EssaysConcerning

I’ve drafted a suggested Keir Starmer speech, next time Rishi Sunak or his client media attack Labour for their £28 billion per year green investment promise. Instead of being on the defensive, I suggest attack. Over to Keir …

“The World Economic Forum, a very conservative club, have now put extreme weather events as the top global risk for next decade. The International Energy Agency, another quite conservative institution, says that no new fossil fuel exploration are required to meet 2050 net zero goals. And at least half of the UK population actually want the 2050 goal brought forward, only 7% want it put back.

Yet the Prime Minister is deaf to the experts and deaf to popular opinion. He is now fully captive to the climate action delayists – actually climate change deniers – of the increasingly hard right of his Party.

If you want more extreme floods and more extreme heat waves, getting worse every year and,

if you want crop failures around the world spiking food prices and,

if you want petrostates and wars causing energy insecurity and poverty,

then vote Tory.

If you want instead a Government that is not in denial and truly acknowledges the serious risks we face and,

if you want a Government that will accelerate action on climate change by greening our energy, and protecting the ecosystems on which we depend and,

if you want a path to a sustainable future that is fair to all, 

then vote Labour.”

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2024

Summary: The neoclassical economics, assumptions, methods and data used by William Nordhaus and other economists in their models (known as IAMs, Integrated Assessment Models), on how the economy interacts with climate change, are flawed. They rely on narrowly defined data, projected into the future in simplistic ways, that grossly underestimates the likely impacts of global warming on the economy, and in broader terms. These misrepresentations have acted as a fig leaf that have enabled policy-makers and politicians to avoid taking urgent action to reduce carbon emissions, and has therefore already done incalculable harm. It is not too late to base policies on scientifically grounded estimates of future impacts, and to ensure these deliver a fair transition to a net zero future.

A fundamental question

A fundamental questions is how much warming can we realistically tolerate to avoid serious damage? As we will see, economists have hitherto come up with surprisingly high estimates in answer to this question.

I know I am not alone in being both puzzled and angry at the apparent lack of urgency shown by governments to the growing risks of man-made global warming. For the purposes of this essay, let us be generous and assume that these politicians aren’t from the breed of economic liberals who obdurately denigrate climate science for ideological reasons. 

We are nonetheless left with something far more insidious and dangerous. Mainstream policy-makers and politicians who walk the corridors of Westminster and other centres of power who seem quite happy to see new fossil fuel exploration, and keep putting off urgent plans to transition to a net zero future. They fail to acknowledge that not all paths to net zero are the same [1]. 

So what is going on?

Nordhaus’s neoclassical economics

One explanation for this lack of urgency is because economists hold much more sway with policy-makers than scientists, and hitherto, economists have been telling a quite different story to the one we hear from scientists.

Scientists will say that an average rise in global mean surface temperatures of 4°C or more over a mere century or so would be catastrophic. Scientists will point out that the PETM (Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) 56 million years ago was estimated as being a rise of about 5°C (which occurred over a period of several thousand years) [2]. 

While we do see temperature ranges between the tropics and polar regions that greatly exceed 5°C, it is a misunderstanding (that infects the work of some economists) to imagine that this should be a source of comfort. Heating the whole world by 5°C is an enormous amount of energy that has in the past and would in the future knock the climate into a completely new state. It would be an end to the relatively stable climate in which humanity and nature has co-evolved and co-existed, and do this not in several thousand years but in a mere century. A blink of the eye.

Yet William Nordhaus, whose pioneering work on IAMs won him the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2018, estimates economic damages by the middle of the next century to be just 2.1% with a warming of 3°C and 8.5% with a warming of 6°C [3]. Bear in mind that 8.5% drop on GDP is less than two times the financial crash following the 2008 banking crisis (about 6% drop for the UK).

So, during a global temperature rise that will bring mass extinctions, hugely destructive sea level rise, etc. Nordhaus’s economics seems to just give a shrug! Nothing to see here. Any wonder then that Rishi Sunak is also giving a shrug, and why the UK Treasury and many other arms of Government seem not only relaxed about climate change but in many cases have, and continue, to actively frustrate the path to net zero.

I should add that Nordhaus himself adds words of warning [3]:

“Because the studies generally included only a subset of all potential impacts, we added an adjustment of 25 percent of quantified damages for omitted sectors and nonmarket and catastrophic damages …”

So, there’s a whole lot we don’t know or are not measured well enough, so let’s add a measly  25% to the narrowly circumscribed and quantifiable impacts. Wow! Why not 250%, or 500%?

Other economists have been deeply critical of this approach and regarding specific aspects of the modelling. Issues include:

• the scope of impacts included is quite narrow. A key reference used by Nordhaus acknowledges “As a final conclusion, we emphasize the limited nature of work on impacts.” but that does not seem to stop them publishing [4]

• many often questionable parameters are included. For example, extrapolating from current meagre efforts to date “it is assumed that the rate of decarbonization going forward is −1.5 percent per year” [3], yet detailed analysis of existing technology indicates dramatic worldwide savings totalling trillions of dollars by 2030 are achievable with ambitious decarbonisation policies and plans [5].

• using the productivity of different regions with current climatic variability, such as the continental USA, as a way to calibrate forward in time, over many decades, the impact of global warming, signals a complete misunderstanding of climate change and is grossly misleading.

• discounting damages is based on current data for goods, so grossly underestimates impacts on future generations (the Stern Review had a lot to say about discount rates).

• extrapolations from current data is done using simple smooth functions, whereas we can expect discontinuities and abrupt changes as the world warms, in thousands of systems in a myriad of ways (more to say on this below in thresholds and system impacts)

The UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) originally set the target for peak global warming to be 2°C, with a supplementary Paris Accord ambition to keep it to 1.5°C, under pressure from the most vulnerable nations. Yet the current policy commitments (the Nationally Determined Contributions) from the parties to the convention would take us currently to between 2.6°C and 4°C according to the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2022 [6].

A critique of neoclassical economics

Steve Keen has provided a comprehensive and excoriating critique of the work of Nordhaus and others in his paper The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change [7]. I want to pull out a few key observations (quoted snippets) from Keen’s paper, but please study the paper in full:

• Nordhaus excludes 87% of US industry from consideration, on the basis that it takes place ‘in carefully controlled environments that will not be directly affected by climate change’

• Nordhaus’s list of industries that he simply assumed would be negligibly impacted by climate change is so broad, and so large, that it is obvious that what he meant by ‘not be directly affected by climate change’ is anything that takes place indoors – or, indeed, underground, since he includes mining as one of the unaffected sectors (more to say on this below in thresholds and system impacts).

• If you then assume that this same relationship between GDP and temperature will apply as global temperatures rise with Global Warming, you will conclude that Global Warming will have a trivial impact on global GDP. Your assumption is your conclusion.

• Given this extreme divergence of opinion between economists and scientists, one might imagine that Nordhaus’s next survey would examine the reasons for it. In fact, the opposite applied: his methodology excluded non-economists entirely.

• There is thus no empirical or scientific justification for choosing a quadratic to represent damages from climate change – the opposite in fact applies. Regardless, this is the function that Nordhaus ultimately adopted.

• As with the decision to exclude ∼90% of GDP from damages from climate change, Tol’s assumed equivalence of weather changes across space with climate change over time ignores the role of energy in causing climate change.

• What Mohaddes called ‘rare disaster events’ – such as, for example, the complete disappearance of the Arctic Ice sheet during summer – would indeed be rare at our current global temperature. But they become certainties as the temperature rises another 3°C.

• The numerical estimates to which they fitted their inappropriate models are, as shown here, utterly unrelated to the phenomenon of global warming. Even an appropriate model of the relationship between climate change and GDP would return garbage predictions if it were calibrated on ‘data’ like this.

Deeply problematic, as Keen points out: 

The impact of these economists goes beyond merely advising governments, to actually writing the economic components of the formal reports by the IPCC (‘Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change’)

and he concludes:

That work this bad has been done, and been taken seriously, is therefore not merely an intellectual travesty like the Sokal hoax. If climate change does lead to the catastrophic outcomes that some scientists now openly contemplate … then these Neoclassical economists will be complicit in causing the greatest crisis, not merely in the history of capitalism, but potentially in the history of life on Earth.

Beyond Nordhaus

It seems that Nordhaus and others have been able to pursue their approach because they had free rein for too long in what seemed to be a relatively niche field (when compared with the majority of climate change related research). It would be easy to shrug concerns off as a squabble amongst academics in an immature field of research. 

Wrong! The issues are not of mere academic interest but have real-world consequences for policies and climate actions being undertaken (or rather, not undertaken) by governments and industry. For example, a recent paper by Rennert et al [7] on the social cost (SC) of carbon dioxide (CO₂) notes:

For more than a decade, the US government has used the SC-CO₂ to measure the benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in its required regulatory analysis of more than 60 finalized, economically significant regulations, including standards for appliance energy efficiency and vehicle and power plant emissions.

and this paper arrives at a social cost for carbon dioxide that is 3.6 times greater (that is 360% higher) than the value currently used by the US Government, and leads to their conclusion that:

Our higher SC-CO₂ values, compared with estimates currently used in policy evaluation, substantially increase the estimated benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation and thereby increase the expected net benefits of more stringent climate policies. 

In plain English: we urgently need to stop burning fossil fuels.

Other papers are now amending IAMs to be more realistic. One paper titled Persistent inequality in economically optimal climate policies [8] notes:

The re-calibrated models have shown that the Paris agreement targets might be economically optimal under standard benefit-cost analysis. 

These researches are however concerned at the narrow cost-benefit global approach. They take a more detailed look at the differences between and within countries when it comes to the fairness of future pathways. They find that the economic response to climate change will vary greatly depending on the level of cooperation between countries. The conclusions are curiously both optimistic and depressing:

Results indicate that without international cooperation, global temperature rises, though less than in commonly-used reference scenarios. Cooperation stabilizes temperature within the Paris goals (1.80°C [1.53°C–2.31°C] in 2100). Nevertheless, economic inequality persists: the ratio between top and bottom income deciles is 117% higher than without climate change impacts, even for economically optimal pathways. 

So better modelling indicates we can dial back on the ludicrous Nordhaus ‘optimal’ warming estimates to something closer to the UNFCCC’s 2°C, as a target that policy-makers and politicians should take seriously. The bad news is that the well known deep inequalities that exist in how climate change plays out will not be remedied merely by staying within the 2°C limit.

Other things must happen – in the solutions that are adopted and how these are implemented within countries and across regions – to ensure that inequalities are not perpetuated or even widened.

Thresholds and system impacts – nature

I want to illustrate the idiocy of the approach taken by Nordhaus and others who use IAMs to project implausibly minimal impacts resulting from 3°C to 6°C of global warming.

It speaks not merely to the lack of an appreciation of how systems work in the real world, but also, a complete absence of imagination. 

Systems thinking has recently become a buzz word in some UK Government departments, but it is not obviously reaching the parts of the Treasury or Number 10 Downing Street where decisions are made.

We don’t need one of the much talked about major tipping points (e.g. loss of Arctic Sea Ice) to suffer extremely severe consequences from global heating. 

When talking to young people about climate change there is a story I like to tell that helps illustrate how a small change in global mean surface temperature can have a big impact, and it concerns the Pied Flycatcher. This is a picture I created when talking to Primary School children (picture me also holding a globe at the same time to show the migratory paths).

This what I say:

“The Pied Flycatcher flies from Africa to northern Europe just in time to nest so it can feed its  hatchlings on the caterpillars of the Winter Moth, which in turn feed on the leaves of oak trees. 

But the oak trees have been coming into leaf a few weeks earlier, due to global warming, and the moths have adapted.

But the Pied Flycatcher in Africa is unaware of this, so it arrives at its normal time of the year only to find that caterpillars to feed its hatchlings are scarce.

Fewer hatchlings survive to make the return journey to Africa later in the season, so their numbers decrease.

This has all happened owing to only a small change in the temprature, because life-cycles of the bird and moth that worked together have now being disrupted.“

It is not hard to see that the link (the red arrow) between these separate life-cycles has been broken and has thereby disrupted the system as a whole. There has been a severe decline in their numbers as a result of this ecological dislocation [9], and this (at the time) with less than 1°C of global warming.

In general, nature can adapt to changing climate, but within limits and only at certain ‘speeds’. A species of plant that likes cold conditions might migrate further up a mountain as the climate warms, but eventually it will run out of mountain!

With global warming now being so fast, nature cannot fully adapt or evolve to the changes being wrought.

Thousands of such ecological (and indeed physical and societal) thresholds have been crossed and will be crossed.

Thresholds and system impacts – human society

Let’s move to another example of how climate change is already having an impact – and in this case with industry. 

Last summer there was a drought in Europe. Politico reported [10]

Water levels on the Rhine, Europe’s major inland river connecting mega-ports at Rotterdam and Antwerp to Germany’s industrial heartland and landlocked Switzerland, are precipitously low …

That’s a pressing problem for major industries, but it also puts a damper on EU plans to increase the movement of goods along waterways by 25 percent by 2030 and by 50 percent by 2050 …

So those factories that are ignored by Nordhaus because they are indoors find that their raw materials struggle to get in and their produce struggles to get out, when the Rhine is dried up. Not exactly rocket science insight! Note here the complex picture of potential harmful feedbacks:

• global warming causes an extreme weather event (a widespread drought)

• the drought causes low waters in the Rhine

• the low water in the Rhine adversely impacts the passage of material and thereby the manufacturing sector

• mitigation steps would require more land transport, leading to greater net emissions (but could not completely replace the tonnage provided by shipping)

• greater net emissions increase the risk of extreme weather events.

It really isn’t hard for even young children to work this out (I’ve had conversations along these lines with 12 year olds) but apparently too hard for some economists. 

One of economist (surveyed by Nordhaus), Larry Summers, replying to one question said ’For my answer, the existence value [of species] is irrelevant – I don’t care about ants except for drugs’. I guess no one has told him that insects pollinate plants and are therefore an essential part of life on Earth, including human life, and hence our economy. It starkly illustrates the recklessly narrow scope of climate impacts considered by some economists.

Conclusion

For too long, policy-makers and politicians, in the UK, USA and elsewhere have been able to justify their inaction on climate because of the economists like William Nordhaus telling them that a warming globe will have essentially only marginal impacts on the economy. A 2015 survey of the social cost of carbon used by countries [11] found a number of countries using an average 2014 price of $56/tCO2 similar to the USA (rising to $115 in 2050). The UK is actively reviewing how it puts a cost on carbon, as in a January 2023 paper by the BEIS Department [12].

Nordhaus would now say that he is calling for early mitigation, at least on a precautionary basis, but that is a bit like calling the fire brigade when the fire is already well established.

It is time for policy and action to be based on science, systems thinking, and a just transition, rather than some approaches and models that are well past their sell-by date.

George Box quipped that ‘All Models are wrong but some are useful’.

In the form that William Nordhaus and others have developed IAMs over the last few decades, a better aphorism to use might be:

‘All models are wrong, and some are dangerously misleading’.

Thankfully, if belatedly, other economists have been teaming with climate scientists, and challenging and improving the models. Models are needed, and can be useful, to guide our thinking. There is still much work to do. We need to be able to ask ‘what if …?’ type questions to see what the future might look like with different assumptions, and drive ambitious policies.

It’s now time for policy-makers and politicians to recognise the need to radically review their policies and actions, based on the best available approaches and models.

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2023

References 

1. Not all paths to net zero are the same, Nailsworth Climate Action Network, 5th October 2023, https://www.nailsworthcan.org/blog/not-all-paths-to-net-zero-are-equal 
2. Is 2°C a big deal?, https://essaysconcerning.com/2021/10/14/is-2c-a-big-deal/ (including references to specific sections of the IPCC AR6 Report).
3. Nordhaus, W. Projections and Uncertainties about Climate Change in an Era of Minimal Climate Policies. 2016 Am. Economic J. 10, 333–360, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20170046 
4. Nordhaus, William D., and Andrew Moffat,  2017 A Survey of Global Impacts of Climate Change: Replication, Survey Methods, and a Statistical Analysis, National Bureau of  Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper 23646, https://www.nber.org/papers/w23646 
5. Decarbonising the energy system by 2050 could save trillions – Oxford study, Oxford University, https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-09-14-decarbonising-energy-system-2050-could-save-trillions-oxford-study  
6. UNEP Emissions Gap Report, 2022, https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2022 
7. K. Rennert et al, 2022, Nature, 610, 687–692, Comprehensive evidence implies a higher social cost of CO2, DOI 10.1038/s41586-022-05224-9, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05224-9 
8. Gazzotti, P. et al. Persistent inequality in economically optimal climate policies. 2021 Nature Communications 12, 3421 (2021). DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-23613-y. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23613-y#citeas
9. Both, C., Visser, M. 2001 Adjustment to climate change is constrained by arrival date in a long-distance migrant bird. Nature 411, 296–298 (2001). DOI 10.1038/35077063. https://www.nature.com/articles/35077063#citeas
10. Joshua Posaner and Hanne Cokelaere, Deep trouble for EU shipping push as Rhine River runs dry, Politico, 7th August 2022. https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-rhine-river-climate-change-heath-shallow-rhine-undermines-europes-waterways-push/ 
11. Smith, S. and N. Braathen, 2015 Monetary Carbon Values in Policy Appraisal: An Overview of Current Practice and Key Issues”, OECD Environment Working Papers, No. 92, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/5jrs8st3ngvh-en.
12. Valuation of energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: Supplementary guidance to the HM Treasury Green Book on Appraisal and Evaluation in Central Government, January 2023, Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

If the experience of a good friend of mine with British Gas is anything to go by, then the answer to this question is a definite no! Two and half months after a team of subcontractors arrived, and 15 return visits later, my friend still doesn’t have a properly operating system!

Nevertheless, I welcome the fact that British Gas want to offer householders the option to install a heat pump, which was launched in 2022. And the commitments provided are reassuring: 

Is my friend’s experience a one off, or evidence of a deeper issue with how the outsourcing is operating? I don’t know, but British Gas need to urgently determine the answer to this question (and also help my friend!).

As a strong advocate of heat pumps and as someone who is frustrated at the disinformation that surrounds them, pushed by fossil fuel interests, my concerns in this case have nothing to do with the technology or its capability to fulfil its promise. It is a question of how best to scale up capacity.

But let’s wind back a bit and consider the broader question of how large companies use sub-contractors, and outsourcing in general.

Why do they do it?

The risks and failures of subcontracting

Companies often resort to outsourcing because they lack either the skills or capacity to deliver a service, particularly when they are new entrants into a market they want to penetrate. The logic is often that they do not have the time to immediately meet the demand, so seek the support of other companies to fulfil this demand. 

Large providers with an existing customer base have the power to make an attractive offer, but often jump the gun, and go to market before they truly have the capability to fulfil the latent demand. I’ve seen this many times over the years in different sectors.

In some the of largest IT projects I have witnessed, especially with Government procurement, big companies win the main contract on the basis that they have the financial muscle to lead, but know they do not have the specialist skills, so they sub-contract to medium sized companies with spare capacity. 

Often, these medium sized companies also lack the specific skills or capacity for the projects in play, so they too subcontract to those with genuine expertise in the new technologies, even sole traders. Via this process of successive subcontracting, there is a dilution of accountability. The ones who end up on site discover that there has been a mismatch between client expectations and the resources assembled to deliver the project.

Why don’t the main contractors not do the obvious thing and train up their staff to deliver the new stuff? A very good question, and one that has always puzzled me. 

Sometimes it is due to organisational inertia. Imagine a building company that has spent several decades delivering standard British build homes. There is a whole industry behind the standard model. It takes changes in many aspects of the business operations – supply chains, basic skills, and much more – for them to move to something different, such as European style modular, 2050 ready, house building. 

The same is true of a large company that has spent years delivering gas boiler installations, now wanting to start delivering heat pump systems. The pressure to create a sales pipeline will often trump the concerns of the engineers wanting to create a solid new delivery model. Inevitably, companies end up trying to run before they can walk.

Impact of failed subcontracting

My friend is very ‘Green’ in everything she does. She wanted a heat pump to replace her boiler. If she’d asked me, I’d have recommended a few questions to ask any potential supplier (see below).

She opted for British Gas because they were her existing supplier and their website made reassuring claims.

The promise was to arrive late in July this year, and finish the installation within 3 or 4 days, It is now mid October (two and half months later) and after 15 visits by the sub-contractor and British Gas the system is still not working.

It is obviously not the fault of the technology (they deployed well established products), but the lack of competence and experience of the staff the subcontractor deployed. Because my friend’s contract is with British Gas, the issue is 100% with them, and they acknowledge that.

Questions for British Gas and other outsourcers

These are my questions for British Gas:

• How do they recruit subcontractors?

• How do they ensure their subcontractors are competent, in both heat pump installation in general, but also the specific product configurations preferred by British Gas?

• What project management and oversight do they provide to ensure effective delivery?

• If there are issues, how effective is their ability to escalate matters, to ensure timely resolution?

On the basis of my friends experience the answers to all these questions is really disappointing.

So will outsourcing turbo-charge the roll-out of heat pumps, by British Gas and other large companies wanting to get into the market? 

My genuine belief is that it will not. 

The small and medium sized companies/ enterprises (SMEs) that know how to do it are already maxed out, so the only option that outsourcing can provide is to go with companies that do not know how to do it, but claim they can. 

A better model in my view for expanding the capacity of the heat pump delivery market is to replicate existing successful SMEs.

Companies like British Gas cannot build a business by outsourcing to subcontractors who lack competence and experience, they need instead to properly skill up their own workforce and have systems in place to ensure they achieve effective delivery. 

Meanwhile, as we enter winter, my friend is still being let down, not by the technology or its ability to do the job, but by incompetence.

What a delivery process looks like

Delivering a heat pump to replace a boiler is really not that complex but as with any technology, it requires genuine experience and a proven delivery process, not just classroom training. A mitred butt joint is quite a basic carpentry skill, but you can’t just show some Powerpoint to an apprentice and expect them to pull it off very well, and start being a frame maker. Practice makes perfect. 

A plumber experienced in fitting gas boilers and radiators will have many transferrable skills. However, a sole trader plumber will rarely be able to make the transition to a sole trader heat pump installer. If they’ve never worked with heat pumps, don’t expect that minimal training will ensure successful delivery, especially given that many of the most specialised tasks – the electrical and digital setup of the heat pump – are not plumbing tasks at all. 

Installing heat pumps really needs a team with a variety of skills, and I believe this is the only way to properly scale up the installation of heat pumps as  I wrote about here.

Only a company that is focused on installing heat pumps and has successful projects it can reference, would I ever consider to install a heat pump in my house. I followed my own advice and it proved to be a good decision. 

I want the people who turn up on site to be co-workers, employed by the same company, not an assortment of contractors who are strangers to each other, with no shared company ethos and ways of working.

That is why out-sourcing so often delivers poor results for the customer, be it software, house building or the installation of a heat pump system. It leads to the dilution of accountability, and really no assurance in the quality of practice that actually turns up on the day.

Following this essay I’ve produced A Guideline for Householders Considering a Heat Pump.

I really want British Gas to make a successful switch from installing gas boilers to installing heat pumps, but they really do have to consider how they do this.

If they choose in the short term to outsource work, they will need to ensure that there is true competence and experience in the teams that are deployed in their name.

How they ensure the quality of those teams is up to them, but it is essential they do.

© Richard W. Erskine, 2023

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A Guideline for Householders Considering a Heat Pump

Here is my guideline for householders considering signing a contract with an air source heat pump installer.

1. Getting an understanding of what is possible 

It’s really important to move beyond the misinformation and received wisdom attached to heat pumps.

The essential point to understand is that if a building can be heated by a gas boiler, it can be heated by a heat pump. But of course in both cases, the unit needs to be sufficiently powered and the rest of the plumbing setup and sized correctly too.

It will mean that some things change though. For efficiency reasons it is best to use a ‘flow temperature’ as low as possible (that is the temperature of the water flowing through your radiators). This is actually true whatever the heating source.

A room that needs to be heated to 21°C does not need a flow temperature of 70°C or more. The latest UK building regulations for new builds mean that whatever the heating system used, the flow temperature should not exceed 55°C. So plumbers will need to learn how to implement ‘low temperature’ systems, whether with gas boilers or heat pumps.

Often 35°C is enough, and even in mid winter, 50°C is the maximum required in even the most challenging of settings. The 3 key factors that determine the flow temperature are: the external temperature; how well insulated the house is; and the surface area of the ‘emitters’ (radiators or underfloor heating):

• The colder it is outside, the harder a heating system has to work to achieve the same result, but a well designed heat pump system will normally ensure that the flow temperature never needs to be more than 50°C, even when it is -5°C outside.
• The fabric of the building determines how fast the building loses heat, but it is a myth to say that old buildings cannot be heated by a heat pump or need ‘deep retrofit’ before they can. This case study and others cited in the essay prove otherwise.
• The larger the surface area of your radiators, the lower the flow temperature required (whether it be a gas boiler or heat pump). By moving from a single panelled radiator to a double panelled one with fins, the effective surface area is increased greatly, without the wall space of the radiator increasing at all (the height and width of the radiator unchanged even if it gets a bit fatter). The same is true moving from a double panelled to a triple panelled radiator, when this might be needed (which is not as common as is believed). 

The pipe work will need sufficiently sized pipework and flow rates to move the heat needed around the house, but that should be part of the assessment that a supplier makes. In many cases, no changes to pipework are required.

In terms of system operation, householders will not have the fast heating up of the house twice a day as they do with a gas boiler. Instead the heat pump stays on for longer, and the house does not go through big swings in temperature. In many cases, the system is setup to stay on 24/7 but with the system set back a few degrees overnight.

2. Get a proper assessment done

A reputable company providing installation services for a heat pump should do a full room by room assessment of your home and check various things we have already mentioned: the state of the plumbing; existing radiators; space requirements inside and outside for the kit required; etc. A householder will typically have to pay for this report but be offered a refund if they go with this supplier. 

Other things the assessment will cover are the electricity and water supply. In some homes that have not been upgraded for many decades, remedial work might be required, for example, to carry our work on the mains supply, but this is often unnecessary. They might recommend that an electrician does a ‘load survey’ before the project proceeds (in my larger than average old house I was worried that our 80A mains fuse being too low, but it turned out to be fine).

I would recommend getting at least two assessments from different suppliers. If their assessments are not similar (e.g. in terms of the size of heat pump required and costs), then you need to understand why. Also, ask for references in the locality – and take up an offer to visit these. Consider choosing a supplier that is not too far away, as they need to be able to pop back to fix any issues post installation.

A potential installer should produce a professional report (delivered electronically as a PDF) that should be quite detailed, including the following:

• the assumed nominal coldest day of the year used as a basis for the design including maximum heat loss calculations (e.g. external temp of -3°C);
• confirmation or otherwise that the design uses MCS standards for target room temperatures (21°C, 18°C and 22°C for living spaces, bedrooms and bathrooms, respectively);
• an estimate of the heating power requirements (in kW) for each room when heat loss is at a maximum;
• the total heating power requirement (in kW) for the house as a whole when heat loss is at a maximum;
• the maximum flow temperature for the radiators;
• the total expected heat delivered by the system over a year (in kWh);
• the estimated Seasonal Coefficient Of Performance (SCOP) for the system over a typical year.
• confirmation that the system design and products used will be specified to include metering that will enable – over any period – electrical usage (kWh) and heat delivered (kWh) to be viewed (via an App) (without this, the householder is unable to ascertain how efficiently the system is actually operating);
• the capacity of the water tank, based on the usage for the potential occupancy of the house.

You may say ‘Oh, but I’m happy with 19°C in my living room’ or ‘our children have left home, so can be we get away with a smaller hot water tank?’, but remember that the system needs to be fit for the house, and future occupants when and if you move on.

The steps required before the installer can come on site to install the heat pump system will vary a little, depending on the householder’s situation (e.g. if local authority permissions are required). This list is illustrative of the preparatory steps that need to be ticked off:

• Local authority approvals ✔︎
• Electrical ‘load survey’ ✔︎
• Water pressure checks ✔︎
• Checks on pipework sizing in the house ✔︎
• Clearing loft and installed improved insulation ✔︎
• Sorted out draughts in windows and doors ✔︎
• EPC certificate ✔︎
• Government grant conditions met ✔︎
• Check by installers of suitability of locations for outside external equipment, ✔︎
• and checks on space inside for internal equipment ✔︎

3. Project execution

There should be someone who is the point of contact for sorting out issues, acting as project manager (PM). 

The team should arrive onsite with all the equipment and gear they need that matches the design. That includes the heat pump, new hot water cylinder, any new radiators, pipework, valves, etc. If there is a lot of going back and forth to local suppliers of kit then that suggests a poorly organised team.

A typical installation process would be as follows:

• Introduction to installation team, and logistics agreed (eg. access times)
• Old gas boiler and tank removed
• Existing pipes and radiators flushed
• Heat pump (external) and other kit (internal) moved into position
• Plumbing in of kit (heat pump, hot water tank, etc.)
• Plumbing in any new radiators specified
• Heat pump connected to electrical power
• Control system system installed (the ‘brains’ of the system)
• One wireless thermostat placed in living room, set to 21°C
• Various control setups competed
• Setback thermostat e.g. by 3°C to 18°C between 10pm and 6am
• Weather compensation setup
• System put into operation
• Radiators ‘balanced’ to ensure optimal heat distribution (after that, householders should avoid fiddling with radiator TRVs)
• Metering installed if not inbuilt for flow/return heat and electricity usage
• Certificates produced for MCS compliance

The householder should be briefed on the system setup, specifically:

• the optimal location for the thermostat (this is typically a single one placed in the living room and set to 21°C. If the system is designed and installed properly, all rooms will achieve their target temperature if the living room reaches its target temperature – no need for clear controls in every room)
• setup the operating regime over a 24 hour cycle e.g. any set back used overnight
• that weather compensation is, as per good practice and to maximise efficiency, in operation (so the system only works as hard as it needs and when it is warmer outside, the flow temperature automatically is lowered).

The householder should be briefed on how they can use a console or App to ascertain:

• current state of operation (e.g. flow temperature, tank temperature, mode of operation (space or water)
• electricity usage by the heat pump over a given period
• heat delivered by system over a given period
• the coefficient of performance (COP) over a given period (e.g. day, week, month or year) (which is the ratio of the heat delivered and the electricity usage)

Over a period of a year, the COP is termed the Seasonal COP, and in a properly designed modern system, it should be at least 3. In my old house we achieved 3.3 last year. In a modern well insulated house, even better results (higher SCOPs) are achievable.

In addition

• there is just one task, in my experience, that a householder needs to be briefed on, which is checking the water pressure in the system. With old plumbing, there can be air locks created even after the system was setup correctly, and this can lead to slight drops in pressure. A simple process is used to reestablish the correct pressure, and the householder should have received the simple instructions on how to do this (I had to do this twice in the first month, but not since).

4. Post Project service

The team should of course leave the site having completed all the tasks, ensured the system is operating correctly, and that everything is tidied away. If radiators have been replaced then old ones will be removed, unless the householder wishes to retain them for any reason (perhaps some are not so old and they can use in another project elsewhere).

Within a few days of the installation, the company / project manager should make a call to check that everything is OK. 

The company should have already offered to carry out the annual service and indicate the costs for doing so (typically £150 or less). This service will check the status of the refrigerant in the heat pump, and other tasks. It is important that annual checks are carried out (just as they are for any heating system).

The company should respond promptly if it appears that the system is behaving badly e.g. if the COP is less than 2 for example for an extended period.

In a well designed and installed system, the householder can simply let the heat pump do its thing and will not need to do anything. No fiddling with the system console or radiators is required and to be discouraged. Just leave it alone. 

But it is important to periodically check how the system is performing. I would suggest doing this weekly at first, but then monthly once you are convinced that the system is operating well. After some time you may choose to do it only every quarter. I would recommend that you always do an annual check on performance. When in the future you possibly come to sell the house, being able to quote the SCOP achieved for successive years will provide reassurance to any buyer.

END

Appalled by the decision to approve the Rosebank project? You should be.

The International Energy Authority (IEA) – a quite conservative and hardly radical organisation – state in their landmark Net Zero Pathway report:

“By 2050, fossil fuel demand falls by 80%. As a result, no new long-lead-time upstream oil and gas projects are needed”.
https://www.iea.org/news/the-path-to-limiting-global-warming-to-1-5-c-has-narrowed-but-clean-energy-growth-is-keeping-it-open

If this is true globally, it is even more true for an advanced economy like the UK.

Our Government will no doubt claim we can use unproven carbon capture at scale, or deploy dodgy carbon accounting (we are world leaders in that at least), to claim they can still get to Net Zero, or ‘Not Zero’ as we should be calling it.

Rosebank is not about lowering bills and energy security as the Government claims, for several reasons:

• Every tonne of carbon dioxide we emit increases the risks of extreme weather events, crop failures and health hazards – that damages everyone’s security
• Most of the Rosebank output (oil) will be sold on international markets with UK consumers getting no preferential treatment in terms of bills or energy security
• Renewable energy costs have dropped massively and the UK has the capability to max out wind and solar
• Electrification will enable huge improvement in energy efficiency in transport and heating
• Electrification is future proofing – it can take electricity from any source (wind, wave, solar photovoltaic, etc) and at different scales (your roof, community energy, North Sea)
• Mixed signals creates market confusion that only delays the transition to a post fossil fuel secure and healthy future, and it harms our ability to show ambition and leadership
• The IPCC says that every year matters, every tonne of carbon matters, every action matters. We need our Government to listen to the great majority of UK citizens that say they want action.

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2023

My interest in this question derives from many years working with large organisations internationally in both the public and private sector, who strive to improve their curation and uptake of institutional knowledge by the experts within the organisation. So, I am not thinking in terms of the general use of tools such as ChatGPT as simply a better Google, for use on the internet.

AI and Jobs

Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools make people redundant? 

Some people, undoubtedly, particularly if they are doing mundane desk-based jobs collating information or giving advice that is based on a body of accepted information. In some cases, the jobs may not be regarded as mundane, but may be be subject to procedures that are relatively easy to emulate.

But will ChatGPT or subsequent AI tools replace experts? It depends a little on what we mean by an expert.

Imagine a community centre where experts are paid to offer advice to people on their entitlement to benefits. One can well imagine an AI tool very quickly replacing the basic role of synthesising the information needed to help someone know their rights.

Is this enough? I don’t think so. Context is crucial.

The person’s situation may be complicated by multiple factors including complex domestic relationships, mental health problems, access to transport, and many others. The adviser will need to display emotional intelligence not only knowledge of the current state of legislation. It may be that in being able to get support in checking knowledge of the latest legislation on benefits, the adviser can spend more quality time with someone who is in desperate need of support.

In this example AI would not be replacing a human, but would be helping redefine the role of the human, to increase their true value to society.

AI as an on-demand wikipedia without editors

In the context of knowledge in general, the AI models that are emerging today, are being seen as ‘oracles’, able to dispense accurate and well sourced summary answers to complex questions.

However, it is worth noting that AI models such as ChatGPT have to feed off source material.  Who chooses the scope of this source material? If the material is of varying quality and provenance, what rules are embedded in the AI to help it decide on the level of trust it gives to different sources?

When such tools try to synthesise knowledge from public resources on the internet they confront the very real issue that much of what is written on a subject is copied; and often without being checked first. Even trusted actors can fall foul of using poorly researched information and unwittingly give it credibility by propagating it.

If you ask Google ‘when did the Titanic sink?’ you’ll get the basic answer pretty quick. An AI tool does not do much more. They will refer to the collision with an iceberg and broken compartments taking on water.

If I ask the question ‘why did the Titanic sink?’, things get more interesting, and the AI tool can do better than Google. However, it may not anticipate the 5 whys that inevitably result. Why was it going too fast, and so on.

I had to experiment with one AI tool to get the right question in order to get to the primary cause I was interested in:

What were the company pressures that influenced the captain of the Titanic to maintain high speed despite the risk of iceberg collisions?

The answer I received was:

There were allegations that Captain Edward J Smith was under pressure to maintain high speed despite the risk of iceberg collisions. It was claimed that he ordered to ‘make a record crossing’ thus indirectly causing the collision with the iceberg. However, it is also suggested that the Titanic hit an iceberg in 1912 because of a basic steering error, and only sank as fast as it did because an official persuaded the captain to continue sailing.

I still feel I would need a historian with expertise in this area to really delve into the history. Having a very smart on-demand dictionary is great, but is Wikipedia-without-editors (as some may see it) really enough? What about the intentions that lie behind a question or the specific context that it is being raised in? 

A historian might conceivably point me to diaries written by the captain long before the ship sailed, and only recently discovered – and are not fully digitised – that reveal the pressures he felt under to go as fast as possible.

AI and complex questions of science and history

Let’s try a much more difficult question. 

When was the science settled that the world is warming as a result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases?

I got the following answer from an AI tool (a ChatGPT derivative):

The science of climate change has been studied for over a century. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change Earth’s energy balance and climate1. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was formed in 1972 as a result of growing concern about the impact of human activities on the environment. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme to provide scientific information on climate change. The IPCC Third Assessment Report in 2001 found “new and stronger evidence” that humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause of the warming seen in the second half of the 20th Century.

Not a bad answer, but not one I feel would satisfy an expert climate scientist. 

This is what Spencer Weart writes in The Discovery of Global Warming, referring to the seminal 1967 paper by Manabe and Wetherald:

This was the first time a greenhouse warming computation included enough of the essential factors, in particular the effects of water vapour, to seem plausible to experts. Wallace Broecker, who would later play a major role in climate change studies, recalled that it was the 1967 paper “that convinced me that this was a thing to worry about.” Another scientist called it “arguably the greatest climate-science paper of all time,” for it “essentially settled the debate on whether carbon dioxide causes global warming.” Experts in a 2015 poll agreed, naming it as the “most influential” of all climate change papers.

So I went back to the AI tool, to ask the question more precisely, and anticipating something closer to what I expected:

When were climate scientists finally convinced of the greenhouse gas theory for global warming on Earth.

I got the following answer:

The greenhouse gas theory for global warming on Earth was first proposed by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1896. In his 1938 study, he showed that humans had already emitted enough CO2 into the atmosphere to increase the average temperature on Earth and that the Earth was responding: Over the previous 50 years, the average temperature had indeed increased as per Arrhenius’s proposed greenhouse effect. Many other theories of climate change were advanced, involving forces from volcanism to solar variation. In the 1960s, the evidence for the warming effect of carbon dioxide gas became increasingly convincing.

By around 2000, many climate scientists were convinced that the rise in temperature was likely to continue as greenhouse gases accumulated. Some predicted that an unprecedented global warming would become apparent.

Let’s forgive the fact that the tool confused Callendar with Arrhenius when  referring to the seminal 1938 paper (it was Callendar who first showed empirical evidence of man-made emissions causing global warming), or the suggestion that Arrhenius was the first to understand the carbon dioxide driven greenhouse effect (Tyndall certainly did, much earlier, but Arrhenius was the first to calculate its magnitude). 

The bigger surprise was that the AI tool did not cite or allude to the 1967 Manabe and Wetherald paper.

I am sure that new versions of ChatGPT and other tools will fix such problems when answering complex and nuanced questions.

AI in an organisational knowledge context

There is however a more fundamental issue with the use of such tools within organisations – whether public or private – that are aiming to become learning organisations and develop  a body of trusted knowledge.

Chinese walls, confidentiality and other factors mean we cannot simply let rip with open access to the information held in organisations.  And while quantity is useful to AI it is much  less important to an expert than the quality of the information and insight being parsed.

Let’s consider a scenario.

A multi-national consulting engineering company has done thousands of projects around the world. It partners with diverse international and local companies – experts in specific disciplines such as new materials, acoustics, carbon accounting, and much more – in design, project management and construction 

On the one hand, the consulting company wants its intellectual property respected, and in many cases, kept confidential. Clients and partners want the same for their contributions to projects. A complex Venn diagram emerges of private and shared information, and the insights (knowledge) that emerges from these experiences. Document management systems are used to apply both open access but also need-to-know policies, and often at quite a granular level.

Documents never get printed and left on trains because people who by virtue of their role need access to certain collections of information, get it – by design. Documents that are needed to be retained and never unintentionally lost, never are – by design. This is just basic content management good practice – notwithstanding the inability of Governments and many companies to apply these 20th Century capabilities effectively.

The issue for AI is that it would need to be able to navigate these complex access rights when providing answers to questions. The same question would have to give different answers to different people; even within the same organisation if chinese walls are not to be breached. This is the Achille’s heal of AI if it is to be commercialised in an institutional setting.

I am grateful to a relative (Jon Hayter) for making the following observation:

 Isaac Asimov clearly gave some serious thought to this when he wrote “I,Robot” 

At one point when the hero is speaking to a holographic version of his deceased mentor the programme gives him information but can only answer specific questions. At one point when he has made a statement based on his own thought processing the hologram says “That, is the right question”

On the other hand, the consulting organisation also wants to parade their experience and say that it uses its unique collective know-how on past projects in the conduct of new ones. This is in part through the tacit knowledge of their expert employees, as well as the codified experience within the organisation (guidelines, technique papers, anonymised project summaries, etc.) embodied in the lingua franca of knowledge: documents.

Resolving this tension between confidentiality and reuse is part of the art of working in complex organisations, and especially in consulting.

It begs a question as to the source set of information that an AI tool can or should use to answer a queries like:

We’ve been asked to design and manage the construction of a new theatre in north east China that will be a  showcase for regional Chinese culture, and an exemplar of sustainable construction and operation. What projects should we learn from and who would we ideally partner with?

Financial constraints, unrealistic expectations, political interference and resulting scope creep will be at least as important as innovative design and engineering, and all have to be factored into the answer.

Much of what is most useful as source material will be the tacit knowledge that is often not written down, and by definition, unparseable.  This is gold dust.

To counter the ‘not written down’ issue, some organisations conduct informal review interviews and workshops at the end of each project to tease out insights. For those enlightened consultancies that actually make time to do this, these reviews would aim to provide not only an overview of what was done (the what), but also why it was done that way.

Those candid reflections; those serendipitous encounters; those lightbulb moments – none of which appeared in the project file – might be scribbled in notebooks or might surface in those informal post-project reviews. Sometimes it has to wait till the exit interview or even retirement (to save the blushes)!

As things stand, only true experts can navigate the intersection between technical know-how, personal testimony, historical and current context, emotional factors, politics, deep insights, and much more, that explain the why’s and wherefore’s of key decisions on complex endeavours. 

Would ChatGPT conjure up a Sidney Opera House design out of the blue if nothing remotely similar existed beforehand?

You know the answer.

That does not mean that the AI of the future cannot play a role as an assistant in these endeavours – taking on some of the mundane tasks that exist in the curation of information and even knowledge.

For example, in the business of applying subject-specific metadata based on controlled vocabularies, AI could certainly prove a powerful assistant by making time-consuming tasks more efficient, if not quite a complete replacement for the expert knowledge curator.

However, I am confident that for the foreseeable future, it will not replace the true expert within an organisation.

Your job is safe.

(c) Richard W. Erskine, May 2023

Update a: A survey by Nesta UK of Heat Pump users published 23 May 2023 finds high levels of satisfaction with heat pumps, see Note [7]

Update b: Following requests from some readers for more information on the data, an Appendix has been added to provide details of the data collection, analysis of the COP and SCOP achieved, and a comparison of running costs pre and post the heat pump installation.

Here is a plot spoiler: my wife and I are delighted with the results of living in our listed Cotswold stone home heated by an air-source heat pump since December 2021. I want to share our story as a corrective to the belief, widely expressed in the media, that it would be impossible to do what we did: self-evidently, this is untrue.

In case you want answers to the burning questions I often hear, I’ve collected a few (see Note [1]).

Here’s our story.

Beginnings

Twenty five years ago my wife and I bought an old Grade 2 Listed property with friends and split it in two.  It was a bargain; ignoring the subsequent years of work! Renovations of sash windows and shutters, valley gutter lead work, lime mortar of the end terrace, and so much more, followed over the years.

It turned out the party wall used to be an external wall when the property was first built in 1805, but about a decade later the mill-owner who acquired it wanted something much more substantial. He extended the small cottage outwards and upwards into what was advertised later as a “capital messuage”. Not a property I’d ever imagined owning, but somehow we found ourselves as custodians of this beautiful property.

When we arrived there was a higgledy piggledy array of partitioned rooms created for the care home it had been used for prior to its closure. We set about restoring it to its former Georgian glory. But there is always something to do on an old house, and the journey continues. That’s why it always amuses me when people talk about ‘retrofit’ as if it is some fast and easy project, because from my point of view, maintaining the fabric of a property is always a process not an event; a process that never really ends.

We couldn’t find any way to split the existing water, gas and electricity utilities in two, externally or internally. So we had to start again with new services, that were routed in at the back of the property, so as not to impact on the Georgian front elevation. Both households were essentially starting with a blank canvas and put in completely new plumbing and gas boilers. We called our plumber ‘Danny the ferret’ because of his ability to get into impossible spaces and never leave a mess. The small new gas boiler could now heat our now separate property in less than an hour; like a Ferrari, able to go from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds. 

Little did we know then, but Danny did such a great job on the pipework and radiators that when last year we had an air-source heat pump fitted, the plumbing through the house turned out to be fit for purpose (big enough pipes in the right places). No new copper piping required except to connect the new equipment, and only one third of the double-panel (with fins) radiators he fitted needed fattening a little to be replaced by triple-panel radiators.

And those that were upsized (like the one illustrated) were a bit fatter but the same height and width, so fitted into their positions without any need to change the pumbing. This in effect increases the surface area of the radiator, allowing for a lower flow temperature to still heat the room to its target temperature.

Exploring opinions on heat pumps

While I am no laggard, I’m also generally not an ‘early adopter’ of anything, even when I believe its the right thing to do. It took me a decade longer than most to switch from a film to a digital camera because I was unconvinced they were good enough. I tend to prefer for others to learn the lessons and pass them on. I like it also when there is an inevitable reduction in costs as a market matures a little. So I did get a digital camera finally, 20 years ago now, and it’s been great, but I was hardly an advocate for ‘new tech’.

My old friend Chris runs a successful business, Yorkshire Energy Systems (YES), installing solar and heat pump systems (amongst others), and had already been giving me an education on heat pumps.  I thought we should consider one when we had to replace our existing system, but again, I was in no rush, I needed time to explore the subject.

I invited Chris down to Nailsworth to give a talk to the local climate group I helped run (Nailsworth Climate Action Network), and also invited leaders of local political parties of all persuasions from the Stroud Valleys, including the then MP for Stroud, David Drew for Labour, and the prospective Conservative candidate, Siobhan Baillie (who in a subsequent election became our MP). 

The talk went down extremely well – Chris is a brilliant speaker.

Chris later gave another talk for us online during Covid. This also went down well and was recorded, then posted on our website: What if we could all heat our buildings with renewable technologies? It addresses most of the myths you hear about heat pumps, and a number of people have told me how it helped make up their mind, and go for a heat pump.

I have a good natural science background, so I was not in any doubt about the soundness of the 19th century physics that underpin the workings of a heat pump, which we all blithely rely on every day (most people have a fridge, which pumps heat from inside the fridge to its outside). But understanding the science is rarely enough, even for ex-scientists!

While in one ear Chris was telling me that any building that can be heated with a gas boiler can be heated with a heat pump, in the other ear, other friends, including experts in insulating old buildings, told me that ‘deep retrofit’ was an essential precursor to heating an old building with a heat pump, especially an air-source heat pump. Doubts crept in.

I also cannot have been totally immune to the drip drip effect of reports on the BBC and elsewhere. Heat pumps were first demonstrated in 1830 and the theory was in place in 1852 [Note 2], yet this is what Roger Harrabin said in a 2014 report on a water-source heat pump installed to heat the historic house of Plas Newydd in Wales (science facepalm warning):

It’s barely believable that this sea water has enough heat to warm anything, it’s pretty chilly at this time of year, but yet, thanks to an extraordinary technology called a heat exchanger, it’s the sea that’s going to heat this house.

But cold water contains enormous amounts of energy. Thermal energy is just the jostling of molecules. So the water Roger Harrabin was feeling, say at 7°C, is a sweltering 280 Kelvin (on the absolute temperature scale), with no shortage of jostling molecules from which energy can be extracted. Similarly for air. If you stand in front of an air-source heat pump the air blown out is colder than the surrounding air by a few degrees, because the heat pump has extracted thermal energy from it (using the same tech that a fridge uses to extract thermal energy from anything you put in the fridge). This is more than enough to heat a home.

Yet journalists and commentators have continued to assert that heat pumps can’t heat older buildings without substantial insulation work. Our national broadcaster (the BBC) is culpable, despite its duty to “inform, educate and entertain”. Most recently, during the 8th March 2023 episode of Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 programme, the host expressed dismay that a radiator was lukewarm. What hope is there when a key programme is failing to “inform and educate” in this way. A hint: it is the thermometer in the room that tells how warm the room is, not any preconceptions on how hot a radiator should be.

Roger Harrabin, Jeremy Vine and many others in the media do a great disservice by sharing their incredulity, and repeating unfounded beliefs about heat pumps.

Why did we decide to go for it?

For us there was a stark choice we faced that forced us to stop vacillating, and certainly stop listening to the naysayers:

• Firstly, the 25 year old gas boiler was creaking and behaving a bit oddly even after a service. There was no ‘ripping out’ as the tabloids and others emotively campaign against, merely the natural end of life that could no longer be serviced to stay in operation much longer.

• Secondly, I had seen the data from the Energy Saving Trust, and it was quite clear that getting off using gas to heat our home and replacing it with a heat pump would massively reduce our annual carbon footprint (as I wrote about in Are Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHPs) a Silver Bullet?). This is true even after allowing for an electricity grid that was not yet fully powered by wind, solar and other alternatives to fossil fuels. As a family who wanted to do their bit to reduce the impact of our household on global warming, this was a pivotal moment. If we didn’t take the plunge now, we’d be locking in a high carbon footprint for another 20 or so years with a new gas boiler.

• Thirdly, the idea that we must carry out extensive insulation (as the The Retrofit Academy claims) before even considering a heat pump, was simply impractical.  Even if we could have afforded the eye-wateringly expensive costs of ‘deep retrofit’, Listed Building approval would not have been forthcoming. Imagine wrapping this Georgian splendour in external wall insulation, or removing coving and panelling to somehow fit internal wall insulation.

• Finally, at the time, the domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) was still available but due to close at the end of March 2022, so we needed to get a heat pump system in by then if we were to benefit from the scheme.

Going for it – plans and preparations

So we made the decision in July 2021 to ‘go for it!’. I prepared an outline plan, checklist, questions, etc. We wanted to do it right first time.

I prepared a plan of the house showing the floor area and volume of each room, existing radiators, etc. We bought seven digital thermometers to distribute around the house to ‘benchmark’ how it behaved with the existing gas boiler. I did calculations using current bills and ‘what if’ estimates of future gas and electricity prices to determine whether we would break even on running costs. I remember saying to my wife “gas prices are likely to go up faster than electricity prices sometime in the future. So while our running costs may struggle to compete with cheap gas today, with the current ratio of units costs, that’ll change sooner or later, as the grid gets greener”. Little did I know then that a combination of Putin and a super efficient heat pump would make it sooner, not later.

The biggest challenge was our living room with its large bay window – a thing of beauty but also a significant challenge in terms of heat loss. When the sun is up, even in winter, the room receives a lot of extra warmth (so-called ‘solar gain’), but when the sun goes down, we have to use shutters to reduce heat loss. Not ideal, but sometimes compromises have to be made.

The project forced us to finally clear out the loft. About 100 boxes from our two daughters and us needed sorting, many unsorted from when we had moved in 1998! After several dusty visits to the loft we cleared it, cleaned it, then beefed up the insulation with 300mm depth of Knauf insulation rolls.

The first thing to be grateful to the heat pump for is that it forced us to clear the loft when in our late 60s, rather than having to face it in a decade or two when our knees will have gone. It was such a relief, I can’t tell you.

We had already done what we could to reduce draughts. Our beautiful sash windows could not be replaced even if we’d wanted to. When we had a major servicing job done on them (thanks to a local firm Simply Sash Windows with expertise in historic buildings). We had discreet brushes fitted that paid back immediately with a significant reduction in draughts (when our local climate group did a local ‘retrofit fair’ we included short video snippets on our website to explore options, such as for draught proofing).

For other homes and householders there may be good reasons for carrying out more extensive insulation and other ‘retrofit’ measures. However, bear in mind that if the objective is to get off gas, and thereby reduce your carbon footprint significantly, you really should leave enough in your budget to finance a heat pump system. I discussed this in an essay Insulate Britain: Yes, but by how much? that has attracted a fair amount of mostly positive attention.

For building regulation reasons when we took on the property, we’d had fire strips with brushes fitted around existing internal doors, and it turns out this was very helpful in reducing the turnover of air in the house, and so reducing heat loss.

We contacted two companies specialising in heat pumps. My old friend Chris’s company YES in Yorkshire, and a local company CEG (Cotswold Energy Group) which was recommended to me by a customer of theirs in Nailsworth. Both firms have a proven track record of installing high quality systems (my research assured me). 

We had approval from the Listed Building Officer in August 2021 to proceed, based on outline plans I submitted for locating the external unit well out of sight at the rear of the property. The new services we got installed 25 years ago ran up the back of the building and into a boiler room that could be repurposed for the internal units required for the new system. We had a few lucky breaks like that. The new hot water tank would just fit. Another lucky break.

The surveying of the house is a crucial stage in the process and ought to be whatever heating system is installed. Overall, these were the checkpoints I ticked off on the project prior to installation:

• Listed Building approval ✔︎
• Electrical ‘load survey’ and mains fuse; existing 80 Amps would be fine ✔︎
• Water pressure checks ✔︎
• Sizing of pipework in the house ✔︎
• Cleared loft and installed new beefed up insulation ✔︎
• Sorted out draughts in windows and doors ✔︎
• EPC certificate ✔︎
• RHI requirements met ✔︎
• Check by installers of suitability of platform outside for external units ✔︎
• Check space inside for internal units ✔︎

We were now ready to proceed and made our requirements very clear. For example, I said I was not interested in a hybrid system with gas as a backup; that seemed a bit like buying a petrol car in 1910 and having towing arms for a horse, just in case. A few people tried that, but it didn’t catch on.

The instructions was clear: size the system properly to meet our requirements and those of any subsequent owner (including one who might have 4 teenage children who shower a lot).

The two quotes were very similar in terms of proposed design and costs. In the end, we felt that everything else being equal, going local swung it, in case we needed any call outs to sort out teething issues and future servicing. Chris felt this was an important factor to be taken into consideration.

System design

With a big enough heat pump you can heat any building that a gas boiler can heat. Geneva City Hall has been heated by a water-source heat pump since 1928, and a large air-source heat pump at Hillpark Drive, Glasgow has been heating 350 homes since 2017.

The system design followed MCS standards (Microgeneration Certification Scheme), which stipulates that the system should be able to achieve at least 21°C in living rooms, 18°C in hallways and bedrooms, and 22°C in bathrooms; and be able to do this on the nominal coldest day of the year for your location. For our system and location, that meant that the heat pump itself, and radiators, were sized to achieve these targets with a flow temperature of 50°C, when it was -1.6°C outside. The ‘flow temperature’ refers to the temperature of the heated water pumped to the radiators.

It is crucial that the assessment is done room by room. If just one large room has an undersized radiator, the room may not reach its desired temperature at the expected flow temperature, undermining expectations, for no fault of the heat source itself. In our case, only a third of the radiators

The heat pump itself must be able to achieve the peak heating demand for the whole house.

Because the largest heat pump available at the time was just short of the peak demand estimated for our home, we ended up with a so-called ‘cascade’ system, with two smaller heat pumps working in parallel, in conjunction with a buffer tank. In total, it had more peak power than we needed, but not so much as to cause an issue.

In a way, the so-called ‘cascade’ system (actually not in series but two in parallel) turned out to have the benefit that when it was comparatively warm outside, only one of these units needs to be in operation at any time. The clever electronics made sure that each one shared the work equally over the year.

The only issue was that both firms were maxed out with work because others like us were trying to get things done before the end of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI). In addition the Covid pandemic had disrupted supply chains for heat pumps, like everything else, so kit was also scarce.

The installation

Consequently, the installation was finally done at the start of December 2021, taking just over a week. It was a larger than normal system for a larger than normal house, but the principles are the same, whatever the property.

The twin Mitsubishi Ecodans were placed on a platform we created outside the old boiler room:

The new internal setup looked as follows:

You may think that this looks complicated, but it is not a complexity that you need to deal with or even to understand, any more than you need to understand how a modern car works. In many ways, the increase in sophistication of systems (be they cars or heat pumps) reflects their ability to be ‘easier to drive’, extremely efficient, environmentally aware, and with very little in the way of maintenance to worry about. Hardware and software combining forces!

The installation process went as follows:

• Introduction to installation team, and logistics agreed
• Old gas boiler and tank removed
• Existing pipes and radiators flushed
• Heat pump and other kit moved into position
• Plumbing in of kit (heat pump, hot water tank, etc.)
• Plumbing in the few new radiators required 
• Heat pump connected to electrical power
• Control system system installed 
• One wireless thermostat placed in living room, set to 21°C
• Various control setups competed
• Setback thermostat by 3°C to 18°C between 10pm and 6am
• Weather compensation setup
• System put into operation
• Radiators ‘balanced’ to ensure optimal heat distribution
• Metering installed for flow/return heat and electricity usage
• Certificates produced for MCS compliance

In addition to the assessor/ designer who did the design we had two plumbers who did the physical work and ‘plumbing in’ of the new kit, followed by an electrician who did the setting up of the heat pump (see ‘The Team’, Note [3]).

As it turned out, only on a few very cold days (in practice, a minimum of -5°C) did the flow temperature ever get as high as 50°C (the maximum design ‘flow temperature’ for our system). The flow temperature is best kept as low as possible, while still doing its job (see Note [4]).

The results

So how did things turn out?

We get the space heating we need and plenty of hot water. Our hot showers have never been better. We have bills that of course have gone up due to the energy crisis, but less than they would have done if we’d stayed on gas.

A key measure of the success of a heat pump installation is the performance it actually achieves in practice – as opposed to some published figure that assumes an idealised situation.

For any heating system one needs to think of the performance of the whole system. In addition to the heating system, there are the radiators and fabric of the building, because it is all these together that determine how efficiently rooms are maintained at a desired temperature.

For our heat pump, performance was assessed using the ‘seasonal coefficient of performance’ (or SCOP), which is the heat energy delivered during the year (in kilowatt-hours (kWh)) divided by the electrical energy used by the heat pump (in kWh).

For our system, the SCOP achieved in the year to March 2023 was 3.3, or 330% in percentage terms; pretty impressive I feel. That means that for every 1 kWh of electricity we put in, we get 3.3 kWh of heat out of the heat pump (2.3 kWh of this is harvested from the ambient air). By comparison, the old gas boiler was only 72% efficient, meaning that for every 1 kWh of primary energy in the gas put in we got 0.72 kWh of heat out.

This means that even though the unit electricity price is greater than the unit gas price by a factor of over 3, this is more than offset by the relative performance of the new heat pump compared to the boiler it replaced. So our running costs are less by comparison.

This result is totally at odds with the naysayers we hear incessantly in the media that they are difficult to install, won’t work on older buildings without substantial insulation measures, or will cost a fortune to run. None of this received wisdom has been true in our case.

Our experience is in line with the Catapult study (2021/22) that concluded that All housing types are suitable for heat pumps, finds Electrification of Heat project

The project has not identified any particular type or age of property that cannot have a successful heat pump installation. The suggestion that there are particular home archetypes in Britain that are “unsuitable” for heat pumps is not supported by project experience and data.

So I don’t believe our experience is in any sense exceptional or to be treated as anecdotal. Rather, it demonstrates that even in a building that is ‘hard to treat’, as the experts would call it, there is no reason an air-source heat pump cannot be successfully installed and operated, with a little care and preparation.

I hope that our story provides an illuminating corrective to the media naysayers, and others who should know better.

If it gives encouragement to those wishing to get off gas for whatever reason, it will have done its job.

If you are doing it to lower your carbon footprint, then whatever your lifestyle, it will be one of the most impactful decisions you will ever make in your lifetime.

© Richard W. Erskine, 2023

If you liked this essay, you might also be interested in Insulate Britain: Yes, but by how much?

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NOTES

[1] Burning Questions (and Answers)

Q. So can you really heat a large old house with an air-source heat pump, without ‘deep’ retrofit?

A. Yes. 

Q. But does it cost more to run than than if you’d stuck with a gas boiler?

A. No,  comparatively it costs less. Of course, gas and electricity unit prices have both gone up, but gas proportionally more and the efficiency of the heat pump trumps the differential in electricity-to-gas unit price. See Will my heating bill increase if I get a heat pump? another essay I have written, where I show this in detail.

Q. But it’s really expensive to install surely?

A. It costs less than a new kitchen that is mostly MDF and air, and yet we all seem happy to pay for a new kitchen that the next owner of the house will quite possibly “rip out”. The heat pump will probably last for 25 years and will over its lifetime save you more in carbon emissions than anything else, for a typical householder at least 3 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year compared to gas with the electricity grid as at present (and even more as the grid gets greener). Octopus Energy are creating a market for a low cost heat pump installation, that may meet the needs of a majority of householders, if not outlier cases such as mine.

Q. But can we go green using biogas?

A. Burning stuff is so last century! And as Prof. David Mackay said, if you have some gas it is much more efficient to send it to a gas turbine to create electricity to power a heat pump in your home than to burn the gas in your home. The same would be true of biogas, an idea that has been heavily criticised by independent expert Dr Richard Lowes , and flies in the face of the clear recommendations of the Climate Change Committee, see Note [6].

Q. Should we hold on for hydrogen boilers?

A. No. Using ‘green hydrogen’ from excess renewable electricity to make hydrogen to burn in our homes would require 6 times as many wind turbines than if we simply sent the electricity direct to home to power heat pumps. Hydrogen will be in demand in hard to decarbonise sectors including fertiliser production, etc. Anyone who gets a hydrogen boiler will be locked into expensive hydrogen. The Climate Change Committee expect hydrogen to play only a niche role in heating (see Note [6]).

Q. Did you have to change all your radiators, and pipework?

A. No. The pipework did not need changing and only 1/3rd of the radiators needed fattening a little (from 2-panel to 3-panel); their width and height were unchanged.

Q. Is it noisy?

A. Not at all, even standing close by. If birds are singing you can’t hear it at all.

Q. Can it heat hot (tap) water?

A. Yes. It does that in shortish bursts, and because the hot water tank is under mains pressure, the showers are now much better.

Q. Does it use an immersion heater some of the time?

A. Not for day-to-day water heating. It does use an immersion heater periodically to boost the tank’s temperature from 50°C (the target temperature, achieved with the heat pump) to 60°C (required to kill the organisms); no point flogging the heat pump for this little job. This deals with the risk of Legionella, which is a requirement under current regulations (even though the sealed nature of the system makes it an extremely low risk). In any typical month, the legionella ‘purge’ occurs only for a few hours overnight every two weeks. It has very little impact on the measured performance or the heating bills.

Q. But my plumber said you can’t get the water hot enough?

A. Untrue. Because who wants the hot water from a tap to be more than the new building regulation of 48°C, which a heat pump can easily achieve. Why would we want young or older relatives and visitors to scold themselves?

Q. My plumber also said that radiators never get hot enough?

A. Your plumber is mistaken. Again the new building regulations (whatever the source of heat) are that the ‘flow’ temperature should not exceed 55°C. If your room needs to get to 21°C say, then (depending on the external temperature) you may only need 35°C, 40°C or 50°C (in the most cold days), to get the room to 21°C. Not as fast as if the flow temperature was 75°C, but just as assuredly, and more cost effectively. Your skin temperature is say 34°C, so a radiator at 40°C or even 50°C might feel lukewarm, but that is irrelevant. It’s what the thermometer on the wall says that counts. Don’t touch, look!

Q. Was the project disruptive?

A. Not the fitting of the heat pump, which took just over a week. For us, the most challenging thing was clearing the loft, in order to increase the loft insulation to modern standards, and get the grant.

Q. Do you have smart controls around the house?

A. No. A well designed system (whatever the source), which includes properly sized radiators and weather compensation, will always ensure that if the single thermostat in your living room is reading the target temperature there, the other rooms will also be at their target temperature. No fiddling with controls in rooms or zones. By keeping it simple in this way, we actually can forget we have a heat pump at all. It works reliably, without us ever having to fiddle with any dials or thermostats. We just let it do its thing.

You will have many more questions no doubt, but these are typical of the ones people raise with me, so I hope the answers have proved illuminating.

[2] History of heat and heat pumps

19th Century scientists developed the ‘kinetic theory of heat’.

They established that ‘heat’ in substances was no more than the jostling of molecules, and the higher the temperature, the greater the average speed of their jostling. Not only that, but that this jostling only ceases at ‘absolute zero’, which is -273.15 degrees on the Celsius scale. So the water Roger Harrabin was feeling, say at 7°C, was a sweltering 280 Kelvin (the name subsequently given to this new scale). No shortage of jostling molecules from which energy can be extracted. A balmy -5°C for winter air passing through an air source heat pump – no problem – it being a balmy 268 Kelvin.

As has been noted:

The first working compression–expansion refrigerator (or heat pump) was built by Jacob Perkins in the 1830s. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) first proposed using heat pumps for space heating in 1852.

For those interested in learning more about the history, Boltzmann’s Atom: The Great Debate That Launched a Revolution in Physics is a great biography of one the principal scientists who shaped this theory, and fought a long battle with naysayers such as Mach who couldn’t bring himself to believe in the existence of atoms.

[3] The Team, for our project overall were:

• Senior manager, who provided oversight at every stage to ensure a quality delivery: during assessment, proposal, installation and hand-over.

• The assessor/ designer. She was in her 20s, a graduate with a 1st Class degree in Geophysical Sciences who’d decided to not go into the oil & gas industry, and instead become a heat pump consultant. She did the surveying of the property, estimating heat loss for every room, and preparing a detailed design and costing for the system.

• There were two plumbers who did the physical work, both young (also in their 20s). They first removed the existing boiler and hot water tank. They then got the units in place on the day, including a heat pump (actually two in our case) that had to be lumbered up a steep path to reach the back of the house (built into the side of a hill); a hot water tank; water pumps etc. They then connected all the pipework to the units. Because they were part of a team, these plumbers didn’t need a deep knowledge of heat pumps, just the principles of low flow temperature systems. They drained and flushed the existing plumbing in the house, and found no issues with it holding the slightly higher water pressure needed for a heat pump. Only a third of the radiators needed up-sizing to triple panel ones – and given all the dire warnings I’d heard (false as it turned out) I was pleasantly surprised by this. Once the system was operating, they ‘balanced’ the system, so heat was as evenly distributed as possible.

• There was one electrician, who not only did the electrical connections, but also setup the controls for the heat pump(s). The so-called ‘weather compensation’ is a crucial part of the setup, as it optimises the efficiency of the system. The temperature of the water being pumped around the radiators is kept as low as needed to deliver the space heating. We also decided to have the heat pump on continuously but set back a few degrees at night. This meant that the heat pump was not having to work too hard in the morning to reach the target temperature in rooms. With our thick walls, it would not be a good idea for these to cool down too much. Paradoxically, we use less energy this way than if the system went off completely over night.

I explore the question of how we scale up capacity in heat pumps in How hard will it be to scale up heat pump capacity in the UK?, another essay of mine.

[4] Flow temperature is best kept as low as possible, that does the job

The larger the surface area of the radiator, the lower the flow temperature needed to deliver the required amount of heat. This is why underfloor heating is often able to operate at a mere 35°C. But even for a system like ours, the flow temperature can be relatively much lower than expected. For example, in the last 7 days, the external temperature has ranged from 8°C to 11°C, and the flow temperature has never exceeded 36°C.

Which is why the talk of ‘high temperature heat pumps’ to deal with difficult buildings strikes me as a non sequiter.

In any case, building regulations that came into force in June 2022 in the UK mean that all new systems must have a flow temperature no higher than 55°C, whatever the heat source, so those trying to flog high temperature heat pumps are barking up the wrong tree in my view. 

Just design the low flow temperature system properly. Job done.

[5] Performance of air-source heat pump based system

The performance for the system relates to the heat pump, radiators and the fabric of the building itself. Any one of these can influence how good the measured performance is. The performance over a given period (say a day) is calculated as the ratio of the heat energy that the system delivers (in kilowatt hours, kWh), and the electrical energy used by the system (in kWh). Because a heat pump harvests energy from the ambient environment (air, ground or water) warmed by the sun, the performamce will be greater than one (or 100%).

For space heating the performance gets less the greater the difference is between the outside temperature and the required internal temperature. We follow a common practice of calling the performance measure the ‘coefficient of performance’ (or COP) and over a whole year, calling it the ‘seasonal coefficient of performance’ (or SCOP).

A 2013 Study by Energy Saving Trust – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/analysis-from-the-first-phase-of-the-energy-saving-trust-s-heat-pump-field-trial – reckoned that the SCOP for an air-source heat pump is typically 2.5 (or 250%), but as we have seen, it is more common to get a SCOP of over 3 (300%) in 2023, using a modern heat pump and practices.

But what about the daily performance? Well, for our system, even when it was -5°C (colder than the nominal coldest day -1.6°C) the daily COP was 2.1 (210%) and over the year, the daily COP got as high as 5.4 (540%).

The SCOP we achieved of 3.3 (330%) was extremely good, in our view.

Another way to measure performance is the kilowatt hours required to heat one square metre per annum (kWh/m².a). The average British home needs over 130 kWh/m².a, but a new house built to Passivhaus standards would need just 15 kWh/m².a. The Association of Environmentally Conscious Builders aim for 50 kWh/m².a when doing retrofit on existing buildings, with a “certifier approved exemption” 100 kWh/m².a for difficult older buildings. Their standards for doing retrofit can be found here: https://aecb.net/introduction-to-the-aecb-carbonlite-building-and-retrofit-standards/

Our building was using delivered energy of 123 kWh/m².a to heat the house when using the gas boiler. After modest retrofit ‘fabric’ measures and moving to the air-source heat pump, the demand has reduced to about 114 kWh/m².a (not far off the AECB higher “exemption” of 110 kWh/m².a, although I should stress we have not asked an AECB member to review our fabric measures). The reduction in heat loss due to the loft insulation is possibly offset by the 24/7 operations of the heat pump (with overnight setback). See the Appendix for more details.

Nevertheless, I am convinced that the gentler heating with the heat pump (rather than the wild swings we had with the gas boiler) gives rise to improved comfort and energy management overall.

[6] Heat pumps will be primary tool in decarbonising heating

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) in their 6th Carbon Budget stated (based on very detailed modelling of scenarios, costs and risks):

‘By 2030 37% of public and commercial heat demand is met by low-carbon sources. Of this low-carbon heat demand 65% is met by heat pumps, 32% district heating and 3% biomass. By 2050 all heat demand is met by low-carbon sources of which 52% is heat pumps, 42% is district heat, 5% is hydrogen boilers and around 1% is new direct electric heating.’

Other experts agree. LETI conclude that heat pumps are a far superior option for home heating than hydrogen; see their report Hydrogen: A decarbonisation route for heat in buildings?”, LETI, February 2021

And the district heating itself can be provided by commercial scale heat pumps. Some can have a heat power rating of 48,000 kW (compared to a typical 3 bedroom home needing 6kW) – see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65321487. Since district heating will often be needed in towns which often have a river flowing through them, or are by the sea, water-sourced heat pumps can be used.

So in practice, combining the domestic and commercial/ district heat pump provision, heat pumps would eventually provide the great majority of the heat ti dwellings of all kinds.

[7] Nesta UK, ‘Heat pumps: a user survey’, 23 May 2023 is a large and comprehensive survey of user satisfaction with heat pumps. Find it here: https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/heat-pumps-a-user-survey/ and a Guardian piece about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/30/heat-pumps-more-than-80-per-cent-of-households-in-great-britain-satisfied-with-system

Deputy Director of Nesta, Katy King, provided some summary points from survey on Twitter:

• Satisfaction with heat pumps is high and, overall, satisfaction levels between heat pump and gas boiler users are very similar.

• But heat pumps users were MORE satisfied with their running costs than boiler users.

• People who installed a heat pump into their own home were the most satisfied (81% as or more satisfied than previous heating system)

• When you include homeowners who didn’t commission the heat pump themselves in the sample, 73% of heat pump owners are as satisfied or more satisfied with their heat pump compared to their previous heating system.

• Satisfaction with heat pumps is just as high in older properties – People living in Victorian houses were just as satisfied with their heat pump as people in mid-century properties or modern homes

• As the overwhelming majority of heat pump users are satisfied with space and hot water heating, safety, reliability and noise – it’s time to put to rest outdated concerns about the heat pumps.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to thank my old friend Chris Wilde, who is Managing Director of Yorkshire Energy Systems (YES), for educating me on heat pumps over the last few years, and showing me the art of the possible. Always witty and wise, I have learned so much from Chris.

Also, thanks to the team from Cotswold Energy Group (CEG), who were very professional at all stages in the project. I’d like in particular to thank Zoe Phillips for her advice and support.

Thanks to Marilyn, my wife, for reviewing the essay and providing improvements, but most of all, for being my companion on this journey.

Any errors in the essay are all mine.

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APPENDIX – A Closer Look at the Data

A number of people have asked me to provide additional data on the performance of the system. I was keen to keep the essay accessible and non-technical but I appreciate that some readers may want more. So here it is – for those that want more!

Data prior to heat pump when house was heated by a gas boiler

Prior to the Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP), the house was heated with a gas boiler dating from 1998 (both space and water heating).

The house is a large semi-detached dwelling with a floor area of 251 m² over three floors.

Prior to 2020 we had done what we could to the house to help reduce heat loss, including:

• fixing guttering
• fixing lime mortar on external walls
• adding brushes to sash windows to reduce draughts
• in a back area fixing insulation of the pitched room of a small extension room

But as to the main building, it is Grade 2 Listed and so certain measures (such as wall insulation). As part of the move to a heat pump (and as a condition for getting the RHI grant), we did add beefed up insulation to the main building’s loft in 2021.

In 2020 the gas usage was 45,567 kWh and cost £1,409 (with an average unit cost of 3p per kWh; including standing charges).

I estimated that 94% of this was for space heating, which gives  42,833 kWh/yr for space heating. But allowing for the old gas boiler being only 72% efficient (see Appendix Note [ii]), the actual house heat demand for 2020 was less, at 30,840 kWh.

This yields a unit heating demand of (30,840 kWh/a)/ (251 m²) = 123 kWh/m².a – when comparing homes this is a very useful measure to use because one can compare two houses of different sizes if one uses this measure of energy per unit area.

Now, given one estimate for the average heat demand for UK is 133 kWh/ m².a, it seems that my old house was already doing quite well – being slightly better than the UK national average per unit area.

Data collection

Most heat pumps come with consoles and / or Apps to enable a householder to monitor energy usage and performance. The Mitsubishi Ecodan does have this capability.

So normally, finding out the Coefficient Of Performance for a heat pump over a day, week, month, or any other period, should be easy and out of the box. Our situation was unusual and more complex than most people would have to experience for reasons I will explain.

In our setup we had two 11.2 kW Ecodans, that work in parallel (what Mitsubishi confusingly term a ‘cascade’ system), so that the peak heat output is 22.4 kW, although the peak heat loss estimated was a bit less than this (at 18.6 kW when the external temperature was at the nominal coldest day of the year, at -1.6°C)

To cut a long story short, it turns out that Mitsubishi’s marketing blurb was wrong and the standard metering features didn’t work with a ‘cascade’ setup as they do for a single unit (which is the most common situation). However, Cotswold Energy Group were brilliant and remedied the situation by installing 3rd party meters to enable performance to be measured and recorded. It did mean we ended up with a slightly more complex and bespoke setup. The good news is that it all works fine and now I don’t have to worry about it – I just read the numbers off a table or graph.

The heat meters get rate-of-flow data from the pumps and temperature data from gauges that were fitted to the ‘flow’ and ‘return’ pipes. The temperature drop between the warm flow and cooler return, multiplied by the flow rate, gives an instantaneous measurement of the heat being delivered to the house (e.g. to the radiators, but when in hot water heating mode, to the hot water tank).

These are the two heat monitoring meters used:

In addition, there was a meter for each heat pump measuring how much electricity they were using:

These 4 meters were then wired up to a data aggregation unit (Teracomsystems TCW260) which does the mathematics to work out the COP for each heat pump (and for the system overall). This local wifi connected unit stores the data over time, and can be accessed by a browser to produce reports, which can be configured in different ways.

I am able to download the data into a spreadsheet to then do further analysis if the raw reports are not quite enough to answer all my questions.

I also manually read the data for a while and did the calculations manually, just to satisfy myself that the system was setup correctly to give me the answers I needed. 

In addition to the heat pump data, I also bought some digital thermometers to place around the house to assure myself that each room was reaching its design target temperature.

When doing visits of people thinking of getting a heat pump, I will get them to place their hand on a radiator and ask them “is that on?”. Oh, it doesn’t feel very hot? They often reply. I then get a thermal gun (cheap to buy – its not a camera – and a useful tool) and check the temperature of the radiator. Say, it is a typical 40°C. I then check the temperature of the palm of their hand – I typically get 34°C (a bit less than a human’s core temperature). “You see, not much different, so not surprising that it doesn’t feel ‘hot’ to touch!”. I then direct their gaze to the digital thermometer on the wall – “what does that say?”. Oh, it’s 21°C! “Indeed, just as it was designed to achieve, 40°C in this radiator is enough to heat this room to 21°C – so don’t be misled by touching the radiator and assume that tells you anything useful, it doesn’t”

By the way, there is just one thermostat in the house (in the living room). The design of the system ensures that when the sitting room is meeting its target temperature (21°C), then the other rooms will meet their temperature. So no need for thermostats or fancy controls on each radiator or in each room. I don’t even touch the TRVs. The system was ‘balanced’ by the installers, and we then just leave it alone.

The heat pump will adjust the flow temperature to deliver the right amount of heat to this and other rooms. The colder it is outside, the higher the flow temperature required and delivered. This is called ‘weather compensation’. In our system, the flow temperature never needs to get higher than 50°C. Most of the time it is a lot less than this. This ensures that the efficiency of the system is maximised (which also means the running costs are correspondingly reduced).

Needless to say, the system has performed brilliantly, thanks to the quality work done by Cotswold Energy Group in the design, installation and commissioning of the system.

We basically now do very little. No twiddling of dials. We just let the system ‘do its thing’.

Performance data for heat pump

In the year from when data was available for the new Air Source Heat Pump – from 1st April 2022 and 31st March 2023 – the total heat demand in the house was 29,689 kWh/a (‘a’ here standing for ‘annum’).

Only slightly (about 4%) less than the inferred heat demand for the pre-heat pump period (despite additional loft insulation).

Due to reduced occupancy, we estimated a slightly lower level of hot water usage, and so space heating was estimated at 96.6% of the total demand, that is. 28,681 kWh/a (see Appendix Note [i]).

In terms of unit area heat demand, that now comes to 114 kWh/ m².a

The Association of Environmentally Conscious Builders (AECB) aim during retrofit to reduce heat demand to 50 kWh/ m².a, but will allow exceptions for difficult to treat older dwellings like mine, with relaxed target of 100 kWh/ m².a. So, our figure of 114 kWh/ m².a is not too far off that relaxed target.

SCOP (Seasonal Coefficient Of Performance)

The total electricity used by the ASHP during the year in question was 8,843 kWh.

The SCOP can be calculated as ‘total heat demand’ divided by the ‘total electricity used’, which in our case was

= (29,689 kWh / 8,843 kWh) = 3.36

This is an astonishly good result for our old house. I had been told by some people to expect much worse. But Zoe had estimated accurately what to expect, and so it was gratifying to see her estimates confirmed in practice.

There is a slight error in this calculation as it does not separate out the direct hot water components (for taps/ showers). But it is only a small error as the great majority of the energy used was for space heating.

Winter COP

Ah, yes, but was it OK in winter? People will be wondering.

I have daily data on heat demand and electricity usage. Obviously this was greatest during the winter months. But interestingly the average COP (Coefficient Of Performance) held up remarkable well; remembering it is not an absolute measure of heat demand but the ratio of heat demand and electricity used.

This is what my analysis found (and is illustrated in the scatter diagram):

• Average COP over winter months 22/23 (Dec’22, Jan’23, Feb’23), was 3.4  [note that the average external temperature was 6.2°C]
• Design MCS coldest day for location was -1.6°C and on actual data fit line this gives a day-COP of 2.3
• Actual coldest day was -5°C and data point gives COP of 2.

It is interesting that in summer, the COP can actually be worse in summer than in winter because, while much less energy is being used, the proportion of that energy being used for hot water rather than space heat is higher and that tends to be less efficient, so the ratio can be worse.

Overall, the winter COP was on average close to the overall annual COP (or SCOP).

Running costs comparison

My current (5th Nov 2023) flexible Octopus tariff charges 26.85p/kWh for electricity and a 52.32p/day standing charge. The gas unit pricing is 6.82p/kWh and 27.47p/day.

If this was the charge for the full 12 months, the cost would be:

(8,843 kWh x 26.85 p/kWh) + (365 day x 52.32 p/day)

= £2,565

Whereas for the same period, if we’d stayed with the gas boiler, we’d need to deliver 29,689 kWh of heat, but to do this with a 72% efficient boiler that would required burning gas with a calorific value of (29,689/0.72), 41,234 kWh, and the per annum costs of this would have been:

(41,234 kWh x 6.82 p/kWh) + (365 day x 27.47 p/day)

= £2,912

So, despite the fact that the unit price of electricity is almost 4 times that of gas (26.85/6.82), the efficiency of the heat pump combined with the inefficiency of the retired boiler more than compensates for the difference.

Of course the unit prices of both electricity and gas have risen since 2020, and even the differential in price has not improved, but the heat pump ensures we are better off than we would have been if we’d stuck with the old gas boiler.

Appendix Notes

[i] How much energy does it take to heat the 300 litre hot water tank?

The temperature in a modern unvented hot water cylinder is stratified with cold water entering from the base of the tank under mains pressure and hot water being delivered also under mains pressure from the top of the tank. The thermostat is in the upper part of the tank.

However, for simplicity, let’s work out how much energy would be needed to heat 300 litres uniformally at 40°C, up to the target temperature of 50°C.

Being careful to do housekeeping on the dimensions.

It takes 4180 joule to heat 1 litre of water by 1°C

So to raising 300 litre by 10°C (from 40°C to 50°C)

requires 4180 (joule/litre.°C) x 300 (litre) x 10 (°C) = 1.254 x 10⁷ joule

1 joule = 2.778 x 10⁻⁷ kWh

So the energy required can be converted to kWh units as follows:

(1.254 x 10⁷ joule) x (2.778 x 10⁻⁷ kWh/joule) 

= 1.254 x 2.778 kWh

= 3.48 kWh

or 3.5 kWh approx.

I used this figure as an estimate of hot water daily energy usage during the period post installation of the heat pump.

[ii] Retired gas boiler efficiency

The retired gas boiler was a Glowworm Hideaway 120B (a Balanced Flue Boiler).

I used the BRE/SAP products database https://www.ncm-pcdb.org.uk/sap/ to get the efficiency figure for this boiler, which stated a ‘SAP seasonal winter efficiency of 72.9%’ and for seasonal summer efficiency 62.8%. Given that winter was when the boiler worked hardest, I used the former figure, rounded down to 72%. Given it was 25 years old, this may have been slightly optimistic.

THE END

I was asked this question by a householder who is in the process of considering making the switch from a gas boiler to a heat pump, in part due to a desire to reduce their carbon footprint. After an exchange where I learned their current situation and thoughts, they asked:

“One thing that keeps going through my mind are the electricity costs for the heat pump. We are billed for 40,000 kWh of gas, which is a lot. How much would it cost us for the electricity to run a heat pump?

Also, can we install a solar PV system that would be able to generate at least some of the electricity we need?“

I replied as follows:

“It depends in part on the extent of the fabric measures you do implement, although I understand that you have decided not to execute the ‘deep retrofit’ that an architect recommended due to the huge cost, for your 17th Century home. Can I just make it clear that your architect is ill-informed in saying that deep retrofit is essential before you consider a heat pump.“

No change in heat demand

“Let’s assume your current gas boiler has been operating at 80% efficiency.

That means the actual current delivered heat energy is 0.8 x 40,000 kWh = 32,000 kWh, which is then the actual heat demand! (You say that the bulk of this is on space heating, so I am ignoring the complication of the split in energy use between water and space heating, for simplicity).

Let’s assume in first instance that you don’t reduce this amount in the short term (through insulation etc.), in order to make a like for like comparison.

Let’s also assume that you achieve a SCOP (Seasonal Coefficient of Performance) of 3 (by the way, my listed house has a predicted SCOP of 3.6, so better than 3. So, for the calculation below, this can be regarded as a conservative estimate, as long as your system is professionally designed and installed; and remembering that the system as a whole may require some radiators to be upgraded).

That would imply the amount of electrical energy required would be 

= 32,000/ 3 = 10,700 kWh (rounded up)

I am going to use capped prices (as at Autumn 2022) to get a ‘worst case’ for you at least this winter.

At the current capped rate of 34p/kWh for electricity this would mean an annual cost of

10,700 kWh x 34 p/kWh = 363,800p = £3,638 using the heat pump system

The cost of using the current boiler, with 10.3/p/kWh for gas, would be:

= 40,000kWh x 10.3p/kWh = 412,000p = £4,120 using the gas boiler.

This calculation (with its assumptions) implies that the running costs would be less for the heat pump than with the gas boiler.

This might at first surprise you given the higher unit cost of electricity, but it rather demonstrates the impact that much higher efficiency has on running costs.

Obviously, this will change if/ when the unit prices change, but not necessarily in a bad way. If, as has been muted, electricity costs from renewables are decoupled from the costs of gas station generated electricity (which is dependent on world market costs, which then tends to drive up the costs of all domestically generated electricity irrespective of source. Then in future, we could see a drop in electricity, and this would be a progessive reduction as the grid gets greener and greener over time). “

After fabric measures

“It would also be different if – as would be prudent – any measures are undertaken like loft insulation to reduce heat demand. You said you planned some measures. As my essay explained, there is a trade-off between insulation (and other fabric measures) and a heat pump, which depend in part on your overall retrofit budget. All I suggest is that you leave some money in the pot to get a heat pump, but that’s not to say that fabric measures are not important, far from it.

Suppose that following loft insulation and other fabric measures you decide to implement, the actual heat demand of 32,000kWh was reduced by 20%, to 25,600kWh.

With the same SCOP, that would imply the amount of electrical energy required would be

= 25,600/ 3 = 8,500 kWh

At the current capped rate of 34p/kWh for electricity this would mean an annual cost of

8,500 kWh x 34 p/kWh = 289,000p = £2,890 using the heat pump.”

With domestic solar PV

“Solar energy peaks in summer whereas heating requirements peak in winter (but both are middling during Spring and Autumn, the ‘shoulder’ months). Nevertheless, one could reasonably expect – thanks to the ‘shoulder’ months – that the home grown electricity would reduce the heat pump running costs by roughly 25% (only a professional house survey, taking into account the orientation of panels, tree shading, etc., would answer this question precisely).”

Summary

“With your current gas boiler your annual heating costs are: £4,120

With a professionally designed and installed heat pump system and no insulation measures your annual running costs should be no more than: £3,638

With a 20% reduction in heat demand following cost effective insulation/ draught proofing, the heat pump annual system running costs would be: £2,890

With solar PV, let’s assume a further reduction in costs of 25% giving the heat pump system annual running cost of: £2,168

I hope that helps.”

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2022

“Flying is only 2% of global emissions, so it’s ok to fly.” That’s what I heard from a neighbouring table in a restaurant. I didn’t have the heart to lob in a comment “Yeh, but I bet it’s not 2% of your emissions!”

The Oxfam Extreme Carbon Inequality report [1] showed that top 10% by income were responsible for 50% of emissions and bottom 50% were responsible for just 10%, so averages such as that 2% figure can conceal some important truths and not a lttle of moral hazard.

The significant warming that the planet is experiencing [2] is thereby much more of an issue currently of high consumption in the West than population growth in the global south.

We can quite easily get a feel for the numbers.

Let’s start with averages

The world emits about 40 billion (giga) tonnes of carbon dioxide a year (or 40 GtCO₂/yr) from burning fossil fuels [3].

We have a world population of about 8 billion, so the average CO₂ emissions per person is 5 tonnes of CO₂ a year (5 tCO₂/yr).

2% of that figures gives 0.1 tCO₂/yr.

Time to relax?

So what about the average flyer?

2% of 40 GtCO₂/yr is 0.8 GtCO₂/yr, or 800 MtCO₂/yr.

A Smithsonian Mag article [4] estimated that only 6% of the world’s population flew in any one year; 6% of 8 billion is 480 million people.

If we share out the 800 MtCO₂/yr of flying emissions amongst those 480 million in any year, we get 1.7 tCO₂/yr per person. Given that a UK to Madrid flight is estimated as 265 kgCO₂ (0.265 tCO₂) [5], it shows the impact that longer journeys and frequent flyers are having in pushing the average up to over 6 times this number.

Needless to say 1.7 tCO₂/yr is nearly 40% of the world’s average per person total footprint, not a comforting 2%.

What about the UK?

Pre-COVID figures suggest that nearly 50% of UK citizens fly at least once per year, and flying accounts for 7% of the UK’s emissions. However, 1% of UK residents were found to be responsible for 20% of overseas flights [6].

It gets worse

The emissions from flying become stacked higher and higher with increasing income. The top 1% globally emit a staggering 7,500 tCO₂/yr, and are responsible for half of the world’s flying emissions [7].

The takeaway message

Let’s not kid ourselves that our flying emissions are ‘small’. In the UK they are on average 7% of our CO₂ emissions but the actual emissions increases in line with our consumption, which tends to correlate with incomes.

The case for a fair system that does not penalise the least well off, and has an escalating frequent flyer levy, is now undeniable. It needs to be sufficient to disincentivise frequent flying. Whereas the incentives today are completely the opposite. Airlines reward frequent flyers with gold membership cards, priority boarding, deluxe lounges and streams of offers.

As more people in the world gain access to flying, and as the relatively easy-to-decarbonise sectors (like cars and heating) are dealt with, the percentage of emissions from flying – however you wish to measure it – will only grow.

I’m not going to tell anyone “don’t fly!”, how could I? When I was working as a consultant until my retirement in 2016 I was making 10 to 15 flights a year. I’m in no position to preach to anyone. But we have all been in denial about flying, myself included, for too long.

If we can’t stop flying, can we at least stop lying … to ourselves!

(c) Richard W. Erskine, August 2022.

References

1. Extreme Carbon Inequality, Oxfam, https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/research-publications/extreme-carbon-inequality/
2. IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 3−32, doi:10.1017/9781009157896.001.
3. See Figure SPM.4(a) in Reference [2]. This does not include the contribution from other greenhouse gases that currently make a lower but still very significant contribution as shown in Figure SPM.2 in Reference [2].
4. How Much of the World’s Population Has Flown in an Airplane?, Christine Negroni, 6th January 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/how-much-worlds-population-has-flown-airplane-180957719/
5. Climate change: Should you fly, drive or take the train?, BBC, 24th August 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49349566
6. 1% of English residents take one-fifth of overseas flights, survey shows, Niko Kommenda, 25th September 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/25/1-of-english-residents-take-one-fifth-of-overseas-flights-survey-shows
7. 1% ‘super emitters’ responsible for over 50% of aviation emissions, Andrew Murphy, Transport & Environment, 3rd December 2020, https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/1-super-emitters-responsible-over-50-aviation-emissions/

One would like to imagine that Middle England might have woken up to the reality of climate change with ever more frequent heatwaves (not to mention flooding), but judging from the latest screams of derision from the usual suspects at the warnings of imminent heat stress, it’s hard to tell.

So, how do we navigate the conversation on climate change during a heatwave? 

How do we make the link between the latest extreme heat wave to climate change when we have been telling people for years that weather extremes are not to be confused with the long term trends associated with climate change?

For example, in situations such as when a US Senator held up an unseasonal snowball to ‘demonstrate’ there is no global warming, he was rightly reminded of this distinction.

I’ll get back to these questions. I wanted firstly to illustrate the challenge we face in trying to have a conversation with the doggedly unconcerned.

Stuff and Nonsense

I overheard someone in a delicatessen yesterday joking about “hilarious” letters in The Times, writing on how we didn’t need extreme weather warnings back in 1976. 

Can’t we just enjoy it? 

Chuckle, chuckle. 

Bloody nanny state. 

Helloooo … It’s called summer!

What’s the world coming to?

I wanted to ask if she knew that there were 70,000 excess deaths across Europe during the 2003 heatwave, and that just this week fires have been raging across Europe, from Portugal to Croatia, devastating many communities.

I resisted the temptation.  No, I chickened out.

It reminded me of the ‘stuff and nonsense’ sketch French & Saunders did some years back satirising Middle England’s perpetual angst over our alleged nanny state (you know, the one that gave us food banks, Grenfell, and a host of nannyish things). 

The sketch – which I cannot find on YouTube – had two portly conservative stalwarts trying to outdo each other with stories of how much pain they have endured without needing to call a doctor. Shotgun accidentally blew my foot off … ha, ha, ha, no problem!

bloody bed-wetters these days …. 

… stuff and nonsense.

It’s really no different to the ‘Elf ’n’ safety’ campaign Richard Littlejohn, Boris Johnson and others have pursued over many years in their toxic opinion pieces in the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, and elsewhere. This is now firmly embedded in the psyche of Middle England and a favourite source of jokes at Conservative Party conferences.

Extreme weather and climate change

Yes, we did have a very hot summer in 1976, but what does that prove? 

Whataboutery only proves that the speaker has no ideas and no grasp of the evidence.

The truth is that as with a progressively loaded dice, the odds keep changing. This is the latest from the MetOffice [1]:

“We found that in just two decades, the probability of seeing those record breaking 2003 temperatures again have become more than 10 times more likely.”

And the chances will keep increasing. Warnings like this are not new. Dr Peter Stott from the Met Office wrote in 2014:

“Updated model projections of future changes suggest that by the end of the century summers as hot as 2003 will be considered unusually cool.”

That is no longer exceptionally hot, but exceptionally cooler than the new normal.

Think about it.

The odds have increased because of our human emissions of greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. The odds get worse with every year we continue to emit the stuff.

I don’t think our progeny will be chuckling away in 2100 at anti-woke opinion, just despairing at the obdurate ignorance of those led us to this place.

The language of weather and climate

The British have a very well developed language of weather, which suffuses our every day encounters, our poetry, our paintings and our culture generally.

Surrounded as we are by a warm ocean, a cold pole, a European continent and, from below us, the Mediterranean and Saharan land mass, our weather can seem unpredictable.

We are less articulate when it comes to climate; barely literate.

But we have been told not to confuse weather with climate. Climatologists customarily defined climate change as a trend that could be discerned over a few decades, not a few days. 

This makes it hard to talk about any one particular event – such as the 2003 heatwave – and put it down to climate. This was a godsend to climate change deniers, who like tobacco companies before them would make the defence that this person could have got lung cancer anyway (the increased odds don’t prove that THIS person would not have got it anyway).

Of course the counter reflex of claiming that every extreme event is the result of our human emissions doesn’t convince either; our weather variability doesn’t go away in a warming world, it is just gets superimposed on a rising trend.

So, just as a pinball machine on a tilt will still produce apparently random outcomes, the biases formed by the tilt will increase the odds of some outcomes versus others. The UK is getting warmer, and that has consequences as both ends of the hydrological cycle: be it extreme heatwaves or extreme flooding. 

A new science has come to the rescue in our attempts to unpick the apparent contradictions in talking about short term weather extremes in the context of longer term climate change: extreme weather attribution.

Extreme weather attribution

It is now possible for climate scientists to put a number on a particular event and say how much more likely it was as a result of man-made global heating; 20%, 50%, 3000%, or whatever the physics and historical records together show.

This is actually not so new in its general application, as the quotes from the MetOffice above attest to. General retrospective studies on the raised chance of, say, a hot summer across the UK or Europe, have been published before.

What is relatively new is taking a specific event that may be relatively localised and ascribing odds to it, and doing this within a few days of the event occurring; of extreme weather attributions as a service.

Dr Friederike Otto is one of the pioneers of this science and approach. Her book is an unputdownable account of her journey and the implications of this work: Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change, 2020

Speaking of the floods in Germany in 2021 she said [4]:

“These floods have shown us that even developed countries are not safe from severe impacts of extreme weather that we have seen and known to get worse with climate change,”

In May this year, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) organisation issued [5] its analysis of the extreme / early heat wave in Pakistan/ India in early Spring, which they concluded was 30 times more likely (i.e. 3000% more likely) than it would have been without human caused global heating.

A different conversation

So what do I do next time I’m in a queue and I hear someone chuckling at the latest opinion piece in the papers mocking those concerned at climate change and the latest extreme weather event? I might try a gentle question:

“Can I ask why you think there is nothing to worry about?”

This should flush out enough to respond to with the material I covered earlier. 

It’s real, the impacts can be life threatening, and the trends mean it’s going to get more frequent and more intense. One could continue:

“Why does this have to be part of an on-going culture war?  

Why isn’t this something that should unite us, if not for our own sake, for the sake of our grandchildren?

Surely that is no laughing matter?”

. . . o o O o o . . .

(c) Richard W. Erskine. 17th July 2022.

References and notes

 1. ’New study examines chances of record June temperature’, MetOffice, 29th June 2022, https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2022/climate-change-slashing-odds-of-record-western-european-june-temperatures 

2. ‘Heatwave increases’, MetOffice, 2014, https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/2014/heatwave-increase  

3. ‘Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change’, Friederike Otto, 2020

4. ‘Germany’s deadly floods were up to 9 times more likely because of climate change, study estimates’, Angela Dewan, 24th August 2021, CNN, https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/23/europe/germany-floods-belgium-climate-change-intl/index.html

5. ‘Climate Change made devastating early heat in India and Pakistan 30 times more likely’, World Weather Attribution (WWA), 23rd May 2022, https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-change-made-devastating-early-heat-in-india-and-pakistan-30-times-more-likely/ 

How does one speak about climate change to a friend, colleague or neighbour who is not engaged, and sceptical about the need for urgent action?

I was prompted to write this essay because I have been asked this question three times in the last two weeks, and it got me thinking.

In the local climate group I help run, we focus on positive local action. Unlike many climate groups we do not post dystopian images of the latest horror from the front line of climate impacts. This is not because we deny them but because we have found it is not the best way to engage people who are thinking about getting involved, or are avoiding getting engaged! 

They can find the scary material elsewhere, and our job, as a climate group, is to facilitate and catalyse change, through networks, conversations and projects.

But then there are some people – in every community – who clearly do not feel that urgent action is needed. So can we really avoid dealing with those sceptics?

The sceptics we are talking about here do not fit the stereotype of an ideological ‘denier’ – such as Lord Lawson – but they have often heard or read things that reassure them that action is not urgent (‘those alarmists have gone too far!’, they hear, a reassuring salve). Conservative newspapers actively dismiss the need for urgent action. 

So will facts change a sceptic’s mind?

It is well established that while facts are important, a key reason why people believe in certain things is their culture and values (I recommend reading Katharine Hayhoe on this [1]). 

If one group believes in the freedom of communities to do their own thing, free of central Government ‘interference’, there is then a perceived conflict of values with others who favour the need for regulations to promote change. The challenge is to find the common ground, the shared values.

If someone believes that the planet will work things out, with or without our help, they may be quite fatalistic about society’s ability to change ‘there is nothing we can do’. The challenge then is to show how – assuming we had sufficient agency to cause the problem – we also have the ability to prevent the worst happening.

Most people are neither deniers nor fatalists. They want a positive future for their children and grandchildren. If they can see the need for change, they can become champions for change.

Who are we talking to?

It is very easy, especially for those like me who spend way too much time on Twitter, to frame the engagement challenge in terms of those on the ideological right who have made a career out of climate science denial.  That is a mistake in my view.

Various surveys in the UK, USA and elsewhere indicate a growing number that see the need for change. Some just voted in Australia to end the reign of a right wing, climate change denying party.

The UK Government’s Winter 2021 Attitudes Survey showed that 85% of respondents were either ‘very concerned’ or ‘fairly concerned’ about climate change [2].

(Credit: BEIS Public Attitudes Tracker: Net Zero and Climate Change Winter 2021)

Even in the USA, where we are constantly reminded of the polarised nature of political debates, we find that on climate change, there is a majority of people who are either ‘Alarmed’ or ‘Concerned’ (in the nomenclature of the Yale Climate Change Communications ‘6 Americas’ [3]). 

As the authors of this report write:

There has been substantial change in the distribution of the Six Americas over the past five years. The Alarmed segment has nearly doubled in size, increasing 15 percentage points (from 18% to 33% of the U.S. adult population), including an increase of 9 percentage points from March 2021 to September 2021. In contrast, over the past 5 years only about 1 in 10 Americans have been Dismissive (decreasing from 11% to 9%). Overall, Americans are becoming more worried about global warming, more engaged with the issue, and more supportive of climate solutions.

The ‘Dismissives’ are only 9% of the US population, but often appear to be 90% of the commenters on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. That is not a reason for allowing them to frame the conversation in their terms. 

Instead, we increasingly need to get off our computers and have 1:1 convivial conversations in person, over a cup of coffee, at a market stall or over the garden fence, with the majority who are genuinely curious at exploring the issues.

The ‘Why?’ question

Exploring values as opposed to just facts is a crucial part of the conversation. When someone makes a strong, provocative statement, the response should initially aim to explore the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what’:

Why do you feel that?

This might well reveal those values or assumptions that are really at the heart of someone’s feelings, and explain the anger or frustration they express. This is almost impossible to do online.

Those sceptical of the need for change are not solely on the right. There are some environmentalists who have a such a strong preference for nature-based solutions, they will find all the downsides of technological solutions, while being blind to any shortcomings of their preferred solutions.

In fact, we all need to ask ourselves the ‘Why?’ question from time to time, to question our beliefs, biases and assumptions.

A little bit of knowledge can be a useful thing

People new to climate change can be overwhelmed by its sheer complexity, and think they must have encyclopaedic knowledge to engage with people, especially sceptics; they don’t!

It does help to know some key concepts, which can be used to help guide responses to questions. A few are summarised here:

• Civilisation and agriculture have blossomed since the end of the last ice age with a stable atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at 300 parts per million (ppm). In just a short period since the start of the industrial revolution, human emissions have pushed it to over 400 ppm [4]

• There are many carbon cycles that cover vastly different timescales. Despite large flows of carbon into and out of the oceans, the flows balance each other; maintaining a stable concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Humans are now upsetting that balance at alarming speed [5]

• Carbon dioxide is called a ‘long-lived greenhouse gas’. The raised concentration in the atmosphere (caused by burning fossil fuels) remains raised for a very long time [6]

• The rise in global mean surface temperatures of about 1.2°C since the start of the industrial revolution is already having impacts, and every 0.1°C of rise on top of that will increase the impacts [7].

• All societal and personal choices have a carbon impact of some sort, but it is important to understand the full impact of any choice, over the full life-cycle of a thing or activity. We should not let a lack of perfect solutions stop us taking action [8].

How to engage with the Concerned or Cautious?

There are many different styles of engagement. This is my personal perspective, but everyone can develop their own style.

There can be a tendency to try to argue facts with people, but this can be difficult. If the challenge is based on some bad reading of a topic, and is not something you feel qualified to respond to, is that the end of the conversation? I would argue that with a questioning approach, a fruitful conversation is still possible.

Questionable challenges come in a variety of categories. Here are a few key ones: 

• Simply fallacies of argument that require no knowledge of the facts per se.

• ‘What about?’ type challenges that are aimed at deflecting from a core issue.

• Misunderstandings in the nature of a system, that often ignore important aspects of the system.

These can cover quite a wide range of what one might hear at a climate stall or over a coffee with friends. Often they are combined in different ways, but usually one of these plays a central role.

Simple fallacies of argument

There are many resources that deal with critical thinking and fallacies of argument. The Greeks were familiar with many of them, and they are still used in debates. Debates and conversations on climate change are not immune to fallacies of argument.

Here is one example:

‘By far the greatest use of peat in the world is burning it for fuel, so isn’t stopping its use in our gardens really just virtue signalling?’

In such cases, you don’t need to google the actual numbers because this is a simple logical fallacy and the best way to deal with it is to substitute another example that exposes its flaws:

‘If it was true that the greatest number of wife abusers in the world is in <another country>, would it be ok to say that calling for a stop to wife beating in the UK is really just virtue signalling?’

That is obviously nonsense, but then so is the argument against stopping using peat in gardening.

There are are countless examples of the use of fallacies of argument. One advocate from a think tank that denied the need for action on climate change made a statement on TV along these lines:

‘I am not a climate denier, but this latest scientific report is saying we must reach net zero by 2050, which seems to be ludicrously exact in its timing, doesn’t it?’

This is what might be termed the Fallacy of Precision. My response would be through a progressive sequence of questions:

‘You do accept that warming will increase with more emissions?’ (if not, that reveals climate science denial)

‘You do accept that more warming will cause more extreme weather events and therefore more impacts?’ (if not, that reveals climate science denial)

‘So you accept that the sooner we make cuts the greater our ability to reduce harms?’ (if not, that reveals they don’t understand that prevention is always better than cure)

So in response to this example of the Fallacy of Precision, the key argument is:

‘It is ok to get there early; I’m happy with 2050 +/- 5 years! It is not about binaries. The longer we delay, the greater the risks. 2050 is a political planning goal, and to declare it is not saying there are no risks before that date, and catastrophe after it. The impacts are already being felt, and will increase with more emissions.’

What about?

Whataboutery is as old as the hills.

A very common one I encounter is:

‘What about China? The UK has a tiny footprint by comparison’

My personal favourite immediate response is the take the iPhone out of my pocket and ask:

‘Where do you think this was manufactured?’ (they normally guess right, yes, China)

then follow up with

‘So how do we account for the associated carbon?’ 

They realise that they have to concede that it isn’t quite so simple as blaming China, but the comeback is often:

‘Yes, but population growth is a big issue isn’t it?’

I respond that I acknowledge the issue of resource depletion, but in the context of climate change, I am concerned with the idea that we should place the blame for our situation on the poorest in the world. Africa has been responsible for just 3% of emissions, yet will be hit very badly by climate change; worse than us. At this point I often get out a pen and paper and ask if they are familiar with the Oxfam Extreme Carbon Inequality report? Most are not, so I sketch out the key figure based on the report [9]

Hand sketch by Richard Erskine, based on Oxfam ‘Extreme Carbon Inequality’ report.

‘This shows that the richest 10% of the world’s population have been responsible for 50% of carbon emissions, yet the poorest 50% have only been responsible for 10% of emissions.’

This is a great conversation starter, because it can lead in many directions:

• historic emissions;

• funding for adaptation;

• per capita versus national emissions;

• resource depletion;

• educating girls;

• low carbon development for poorer countries;

• climate justice; 

• and much more.

This is an area that is not awash with easy solutions, but it is a chance to challenge simplistic claims that population growth is the cause of the climate crisis, when in fact, consumption growth (propelled by fossil fuelled energy) is demonstrably the primary cause.

Misunderstandings in the nature of a system

Here is one example of a claim I heard recently:

‘Blue Whales eat krill and poo 3 tonnes  a day, so if we got them back to the levels in the oceans before humans decimated their numbers, we could draw down most of the carbon we emit. Problem solved’

The person involved was a huge fan of what are called ‘natural solutions’, and that is fine, as long it isn’t used to dismiss other valid solutions (which was his intention, based on other remarks he made dismissing Wind Turbines etc.).

This illustrates the immediate difficulty for someone at a climate stall in a market who is no expert on carbon cycles, whales or even the total carbon emissions emitted by humanity. But interestingly, despite those apparent shortcomings, it is possible to challenge such a claim …

… by using questions back at the questioner, using the ‘little knowledge’ I shared earlier.

It is crucial that the response is not merely a counter statement. Always start with questions. Ones like:

‘I’d be interested to read more on this idea, do you have a good source?’ (if it is simply a second hand belief that has not been properly researched, they may stumble a bit here)

‘How long would it take to build up the Blue Whale population, and would it be in time to avert dangerous global warming?’ (this may elicit a response like ‘maybe 50 years’, and the follow up might be ‘do we have 50 years?’)

‘That’s interesting, but can you explain why the atmosphere has been so stable since the last ice age, even before we started decimating the whale population?’ (this is of course a trick question, but a valid one. The whales’ contribution to carbon cycles was there 5,000 years ago, yet the carbon dioxide levels didn’t drop because of it; it was in balance)

This could lead to a co-discovery of some more information. Maybe a bit more reading on carbon cycles and so on. Maybe the conclusion will be that we need the whales back, but they won’t get us out of our current predicament.

Conclusion

These are just examples of actual encounters, but I hope they give a flavour of the approach I like to take.

Those new to climate change who want to engage friends, neighbours and others should not feel intimidated. Responding to someone who expresses certainty with questions is always a reasonable approach, that everyone can learn from. If you are part of a fledgling community climate group, you can develop your confidence by working with others when running a climate stall. Learn from others who are more experienced, and then start to have a go yourself. Practice makes better (don’t be beguiled by the illusion of perfect!).

Remember, the great majority of people out there are on your side, and even those that are not, manage to be polite when face to face, in person.

And try to reduce your time on Twitter. Yes, that’s you I’m talking to Richard!

© Richard W. Erskine, 2022

Notes

1. Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us – A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, Simon & Schuster, 2021.

2. BEIS Public Attitudes Tracker: Net Zero and Climate Change Winter 2021, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1064031/BEIS_PAT_Winter_2021_Net_Zero_and_Climate_Change.pdf 

3. Yale Climate Change Communications ‘6 Americas’, https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/global-warmings-six-americas-september-2021/

4. Since the end of the last ice age, the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide was stable at just under 300 parts per million (ppm), but since the industrial revolution it has risen to over 400 ppm; higher than at any time in the last 3 million years. The nearly 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age have been relatively stable, and civilisation and agriculture have blossomed in this period.

5. Carbon cycles are just that. There are short-term cycles (like the Northern Hemisphere’s autumn and spring cycle, leading to flows of carbon into and out of the atmosphere) but also longer term ones. The longest are geological in timescale. The oceans store huge amounts of carbon in their depths, but there are chemical, physical and biological processes that mean carbon flows into and out of the atmosphere. The reason for the stability of the pre-industrial concentration in the atmosphere is precisely because a combination of these cycles has created a balance. The balance can be disrupted and changed over long periods. The current disruption is extremely fast and man-made.

6. Carbon dioxide is called a ‘long-lived greenhouse gas’. When humans emit an amount of it into the atmosphere about half is absorbed in the oceans and biosphere, about half remains in the atmosphere, and because the the balancing cycles (and despite the fact that individual molecules may move back and forth on quite short timescales), the raised concentration in the atmosphere remains raised for a very long time.

7. I’ve answered the question ‘Is 2°C a Big Deal?’ in another essay: https://essaysconcerning.com/2021/10/14/is-2c-a-big-deal/. According the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a rise in global mean surface temperatures is already having impacts and every additional 0.1°C of rise has consequences, so it is now urgent to try to avoid 1.5°C and at least 2°C. They found that the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C was huge, in terms of impacts; and the risks escalate if we go above 2°C. All policies and actions need to be judged on whether they fit into the narrowing window of time.

8. All societal and personal choices have a carbon impact of some sort, but it is important to understand the full impact of any choice, over the full life-cycle of a thing or activity. One considers how bad one thing is, it has to be considered alongside the alternatives. We all have to live, to breath, travel to work or play, etc. and so we have to consider a ‘balance of harms’ and also, a ‘balance of benefits’.

9. Extreme Carbon Inequality, Oxfam, 2015 https://www.oxfam.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en-UPDATED.pdf 

I want to challenge the assumption that scaling up heat pump capacity in the UK is very hard. 

In many ways this belief is symptomatic of a wider malaise in the approach to skills we have had in the UK for far too long. Maybe the crisis in energy – and particularly gas – now confronting us is the jolt we needed to do a rethink.

Scaling is only hard if we still frame the challenge in the same ways we do today – in terms of number of certificates gained through further education colleges. This is not the answer. 

We need something far more like the apprenticeships of old – not those where all the money pours into the colleges, but one where the firms who are doing the real competency development through practice get a decent share of the funding.

Another implicit assumption that needs challenging, is that we need to create clones of experts with very deep heat pump expertise. I don’t think that is true (except maybe in very hard or non-standard outlier cases). In all technologies, as they mature, there is an element of de-skilling that takes place. 

An example is software, where modern tools alleviate a lot of the skills hitherto required in, for example, creating a web site. Although this can reframe the skills question, and quite different design skills can emerge (e.g. illustrators rather than coders).

Heat pumps have matured to the point where we are near to this point (but they still have some work to do to simplify their manuals further).

Finally, we need to scale up the number of heat pump SMEs (Small and Medium sized Enterprises). A massive strategic blunder would be to see the challenge as retraining 100,000 existing one-man-band boiler fitters/ plumbers, to turn them into 100,000 one-man-band heat pump fitters/ plumbers.

A new SME-led approach would put the emphasis on competency development and rebalancing the training budget, with more of the funding going towards the SMEs who can grow the right skills, and do this organically.

We may still need training colleges, but we have to accept that the current model is broken and it is not fit for purpose, and certainly not for our current emergency; their role needs to be radically transformed.

If a heat pump project is broken down into its distinct roles and competencies, the challenge becomes much easier. 

In what follows, I am assuming an air-source heat pump (ASHP) and a ‘wet’ heat distribution system (pipes and wall-mounted radiators), as this will apply for the overwhelming majority of homes that need to transition from gas boilers (to be ‘retrofitted’).

Meet the total UK team that would be needed to install 1,000,000 heat pumps a year by 2030 [1]:

• 9,000 electricians with expertise in configuring heat pumps.

• 4,500 assessors/ designers to assess a property, carry out heat loss calculations, and size and design the whole system (heat pump, hot water tank and radiators). This is the most critical role to ensure the overall system design performs to the efficiency expected.

• 45,000 plumbers required to follow the designs given to them, but not to understand heat pumps in any depth.

Britain with the help of its allies trained 100,000+ pilots in WW2 in just a few  years, and many more women and men building the planes. They didn’t do that by sitting them in classrooms, trying to get them to understand aerodynamics! They got plonked into two seaters and were soon taking the controls.

We need to be honest about the malfunctioning monetised approach to technical training in the UK (actually, most ‘higher education’), and instead focus on practical skills, competency development, and real world practice / achievements. I recommend a great discussion on the issue of ‘resources not courses’ [2]. 

I asked a plumber who was part of the team that installed the heat pump in my house about his college training. He told me “I didn’t get much out of it. I only really learned what I was doing when I left college and started work, and it took a few years to gain my confidence”.

The individual tasks involved in assessing, designing, installing and commissioning a ‘heat pump system’ can be broken down and assigned to roles with the right skills.  I have outlined the project in the notes [3].

The interesting observation is that the plumber is the role which puts in the most hours on the project (to do traditional things like bending copper pipes), but requires the least level of knowledge on heat pumps. They just need to follow the design handed to them. So scaling capacity, if targeted effectively, can be very effective. I have included a skills table in the notes.

The assessor/ designer who was on the team that installed the heat pump in my house – let’s call her Chloe – was a physics graduate in her late 20s. She made easy work of the assessment, calculations and design, and putting together the proposal for the overall solution.

In 10 years, would it really be so hard to scale an SME-led model, including cross-trained electricians and plumbers, and developing a new career path for ‘heat pump assessor/ designers’ like Chloe?

Let’s not talk ourselves into defeat.

We just need to get smart, and organised, and fund the right things.

© Richard W. Erskine, 2022

NOTES

[1] Estimate of roles required for a typical dwelling

Note that 10 man-days per house, would typically mean 2 plumbers for 5 days.

[2] Resources not courses

There are deep issues with teaching and training in the UK. The marketisation of education and training means that further education colleges are paid for accrediting students, not developing true competencies. There is a great discussion on this in relation to heat pumps at the BetaTalk – The Renewable Energy and Low Carbon Heating Podcast in the episode The Training Fiasco in Plumbing & Heating – I am certainly not claiming there is an easy way of fixing the training issues in the UK. I am simply saying we can reframe the problem through better organisations and coordination of the roles and skills.

[3] Project outline

1. Assessment of the heat loss of the house in its given state of fabric, in order to ensure that the heat pump can deliver the peak load required, during the depths of winter. This must be done room by room to ensure correctly sized radiators in every room. Other aspects to be assessed are the existing pipework, radiators, power supply and water pressure.

2. Design of the whole system, including the air-source heat pump (ASHP), and requirements for hot water, and radiator heat distribution. Any upgrades of radiators will be part of the design, as well as decisions on the peak flow temperature required.

3. Installation includes several tasks. Physical installation of the ASHP and associated kit (control system, buffer tanks, etc.). Connection to the electricity supply. Connecting the heat pump sub-system to the existing pipework, and upgrading any radiators as per the design. Then ‘balancing radiators’ to ensure optimal heat distribution.

4. Commissioning involves configuration of the controls (including ‘weather compensation’) to maximise the efficiency of the heat pump during all weathers, and enabling effective energy monitoring so that the customer can see how well the system performs over days, months and years; and finally, ensuring all the paperwork is completed with certification authorities such as MCS (Microgeneration Certification Scheme).

Each hands-on role can be addressed differently in terms of scaling capacity. We will need:

• An assessor/ designer, who can also play the role of designer, and needs a high level of knowledge of the overall system aspects.
• A plumber who will do pipework and deal with physical kit installation, but requires only limited knowledge of heat pumps.
• An electrician/ configurer with high skills in the specific heat pumps installed, and their controls.

Other roles not directly involved are management, accounts, supply chain/ store manager, sales & marketing, and these are important as in any similar business, but don’t ‘scale’ anywhere near as fast as the hands-on roles.

Here is how the the hands-on roles match the stages in the project:

In the face of turmoil in the gas markets, it’s not surprising that multiple articles and opinion pieces have been pouring forth on fracking for gas in the UK – and calling for a delay to the transition to low carbon – from the same nexus of right-wingers (GWPF, etc.) who have spent years denying global warming, and deny the impacts are anything to worry about (despite the latest stark warnings from the IPCC summarised by Carbon Brief)

Not happy with denying the causes and impacts, of man-made global warming, the next stop for these bad-faith actors has been to deny the solutions. Hence the stream of nonsense attacks on EVs and Heat Pumps recycled year after year, and month after month, with increasingly shrill voices as the adoption of these solutions begins to demonstrate traction. 

Market forces guys, you should love that!

No, they will never let the science – which shows the overwhelming logic of electrification of end-use technologies – get in the way of their ideologically based opinions.

It is of course a long-running multifaceted campaign by right-wing ‘think tanks’, such as GWPF in UK and Heartland Institute in the USA, that have hitherto been successful in slowing action on climate change. Now the tide has turned in recent years, and they know that public opinion is not on their side, but that won’t stop them finding opportunities to muddy the waters.

And we are in the midst of just such an opportunity, and you can imagine them thinking:

I know! Let’s exploit the Ukrainian tragedy and crisis in gas markets – and anxieties in UK society – to double down on anti-renewables, and demand more pro-fossil fuel exploration; especially fracking. 

So their latest stunt is to coordinate articles in the Telegraph etc. and a letter from the usual suspects in parliament; some affiliated or cosying up to those very same denialist right wing ‘think tanks’.  

For those of us that are genuinely concerned about UK energy security and resilience, and a greener future that will make us more resilient in every way – food security, conserving nature, and much more – the question is: what to do?

Keep calm and carry on is my main message.

The path to net zero will continue to be bumpy. Getting off our addiction to  fossil fuels has withdrawal symptoms. A serious fight back and disinformation war from vested interests was inevitable. They see action on climate change as a threat to their illusory vision of an unfettered ‘free market’; so regulations to address harms to the environment, nature and human health are an anathema to them. Hence Trump’s attempts to eviscerate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The good news is that only a dwindling segment of the population are ‘dismissives’ (to use the nomenclature of the Six Americas), making up just 9% of US population. 

Similarly in UK, there is a majority who want action on climate change.  The latest UK Public Attitudes Tracker (BEIS, Autumn 2021), shows that 85% of the UK adults were concerned about climate change, and 87% supported renewables. Whereas only 17% supported fracking.

It’s not just the public who are sceptical about fracking, energy experts question the potential role that fracking could play in the medium term to address soaring energy prices. 

You can understand why the likes of Steve Baker MP, Matt Ridley, et al are becoming increasingly desperate and alarmist. Expect more heat, and even less light, from the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, GWPF, etc., and their various enablers in the media.

Give the noises off a rest guys, it ain’t working.

© Richard W. Erskine, 2022

REFERENCES

In-depth Q&A: The IPCC’s sixth assessment on how climate change impacts the world, Carbon Brief, 28th February 2022, https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-qa-the-ipccs-sixth-assessment-on-how-climate-change-impacts-the-world

Why fracking is not the answer to soaring UK gas prices, Professor Michael Bradshaw and co-authors, The Conversation, 2nd March 2022 https://theconversation.com/why-fracking-is-not-the-answer-to-soaring-uk-gas-prices-177957 

BEIS Public Attitudes Tracker: Autumn 2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/beis-public-attitudes-tracker-autumn-2021 

Global Warming’s Six Americas, Yale Program on Climate Communications, September 2021 https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/about/projects/global-warmings-six-americas/ 

It seems bizarre that the fate of the world might hinge on this question, on the psychological state of one man, but this is where we are.

We are told that a NATO secured ‘no fly’ zone over Ukraine is not possible, because it might trigger World War III, and ultimately Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) with an exchange of strategic nuclear weapons.

We know that nuclear weapons do not prevent terrorism, civil wars or conventional ones, and ‘great power’ proxy wars have been a scourge on the world since 1945.

Near misses between nuclear powers have been far more frequent than many realise. As Sasan Aglani states:

“A recent Chatham House report documents 13 instances between 1962 and 2002 where nuclear weapons were almost inadvertently used due to miscalculation, miscommunication, or technical errors. What prevented their use on many of these occasions was the ‘human judgement factor’ – intervention of individuals who, based on prudent assessment of situations and against protocol, either refused to authorise a nuclear strike or relay information that would likely have led to the use of nuclear weapons.”

And in the latest moment of high risk, NATO’s nuclear weapons haven’t restrained Putin; far from it.

In a sense, they have enabled him.

Nuclear deterrence is usually described in the simplistic terms parroted by politicians, and as the UK’s Ministry of Defence describes:

“Potential aggressors know that the costs of attacking the UK, or our NATO allies, could far outweigh any benefit the could hope to achieve”.

But this was the obsolete MAD strategy of the 1950s, not the more complex picture that emerged from the 1960s onwards: flexible response.

Both US and Russian military strategists were unhappy with a nuclear force that was literally incredible. They needed some way to make MAD credible, that is, to make nuclear weapons usable.

The answer was a ladder of response: the threat of battlefield nuclear weapons would cause an opposing large conventional force to think again. If that failed to deter, then medium range nuclear weapons would do the trick. The ultimate ‘deterrent’ would be strategic intercontinental multiple warhead missiles.

But this is the kind of theoretical scheme dreamt up by wonks in think tanks. It can be tested in war games but not in practice, and certainly not with Putin in the room, playing the game. 

It takes no account of accidents, miscalculation or, dare I say, one mad man who refuses to act logically.

If Putin ordered a battlefield nuclear weapon attack on a Ukrainian city that refused to submit, what would NATO do then? 

Would Putin go this far, risking that “it might trigger World War III”?

He seems to like taking risks, crossing red lines and getting away with it.

Each time, the world tutted, and looked away, even though the plan was already pretty clear. His intentions towards Ukraine have hardly been a secret. He has given many speeches on the state of the west (which have enamered him to the religious far right in the west), and the need to rebuild a greater Russia.

He clearly wants to undermine western democracies and any countries in Russia’s orbit aspiring to join them.

Putin has always been testing, probing, and seeing what lines can be crossed. 

Is Putin mad?

The problem for the west is that he only needs to appear to be mad to get away with it, and so far he’s doing a pretty good job at that.

We must hope against hope for China to restrain him, for a palace revolt, or anything to restrain his worst impulses.

And when we are through this, in however many years it takes, we must finally stop this irrational belief that nuclear weapons make us secure, and make us safer.

Post-Putin, the world will have been warned again of its folly in trusting in these genocidal weapons.

We must all work towards their total eradication.

Richard W. Erskine, 2nd March 2022.

A little background …

During the 1980s I was research co-ordinator for SANA (Scientists Against Nuclear Arms) and on their National Coordinating Committee. It became SGR (Scientists for Global Responsibility) and remains very active, with many great reports and research on nuclear weapons, non-military research careers, climate change, and much more. SGR’s work on nuclear weapons contributed to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), who went on to win the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.

Please visit SGR’s website and donate towards their important work. 

This essay is a personal piece with a personal viewpoint, as I am just an ordinary member of SGR these days, but I continue to support their great work.

Clearing out over 40 years of files can throw up so many surprises and emotions. This box contained files from the 1980s when I was in my spare time research coordinator for SANA (Scientists Against Nuclear Arms).

One file, preparatory work we did for a local authority preparing a report on the likely impacts of a nuclear attack (countering the whitewashing ‘Protect and Survive’ from the UK’s Home Office). I wrote a program that ran on an Amstrad 8256 to do the maths on casualties.

We helped several local authorities to speak truth to the powers that were telling people to whitewash their windows! The group became a kind of research group for the peace movement, often working quietly from bedrooms and offices, trying to make a difference.

Meanwhile those in the front line – those brilliant Greenham Women – faced the reaction of those who turned fear into hate, stirred by the same media outlets who today pour scorn on those demanding action.

Where is the statue to those brave ladies I muse, as I flick through another file full of newspaper cuttings?

Another file on readings of psychological responses to the nuclear threat, which I summarised on a one pager. Some of the insights seem universal. Denial is a complex condition, and I always cringe when those in denial on climate change feel they are being linked to holocaust denial.

The truth is that most of us are in denial much of the time, because we’d go crazy otherwise. But there are consequences to this.

In my life I stepped back from active work on the nuclear issue to focus on family and career. Burnt out you might say, and needing a break.

Only in my retirement did I wake up to climate change, after reading Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’, and then hearing her speak in Cheltenham. That was quite the kick up the proverbial!

The nuclear threat has not gone away and Russia is now escalating the risks. C.E. Osgood said

“the policy of mutual deterrence includes no provision for its own resolution”.

The risks are pretty binary.

Climate change is different despite some who suggest otherwise (its scales of damage, creeping past us and towards us), but the psychology has common threads.

People ask why decent cultured Germans did not stop the Nazis. Their denial was much more relevant to our current situation than the denial of neo-nazis regarding the holocaust, or the denial of dangerous man-made global warming by the self-appointed ‘contrarians’ who control the right wing media.

It is not that people are intellectually ‘in denial’, any more than a smoker who knows very well the health risks. It is the emotionally centred denial that puts off action.

People are worried about climate change and want action taken – overwhelmingly they do, as studies clearly show – but they have been unable to get beyond that numbing inability to turn wishes into actions. It all seems too much.

As Sandman and Valenti said in relation to the nuclear threat: People are neither apathetic nor actively terrified, but they are psychologically numbed.

The “don’t make a fuss” narrative is alive and well, and soon to be brought into law by our Home Secretary Priti Patel.

But those who did and do make a fuss – The suffragettes, Greenham Women and XR – had the same energy, the same moral outrage which we too often keep bottled up. It hasn’t escaped my notice that it is often women who are the first to step forward, to speak up.

Being polite and “reasonable” can do a lot but rarely is enough to shift powerful forces using propaganda to manipulate public sentiment (to aid in the process of mass denial).

The great psychologist Dorothy Rowe said, in relation to Bomb that we need to convert anger & depression into hope and action. Protest is never enough.

E.L. Long wrote in 1950 in relation to nuclear threat

“scientists had overestimated … power of their message to reform a culture that has ignored other seers and prophets for many ages”.

Only positive visions and futures can change the psychology of mass denial on climate change. Nuclear threats are oddly more intractable, but ought to be simpler, to resolve.

On climate change I veer between despair and optimism, but as many wise heads have said, hope is important, but much easier to sustain if coupled with action: engaging with the community, local counsellors, national politicians, businesses and the rest.

As Katharine Hayhoe replies when asked “what is the first thing I should do about climate change?”

“talk about it!”

with family, friends, colleagues.

Those forces who want to delay action, are happy to have a psychologically numbed populace. Talk and engagement is a great antedote. Telling your counsellors and parliamentary candidates that your vote depends on them demonstrating they really mean action, is another. We all have agency in some or many forms.

Now, I must get back to clearing more of those boxes and piles of papers, no doubt uncovering more memories, triggering more musings.

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2022

Many MPs have tonight voted against measures to protect public health. 

A majority of these did so in the name of freedom, in denial that the fast spreading Omicron variant of Covid-19 is any worse than seasonal flu. Freedom trumps all, according to these ‘contrarians’. The market is king, and the market solves all problems, so the main job of Government is to enable business to do its thing.

As is well documented, ‘doubt is our product’ is the motto that tobacco executives secretly adopted in the face of the unequivocal risk from smoking revealed by scientists, and is now the reflex modus operandi of the anti-science contrarians working assiduously to undermine experts.

It is always the same people. Whether it be smoking causing lung cancer, CFCs causing a hole in the ozone layer, action on climate change, or health measures during a pandemic, those anti-science contrarians will be voting against any regulations to protect people. 

Of course the Catch-22 for those working on actions to avoid the worst, is that for the contrarians, they will use any such success as evidence that the worst projections were an exaggeration in the first place!

You fixed the roof – so all those dire warnings of an impending leak in the roof if it wasn’t retiled were just scare-mongering.

You banned CFCs, and the ozone layer is repairing – as we said there would be no dangerous levels of UV radiation.

You fix some dodgy code (the Millennium or Y2K bug) so the programs would still work after the year 2000 – You see, it was not a problem after all.

You enacted measures to reduce human contact during a pandemic – We told you, the NHS would not be brought to its knees.

You set out actions needed to avoid dangerous man-made climate change – You doomers, the dangers are exaggerated and we should wait to see who is right.

To prove the point, the public officials and experts would have to not act, to let things rip, so that disaster then strikes, and they can then say ‘told you so!’ – but of course they do act.

But the contrarians rarely totally prevent action being taken – even with the worst Governments – but they can effectively delay it.  They are good at that.

Many deaths that could have been avoided result from these delays. There is no freedom for them or their bereaved families.

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 14th December 2021

First posted 2021. Note [12] added 19th July 2023. Doesn’t change the argument and evidence for increased risk of extreme events as global / regional average temperature increases, but adds nuance to Hansen’s claim of fattening of the tail

Alok Sharma, President for COP 26, told a recent meeting:

“Every fraction of a degree makes a difference”

Reported by  Shaun Spiers, Executive Director of Green Alliance UK, on Twitter (@ShaunSpiers1, 5th October 2021.  

Alok Sharma talked powerfully of the real impact of climate change across the world. Richer countries have a moral duty to act, and it’s in their self interest. 

Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s Energy & Environment Analyst since 2004, responded:

“This is such a hard concept to get across. @AlokSharma_RDG is right – every fraction of a degree really does matter. But how to you explain that to the public who may not even take off a layer of clothing for  two degrees?”

I would direct Roger and anyone else seeking an answer to Katharine Hayhoe, who is the supreme master of communication on such questions. Her short video “What’s the Big Deal With a Few Degrees?” answered the question in a very accessible way.

1°C is already big deal

As Katharine Hayhoe concludes, the Earth is already “running a temperature”, and on Twitter said:

“Using our body temperature is one simple and surprisingly relevant analogy. A fever of 2°C has significant, noticeable, and if sustained long-term, dangerous impacts on our health & well-being.”

The Earth System is very complex, and so is the human body. Part of this wonderful complexity is the ability to self regulate. Under normal conditions this manifests itself as a stable system in dynamic equilibrium, albeit with minor variations and cycles (such as the seasons and mentrual cycles).

Since the end of the last ice age, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and hence the global averaged temperature of Earth (not to be confused with weather), has remained remarkably stable, despite large flows of carbon associated with the carbon cycle (which tend to cancel each other out). Human civilisation and its agriculture have emerged over 10,000 years, benefiting from this largely stable climate.

Human emissions since the industrial revolution about 200 years ago have now increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere by 1/3rd from 280 parts per million to 414 ppm [1]. This is level is more than at any time in the last 2 million years [2]. 

This is already causing a major disruption in the delicate balance that has existed in pre-industrial times, and we are already seeing the impacts in the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events. Each fraction of a degree is important in limiting the damage.

To explain what seems at first to be such a surprising consequence from such a small change is important to realise a few things:

• the land on Earth is under 30% of the total surface area, and the ocean’s temperature is moderated by the heat capacity of a large volume of water, so land is proportionally more affected.

• as was predicted in 1967 [3], there is proportionally more warming as you move towards the poles.  This not only warms high latitude regions, but disrupts the jet streams that help drive weather patterns at lower latitudes.

• the rises in temperature are not evenly spread around the world and in a cruel twist, many regions which are the poorest and least responsible for emissions will face the worst impacts.

• a shift in the averaged temperature hides a massive increase in the chance of weather extremes.

• at both extremes of the hydrological cycle (dry regions and wet regions) there is a tendency to magnify these extremes (dry regions get drier, wet regions wetter).

Even with ‘just’ a 0.9°C increase (relative to pre-industrial, this is a 1.2°C increase) in a global mean surface temperature between the 1951-1980 average, and 2009-2019 average, Hansen and Sako have  shown [4]: 

• hot summers on land in the Northern Hemisphere already occur twice as often and, 
• extremely hot summers (like 2003) already at least 200 times more often   

As Katharine Hayhoe explained, a 1°C rise in GMST is an enormous amount of energy. 

The difference between a 1.5°C rise and a 2°C rise is highly significant. The IPCC’s 1.5°C Special Report [5] [6] showed a number of ways in which the impacts of 2°C are significantly magnified compared to 1.5°C:

“At 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, about 14 percent of Earth’s population will be exposed to severe heatwaves at least once every five years, while at 2 degrees warming that number jumps to 37 percent.”

Humanity has left it so late to act that avoiding 1.5°C is now well nigh impossible (according to the IPCC), but we can still decide and act to keep below 2°C, and must avoid the increasingly dangerous higher temperatures.

We are warming very fast

Climate change is happening in a mere flick of the fingers on geological timescale.

Going back as far as the emergence of Homo Sapiens less than 300,000 years ago, the rate of increase in carbon dioxide levels has never been this fast, and the global mean surface temperature has never risen this fast.

It got me thinking about how to articulate why the current rate of change is truly unprecedented.

It is important to note that there is usually an initiating cause of a global warming episode in Earth’s deep past – such as orbital changes that provide the drum beat for ice ages, or even earlier, extreme volcanism. But the main cause of the warming has without exception, since life has existed on Earth, been the release of greenhouse gases. These have been principally carbon dioxide and methane released over thousands of years (short on geological timescales).

Our current situation is quite different for 3 reasons:

• The initiating cause and the main cause are one and the same: human caused emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels (3/4 of the problem) and emissions of greenhouse gases from agriculture (1/4 of the problem).

• The period over which this is occurring is an instant in geological terms, just 200 years or so since the start of the industrial revolution,
  • whereas for the exit from the last ice age, it took 8,000 years [8]
  • another analogue to the current fast warming is the PETM (Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum) with an initial burst of greenhouse gases and warming over a period of between 3,000 and 20,000 years [9]

• Human choices are the ultimate cause, and we can stop it.

Currently we have warmed by about 1.2°C in less than 200 years. 

The rate of increase in carbon dioxide concentrations is a useful indicator of risk, because it is the doubling of concentrations that give rise to an increment of warming of about 3°C. Only by stopping emissions can we stop further warming.

The rise in CO₂ concentrations averaged over 200 years is 0.67 part-per-million per year (ppm/yr), which is unprecedented. The PETM higher rate of rise of 0.42 ppm/yr comes close, but the exit from the last ice age is much slower, at a rate of 0.01 ppm/yr.

If we continue on the high emissions path we are on, we could reach 4.4°C of warming (3.3°C – 5.7°C range, relative to pre-industrial) [10]. 

This results from a further increase on carbon dioxide concentrations at a rate of 9 ppm/yr [11], which would far exceed even the upper estimates of the rate of increase during the PETM.

I have summarised all this in the following table.

I wonder how anyone can imagine we are not in a climate emergency looking at this table.

(c) Richard W Erskine, 2021.

[correction – I transcribed the wrong numbers from the table to the narrative for duration of PETM pulse – now fixed]

. . . o o O o o . . .

Notes 

1. See atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) levels, 1800–present, https://www.sealevel.info/co2.html  (original sources NOAA and NASA).
2. The IPCC states “In 2019, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations were higher than at any time in at least 2 million years” (in Ref. A, section A.2.1)
3. Manabe and Wetherald in 1967 published results using the first full model of the greenhouse effect including radiative, convective, and other key aspects, to model the greenhouse effect on earth (Manabe having received a share on the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions)
4. James Hansen and Makiko Sato published estimates in 2016 (Ref. B). These have now updated in 2020 in, see http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200706_ShiftingBellCurvesUpdated.pdf 

• Hansen and Sato use baseline 1951-80, which is 0.3°C above the accepted Pre-industrial baseline. So the 0.9°C of warming to date, is equivalent to 1.2°C relative to pre-industrial.

5. See IPCC Reference C, and and useful summary by NASA, Reference D.
6. Global Warming of 1.5C, A Special Report by the IPCC https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ 
7. During a much earlier period in geological history, about 56 million years ago, when the world was already warm and ice free, there was an event that lead to extremely fast (in geological terms) warming. It is called the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This is described by the IPCC as follows (Ref. A):

“A geologically rapid, large-magnitude warming event at the start of the Eocene when a large pulse of carbon was released to the ocean-atmosphere system, decreasing ocean pH and oxygen content. Terrestrial plant and animal communities changed composition, and species distributions shifted poleward. Many deep-sea species went extinct and tropical coral reefs diminished.”

8. The Last Glacial Maximum was 23-19 thousand years ago (Reg. A). The current period of interglacial temperatures has lasted 10-11 thousand years. I take 19-11=8 thousand years are the period of exit from the last ice age.
9. For PETM, numbers taken from IPCC (Ref. A) are: 900->2,000 ppm CO₂ (sect 2.2.3.1); 0.04-0.42 ppm CO₂/yr(Table 2.1) and estimate of 5°C (4°C – 7°C  range) globally averaged warming (sect 2.3.1.1.1). Although a new study (Inglis (2020) suggests greater warming.
10. The SSP5-8.5 high emissions scenario gives rise to a warming of 4.4°C [3.3°C – 5.7°C range] relative to pre-industrial by 2100 (see Table SPM.1 in Reference A).
11. Box TS.5 in Ref. A indicates SSP6-8.5 would have cumulative emissions of 11,000 GtCO₂. But Figure SPM.7 has 38% of these emissions absorbed by ocean and land/biosphere, so 0.62*11,000=6,820 GtCO2 CO₂ remains in atmosphere (for a long time). Now Mackay noted “A useful way to calculate things is to remember that 127 part per million (ppm) of CO₂ in the atmosphere equates to 1000 GtCO2”, so 6,820 GtCO₂ equates to 6.82 * 127 = 866 ppm CO2. We need to add that to the pre-industrial level of 280, giving a total 1146 ppm CO₂. Now, dividing this by 80 years (2020 to 2100) gives 9 ppm CO₂ per year on average. Note that this case includes high GHG emissions, but also incorporates a reduced level of take up of greenhouse gases in the oceans, land and biosphere (something that many who criticise this scenario as ‘pessimistic’ fail to grasp).
12. The question of not whether Hansen is correct in seeing not just a shifting of the distribution (which is undeniable) with increased risk of extreme weather. This may surprise some but is basic statistics, and a long expected result, as shown, for example in the IPCCs 4th Asessment Report (2007) , buried deep in the Technical Summary Box TS.5: Extreme Weather Events. The question is whether Hansen is right in seeing a change in shape of the distribution (fatter tails, or in maths speak, a change in the standard deviation). This was challenged by one author (see Ref. E). However, to reiterate the key point: this doesn’t alter the fact that we will expect an increasing level of extreme weather events as the ‘mean’ temperature increases.

References

A. IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.

B. James Hansen and Makiko Sato (2016) Environ. Res. Lett. 11 034009

C. Global Warming of 1.5C, A Special Report by the IPCC https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/

D. Alan Buis, A Degree of Concern: Why Global Temperatures Matter, NASA, 19th June 2019 https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2865/a-degree-of-concern-why-global-temperatures-matter/

E. ‘Increased variability?’, ‘Tamino’, Open Minds blog, https://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/increased-variability/

. . . o o O o o . . .

The UK’s first hydrogen strategy was issued this week. It caused a lot of heated debate.

This is in the context of the latest IPCC Report. Commenting on it Dr Emily Schuckburgh noted in Carbon Brief:

“Ever more certain, ever more detailed. That’s the brief summary I would give the AR6 WG1 summary for policymakers (SPM). Once again it provides a comprehensive chronicle of extreme weather induced by climate change and the risk of catastrophic future impacts. It estimates the remaining carbon budget from 2020 for a reasonable chance (67%) of limiting warming to 1.5C is 400bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2). With global emissions in 2020 of 40 GtCO2, this re-emphasises that this decade is critical”.

There is no dispute that hydrogen will play an important role in decarbonising some areas of the economy, especially hard to deal with ones like steel and fertiliser production.

But the report is a little disappointing in sitting on the fence on a number of issues, notably transport and heating, where there is doubt as to the role hydrogen will play. The report says (p. 62):

“Before hydrogen for heating can be considered as a potential option to decarbonise heat in buildings, we need to generate further evidence on the costs, benefits, safety, feasibility, air quality impacts and consumer experience of using low carbon hydrogen for heating relative to other more established heat decarbonisation technologies.”

And (p. 65):

“We recognise that the longer-term role for hydrogen in transport decarbonisation is not yet clear, but it is likely to be most effective in the areas where energy density requirements or duty cycles and refuelling times make it the most suitable low carbon energy source. 

But despite these sensible cautionary words, the report goes on to try and give the impression that domestic heat and transport are still in play, given more research. But are they?

In the area of cars, many car manufacturers have halted or are cutting back R&D on hydrogen fuel cell cars. One of the issues is the relative inefficiency compared to Electric Vehicles (EVs), but building out the infrastructure is another concern.

“You won’t see any hydrogen usage in cars,”

said Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess, speaking to the Financial Times, adding that the idea of a big market for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is …

“very optimistic … not even in 10 years, because the physics behind it are so unreasonable,”

For heating, if we were to use ‘Green Hydrogen’ (created via electrolysis using renewables) to heat our homes, it would require nearly 6 times as many wind turbines compared to directly using the electricity to power heat pumps (which harvest ambient energy in the environment, and so are much more efficient) [1]

The Committee on Climate Change rather highlighted this in their 6th Carbon Budget where they state (for their ‘balanced pathway’):

“By 2030 37% of public and commercial heat demand is met by low-carbon sources. Of this low-carbon heat demand 65% is met by heat pumps, 32% district heating and 3% biomass. By 2050 all heat demand is met by low-carbon sources of which 52% is heat pumps, 42% is district heat, 5% is hydrogen boilers and around 1% is new direct electric heating.”

Or as Professor Cebon said in the Financial Times:

“Hydrogen should be used only as a last resort for sectors that have no option to electrify … Directing public funds towards hydrogen in sectors that have  more effective alternaive solutions is a mistake”.

In other news, Octopus Energy will soon be making a major announcement on heat pumps (they have been teasing the market on Twitter), and are expected to offer a much reduced cost for components and services, to provide a mass market offer. If the Government comes through with an up front grant of several thousand pounds for installation of heat pumps (air source), to replace the Renewable Heat Incentive (which expires in March 2022), this could be a game changer (in terms of mass adoption).

It has been a turbulent week for hydrogen. 

Chris Jackson, chair of UK Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Association Chair has stepped down owing to the Government’s continued support for ‘Blue Hydrogen’ (derived from natural gas, and which involves burying a by product, carbon dioxide, using a method called ‘carbon capture and storage’ that has not yet been proven at scale, but is being pushed by fossil fuel companies like Shell). Chris Jackson said:

“I would be betraying future generations by remaining silent on that fact that blue hydrogen is at best an expensive distraction, and at worst a lock-in for continued fossil fuel use,” 

It feels like the debate over hydrogen will continue, just as it has been for decades, with fossil fuel interests continuing to try to shape the debate in their favour, with arguably far too much influence in policy circles.

In the meantime we need to decarbonise fast, and we don’t have time to waste – just 10 years to put a serious dent in emissions as the IPCC has indicated. Do we really have the time to keep kicking the hydrogen can down the road?

They say the market will decide.

The good news is that for both cars and heating we have electrification solutions (EVs and heat pumps) available, and they are growing in popularity.

Maybe the market already has decided.

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2021

Notes

[1] “Hydrogen: A decarbonisation route for heat in buildings?”, LETI, February 2021, https://www.leti.london/hydrogen

(based on original work by Professor Cabon – see https://www.gshp.org.uk/Hydrogen_for_Heating.html )

Figure from the above report. For ‘Green Hydrogen’ we would need a factor of 270%/46% more renewables generation to match the heat provided by heat pumps, that is, nearly 6 times as many off-shore wind turbines operating in winter when we need the heat, for example.

. . o o O o o ..
 

The short answer is: no and yes.

There is a lot of debate about the role of individual actions in relation to climate change. Allegra Stratton was rightly mocked for suggesting people should refrain from rinsing plates before they are put in the dishwasher. Michael Mann makes a much more serious point, saying that fossil fuel interests – having moved on from climate science denial – are,

“trying to convince people that climate change is not the result of their corporate policies but of our own individual actions” (Scientific American, January 12, 2021)

And of course, Michael Mann does not say that behaviour change is unimportant, but it should not be used to distract us from the much bigger actions that large organisations (especially fossil fuel ones), supply chains and Governments must take.

Whilst others stress the importance of systems change, and the coupled role of behaviour change. Lloyd Alter writes that behaviour change is important:

“… because we have to stop buying what the oil and car and plastics and beef companies are selling; If we don’t consume, they can’t produce. It makes a difference; I vote every four years, but I eat three times a day.” (Treehugger, May 11, 2021)

And we have to recognise there are limitations to personal actions when not supported by the system. If I want to ditch the car and take an EV bus to go to work 10 miles away, I cannot do that if there is no EV bus (and maybe no bus at all, at the times I need them).

So, at whatever scale we look at it, and through whatever ‘lens’ we choose, we see the connectedness of actions by individuals, businesses, public institutions, local government, national government and multi-nationals.

I want to show at the scale of a town, how we might think about the power that resides in the hands of individuals; and they can possess multiple persona. Yes, they are consumers, but they are so much more. They are voters, employees, church-goers, parents, children, neighbours, and so much more.

If we break the silence and talk about climate change – not the science but what it can mean in terms of progressive action – it’s amazing how easy it is to start a conversation.

We need to think about the ‘agency’ that individuals possess, within the network of actors in a local community. The influence they have is much more than the narrow framing of consumerism. We see a richer systems view of influence and reinforcing feedbacks, with multiple actors involved, and individuals taking on a variety of personas. Here is a little illustrative doodle I created:

A climate action group (not shown) can – if it is being effective – engage with all the actors in this schematic by various methods and channels, by networking, engaging, and promoting interactions between them.

For example, holding a fair on house retrofit, and inviting relevant businesses, community groups, councillors and the local member of Parliament. If you don’t ask, you don’t get, my mother used to say!

This does not mean that personal action is unimportant – far from it – but when it can be seen as part of a collective goal to promote changes throughout the system, it is far more powerful. While personal actions today might only impact a fraction of the UK’s carbon footprint directly, indirectly it can have a much greater impact. System change (access to low carbon transport, help with decarbonising heating, etc.) together with personal choices is of course where we need to get to for a high impact on emissions.

The individual will also begin to realise the agency they have to promote not just change, but system change.

(c) Richard W. Erskine

Chris Mason on BBC News at Ten (tonight, on 9th August 2021, the day that the IPCC published the science part of their 6th Assessment Report) stated that (in relation to heat pumps):

“you need lots of insulation to make them work”.

This is completely false: you can heat any building with a heat pump that you can with a gas boiler. Why do BBC reporters keep repeating these myths?

In fact, and in the context of the IPCC report, if one’s main concern was the household carbon footprint, a heat pump would be the first thing anyone would do, as I showed here (given the diminishing carbon intensity of the UK’s electricity grid).

The counter argument commonly used is that the costs of running a heat pump (given today’s unit price for electricity) is unaffordable unless there is huge levels of insulation. Of course if we had a fair fight between gas and renewables, electricity prices would come down relative to gas.

But simple maths shows that even at current gas and electricity prices, if one were to replace an old 70% efficient gas boiler with a modern air-source heat pump (ASHP), then the running costs would not be any greater, with only modest insulation measures, as shown here.

A heat pump can heat any home that a gas boiler can. But it makes no sense to try to heat a barn – with a heat pump or a gas boiler! Insulation and draught reduction make sense – and help improve the comfort of a building – and so ‘fabric first’ is an important message. This leaves open the question: how much insulation a householder considers before they invest in a heat pump?

Depending on how an individual wants to spend their retrofit budget, there will be a cross-over point where acquiring an ASHP will trump any further increment in fabric spending. Adding fabric measures will reduce the size of the heat pump required, but only to a point, as there are some base costs for the system, and we need hot water whatever the state of the fabric.

There are small and large houses, well insulated ones and leaky ones. How do we make sense of the numbers?

A useful metric is the heat energy required to heat one square metre of a home per year (this is measured in kilowatthours per metre square per annum, or kWh/m².a). The average UK house – because our historic housing stock is quite leaky – requires about 130 kWh/m².a. The Association of Environmentally Conscious Builders (AECB) aims, when insulating homes, to reduce this measure to 50 kWh/m².a, although might accept as much as 100 kWh/m².a in the case of (say) a Listed Building. A new build Passivhaus aims to achieve just 15 kWh/m².a.

It is easy to work out what figure currently applies to your house.

Look at your annual energy bills. If heated by gas look at the kWh total for the year. Make a guesstimate for how much of this is space heating, say 80% in the current case. Now divide this figure by the floor area of the home. The question then to think – with the help of a retrofit assessor – how far you can reduce this number.

If you currently have poor loft insulation, then fixing this is relatively cheap and has great pay back. Similarly for cavity wall insulation, and for reducing draughts from doors and windows. You don’t need to rip out your sash windows and replace with double glazing; window brushes, and secondary glazing can make a great contribution with a modest investment. Pragmatism is often required, when assessing where you can get the ‘biggest bang for your buck’.

The other key idea is to think in terms not of ripping out things, but taking opportunities when they arise. So, if a new kitchen is being fitted, then why not use the opportunity to insulate that cold back wall, and maybe even consider underfloor insulation and heating? This is why retrofit can often best be seen as a journey to be followed over a number of years.

What follows is an illustrative schematic showing the balance between the money spent on fabric measures (solid line) and what would need to be spent on an ASHP system at a given level of heat demand. As the heat demand reduces (as a result of fabric spend), so does the cost of the ASHP system (including the heat pump and radiators). The schematic envisages a 4-bedroom semi-detached house with solid walls and poor insulation that is hard to treat, and starts (at the left hand side of schematic) with a terrible figure of 200 kWh/m².a [the numbers are illustrative only – each house is different]:

We then start to move from the left towards the right. Spending even modest money on fabric will mean that the size (and cost) of the heat pump system you might buy progressively reduces (e.g. there is a big drop if one moves from a cascade heat pump system to a single heat pump).

At some point, the marginal cost of incremental insulation will rise above the cost of an ASHP (when the solid line cross the dashed line). For example, replacing all the windows with double or triple glazing is a non-trivial expenditure.

And of course, to try to turn a leaky Victorian house into a Passivhaus makes little sense, so there are natural constraints in how far one goes, depending very much on house and site specific factors.

Some people may decide to adopt the ASHP early for a number of reasons (they need to replace an old gas boiler and care about the climate future, or they live in a house in a conservation area where measures like external wall insulation will not be accepted). They may live on a terrace and external wall insulation for one house without the whole terrace joining in, would meet a lot of resistance (including from the planning department). For whatever reason they make their choice, I call these, ASHP ‘eary adopters’.

On the other hand, they may live in a house that can absorb a lot of retrofit insulation measures – perhaps as new owners wanting to start with a ‘blankish’ canvas – and with the help of a retrofit assessor/ expert, strive to get to the AECB 50 kWh/m².a figure. Let’s suppose they don’t have constraints such as conservation issues to deal with. We might call them ASHP ‘late adopters’.

In practice, householders will be somewhere on a spectrum between these two example – in a decision spread zone. A whole set of factors may come into play in their decision making: wish to improve comfort, or reduce carbon emissions, or concern over gas prices in the future, to name just a few.

It therefore makes no sense to say “you need lots of insulation to make them work”.

No, you need “a sufficiency of insulation” to make the running costs “fit your expectations”, and everyone may arrive at different expectations.

But don’t try to heat a barn, with a gas boiler or a heat pump.

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2021.

Soil carbon is important but it is staggering that both Minette Batters and Prince Charles have made unchallenged statements on @BBCr4today (14th July 2021): That some (livestock) farms are already carbon neutral and that soils could take up 70% of the world’s emissions.

This is all in an effort to promote sustainable livestock farming. Like Graham Harvey in his book ‘Grass-Fed Nation’ they have been seduced by the claims of Allan Savory; but these have been thoroughly debunked by the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN)

The fallacy rests on a confusion between fast and slow carbon cycles, between carbon stocks and flows, which with a little bit of naive maths creates a myth that now permeates the NFU’s PR on the future of farming.

We need better soil health to reduce net carbon release in a warming world, but it is no good using this as a ploy to retain high levels of meat consumption; and we need a massive reduction in the consumption trend.

Godfray et al [1] show the path we are on:

Good soil health will help create sustainable arable farming, but not as a silver bullet to cancel our fossil fuel emissions. Massive reductions in meat production mirrors the same reversal that is needed in all sectors of our economy, and it is a fantasy to suggest otherwise.

Efficient land use is also an issue. Today, over 50% of the UK’s land is devoted to livestock (and this does not include the foodstock we import to supplement their diet), and we import over 40% of our food. To be more self reliant, we have to make a radical shift in diet and land use, as the Centre for Alternative Technology clearly demonstrates in their report Zero Carbon Britain: Rising to the Climate Emergency from which the following Figure is taken:

Livestock reduce the efficiency of calories produced per hectare [2], which is a major issue when it comes to feeding the world.

In the context of the climate emergency, the other issue is that livestock makes a high and increasing contribution to our carbon emissions [1]:

Trying to hide these emissions amongst some warm aspirational words about regenerative livestock farming in idyllic English countryside, is pure delusion (as well as being heavily funded PR), with no scientific basis.

It is such a shame that the NFU (National Farmers Union) are promulgating junk science to advance their meat-first agenda, and it seems that Prince Charles is also on board. 

. . . o o O o o . . .

Science references:

[1] Godfray et al., ‘Meat consumption, health, and the environment’, Science 361, 243 (2018)

[2] Cassidy et al., ‘Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare’, Environ. Res. Lett. 8 (2013) 034015

Having worked with acrylics, watercolours and pastels for some years, I decided, finally to take the plunge and start to use oils. The scene is the view across to the River Severn and Wales from Selsey Common.

I’m still pinching myself that I managed to pull this off. 

The foreground gave me the heebie-jeebies.

Grasses were quite straw like with subdued green, and there was lots of undulations.

I remembered to use a little red to ‘knock back’ the greens, and then added combo of yellow ochre and white to progressively lighten it; and some raw sienna in the other direction (to darken), maybe a smidgen of red too in places.

Also, some slightly larger brush strokes in the foreground to suggest more resolved grass.

I remembered to ‘think tonally’ to observe and think about light and dark – there was a huge range to cope with here. I used some Prussian Blue to help with the deep shadows.

The distant fields was just a kind of noodling around trying to get a sense of distance – so cooler, more muted and less defined the further away.

Wales is just a light purple sliver beyond the Severn, which itself is just a hint of reflected light.

The two fields on the right were compositionally crucial to me as they helped establish a near-ground scale beyond the foreground.

Some flecks of white on the mid distance right for buildings – never forgetting the power of gestalt to allow the viewer to see what their mind reconstructs based on the tiniest of visual clues.

The sky was a struggle – I miss the dynamism of working with acrylics or watercolour, so need to practice my skies – but the good thing is that the dark clouds suggest a darkening of the distant land below, and the few yellowy green bright streaks suggestive of sun breaking through on some fields. A little green in the sky is another fully transferrable trick of the trade.

The foreground is in full sun with slopes facing the sun almost white.

The pros of oils are also the cons.

You can keep fiddling for days if you want (although I finished this over 5 hours on and off); so blending on canvas, and wiping away sometimes, is all possible. Acrylics allow for multiple layers and drying in between, with spraying and all sorts of jiggery-pokery; but the palette needs constant attention to stop it drying out. I think they are both wonderful – its like trying to choose a favourite dish – why choose?

I think I’m going to fall in love with oils … just like I did before with acrylics, watercolours and pastels!

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2021

According to the Committee on Climate Change heating our homes makes up 40% of our energy use and 20% of our carbon footprint. While there have been dramatic improvements in building standards since 1970 there remains a legacy of poorly insulated homes.

Retrofitting our often old housing stock to reduce heat loss is crucial, but we also need to stop using natural gas as the source of heating if we are to have any chance of meeting our goal of halting global heating. 

It got me thinking about this question – if someone asked about retrofitting their house, and was motivated by the desire to reduce the carbon footprint of heating their home: 

what is the first thing they should do?

It may seem a somewhat artificial question, because in any real world situation, several measures are likely to be advisable, but bear with me.

Many retrofit professionals repeat the mantra “fabric first”, which means, focusing on insulating the building, dealing with leaks, and so forth. This sounds like good advice, given that the cost of some measures, like insulating a loft, are relatively cheap and deliver big savings in carbon emissions.

However, in many cases this is expressed in stronger terms, like “deep retrofit”, which can mean doing everything possible to reduce the heat loss of a building. This could include external wall insulation to homes with solid walls (which cannot benefit from cavity wall insulation), new windows, and dealing with associated issues related to moisture, for example. This school of thought suggests that we should only consider using a heat pump after deep retrofit is complete [Note 1]. 

The mantra “fabric first” then effectively turns into fabric only, because it is not difficult to exhaust a householder’s retrofit budget with changes to the fabric of a building. 

So why should we be considering heat pumps alongside changes to the fabric of a building? 

A heat pump harvests the ambient energy outside a house – either from the air, the ground or water. This ambient energy comes from the sun (when the ground is used as a source it is never deep enough to harvest energy from the core of the Earth, even with a bore hole, and is simply extracting energy from the ground that has been warmed by the sun and stored there). 

For every unit of electrical energy put in to drive the heat pump, it is able to deliver at least 3 units of heat energy into the home. A nice simple explanation of this process is provided here.

Professor David Mackay wrote in his seminal 2010 book Sustainable Energy without the hot air (p.151):

“Let me spell this out. Heat pumps are superior in efficiency to condensing boilers, even if the heat pumps are powered by electricity from a power station burning natural gas. … It’s not necessary to dig big holes in the garden and install underfloor heating to get the benefits of heat pumps”

He was calling for the adoption of Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHPs). He didn’t use the words ‘silver bullet’ but it is clear he was a big fan and frustrated at the low level of take-up. As he wrote 

“heat pumps are already widely used in continental Europe, but strangely rare in Britain”.  

I thought about how to present some information to help explore the question I have posed, and compare fabric related measures to an ASHP. I took data from the Energy Saving Trust website for a typical semi-detached house and plotted the capital cost of different interventions against the annual carbon saving that would result.

The capital costs are indicative and include the parts and labour required.

The only change I made to the Energy Saving Trust data was I reduced the savings for an Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP) from about 4.5 tonnes of CO₂ to about 3, because that better reflects the carbon intensity of the national grid in the UK in 2020.

I also indicate the level of disruption involved with colour coding, because this can be a factor in a householder’s decision making. The graph is based on the data tabulated in the Table at the end of this essay [Note 4] (click on image to see higher resolution):

This householder is aiming for the highest carbon saving, and there is only one answer glaring out at you from this graph: the ASHP.

If I change the question slightly we get a more nuanced answer:

what is the first thing they should do, based on carbon reduction ‘bangs for your buck’?

The ratio of the annual carbon saving to the capital cost is a measure of ‘bangs for your buck’.  On this criterion, it makes sense to do the low hanging fruit of loft insulation and fixing drafts, but then once again the ASHP scores very well (this allows for the fact that typically more than half the radiators will need to be upgraded [Note 2], and are included in the cost estimate).

Whereas external wall insulation would typically be similar in cost to an ASHP, but deliver only a third of the annual carbon saving and be a much more disruptive intervention; and in many cases not one that is practical to implement.

A counter argument would be that if we did manage (for a solid walled home) to do all the fabric related measures, we would achieve about 2,400 kgCO₂/yr carbon saving (over half the current emissions of 4,540 kgCO₂/yr) for an outlay of about £18,500; and then the ASHP could be added and would then ‘only’ need to deal with the remaining half, and that could mean that a lower capacity heat pump could be installed, reducing its cost somewhat.

Each situation will be different and depend on what interventions are possible. If a building is listed and external installation is prohibited (and the alternative of internal insulation dismissed), then the fabric related measures would then total 1,500 kgCO₂/yr, leaving two thirds of emissions to be dealt with. 

In either case, in order to maximise the emissions reduction one would require a heat pump.

My argument is not that you must fit a heat pump first, but that you should consider all the available options and to think about a plan (possibly over a number of years). 

I went on to plot another graph where I included the following additional features:

• To show the ‘best’ reasonable case fabric interventions (which would raise the cost of say, wall insulation, but at the same time increase the carbon saving). 
• To include a Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) option, either with horizontally laid slinkies, or using vertical bore hole(s).
• To show what happens as the UK electricity grid moves from 2020 carbon intensity levels to being 100% green.

The following illustrative graph was the result:

There are a number of interesting observations based on this graphic.

• Firstly, as the arrows show, we can increase the carbon savings for each fabric related measure, but these improvements come at extra cost. There will be some trade off for each householder situation as to how far they can go.

• Secondly, once you have a heat pump, the annual carbon saving will increase every year as the grid gets greener (as it has been in the UK), without the householder having to lift a finger.

• Thirdly, while a GSHP may have a better performance than an ASHP, it is likely to be quite limited [Note 3], and as Paul Kenny said in his talk to Carbon Coop ‘Heat Pumps – Learning and experiences from Ireland’, if you have extra money spare, why not do the easy thing and spend it on further upgrades to radiators, when you can achieve a target COP without the major disruption and risks associated with a GSHP project (assuming that is even an option).

• Fourthly, a borehole GSHP is even more costly, and more risky. There are significant risks associated with, for example, drilling into water tables, but the real killer is the cost. For a single householder it makes little sense. Of course, one can imagine scenarios where several houses could share the costs, but these are likely to be exceptional projects; not the basis for mass roll-out of heat pumps.

Some will argue that an ASHP requires supplementary heating during very cold spells in winter. However, in the same talk referred to above, Paul Kenny used data from a significant number of retrofits in Ireland that had ASHPs, using a design parameter of -3°C for cold winters. When the beast from the east came and these houses experienced -6°C, they were all fine and did not require supplementary heating. He wrote a piece on LinkedIn about this experience, which flies in the face of much of the ‘received wisdom’ in the retrofit community.

And in the UK, without the much larger grant that GSHPs enjoy, as compared to ASHPs, it is doubtful there would be anything other than a marginal role for GSHPs. It will be no surprise if ASHPs dominate the heat pump market in coming years and for some installers, this is already the case.

So, are Air Source Heat Pumps a silver bullet to decarbonising the heating of homes? 

One has to say in many ways they are!

But of course, in reality, it makes sense to consider them in the mix of other retrofit measures, and to carry out some improvements to the fabric of a building as part of a ‘whole house’ plan.

We just shouldn’t let the ‘deep retrofit’ mantra put people off considering an ASHP; maybe even as one of the first things you do.

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2021

Notes

1. While I am a huge fan of PassivHaus and similar standards, we must remember that these standards cannot easily be applied to existing stock, and would be hugely expensive. 80% of the homes in 2050 already exist, so 80% of the problem of decarbonising heat in homes is already there; and BRE estimates there are 9 million ‘hard to treat’ homes in the UK.

2. Upgrading radiators is usually required to increase the effective surface area. This is needed because heat pumps operate at a lower flow temperature, and the heat delivered is a function of the temperature of the radiator and its surface area. The surface area can be increased by using 2 or more panels with fins sandwiched between them. This can also help reduce height and width of the radiator that would otherwise be necessary, while making the radiator somewhat deeper / fatter.

3. A GSHP has a better Coefficient of Performance (COP) in winter, an ASHP could do better in Spring and Autumn. The overall Seasonal COP for a GSHP will probably be higher but unlikely to be higher than 15%. We need real world studies to get a good figure here. But the cost of a GSHP using slinkies in 1.2m trenches (for those unusual cases where householders have sufficient land to achieve the area necessary) is something like double that for the ASHP. 

4. Table of Typical three bedroom, solid walled, semi-detached house