
Powering down your computer
The new EnerJ system could cut computer power consumption by up to 90 percent.
So far gains of up to 50% have been achieved by supplying less power to regions of the chip that are performing processes that don’t require absolute precision. However, further savings could be made by also applying the system to software.
I’m told that computers generate about the same emissions as air travel, so the savings are significant.
Thanks to John D for this and several other items.
Turning heavy-duty construction, mining and agricultural machines into hybrids
And thereby saving up to 50% of energy used according to Finnish researchers.
braking was not their primary energy-generation source. Instead, the majority of the energy came from work-related activities such as deceleration, and the lowering of loads.
G77 and China want the Kyoto Protocol extended
I haven’t heard much yet coming out of the UNFCCC climate talks in Bonn, but the G77 plus China have said they want the Kyoto Protocol extended. You will recall that the G77 now includes 131 countries.
Japan, Russia and Canada have all said they won’t accept new binding targets under Kyoto unless all major economies are bound, which includes China and the US. The US can’t, with the deniers controlling Congress, and China won’t – well, not yet and definitely not without the US. So in that sense we’re heading for the same old in Durban in December.
Productivity Commission backs Gillard on climate
In case you missed it on the earlier thread:
The Productivity Commission has backed the Federal Government’s claims that other world economies are taking significant measures to combat climate change.
It says price-based mechanisms, such as the one planned for Australia, are the most effective and least costly way to reduce carbon pollution.
The key question was not what Tony Abbott thought about it; rather what Tony Windsor thought, because he asked for the report to be done. Tony Windsor on Lateline:
But it does answer two substantive questions that I raised probably six months ago now; one being is the rest of the world doing something, or is it doing nothing? I think the answer is yes, the rest of the world is moving in a direction.
The second one I think has been obvious to anybody in recent months, is that if you are going to address this issue, a carbon pricing mechanism is the way to address it.
The report itself can be downloaded from here.
Elsewhere:
Sid Maher in The Australian
Tom Arup in the SMH
Finally
Australia is considering killing feral camels to tackle climate change, thereby saving 1 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
Also the Dalai Lama is here promoting peace of mind and the notion that we should act in the general rather than the national self interest in combating climate change. I wonder what he thinks about killing camels.
Roger Jones, hug!
Thanks for useful round up as ever. Shameless self-promotion – I’ve made a fun (?) bird-watcher’s guide to 25 of the “climate change movers and shakers” . It’s got all the MPCCC, the Climate Commissioners and various other folks, complete with cod Latin Linnean descriptions.
http://adelaideclimatenews.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/twitchers-guide-to-australian-climate-megafauna/
Also on the website is a brief interview I did with Tim Flannery on Wednesday night before the Climate Commission event.
Brian,
From the link on McKibbin.
Draw your own conclusions.
Some interesting findings from the Productivity Commission review (from the Australian link):
Re hybrids, isn’t it true that diesel-electric locomotives have been hybrids all this time?
Thanks Ootz,
that really is a funny cartoon, and it’s been circulating widely 🙂
I’m following up on the threats story because it’s following a similar pattern to how climate science is being treated in the media. Hopefully will have something posted today but do have real work to do (I’ll be getting threats about that, soon).
The Productivity Commission report is interesting. And fairly complex to track the uncertainties through to their conclusions. And there are more conclusions to be made. It’s only a snapshot though, looking at one year’s data. It strongly backs a carbon price and shows how important complementary policies are.
Warwick McKibbin’s comments are unfortunate, too. Neither his, nor Treasury’s model is reliable at that level of detail over the long term. Swan is trotting out the results of an equilibrium model optimised to its assumptions as driven by a carbon price – what it shows is that a price can be absorbed by an economy of the current broad structure. To argue over long-term employment is pointless. There is nothing those models can say about job numbers in 2050, say, that we won’t learn with better detail on the way there. The same goes for McKibbin’s comment:
He was right about Swan’s guff and bluster and the need to increase investment, but the last point will not be improved by his “better” model.
John Quiggin’s recent back of the envelope estimates of what a price could be consistent to match avoided damages is just as informative for the long term. We know it will rise with very simple models. If that is allowed to occur, and the productivity commission report shows it is underway, then the economy will transform to one that is outside the parameters of economies described by the current crop of models. The current policy task is to initiate and facilitate that transformation.
Models can be useful for understanding carbon price implementation and how transition from a carbon price as a cost to it being embedded in the economy as a social benefit might proceed. Long-term projections should be viewed with great scepticism.
Willful,
No. They don’t store power from deceleration.
Not really, wilful. Hybrids have an IC engine that can be stopped and started quickly to reduce fuel consumption, a diesel/electric must run all the time. Also the power from regenerative braking can be fed back into a hybrid’s batteries, a DE has no storage except the diesel fuel.
I did see an interesting plan for a locomotive that did use energy storage via hydraulics rather than batteries. A much lighter beast that didn’t need to have batteries replaced every 10 years or so. I don’t know whether it has made it to production.
The really ironic thing about the way the PC report is being received is that people aren’t really focused on the most important thing, which is that no country has reduced emissions on the scale needed except in periods of economic downturn (and even then the reductions fall well short). It’s hard to take the report at all seriously unless one really believes the orthodox economic fantasies it peddles about extrapolating minimal (or non-existent) abatement results to the relatively rapid society-wide restructuring we will need to avoid the disastrous ecological (and hence social) outcomes the climate science is predicting.
@liz_beths and I addressed the issue of these kinds of unwarranted extrapolations at The Drum yesterday, as part of a more general critique of the carbon price debate. A few people in the comments savaged us for standing against a whole lot of mainstream “expert” advocacy for market solutions, but the abatement record to date strongly suggests that the mainstream approach is simply not working.
Of course that won’t stop everyone harping on about how this report proves something very important. Even though that “thing” is not of relevance to how we’re going to achieve serious emission reductions.
I know it’s only 1 paper, but initial evidence points to our emission being at a greater rate than that that triggered the PETM. Could be a worry ..
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110607121525.htm
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1179.html (paywall)
Check this out Brian!!
Oh, and others.
“””A renewable energy generator for all seasons”””
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028156.100-a-renewable-energy-generator-for-all-seasons.html
Dave @ 11, my mindset was formed by this from 2006, which suggests that it is 30 times faster now than back then. The new paper seems to confirm this in rough terms, although metrics sometimes confuses me.
There is weirdness relating to the PETM, however. It started from a much higher base back then – possibly 1000ppm compared to 280ppm for AGW.
This, of course, makes the problem worse now, because climate sensitivity is logarithmic in its effect on temperature, so a smaller amount will move the temperature more from a lower base.
Hope I’ve got that right!
Brian, thanks for the link to RC. I’d been looking for something like that after reading Dave’s post.
If the paper that Dave linked to says anything, it’s that oceans are critically important to an understanding of how atmospheric carbon is buffered. I find it amazing that there can be enough of a carbon increase in the atmospheric-oceanic system to get the carbon compensation depth to rise enough to have major dissolution events in sediments. Changing the chemistry of the ocean is a big event.
It’s kind of exciting (in a perverse way), to think that we might see similar changes in the oceans soon. Imagine what the huge changes we’ll experience will tell us about climate in the deep past on Earth. Kind of like being on the inside of a building demolition.
Brian@13 Aye – it’s not good whatever the angle it’s looked at
In terms of the effect of carbon price on economic growth it is important to consider what the RBA is doing. In effect the RBA tries to control inflation by changing growth rates by changing interest rates.
If the carbon tax slows growth, it seems reasonable to expect that the RBA will adjust interest rates to compensate. Should work if the effect is small.
John D, I reckon it’s hard to see the carbon price causing a blip on the radar of the RBA.
Dave @ 15, no, it’s not good.
Jess, thanks for the link! On the oceans, I read today Flannery saying that if you compressed the gas of the atmosphere into a liquid, the oceans would be 500 times as big.
jumpnmcar @ 12, energy made from clothing! Not sure what you would do with it, but I’m sure there will be other new and amazing technologies.
Jess @14,
I’ve been doing a bit of work on that but have a bunch of stuff piling up. If the logjam can be relieved a bit, I’ll put up a post on it. Basically, the oceans are driving the atmosphere – the energy in the top 700 m is about 100 times that in the atmosphere. Kevin Trenberth has a really interesting summary paper that may be linked at RC here.
Roger,
I think what is most interesting are the feedbacks that kick in when you have large shifts in climatic regime.
As an example of what I’m talking about (and this is just off the top of my head), the guys in the research group I’m in at ANU (the geophysical fluid dynamics group at RSES – except for me, the lone geologist, we’re mostly oceanographers & fluid physicists) are doing are bunch of really interesting things looking at the way that wind forcing plays into driving the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
As I understand it, changes in wind forcings (i.e. shifts poleward and changes in intensity of the sort that Brian has discussed before) have implications for the meridional overturning (the way that the oceans convect water from north to south) as the speed of transport in the ACC is what determines where and by how much deep ocean water (which stores most of our CO2 and provides the long term buffer to atmospheric CO2 IIRC) can be bought to the surface in the Southern Ocean.
If your deep water is oversaturated in CO2, and you expose it to the atmosphere and warm it up a bit, it can degass pretty well (a bit like a coke can on a warm day). I can’t remember references but I believe that there are suggestions that this might play a part in having large shifts in climate.
This could have some pretty big implications for how much carbon the oceans could actually store. That said, the interactions between wind forcing and how this feeds into the net transport in the ACC are still pretty poorly understood I think (I might just take the opportunity to point interested people to Andy Hogg’s page with info on eddies and the ACC – he knows a lot more than I do obviously).
Of course there’s a lot of speculation here (although it is backed up by a fair chunk of reasoning based on well established physical oceanography), so it will be interesting to see how things actually do change as we start to shift climatic regimes over the medium to long term. That said, I’ll probably be dead before we get any conclusive results eh? 🙂
P.S. I’d be really interested to read whatever you get time to throw together on atmosphere-ocean interactions though.
Jess,
outgassing from the Southern Ocean now looks like it played a big part in the Antarctic-driven warming at the end of the last ice age, though more evidence is needed to be conclusive.
I’m interested in non-linear changes in ocean heat content driving warming. The two could be related. And I wouldn’t count on waiting too long to see ‘surprises’.
Roger, will you be giving a talk at IUGG? I’m coming down for the second week (for the volcanology session) but I’d be interested in popping in to hear you speak.
I am curious as to what positive feedback will have the earliest and most obvious (ie easily measureable, biggest coverage) impact? It would seem to me that the failure of the Gulf Stream and its influence on Western European weather, particularly winter, would have to be right up there. Siberian methane clathrates, West Antarctica ice shelf, even Greenland are far away from population centres to be too easily missed or worse ignored.
Do you feel safe, as a climate scientist, exposing your movements so publically, Jess?
Pablo – It’s difficult to say with any certainty what will happen to the Gulf Stream. I don’t think enough is known about the energetics of the meridional overturning to say for sure whether it would or wouldn’t reestabish itself in a new regime and what form that might take.
I think the biggest change in terms of ocean dynamics will be the worldwide collapse of oceanic ecosystems as we acidify the oceans, killing the smallest carbonate-based lifeforms on which the rest of the food chain depends. Although that might be difficult to spot amongst the overfishing…
Ah, BilB, I’m not really a climate scientist though (just someone with close links research-wise)! Anyway, we now have all those fancy-dancy new keycards at ANU right? That ought to keep me safe. 🙂
Also, there’s going to be several thousand earth scientists descending on Melbourne for IUGG from all over the world, so even though most of us are nerds, it’d be a brave denialist who’d pick a fight.
Further, Jess, damaging life in that top 10 centimetres of the ocean also threatens 50% of our oxygen replenishment. Yet another feedback. Sadly we just do not seem to be able to add up the accumulation of negative feed backs. We tend to address them one by one as if they were the only negative feedback to be concerned about.
Jess,
I am at IUGG but haven’t checked the time. I’ll be talking about how using linear statistics to measure climate is the wrong paradigm because it overlooks what is really going on. Warming comes in bursts first, then appears as a trend later as the capacity of the ocean to absorb energy is exceeded by radiative forcing. It’s something to do with upwelling episodes mediated by climate variability, I think, but the analysis has yet to be done. I’ll be showing how to measure atmospheric warming as steps plus trend, i.e. measuring the dynamics correctly.
Bilb, the wind will make sure that there is mixing in the top layers of the ocean. The big worry is loss of the marine carbonate cycle when shells can’t be laid down any more. Atmospheric oxygen has been increasing over the past decades by measurable but small amounts.
Pablo, I’m hazy on the dynamics but my understanding is that the Gulf Stream is likely to continue and is not totally coupled to the North Atlantic deep over-turning, which is though more likely to slow rather than collapse. Greenland, probably the WAIS, and certainly coral reef ecosystems are much more sensitive. Permafrost methane is a wildcard with large positive feedbacks unable to be ruled out. Recent tipping point info is summarised in the climate commission report released a couple of weeks ago.
Brian @17: What I was trying to say is that the RBA is a stabilizer that will tend to act in a way that minimizes the effect of a carbon price. I also think that the economic noise resulting from RBA actions is great enough to hide any carbon price related effects.
Still think that a carbon price is a crazy way of driving climate action.
Actually, on the subject of North Atlantic deep overturning – my officemate is doing his PhD on horizontal convection in regions with sills (of which N. Atlantic overturning is an example). His research suggests that sea level change could significantly affect the thermal and salinity structure of the main Atlantic basin by changing the depth of the Atlantic over the Iceland-Greenland Ridge, which changes how deep cold water flows from the Arctic basin into the main basin and mixes with the rest of the ocean.
It’s not really a huge tipping point (since you need sea level changes on the order of tens of meters to have an effect) but another cool one nonetheless. There’s just so much we don’t know about the oceans though. It’s getting better with better equipment, but I suspect that a poor understanding of these changes in ocean dynamics is really holding us back.
Roger – I’ll have a look in the programme. My talks are on Monday morning in the IAVECI symposia on lava flows, so as long as we aren’t clashing I’ll have to come along and have a listen.
Thanks for the info on atmospheric oxygen, Roger. That is the opposite of what I would have expected, something must still be working properly. When the issue of the threat to life in the top 10 centimetres of the from detergents, acidification and other contaminates came up some decades ago I remember the quoted figure for oxygen replenishment as being 2/3’s from the ocean. The most recent figure that I heard just the other day was 1/2. The difference must be further research and better information.
You guys have a good conference.
RJ22
That ocean heat current non linearity subject sounds fascinating as does its effect on potential outgassing. No doubt techtonic plate movements and continental placement have a significant influence as well.
Many thanks for assessments on tipping points to watch. I guess the canary in this case will be carbonate based marine micro-organisms as suggested.
The Hobart Mercury looks at local effects of sea level rise implied in the recent report on risks to coastal areas. Oceanographer John Hunter from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre is quoted extensively. Beyond local impacts the most interesting thing he said was this:
Bird gloats on his blog about abusive emails he has sent to Clive Hamilton and others.
http://graemebird.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/phobos-hollow-and-ready-for-dyson-harrop/
When a commenter asks him if he had sent any of the recent threats to ANU scientists, Bird denies it, saying that the last abusive email he sent was to Clive, and that he only sends email under his own name.
He confesses:
I know Bird will never actually get elected for anything, but just imagine if he had been successful the last time he stood. Question Time would become even more of a farce, as Birdy would get worked up and abusive and be ejected, they’d get on for a while, then he would return, get worked up and abusive and ejected again, and again and again. Rinse and repeat until the next election.
I just dipped my toe in the link silkworm provided (and regretted it – I need to boil my toe, and scrub my brain with bleach). Bird seems to be certifiably insane.
I had the same experience, DI. I could not figure out what Bird stands for. Thank goodness we do not have corner store guns in this country.
For something positive and different, here is a reasons-to-be-cheerful “bob each way” extract from Robert Rapier’s Blog
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2011/06/09/roundtable-on-chinas-energy-future/
“China is one of the world’s largest producers of renewable energy, leading in categories like wind power and solar hot water. A statistic I recently read said that China’s energy production from solar hot water is equivalent to the energy output of 40 nuclear power plants.”
and
“China’s potential for growth is frightening. China uses about two barrels a year of oil per person. In the United States we use 23 barrels of oil per person per year. If China’s usage grew to the U.S. equivalent, it would be 85 million barrels a day, which is about the total consumption of oil for the world. However, there simply isn’t enough oil available for that to happen, so it sets up some challenges in the years ahead.”
On a trip to Quindao (level with Seol in Korea and well into the snowline) I saw evacuated tube solar water heating elements on every roof of this city of 10 million. It snowed at least 4 inches while I was there and still the water was hot, so solar water heating is not a tropics only technology.
Message for Tony Abbott, ………and Julia Gillard: building and fitting solar water heating for all of Australia’s buildings equals……..JOBS. And lots of them, not to mention a huge drop in Australia’s CO2 emissions.
It is a case of ‘me too’ here having never before been exposed to the work of Bird. Astonishing. This is what happens to people who don’t complete their PhD’s.
BilB, solar PV of course doesn’t require direct sunlight to produce some power. I’ve just put up a new post having a bit of a look at it.
akn, we used to have Bird on this blog, contributing to climate change threads big time, until we decided to experiment with what life would be like without him.
The experiment’s been successful, Brian. It’s nice to see the scientific method in action.
Brian
Did you forget to create a comment box for your solar PV post?
I noted the unintentional pun:
Parkinson says that the whole solar technology field is still fluid as scientists look at different ways of capturing and converting solar energy. In this post he describes efforts to use concentrated solar to heat compressed air rather than water,
Was the air compressed to a liquid? 😉
Very best wishes are offered on your surgery. I’m not into metaphysics, but on this occasion I wish I could make an exception and contribute emotionally to your speedy recovery.
Yeah, thanks Fran. Finally did it – bust me gut working too hard!
The comments are turned on by default and you have to turn them off if you don’t want them. Something went wrong. tt has fixed now.
Anyone want to try and refute the latest column from Henry Ergas?
Probably be simple if we had a link, Razor.
Brian – I’m guessing from yr comment above that your in for a hernia repair in which event when the doc’s say ‘don’t even lift a litre of of milk or press the break peddle on your car’ – post op – that’s good advice!
Ergas’ piece is about the assumptions underlying the government’s carbon price modelling. The second one is key to his piece so I’ll deal with that first. His proposed approach boils down to: let’s put more effort into reaching a global deal, without coming to the table with any concrete action ourselves. Which would be great if it worked. It would be lovely if Australia could free-ride on the rest of the world.
Ergas is a serious economist. However, the replacement in November 2007 of a Keynesian, socially conservative mixed-economy-running Government which was working towards a market-based mechanism for carbon pollution reduction by a Keynesian, slightly less socially conservative mixed-economy-running Government which is working towards a market-based mechanism for carbon pollution reduction seems to have put him on the water skis off towards the shark.
If you asked him to describe the Prisoner’s Dilemma, he’d castigate you for setting him a first-year economics problem. But his key point is very much:
Prisoner: Oh no! We’re stuck in the prisoner’s dilemma!
Ergas: Let’s plan to get out of it! You go first!
Prisoner: No, you go first …
Ergas: OK, my plan is: let’s plan to get out of it! You go first!
Prisoner: Er, no, I think you should go first!
Ergas: But I have! Here’s my ingenious plan: we should plan to get out of this dilemma! You go first!
Prisoner: Ah, I see. OK, I’ll go first. We should plan to get out of this! You go first!
Ergas: Now you’re getting it! I’ll go first then. I have a cunning plan which cannot fail …
As for the rest:
I think this is arguable either way, especially if you want to get into a debate about what “on track” means. “Contrary to all evidence” is too strong.
I think this is a good point. Carbon pricing mechanisms are designed to change behaviour, and changing behaviour involves costs. But improving energy efficiency to mitigate those costs, and receiving compensation means that “it” probably won’t hurt much. It would be much, much more disingenuous to claim that it will hurt a lot.
It would be open for an international legal agreement to make such an impost legal. And his “Germany” argument holds in the case of an individual country imposing a tariff unilaterally, but falls apart where a large enough group of countries are involved. For example: a credible international agreement – the very thing Ergas argues we should be putting extra effort into working towards.
Whoops, a naughty use of ellipsis there!
Ergas: ‘Direct action’ climate policies are an insult to common sense.
So: the modelling takes into account existing policy. Presumably if it did not, that would be a faulty assumption and the focus of criticism?
Sorry about the length of the comments.
Mckibbin does have a point. Most economic models used to analyse the effect of mitigation policies are CGE models, which don’t allow for shocks to lead to any disequilibria in the labour market. I don’t think Warwick would claim that the forecast for employment or unemployment in his model that far out would be accurate. Just that the labour market is modelled more realistically. The 1.6 million jobs figure cited by Swan largely drops out of whatever they are assuming for population growth, the labour force participation rate and the unemployment rate over the next 9 years.
I’ve just come across a non-AGW explanation for climate change that the denialists, AFAIK, have yet to try on. From p.70 of the Arrow Books (2010) edition of To Kill A Mockingbird:
akn, @ 48, yes it was a hernia job. Now completed. “A routine job”, he said. He told me to lift nothing heavier than my bag, which just had my PJs in it, definitely don’t hang out the washing. So I’ll try to be conservative.
Hey Brian, there has been a few statements on the web about the amount of greenhouse gases from the Chile volcano compared to Human emissions, anywhere from 3 days worth to 60 years worth.
Do you or anyone else have any “trusted source ” that may clarify things?
If you look at the hockey-stick graph of global temperatures, you will see that 1991 was an unusually cool year that defied the warming trend. This is because this was the year that Mt Pinatubo erupted. Its enormous sulphurous emissions were responsible for reflecting sufficient solar radiation back into space to cause a temporary global cooling. However, each volcanic eruption has its own chemical signature, and its warming or cooling effect will vary.
Thanks silkworm.
I was looking for a report from a volcanologist on this particular eruption.
There may not be one yet.
All the speculation, does frame our mitigation efforts as futile.
I will wait for a reputable report.
jumpnmcar, silkworm’s right. If you go here and look at Figure 73 you can see the depressive effect Mt Pinatubo had on global temperatures for a couple of years. But if you look at Figure 72, the effect is harder to see.
Now look here, specifically the 5-year mean in the first graph. The blip is still there, but it doesn’t interrupt the trend.
I’ve heard nothing to suggest that the Chile eruption is anywhere near the Pinatubo eruption in size, so I suspect that the effects on climate globally are close to zilch.