Introduction from the editor
Climate Spectator has run a number of pieces over the past few months, including this week, examining the extent to which substituting coal with gas in power generation might reduce temperature rise. Below is another by Alan Pears summarising work by Tom Wigley. Having myself been a strong advocate for the substitution of coal with gas in power generation, this article led me to take pause and reflect. Tom Wigley is a top notch climate scientist. He is a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports, and was appointed a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his major contributions to climate and carbon-cycle modeling and to climate data analysis. Wigley’s article described below was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Climatic Change.
The great gas debate
The gas industry has promoted shifting to gas as the panacea to cut greenhouse gas emissions. A recent study by climate specialist Tom Wigley has challenged this. Wigley uses a climate model to explore the year-by-year warming effects of replacing half of global coal use with gas by 2050 (phased in at 1.25 per cent additional coal replacement each year to 2050). He includes a range of options for methane leakage from gas production from zero to ten per cent. This provides some interesting insights.
Wigley’s work is much more useful than the Worley Parsons industry study, which uses warming factors averaged over 100 years: this understates the significance of the short-term impacts of methane leakage and simplifies the complexities of atmospheric processes.
Climate Spectator
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