(can of worms alert) Globe hasn't warmed in the last 16 years 76

[beej67]

Worth a read. One significance of the article to me is the 'skeptic' isn't a loon, she's the head of the EAS department at Georgia Tech.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...-report-quietly-released--chart-prove-it.html



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[patprimmer]

Cranky. Did you not notice the smiley with the wink, kinda indicating tongue firmly in cheek

Regards
Pat
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[KENAT]

cranky, putting aside CO2 I believe burning wood in typical home heating installations can be relatively dirty in its own way.

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[patprimmer]

I have seen the pyrolysis products from burning wood under various conditions. It varies quite a bit by species and amount of drying and available oxygen when burning and temperatures at the source, but anyway you look at it, it makes coal look real clean. After reading, you no longer fear being actually burned to death in a wood house fire as except in very unusual circumstance you will be poisoned well before your burned.

Regards
Pat
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[TomDOT]

Pat - it certainly can be a nice-smelling cocktail of volatile poisons when burned at the correct ratios.

The major losers I see in an "end of coal" scenario are the concrete folks. Modern durable concrete is quite dependent on Class F fly ash: a waste product from burning coal for power, particularly dirtier coal. The need is quite acute in areas with ASR-susceptible aggregate sources.

 

[cranky108]

Are you telling me you haven't seen those stoves that burn compressed wood pellets? At times they can be cheeper than Propane.

The theory of using natural gas works well if you live in a town, but for many rural people it is not available. I guess we could ask them to burn coal, and they would if the price was right, but the current usage of coal in power production keeps the price to high.

The issue is not just fixing problems, but also managing unintended reactions.

 

[patprimmer]

Unintended consequences is one thing. Unpredicted serious consequences is yet another.

This has been an ecological disaster in Aus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad

Regards
Pat
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[rb1957]

and bunnies of course ...

 

[cranky108]

I assume this is simular to the rats introduced to many pacific islands. Not that they were intended to be introduced, but they jumped ships.

Or like the dodo birds.

Damage is done. Move on and try to improve things.
Not that I wish to be cold and ignore the past, learn from it and move on (unless you are wanting to take some legal action). Yes I get it that GMO foods may be harmful.

Sad to say that it takes many a men to clean up the mess a few of us make. But making wild clames with wild solutions only tends to desentizise people to the real problems. This is the problem with headline media.
Make solutions affordable, scalable, and workable.

 

[patprimmer]

My point was that history should have taught us to be very very careful before we introduce something new or foreign into the environment as it's very hard indeed to put the Gene back in the bottle.

Regards
Pat
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[rb1957]

? when did we talk about "introduce something new or foreign into the environment" ?

 

[cranky108]

Like my example above about rats on pacific islands. We did not introduce the rats to the islands, they sort of hitched a ride. It is very difficult to prevent those hitch a ride conditions.

Once those conditions happen, all you can do is control. These frogs I assume they have a natural control in there orginal enviroment. Has any one given any thought to that?

We as humans exceeded the earths natural ability to provide for us some time back, so we have to make changes to survive at the levels we do. But there seems to be cutoff point, and that is afflunce. It seems as we gain to a level, of political, money, or something, we are tending to not reproduce as quickly. The birth rates in several afflunte countries are droping. I'm sure exactly what it is, something in the water, or political pundits that bore us to headakes.

 

[patprimmer]

I think dropping fertility rates has to do with birth control, social security as we age (we don't need a tribe of kids to support us) and education and the fewer kids we have the more we can invest in each. In the modern developed world that investment is at a much higher per head cost.

Regards
Pat
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[GregLocock]

An interesting, if dubious, claim I read today was that "If we want to restrict the global temperature rise to 2 degrees C then 80% of the carbon and hydrocarbon reserves currently identified will have to remain in the ground".

There are three fairly enormous assumptions in that sentence, but the general idea is quite interesting, IF CO2 is actually responsible for the temperature rise. Because, quite simply it ain't gonna happen. 5 billion people want our standard of living and the only way they get even a quarter of the way there is on the back of coal, oil and gas.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[cranky108]

Just a thought, but binding carbon dosen't mean we can't use it. Maybe a bad example, but if we shiped coal to the middle east, where they combine it with the natural gas they are flaring now, and they make plastic pellets that become used in plastic everything. If that plastic stuff is used in our homes, or is land filled, we have used it, but not released it.

 

[TomDOT]

Another "useful" binding method is to compost - sure, you lose some of the carbon, but you store quite a bit of it in the soil where it encourages additional plant growth, which captures more carbon. A more long-term method is to charcoal waste wood, then use that as a soil enrichment. Worked for centuries in the Amazon. Charcoaling dramatically improves the in-soil durability of the wood.

 

[buzzp]

Using the logic of the Global Warming advocates, who most believe we had an ice age. If so, how did the ice melt before green house gases were introduced?
Never got a good answer on that one.

Global Warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it is a farse to make a few rich by selling carbon emission tickets to the highest bidder. Wake up folks! The guy (can't recall his name) that pushed this from the 1970's works for China now!

 

[Brad1979]

The answer to the question that I think you are asking is Milankovitch cycles. I'm not sure what the purpose of your question is, however, since this is widely known (even by climate scientists).

 

[cranky108]

Let us at least be honest and think there might be something that comes out of releasing all this carbon into the air. So what if we make a little effort, not as large as the enviromentalst want, but a little effore in that direction. Whats the cost, and do we gain anything?

I also would like to know what I gain with the extra 500 lbs of smog stuff under the hood of my car. It looks like so much stuff I don't really need. What does it do?

If the enviromentlests really are interested in carbon in the air, one would wonder why they are not for nucular power.

 

[GregLocock]

The 500 lb of smog stuff (more like 90 lb I suspect) stops the emissions of hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides and particulate carbon (soot)(if diesel) into the atmosphere. On balance it increases the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.

Here's what the chairman of the IPCC said about AGW:" In a 5000-word interview with Nature he said it was not the global warming threat but something more important. “I am not going to rest easy until I have articulated in every possible forum the need to bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development. That’s the real issue. Climate change is just a part of it”. The “major structural changes” he wants involve transferring wealth from the West to developing countries—such as India—leading to a convergence of living standards. The West thereby pays for its past sins of emission."

So technical solutions such as nuclear are not acceptable to the true believers as they won't bring our lifestyle standards down.


Cheers

Greg Locock


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[zdas04]

I worked on the Oil & Gas industry response (via the API) to a major revision to the Clean Air Act a couple of years ago. The first draft was utter garbage and we were able to eradicate a number of requirements that would have actually increased the amount of crap in the air if they had been implemented. In doing that work I had to review thousands of pages of comments from the e-NGO's and came away from that horrible experience with a conviction that the e-NGO's could not care less about the environment--their only goal is punishing industry. That is it. When they are confronted with raw (unadulterated) test data on the results of some of the stupider components of the legislation they disregarded it and filed suit against the EPA to have it added back in. These people are truly septic.

As to CO2 in the air, I've read 5-6 studies in the last couple of years that hypothesize that CO2 is a lagging indicator of climate change, not a leading indicator. In other words, something causes the earth to warm, the permafrost retreats, the organic material that was frozen in the last ice age thaws and begins biological decomposition which releases the CO2 to the atmosphere. The resolution of the time scale of the ice cores is coarse enough to support either leading or lagging. All the other data sources are course enough to support either leading or lagging. One thing is for certain, there is a staggeringly large mass of frozen organic material in the permafrost. No one disputes that. No one disputes that as the earth goes into a warming cycle, the permafrost is going to retreat.

One article that I read (I couldn't find the link a few minutes ago so I'm going from memory here) said that if CO2 was a cause of warming (instead of an effect of warming), then the mass of organic material in the permafrost would create a positive feedback loop that would fry the planet within a few decades. That loop goes something like: (1) Human generated CO2 creates a slight increase in temperature; (2) the permafrost retreats a small amount, releasing a large quantity of CO2; (3) the temperature increases further; (4) permafrost retreats more; (5) in a few cycles the permafrost is gone and the poles are tropical. The poles are not tropical, ergo CO2 didn't start a positive feedback loop.

I don't know if this hypotheses is any better than the "Greenhouse Gas" hypotheses, but I've seen positive feedback loops and they go out of control in a few hundred cycles--the earth has had millions of cycles.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

"Belief" is the acceptance of an hypotheses in the absence of data.
"Prejudice" is having an opinion not supported by the preponderance of the data.
"Knowledge" is only found through the accumulation and analysis of data.
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