Could Solar Power Save the Polar Bears? Prob Not
The beloved Polar Bear, iconic mascot of Coca Cola, beloved by children everywhere… is going extinct. The Polar bears hold the dubious honor of being the first vertebrate species to make the U.S. Endangered Species Act List primarily because of global warming. That was in 2008. Since then, the loss of “critical habitat” for polar bears — the arctic sea ice where they live and hunt — has only continued to melt into the ocean.
According to the National Wildlife Fund,
“Rising temperatures in the world’s oceans are causing sea ice to disappear for longer and longer periods during the late summer, leaving polar bears insufficient time to hunt. Polar bears can only survive in areas where the oceans freeze, allowing them to hunt seals living under, on, or in the frozen polar ice cap…The best way you can help polar bears is by reducing your carbon emissions.”
2° Celsius | 565 Gigatons | 2,795 Gigatons
The math of global warming usually begins with the “Copenhagen Accord”, a bill drafted by President Obama is response to massive discontent with international response to climate change after global leaders met in Copenhagen to discuss these issues.
In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius…we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required… so as to hold the increase in global temperature below two degrees Celsius.”
2° Celsius does not sound like a lot. How much difference could that small temperature increase really have on this big, huge, giant planet we have?
According the math, a lot.
“We’ve raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target…” wrote Bill Mckibben, the scientist, activist and author of “Global Warming’s Terrible New Math”, featured in Rolling Stone in July 2012. According to McKibben, “Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. (“Reasonable,” in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)”
565 gigatons seems like a lot to me.
But this is where the trouble really begins. Because when McKibbon wrote the article, way back in 2012, the prevailing estimate was a global cache of 2,795 Gigatons of carbon fuel reserves. “In short,” says Mckibben, “it’s the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn. “
Whoops, looks like the number of carbon products we are planning to burn to meet our energy needs is about five times higher than what climate scientists agree is a generous estimate of what is “safe” to burn to prevent catastrophic global warming.
According to Slate writer & scientist, Phil Plait:
A study funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and undertaken by scientists with the U.S. Navy has shown that the Arctic could see its first nearly ice-free summer in just three years, in 2016. These results actually came out last year, and are based on ice loss from a few years back, using a relatively straightforward extrapolation.
In the paper, the scientists claim that ice loss is underestimated by most models because they don’t include feedback mechanisms; that is, processes in the system that amplify other processes. For example, as water warms it cannot hold as much dissolved carbon dioxide. That CO2 is released in the air, accelerating the warming process because it’s a greenhouse gas.
So in less than a year, global warming could completely eliminate all the ice in the poles, aka the critical Polar Bear habitats?!? But I thought we had more time to do something!!
Could Residential Solar Save the Polar Bears?
As someone who works in the Solar industry, it seemed only logical to determine if there was something we could do to swoop in and save the day. I can just imagine the marketing slogans I could generate with math to back it up. “Go Solar & Save Polar Bear!” Pure gold.
I knew there had to be some kind of math that could help me figure out this problem, but not being a mathmetician, I did what any of us would do. I googled it.
That’s where I found this, “How Much Carbon Dioxide Do Solar Panels Save” by Sam Friggens, an energy policy specialist who also works as an energy analyst for an engineering and management consultancy firm.
According to Friggens:
A simple initial calculation of carbon savings from solar panels involves the assumption that all of a household’s solar electricity directly displaces ‘grid’ electricity produced by large commercial power stations. The question, then, is what quantity of CO2 emissions are saved because these power stations are producing 3,000 kWh less every year?
The standard way of calculating this is by using the ‘average grid carbon intensity’ – the average amount of CO2 emitted for each kWh of electricity produced for the grid – estimated at 445g CO2 in 2013. This figure irons out some big differences between coal power which emits a lot more carbon, and nuclear power which emits a lot less.
A more conservative approach, however, is to assume that solar power displaces the most common form of relatively efficient gas power plants commonly used to ‘top-up’ supply to ensure demand is met at any given time. National Grid PLC have recently estimated these ‘CCGT’ plants currently emi t392g CO2 / kWh.
Thus, using this conservative figure, we can say that in terms of electricity generation alone, a standard household solar PV system in southern Britain saves almost 1.2 tonnes CO2 every year.2This is equivalent to the amount of CO2 an economy class passenger emits on a return London-New York flight.
This figure doesn’t tell the whole picture however. The manufacturing process for solar panels is energy intensive with most of this energy coming from burning fossil fuels. Many solar panels are made in China where ‘dirty’ coal makes up much of the country’s power supply.
Because of this, a recent parliamentary paper estimated ‘cradle-to-grave’ emissions of solar power in the UK to be 88g CO2/kWh, whilst noting this will reduce over time.
But if we take this figure as accurate for now, it suggests the estimate of CO2 savings from a standard household solar PV system in southern Britain should be reduced to 0.9 tonnes CO2 p/a.
So, if each household is able to reduce their standard emission by 0.9 tonnes (or tons as we call it on this side of the pond) could we possibly cut enough carbon emissions to make up the difference between those two numbers (565 Gigatons < 2,795 Gigatons) that we learned about? I decided to attempt this math by myself.
2,795 — 565 = 2,230 gigatons
2,230,000,000,000 / 0.9 =
2,477,779,000,000
2.5 trillion households sure sounds like a lot. But who knows? There are a lot of people in the world! Maybe I was onto something here…
But, nope. Alas, if you add up just the countries with household figures listed in Wikipedia, you only get about 1,333,316,210 households — not even close to saving all the polar bears.
Unfortunately, we are going to need more than one solution to solve this critical, life-altering math problem. Sorry polar bears, it looks like you are out of luck.
