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One engineers perspective on global warming 33

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In forum1554 MVP members of eng-tips.com develop articles for publication on the Internet. This informal peer-review process has resulted in several articles being published thus far. Early indications make this seem to be an effective way to make information available to the engineering profession.

One of the articles was on my perspective on global warming. It was published today.

I would be very interested to participate in a discussion here about the article or the subject in general. There were several conversations that were started and then cut short in the Engineering Writers Guild because that group is intended to promote publication, not debate points of view. If anyone want to take up those conversations, this is the place to do it (although it is too late to correct formatting, grammar, or punctuation errors).

The article is available at: One engineer's perspective on global warming

Thank you to all of those who worked hard on this article to keep me more or less honest. I had a lot of help, but at the end of the day any errors and/or omissions are mine. I'll share the credit for the good stuff, but I own the mistakes.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat
 
Click to expand...
rconnor, thanks for fighting the good fight with facts and intelligence. Not that the other side here is opposite in those two regards. But, I've research the global warming issues enough that I just can't read their comments much anymore, even if they are being proposed honestly and thoughtfully. They just can't seem to make an argument without connecting to people or organizations who aren't:


I mean if you referenced liberal political think tanks that got started and are funded by wealthy liberals solely to support global warming, they'd jump all over you. But, then of course, you do reference those liberal ivory towers called universities with their stuck up "research scientists" who are also in on the liberal conspiracy. You know, the 97% who support it:


globi5, unfortunately, I agree with cranky108, I just don't see wind and solar competing with coal. The amount of coal to be burned in the next 30-40 years could exceed what we've ever burned in coal or petroleum in human history. There's just no way. That's the reason why I really wish the other side took this more seriously. In 2050, we'll be up to almost 10 billion people on this planet, global warming could really mess with agricultural production, livestock, and fishing. Perhaps scientists will come up with some new radical form of energy production that we engineers are able to implement. But, if coal, oil, and gas supply the bulk of energy in 2050, we could be screwed.
 
HenryOhm
Germany has far less renewable resources than the US (Germany has less solar, less wind, less biomass, less geothermal and even less hydro) and even though Germany is still subsidizing coal, the renewable power production in Germany in 2014 was already 63% higher than the power production from hard coal: (If this substantial amount of renewable power was missing, undoubtedly more coal power would have been produced).

Keep also in mind that Wind power has meanwhile gotten cheaper than power from new coal power plants:
And while costs of coal power is increasing the costs of renewable power are decreasing.

While I agree that the world can burn more coal if it chose to, I doubt it because new coal power plants keep on facing more competition and as opposed to Wind and Solar power require fuel (which is likely to become more expensive) and are facing water related risks:
In addition, Chinese cities are starting to ban coal not because of CO2-emissions but simply to combat air pollution:
 
"But, if coal, oil, and gas supply the bulk of energy in 2050, we could be screwed."

There is no 'if' about it. You guys with your USAn perspective are completely missing the point. In the next 20 years USA and EU energy usage will drop to a small fraction of the worldwide energy budget. It almost literally doesn't matter what the USA and EU do at this point, it won't make any significant difference to global anthropogenic CO2 emissions. China is opening two new coal fired generating stations a week, and if India could it would be as well.

Most of the 'success' of CO2 control in the first world bloc has been achieved by exporting their CO2 emissions to China in particular and Asia in general. That is an odd way of controlling a global problem.

However the great news is that you've got some dodgy numbers. I haven't seen a 10 billion projection for 2050. The sensitivity to CO2 in the more recent papers seems to be edging down to the value we've always measured in the lab, about 1-1.3 deg C per doubling, far short of the Chicken Little worst case scenarios beloved of the media and the IPCC and politicians, and indeed far short of even the average results from the misleading models.

However we still do seem to face a Malthusian problem, which is that quite simply there are 6 billion people who aspire to, and presumably have a moral right to, live at the same sort of per capita resource usage rate as the first world. Roughly speaking that implies that you, me and everybody else you know,needs to reduce their resource usage by 66%. One counter argument to that is that Malthusian predictions have never panned out in the past, and mostly seem to be a way of selling books and magazines and T shirts. Whoever knew that selling stuff was the key to reducing resource usage?

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
At least living standard and fossil resource usage don't need to coincide.

A person who lives in well insulated house which is getting its heating and hot water from an efficient heat pump which is primarily powered by hydro, wind and PV requires far less fossil resources than a person who lives in a badly insulated house with an old oil furnace.
Example: This building in rainy Switzerland is producing 4.5 times as much energy with its surface alone than the entire building requires to cover all electricity needs including heat pump for heating and hot water:
 
rconnor,
I read those referee remarks a bit different than you do. “The overall innovation of the manuscript is very low” seems to be saying "He doesn't agree with me." " there is a troubling shallowness in the arguments describing apparent discrepancies in estimates of forcing and equilibrium climate sensitivity.” seems to say "he is attacking the thesis of my last published article, he has to be wrong".

It is really all about opinions concerning the value of a piece of work. There were reviewers who hated "1984", "Gone with the Wind", "Dune", "Atlas Shrugged", "Jane Eyre", and "War and Peace". There were reviewers who loved them. I have to wonder if Environmental Research Letters was very careful in their referee selection? That is a question that will not ever be answered.

It does not require an entire university, government department, or news industry to be locked into a smoke filled room to create a desired outcome. A couple of department heads that are careful to hire like-minded subordinates, they are careful to promote the ones that best reflect the target message, they are careful to make life hard on people who question the target message. A few years later and the field is dominated by sycophants. A few years after that the sycophants (true believers who are not in on the joke) are department heads in the next tier of knowledge-workers. The right 50 people in the world in the right positions could easily pull this off without leaving a trace. It would take at least a decade or so to do it, but when you hear stories of "consensus" you have to assume that they started coincident with IPCC and have had nearly 40 years. It is amazing what a small group can pull off when they are the only ones with knowledge of the desired end-state.

I envision 3-4 long-haired hippie types sitting in a room in the early 1980's, smoking dope, and saying, "this crap is boring without a war to protest, we really need to wake up the masses to the dangers of the military/industrial complex." Then another saying, "we've tried protests and marches, nobody pays any attention, I think we need to rot them from within." The third says, "That is cool, man, it'll take a while, but it would be a blast to use their institutions to take them down." And a plot is hatched. It could be exactly that simple. Can you buy a conspiracy of four? Didn't think so. Not sure I do. I do find it much more plausible than the gospel of ACC.

I don't know that this is what has happened. I don't have any peer reviewed references. I have my personal assessment of the state of this discussion and it smells very unsavory. In fact it feels orchestrated. The feeding frenzy among the faithful to attack contrary views is too rapid and organized to be generic in my experience.


David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat
 
Now wait "since electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion engines" while that is true, the energy storage along with the electric motor is far less efficient. First of all the battery system is around 50%, then you have the power production which is again 15% for solar, or 30 to 60% for convential fueled. And if you haven't noticed very few parking lots have solar panels, as there are too many bad drivers.

For the US at least, we are near a saturation point on hydro power, and in fact we are demolishing dams to save fish. So I doubt that in the US we will see much of an increase in hydro power. As far as the rest of the world, india had some major power outages because of a lack of water in there hydro power plants. This would lead me to believe they are near some saturation point in hydro power. And if you look at the disruptions caused in China because of the big dam they built, it's hard to believe there will be many more that size.

And just an FYI for those who don't know it, Wind power is typically produced at night when power demand is low. So until energy storage technology increases in efficiency, or wind power decreases in cost by around 50% we will reach a saturation point on usability soon.

Coal, gas, hydro, and nucular are the few stable and dispatachable forms of energy powering those inefficient electric cars.

At least fuel cell, during there short life, have a much better energy conversion than other technologyies.
 
@greglogock It matters a lot in terms of cultural leadership what the USA do at this point because the "American way of life" is exported to China, India, Latin America, Russia, ... Lifestyle is contagious for the good and for the bad.

Climate change skepticism is good and necessary for the strength of the global warming theory, but skepticism has a disproportionate voice in some corporate media, maintaining a false image that global warming is still in doubt in the scientific community. If 34 national science academies have made formal declarations confirming human induced global warming and urging nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, there is little debate or only debate about nuances among the scientific community.

Truth be said I am not an expert but some of your global warming skeptic arguments sound to me very familiar to those of the smoking skeptics in the 80s:

- Why as CO2 increases steadily does temperature not also increase steadily? CO2 cannot be responsible.
- I know someone who is 90, has smoked heavily all his life and he is as healthy as anyone. Smoking is not as dangerous as they say it is.

- Climate has been changing for thousands of years. CO2 is natural so it cannot be harmful.
- Smoke is a naturally occurring substance in the environment. It has been around for thousands of years, so what can be wrong with smoking?

- The models cannot predict weather accurately so how can we take them seriously?.
- No one knows when a smoker is going to die so how can anyone say their life is shortened by X-years by cigarretes? We can all tell stories about people we know who got cancer but have never smoked, so smoking cannot be bad.

etc, etc...

Admitting we have a problem is the first step in fixing the problem.

 
Can't believe I'm putting my toe back in this but...

When considering the battery powered vehicles (and even hybrids), renewable's, energy efficient houses... you really need to take into account the through life cost/efficiency.

While it can be difficult to do I still struggle to believe electric cars pass that sniff test. Seems like maybe a way to make the drivers/owners feel better about them selves & take advantage of various tax breaks/incentives etc. rather than a real way to reduce CO2 emissions.

Posting guidelines faq731-376 (probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​
 
You can couch the "wealth" of an economy by the number of hours required in a time period to satisfy subsistence needs (food, water, heat, shelter, not cell phones, cable TV, or Gucci handbags). In the U.S. for someone making median income that number (after taxes) for a family of four is around 24 effort hours/month. For a median income family of four in Nigeria it is around 10 effort hours/day, 7 days/week or something like 304 effort hours/month. [before anyone asks, I am not going to dig out the references for this, I only do the reference thing: (1) when I want to; or (2) when I'm getting paid to do the work. Please accept the numbers, accept the concept, or reject any part of it at your discretion, I simply don't care].

The difference between developed economies and un-developed economies is the relative cost of energy. If I only have to turn a knob to get cooking heat that costs pennies/hour then I am "wealthier" than someone who must gather and prepare firewood, start and tend a fire until it is the proper temperature for cooking, and then tend it to keep the temperature in the appropriate range. I'm wealthier if I can turn on a faucet to get clean, safe drinking water than someone who has to carry a bucket to a stream that the village upstream uses for a latrine.

The "fix" for ACC is to tell everyone living at subsistence levels (i.e., after they finish expending energy on subsistence they have no excess energy to acquire capital to spend on the next day's subsistence) that they are stuck at those levels in perpetuity. If I was a villager in sub-Saharan Africa or Mongolia, or Siberia, or most of South America, or most of Micronesia I would very much resent this "I got mine, you can't have yours" attitude. The other "fix" is to tell the billion or so wealthy people in the world that instead of working 24 effort hours/month to satisfy subsistence needs they have to work 60 hours/month. I'd kind of resent that as well.

As an engineer, I have a natural disposition to detest waste. I also have the ability to distinguish between "waste" and "political expediency". I recycle because it gives me an extra trash can, not because our pitiful recycling campaign is actually doing anything beneficial at all. On the other hand I applaud efforts to turn anaerobic landfills into aerobic methane generators to put the biological processes to work on waste hills. That has a real potential to be a permanent solution to both waste disposal and power generation for many communities. Makes a lot more engineering-sense than all the wind farms in the world.

I can't "fix" the climate even if I believed that it was broken. Efforts to apply "fixes" are actually cynical attempts to redistribute wealth from the middle class to the crony class. I'm not OK with that.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat
 
Throwing a Cato analysis out the window purely because it comes from Cato, when all Cato did in the analysis was run Obama's policies as stated through an EPA climate model as provided, is the very definition of "poisoning the well." It is not logic, it is fallacy.

Period.

I'll post the link again.


Now discuss the content within the link and not the name of the website it comes from.

Thanks.


Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
 
globi5, it’s nice to see well referenced posts. They’re few and far between here.

HenryOhm, ya those pompous, greedy, power hungry “research scientists” are always out to screw us! I don’t trust a thing they say! Now a Koch founded and funded, hard-right lobby group, there’s a group that we can all trust for well supported, unbiased, non-ideologically driver research!

mendinho said:
@greglogock It matters a lot in terms of cultural leadership what the USA do at this point because the "American way of life" is exported to China, India, Latin America, Russia, ...
Click to expand...
Spot on. Especially since both China and India have made statements that they will keep their emissions per capita below the US. This, rightly, puts the onus on the developed world to be the forerunners in reducing emissions.

zdas04, you forgot to reference this quote: “the authors have inexplicably used the wrong equation” (he confuses ECS and TCR). I think it was slightly more than a biased opinion that got the paper rejected.

So your conspiracy theory, of how three “long-haired hippies”, while high, concocted a world-wide, multi-decade scam that suckered in pretty well ever major scientific institution and the entire academic field, is based off a hunch. I’m just going to leave this point there.

zdas04 said:
The “fix” for ACC is to tell everyone living at subsistence levels…that they are stuck at those levels in perpetuity
Click to expand...
Again, another example of how you purposefully misrepresent the ACC theory in an attempt to discredit it. This is just wrong. Read about the RCP scenarios, which take into account population and economic growth in the developing world.

zdas04 said:
Efforts to apply “fixes” are actually cynical attempts to redistribute wealth from the middle class to the crony class
Click to expand...
Ya, those 3 pot-smoking hippies that are behind this whole farce sure represent the “crony class” and sure are going to get rich off emission reduction initiatives!

Please explain to me how the revenue neutral carbon tax in BC is a “cynical attempt to redistribute wealth from the middle class to the crony class”, when taxes raised by the tax (which dropped emissions/capita by 10% while GDP grew 3.8% (CANSIM tables 379-0025 and 379-0026)):
[ul]
[li]Low Income Tax Credit – $195 million[/li]
[li]5% Reduction in first two personal income tax rates (the poorest) - $235 million[/li]
[li]General corporate income tax reduction (12% to 11%) - $450 million[/li]
[li]Small business corporate income tax reduction (4.5% to 3.5%) - $261 million[/li]
[li]Source[/li]
[/ul]

beej67, and I’ll repeat my same comment again (which you’ve never addressed):
rconnor said:
perhaps I should use another analogy, closer to your view. A government decides to enact measures to converse a 25 km by 25 km area of forest, while the status quo of deforestation continues everywhere else. CATO performs a “study” that concludes that no species that would have otherwise gone extinct, will be saved from extinction by these measures. Would you still conclude that:
1) The measure should not have been done,
2) By extension, any subsequent efforts to conserve natural habitats should not be done?

Oh, and these measures will have an average net domestic benefit of ~$66 Billion. But you can choose to ignore this if you wish, surely the ridiculousness of the two conclusions still remains.
Click to expand...

This needs to be coupled with mendinho’s point that the developed world needs to (and, for me, ought to) lead the way when it comes to serious emission reduction initiatives. I feel that the EPA’s Clean Power Plan is soft but it is a good, important, start. Hopefully it will get the ball rolling in North America.

So, assuming the CATO analysis is true, it completely misses the point. The EPA's Clean Power Plan was never intended to stop global climate change. It does provide the US with ~$66 billion in average net domestic benefits by 2030 and is an important first step towards emission reductions.
 
It will be interesting to see how the voting populace view the drive to take the energy intensity of USAn life down towards that of (say) Cuba, in order to show the rest of the world the way to solving a rather non-existent problem in the lifespan of them and their children.

Personally I'd have thought many counties view the USA as a beacon for healthcare crime using light armored vehicles to kill citizens in their own homes.





Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
cranky105
In those 0.188 kWh/km Tesla states the efficiency of the drive train and battery is included. 0.188 kWh/km corresponds to less than 2 l of gasoline per 100 km which is well over 100 mpg. (The energy content of 1 l of gasoline is 11.6 kWh).

But even if an EV was not more efficient than a car with an internal combustion engines, it's still more efficient to collect energy to drive an EV from ones roof or a wind farm or even a gas power plant nearby than to import and refine crude oil from oil sands (most of the oil will eventually have to come from tar sands since those are the largest resources left): Over its lifetime a car with a combustion engine consumes maybe about 150 Barrels of crude oil, which corresponds to the processing of 300 tons (660,000 lbs.) of tar sands (for just one car). On the other hand a Tesla S weighs about the same as an Audi A6 (assuming equal performance). So it's doubtful that there is significantly more energy needed to produce a Tesla S as opposed to an Audi A6.

Hydro power may be maxed out as far as energy capacity is concerned but not as far as power is concerned.
(Besides North America already has already 167 GW of hydro power installed which is still significantly more than the amount of Wind power currently installed. )
Power on existing dams is already being increased to cope with the variability of demand (so, it can also be used to cope with the variability of power input from PV and Wind).
Here is an example of a hydro power plant where the power is being increased by four fold: For decades excess Hydro power from the US Northwest has been exported to Southern California: In the future surplus Solar power from the deserts in the US Southwest can be exported back to the US Northwest
Or surplus Wind power can be exported from New England to Quebec: And of course new HVDC power lines can be built to connect the windy Midwest to southern states and hydro power plants in New York and Canada.

As I mentioned before Wind and PV complement each other. So, if Wind farms and PV power plants are interconnected, there's less variability in power production. On page 36 of this document, there's a graph showing power production from Wind and Solar in Germany. Even though the combined power is over 70 GW, hardly any power over 30 GW is being produced, since there's usually either lots of Wind or lots of Solar power.
In General, storage regarding Wind and PV is overrated. For instance, VDE (German Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies) calculated that Germany would need 26 TWh of storage capacity for a 100% renewable grid: (page 28)
However, Norway alone already has 84 TWh of hydro storage capacity.
 
It still costs less for me to convert my car to CNG than the cost of a Tesla. So for dollar efficency a Tesla dosen't make since. Also those batteries won't last but about 6 years.

One would think solar and wind compliment each other, but that's not what is happening, at least in the area of one balancing authorty, which is what utilities are mandated to keep balanced. We are being told to balance our load in our area, not over the whole nation. So with those govermental set requirments wind and solar are unbalancing items.
For your idea to work, then the goverment needs to get out of the way.

Yea we added a small hydro a few years back, but it was mainly installed to reduce the pressure build up of the water flowing to the water processing plant (drinking water is required to have clorene, as well as Floride put in it before they put it on there lawns, and maybe a little to drink).

Strangly most of our customers are more concerned about cost of electricity, than where it comes from. And CNG stations are hard to find. And Tesla recharging stations require a special service. And solar power dosen't happen when I am at home (as I need to work to pay for things).
 
I agree EVs are currently rather expensive (and I actually have converted my car to run on Propane).
However, in the long run the increase of the renewable share in the grid and the electrification of the heating, hot water and transportation sector is sensible (economically, employment-wise, energy-independence-wise and emission-wise).

You may not be able to directly consume solar power from your roof, but your hot-water tank and air-conditioner can and thanks to the grid your workplace can and other buildings in the same region can.

Reserves and balancing are necessary and is something electricity consumers always had to pay for:
For example, the Texas grid operator ERCOT holds 2800 MW of fast-acting reserves 24/7/365 to keep the lights on in case one of the state’s large fossil or nuclear power plants experiences an unexpected failure, as all power plants do from time to time.

Unfortunately, utilities are in general not interested in anyone producing their own electricity because that reduces their market share.
At least the HVDC transmission line which connects Oregon with Southern California was initiated by the government (US President 1961):
 
Cranky - a couple of items.

First, let me modify one of your statements: Wind power is mostly at night when electric cars are plugged in for charging

Second, your claim of 6 years life for Tesla batteries is ridiculously low. They have an 8 year battery warranty, and have stated if the battery degrades to worse than 70% of original rated capacity in that time the battery pack will be replaced or refurbished to original capacity for free.
 
rconnor said:
So, assuming the CATO analysis is true, it completely misses the point. The EPA's Clean Power Plan was never intended to stop global climate change. It does provide the US with ~$66 billion in average net domestic benefits by 2030 and is an important first step towards emission reductions.
Click to expand...

EPA fact sheet states this:

The Clean Power Plan has public health and climate benefits worth an estimated $55 billion to $93 billion per year in 2030, far outweighing the costs of $7.3 billion to $8.8 billion.
Click to expand...


Question: What "climate benefits" are we going to get by 2030 from a plan that only changes the climate by 0.02 degrees C by 2100?

Answer: Zero. This is inarguable. If you would like to attempt to argue it, please feel free. It'll definitely be entertaining reading.

Conclusion: Either (A) All of the estimated billions of dollars with of benefits are due to the EPA's estimates regarding reduced smog and particulates, not climate, or (B) someone at the EPA cooked the books. These are the only two possibilities. In either case, the EPA is being intentionally disingenuous on their fact sheet. Would you consider our very own government being intentionally disingenuous on a "fact sheet" a productive thing to do in the public discourse?

If your claim is correct, that the initiative actually had nothing to do with climate change, why do you think that the president of the United States says specifically that the plan was to combat climate change?


I'm interested to hear an honest answer to this question.

As far as your analogy goes, lets just dig our heels into it. I wholeheartedly thank you for finally engaging the idea that money could be spent in other ways, and comparing those for their impact on the environment. Assuming current rural land values of approximately $100/acre, you could conserve your 25km square plot for $15 million, not $8 billion. With $8 billion, you could conserve 125,000 square miles of rural land. An area about the size of New Mexico.

So yeah, I think that might have a pretty noticeable effect on the environment.




Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
 
It would have a noticeable effect on the environment if we had a single clue how to do it. We don't. Every environmental intervention has had unintended consequences. Even the vaunted reductions in SMOG and Acid Rain have resulted in increased waste in refineries, hundreds of billions of dollars in mandated capital investments, and an ethanol fiasco that we will not know the ramifications of for generations.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat
 
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