Global Cooling Evidence Continues to Cascade; Global Warming Zealots Unfazed

_{Barry Arrington

May 2, 2008

Global Warming, Off Topic}

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Researchers publishing in Nature report that parts of North America and Europe are expected to cool over the next decade. See the story here.

But the author of the report remains a global warming zealot and fears that his science will be used to undermine his religion:

“We thought a lot about the way to present this because we don’t want it to be turned around in the wrong way,” Keenlyside said. “I hope it doesn’t become a message of Exxon Mobil and other skeptics.”

Comments

DLH 3% number courtesy of Roy Spencer in his essay Atmospheric CO2 Increases: Could the Ocean, Rather Than Mankind, Be the Reason?
The evidence for rapid exchange of CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere comes from the fact that current carbon cycle flux estimates show that the annual CO2 exchange between surface and atmosphere amounts to 20% to 30% of the total amount in the atmosphere. This means that most of the carbon in the atmosphere is recycled through the surface every five years or so. From Segalstad’s writings, the rate of exchange could even be faster than this. For instance, how do we know what the turbulent fluxes in and out of the wind-driven ocean are? How would one measure such a thing locally, let alone globally? Now, this globally averaged situation is made up of some regions emitting more CO2 than they absorb, and some regions absorbing more than they emit. What if there is a region where there has been a long-term change in the net carbon flux that is at least as big as the human source? After all, the human source represents only 3% (or less) the size of the natural fluxes in and out of the surface. This means that we would need to know the natural upward and downward fluxes to much better than 3% to say that humans are responsible for the current upward trend in atmospheric CO2. Are measurements of the global carbon fluxes much better than 3% in accuracy?? I doubt it.
DaveScot_{May 4, 2008
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DLH Your calculation of the amount of atmospheric CO2 that is anthropogenic is mistaken. Most of the additional CO2 in the post-industrial atmosphere is from a natural source - the oceans. The oceans contain far more dissolved CO2 than is in the atmosphere. Cold water dissolves more CO2 than warm water. The oceans have warmed slightly in the last century and released some of the dissolved CO2 in the process. In order to call that "anthropogenic" one has to first conclude that the ocean warming is due to man's activity. That has not been established. The earth warms and cools with or without mankind around and so too does atmospheric CO2 rise and fall without mankind around. An inconvenient truth is that in the past, when CO2 levels have risen, the global average temperature rises about 1000 years BEFORE atmospheric CO2 level rises. This is hard data obtained from ice cores and isn't in dispute. Global warming is a CAUSE of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, not a result, in prehistoric times. There is no credible reason to believe that the historic rise in CO2 is any different from prehistoric rises - warming first, then atmospheric CO2 rises.DaveScot_{May 4, 2008
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"But my point was how could increasing by 27% something that is already of such incredibly miniscule proportions in the atmosphere have the horrifying impact being attributed to it. So previously it was 3 per 10000 and everything was great. Now its 4 parts per 10000 and the result is global catastrophe?" I am reluctant to spend much time on this because there is a good chance the post will not appear. So, very quickly: The proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere as a whole is irrelevant. The vast bulk of the atmosphere (O2, N2) has no greenhouse effect. You might as well ask how can a 50% increase in the arsenic in your body have such a dramatic effect when arsenic is such a tiny proportion of the whole body mass (less than 20 mg). As DLH says the "raw" contribution of the anthropogenic CO2 increase is relatively small. Feedback is vital but hard to model. Water vapour is by far the largest contributor to the greenhouse effect but the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere can change in days whereas the amount of CO2 changes over years or decades. Water vapour is best seen as a reaction rather than an action. In particular one of the things that determines the amount of water vapour is the temperature. I don't think this forum is a good place to discuss climate change and I have mixed feelings about the issue. But, I do recognise how little I know and how complex the whole subject is. Which is my sole point.Mark Frank_{May 3, 2008
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Sorry -- nested blockquotes worked in the preview, but not in the final comment. My comment begins with "your maze example."ungtss_{May 3, 2008
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Junkyard Hurricane:
ungtss: Is there any way to “train” a hurricane? Do planetary orbits exhibit pavlovian characteristics?Obviously not
Well, you could train water to only go in a certain path by fabricating a channel for it. You could train a dog in the same way, constraining it to a path via walls. Take away the walls after a few years and it might still continue to follow that path. Same with the water. You could also increase the effectiveness of the wall by electrifying it so the dog would be shocked if it touched it. Or you could just take away the wall and put a electrified collar on the dog and do the shocking yourself for training purposes, or use positive reinforcement of food to constrain the dog’s behavior in the direction you wanted. You could also use electricity to repel or constrain the behavior of nonliving things for example, those magnet toy dogs. The effect of electricity on an actual dog could be described in terms of chemical reactions I assume. Your maze example is interesting, but I don't think it adequately illustrates the responses unique to the dog. You can train a dog to do a certain trick by incentivizing a trick. The dog can actively seek a treat, based on its hunger, and its expectation that a behavior will result in a desired reward, based on its memory of a past association between the two. Water flowing through a maze is incapable of any of the italicized things above. It simply dumbly flows down a channel. But a dog WANTS a reward, and so it PLOTS how to get it. Those emotions -- those desires -- those associations -- are what is uniquely animal, intentional, and ultimately intelligent. A pack of wolves WORK AS A TEAM to accomplish the GOAL of taking down prey. I know one planetary body could scoot towards another via the effect of gravity. But roaches are not moving via the effect of anything except the instinctual knowledge that light = exposure and darkness = safety. That's the fundamental difference between the two.ungtss_{May 3, 2008
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JunkyardTornado at 38
But my point was how could increasing by 27% something that is already of such incredibly miniscule proportions in the atmosphere have the horrifying impact being attributed to it.
Simple - effectively attribute ALL the recent change in global temperature to the anthropogenic increase in carbon dioxide. Claim solar radiation, sunspots, ocean etc are negligible or minor. Consequently CO2 "MUST" be the cause. Therefore we "MUST" reduce CO2. etc. etc. etc. The CO2 increase directly contributes about 1C to the greenhouse effect. (The far greater impact is due to water vapor.) Then "positive feedback" assumptions extrapolate this to 4 C or more. That is where Roy Spencer is challenging which is the cause and which the effect, and whether such "positive feedback" really exists. Come to think of it, where did that fossil fuel come from? if not from the CO2 in the atmosphere? If the earth was so lush back then to provide all that biomass to make into coal, what is the problem with restoring it into the atmosphere? - Would that not improve biotic productivity -which we urgently need to feed the earth's growing population? Whatever happened to ACCOMMODATING climate change? Why "MUST" we stabilize climate?DLH_{May 3, 2008
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ungtss: Is there any way to “train” a hurricane? Do planetary orbits exhibit pavlovian characteristics?Obviously not Well, you could train water to only go in a certain path by fabricating a channel for it. You could train a dog in the same way, constraining it to a path via walls. Take away the walls after a few years and it might still continue to follow that path. Same with the water. You could also increase the effectiveness of the wall by electrifying it so the dog would be shocked if it touched it. Or you could just take away the wall and put a electrified collar on the dog and do the shocking yourself for training purposes, or use positive reinforcement of food to constrain the dog's behavior in the direction you wanted. You could also use electricity to repel or constrain the behavior of nonliving things for example, those magnet toy dogs. The effect of electricity on an actual dog could be described in terms of chemical reactions I assume. And I think some governments are trying to train hurricanes. Can stars scoot away from the light like a roach? I know one planetary body could scoot towards another via the effect of gravity. A photosensitive cell works by means of a chemical reaction doesn't? Doesn't this prove there are chemicals sensitive to the effects of light?JunkyardTornado_{May 3, 2008
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And even if we aren't causing global warming, if it's a bad thing and we can reasonably change it, we ought to. That's why I don't really care whether we are causing it or not.ungtss_{May 3, 2008
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DLH I don't have anything to refute that C02 has increased by the amount you specified due to human activity. But my point was how could increasing by 27% something that is already of such incredibly miniscule proportions in the atmosphere have the horrifying impact being attributed to it. So previously it was 3 per 10000 and everything was great. Now its 4 parts per 10000 and the result is global catastrophe? Have any links explaining the logic of that? I think the cyanide analogy may have come from Rush Limbaugh.JunkyardTornado_{May 3, 2008
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Junkyard Tornado: OK, lets take the intentions of an animal, a predator of some sort. Animals spend most of their waking lives in a search for food - its a basic fundamental drive. That drive is purely a chemical mechanism having nothing to do with intention or choice on the part of the animal. The choice of what food to acquire is determined by availability, what is available in their environment. Of course an animal might have preferences regarding food, so that if there were an abundance of food he might prefer one over the other. Say an animal was really fond of honey and would gorge itself on it endlessly when it was available. Why would he prefer honey? Could there be a mechanism, some explanation in terms of the animal’s neuro-physical chemical make-up that might account for that strong preference? If there were (and certainly there must be) we can therefore see that the animal’s preference has to do with peculiarities of his physical make-up of which he had no choice or preference in determining. So his intention once again is determined by a mechanism. And if it were not, what would it mean? Supposing this intention, this choice was determined by nothing that could even conceivably be explicated or described. It would mean the animal’s choice was pure randomness. So, an animal’s intentions are dictated by fundamental drives and attributes of his physical makeup. That's the old philosophical dispute surrounding freewill + determinism, compatibilism and incompatibilism. Personally, I think that, even granted that animals are "purely mechanism and nothing more," there is still room for "intention" fundamentally different from the simple laws of nature. And it comes down to this: even if animals are only mechanisms, those mechanisms cause things like EMOTION, DESIRE, PLANS, etc -- things that we all experience every day, and which cause animals to act in such a way as to deliberately shape their environments for an end. Like an orangutan spear-fishing; on a human writing music; or a flatworm pursuing dinner. Even if the desires and emotions of the animal are only physical mechanisms -- they are still emotions and desires, and they still cause the animal to shape its environment for its own purposes. That's the fundamental difference between a dog and a hurricane. A hurricane doesn't have any mechanism to "want" anything -- or to "think" anything -- or to "feel" anything. Animals do. And whether those animals are purely mechanistic or not, they still have a capability the weather does not -- the capacity to feel, want, and think, for a purpose. How can you test this? Is there any way to "train" a hurricane? Do planetary orbits exhibit pavlovian characteristics? Can stars scoot away from the light like a roach? Obviously not. Well, the point of DLH’s post was that people are trying to determine whether global-warming is caused by natural or intelligent causes just like with ID, and that is what I was responding to. Got it. For my part, I think the real issue is not whether we're causing it, but a) whether it's a bad thing, and if so, then b) whether we can reasonably do anything about it. Suppose we are causing global warming. What does that matter, if it turns out it's a good thing (and it may well be?) Or what does it matter if in order to reverse it, we'd have to kill off half the population and revert to cave living to reverse it?ungtss_{May 3, 2008
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On CO2, nominally 280 ppm preindustrial / 384 ppm today = 72.9% natural, 27.1% anthropogenic. For current data, see Trends in Carbon DioxideDLH_{May 3, 2008
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JunkyardTornado 4 laws: Gravity, Electromagnetism, Weak Nuclear & Strong Nuclear. How does that cause the 1 billion codons in the genome?DLH_{May 3, 2008
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But someone could say those prexisting conditions had to be a sentient being with intention and volition, etc. And I would say what about epigenesis. At what point in a causal chain must we posit a sentient being directly comparable to a human being. As a Christian I would say, why does the entire universe exist, if it afforded nothing of relevance to the creation of human beings, the supposed endpoint of creation. It seems apparent that the universe must have something to do with our existence, specifically the probabilistic resources it provided through the energy of a million million suns, possibly culminating ultimately in the emergence of a very special cellular entity packed with a huge amount of random genetic information. Maybe I'm confusing ID with YEC, so maybe some of you think the same lines. I think God is so smart he could create the world in his sleep which is what I think happened. I'll try to make that my last post for the day.JunkyardTornado_{May 3, 2008
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DLH:"For The ID vs evolution, consider the distinction of the four laws of physics vs intelligent causation." Yes, saying four laws produced everything (what were those 4 laws again?) doesn't seem very enlightening. If you have some starting configuration and you apply some simplistic transformation to it and the output is Picasso's Guernica, then you could say, "Well Picasso's Guernica was really already in the initial configuration to begin with." Maybe the transformation was only a simplistic decompression. Maybe it was even simpler, e.g. "flip all the bits". So yeah, you're just pushing back what needs to be explained. But whatever that initial configuration x was, and whatever transformation f that was applied to it, f(x) still equates to y, and is merely an alternate encoding for y itself (Guernica). If f were a lot more complex, adding quite a bit of information to x to result in the output y, f(x) still equates to y. So, we don't need to bring some disembodied unspecificable "intelligence" into the picture to observe that to produce y it takes something equivalent to y to begin with. So you could say a million years ago there was a precise encoding for the biological world no different than such an encoding on a computer would be (whatever that might be). So, the above is my personal rather long-winded mantra on the subject, but its sort of contingent on viewing humans, animals, the universe, and everything else as potentially describable in a systematic manner meaning everything is a mechanism. I would say that all science can do is essentially try to posit some preexisting configuration in nature and some set of laws that transformed that configuration into what we have now (and I don't think quantum theory really messes with that picture).JunkyardTornado_{May 3, 2008
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JunkyardTornado at 31 For The ID vs evolution, consider the distinction of the four laws of physics vs intelligent causation.DLH_{May 3, 2008
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ungtss wrote: " think the key is defining exactly how we are using the terms “intelligent” and “natural.” I think that the terms are generally used to distinguish between intentional vs. unintentional acts — thus predators are “intelligent” insofar as their acts are intentional, while weather is not intelligent because there is no intention involved in the varying winds and currents." OK, lets take the intentions of an animal, a predator of some sort. Animals spend most of their waking lives in a search for food - its a basic fundamental drive. That drive is purely a chemical mechanism having nothing to do with intention or choice on the part of the animal. The choice of what food to acquire is determined by availability, what is available in their environment. Of course an animal might have preferences regarding food, so that if there were an abundance of food he might prefer one over the other. Say an animal was really fond of honey and would gorge itself on it endlessly when it was available. Why would he prefer honey? Could there be a mechanism, some explanation in terms of the animal's neuro-physical chemical make-up that might account for that strong preference? If there were (and certainly there must be) we can therefore see that the animal's preference has to do with peculiarities of his physical make-up of which he had no choice or preference in determining. So his intention once again is determined by a mechanism. And if it were not, what would it mean? Supposing this intention, this choice was determined by nothing that could even conceivably be explicated or described. It would mean the animal's choice was pure randomness. So, an animal's intentions are dictated by fundamental drives and attributes of his physical makeup. An animal is a mechanism. Wind currents are a mechanism as well. You could look at the direction a hurricane was taking (and truly what is more complex than weather), and consider various factors in the wind current's environment, bodies of water, land masses, dynamic attributes of the hurricane system itself, and say quite literally, "This hurricane has an intention to either make landfall around Savannah or possibly further south in Jacksonville." This would not be a metaphor wherein only in some poetic sense did the hurricane have real intentions whereas only an animal (wolf? cricket? ape? amoeba?) could have a real intention. That being said, ID is not about explaining the extinction of species — it’s about explaining the origin of the fundamental structures underlying adaptive complexity. No ID advocate I’m aware of is concerned with showing whether dinosaurs went extinct based on intelligent or unintelligent action — it’s the origin of DNA we’re interested in Well, the point of DLH's post was that people are trying to determine whether global-warming is caused by natural or intelligent causes just like with ID, and that is what I was responding to.JunkyardTornado_{May 3, 2008
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JunkyardTornado
In discussing global-warming, the distinction between human and natural causes is really a distinction between human and non-human.
It might help to refine this to anthropogenic vs non-anthropogenic as controllable causes. e.g., in how to rank human raised cattle caused methane which is a much stronger greenhouse gas, vs the large amount of methane caused by termites. It is still an open question on whether science is able to quantify the impact of anthropogenic causes on climate distinct from solar, cosmic ray, ocean, cloud, precipitation and other causes. The IPCC report claims 90% confidence that the temperature rise is anthropogenic. However, other scientists such as Roy Spencer are positing other models and causes which nominally appear to explain most of the temperature variations without any CO2 forcing. See: Roy Spencer Internal Radiative Forcing And The Illusion Of A Sensitive Climate System Thus the unrecognized BIAS (Type B) error could be very high compared to the Type A (statistical analysis) errors. See NIST on Uncertainty
Type A evaluation method of evaluation of uncertainty by the statistical analysis of series of observations, Type B evaluation method of evaluation of uncertainty by means other than the statistical analysis of series of observations.
DLH_{May 3, 2008
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Junkyard Tornado: Its not clear to me where ID stands on animal behavior - do you say that animals operate on the basis of nonmaterial intelligent causation, or rather by responding to their environment, utilizing the physical resources they posses in terms of memory, sensory apparati, etc in order to fullfill basic drives. So the more brain power and the more sensory sophistication an animal possess (i.e. in terms if stimuli discrimination, etc) the more complex and long-term goal oriented its behavior will be and the less simplistically reactive and instinctive. So, would you make a distinction between natural causes and animal behavior? Say some species went extinct and the question was why and one possibility was changes in the climate and another possibility was the migration into the area of some new predatory animal. Would ID say the predator was an example of intelligent causation? Certainly it would be worthwhile to distinguish between weather-related factors and predator-related factors, but is the latter in a different category entirely, representing some sort of nonmaterial intelligent causation. What about humans - are they just a very complex natural cause, or something in an entirely different category from either chance or natural cause. Is the drive for more and more resources, energy, etc. something unique to the human species? I think other animals can cause massive devastation in the search for resources as well. Interesting question -- I think the key is defining exactly how we are using the terms "intelligent" and "natural." I think that the terms are generally used to distinguish between intentional vs. unintentional acts -- thus predators are "intelligent" insofar as their acts are intentional, while weather is not intelligent because there is no intention involved in the varying winds and currents. Of course, weather could be affected by intelligent action -- human-caused changes to temperature and/or content of the atmosphere would certainly change the weather -- but the intelligence would lie in those human actions, and not in the weather itself. The question of dualism -- i.e. whether animal intelligence is "non-material" in some sense -- is really beside the point. Animals are intelligent insofar as they act with intention. That being said, ID is not about explaining the extinction of species -- it's about explaining the origin of the fundamental structures underlying adaptive complexity. No ID advocate I'm aware of is concerned with showing whether dinosaurs went extinct based on intelligent or unintelligent action -- it's the origin of DNA we're interested in.ungtss_{May 3, 2008
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Mark Frank: OK so carbon dioxide has an incredibly minute presence in the atmosphere - 280 parts per million. 0r roughly 3/100ths of a per cent, or 3 parts out of 10,000 in the atmosphere. Increase that to 4 parts out of 10,000 in the atmosphere and what is the result? - global devastation, temperatures spiraling out of control, flooding, etc. Sounds like carbon dioxide is much more potent and harmful than cyanide. I wonder how they make school children grasp this concept. I know I'm having trouble with it. Especially considering at 13,796 feet oxygen levels are 60% of what they are at sea level (and oxygen is 20% of the atmosphere.) Not that global warming isn't occuring here, as well as on Mars and the rest of the solar system.JunkyardTornado_{May 3, 2008
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DLH wrote: "Climate Science April 22, 2008 posits three distinct hypotheses, only one of which can be true : ... The origin and development of biotic systems similarly provides three mutually exclusive options. * 1) The origin and development of biotic systems is purely materialistic from natural law and chance. * 2) The origin and development of biotic systems is partly due to intelligent causation, and partly due to natural law and chance. *3) The origin and development of biotic systems is exclusively due to intelligent causation" Its not clear to me where ID stands on animal behavior - do you say that animals operate on the basis of nonmaterial intelligent causation, or rather by responding to their environment, utilizing the physical resources they posses in terms of memory, sensory apparati, etc in order to fullfill basic drives. So the more brain power and the more sensory sophistication an animal possess (i.e. in terms if stimuli discrimination, etc) the more complex and long-term goal oriented its behavior will be and the less simplistically reactive and instinctive. So, would you make a distinction between natural causes and animal behavior? Say some species went extinct and the question was why and one possibility was changes in the climate and another possibility was the migration into the area of some new predatory animal. Would ID say the predator was an example of intelligent causation? Certainly it would be worthwhile to distinguish between weather-related factors and predator-related factors, but is the latter in a different category entirely, representing some sort of nonmaterial intelligent causation. What about humans - are they just a very complex natural cause, or something in an entirely different category from either chance or natural cause. Is the drive for more and more resources, energy, etc. something unique to the human species? I think other animals can cause massive devastation in the search for resources as well. In discussing global-warming, the distinction between human and natural causes is really a distinction between human and non-human. Someone who asserts this cause is human isn't making a metaphysical stance regarding dualism. The point is that presumably if the cause is human, then something could be done about it (for example forced-sterilization by tampering with the water supply - just curious if eventually they start trying something like this.)JunkyardTornado_{May 3, 2008
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...and from the crackpot file (hope I'm not banned for posting this)- In Black Gold Stranglehold, Jerome Corsi and Craig Smith expose the fraudulent science that has made America so vulnerable: the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and that it is a finite resource. This book reveals the conclusions reached by Dr. Thomas Gold, a professor at Cornell University, in his seminal book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels (Copernicus Books, 1998) and accepted by many in the scientific community that oil is not a product of fossils and prehistoric forests but rather the bio-product of a continuing biochemical reaction below the earth's surface that is brought to attainable depths by the centrifugal forces of the earth's rotation. -Black Gold Stranglehold I think this guy says you can get oil anywhere by drilling deep enough. Don't know the status of this theory at the present time.JunkyardTornado_{May 3, 2008
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Climate Science April 22, 2008 posits three distinct hypotheses, only one of which can be true: * 1) The human influence is minimal and natural variations dominate climate variations on all time scale; * 2) While natural variations are important, the human influence is significant and involves a diverse range of first-order climate forcings (including, but not limited to the human input of CO2); * 3) The human influence is dominated by the emissions into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. The challenge is to disprove one or two. IPCC & Al Gore advocate #3, while Climate Science supports #2. They observe that the Nature paper by Keenlyside et al entitled “Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector” "provides evidence that is inconsistent with the third hypothesis." (See: Will global warming take a short break? - Improved climate predictions suggest a reduced warming trend during the next 10 years - See this which critiques/explains what the paper ACTUALLY says vs newspaper headlines. Roy Spencer may upend IPCC models with cloud and precipitation variations and internal radiative forcings which are ignored in existing models. See: Internal Radiative Forcing And The Illusion Of A Sensitive Climate System He is challenging the assumptions on which is the cause and which the effect. His papers and models may well provide the decisive disruption to conventional models. ------------------- The origin and development of biotic systems similarly provides three mutually exclusive options. * 1) The origin and development of biotic systems is purely materialistic from natural law and chance. * 2) The origin and development of biotic systems is partly due to intelligent causation, and partly due to natural law and chance. * 3) The origin and development of biotic systems is exclusively due to intelligent causation. Neo-Darwinists advocate # 1). Intelligent Design posits that some biotic systems are best caused by an intelligent Designer, and thus advocates #2) and/or #3). (Assuming a Big Tent approach. If I understand their argument, some Young Earth Creationists may advocate #3 while others #2. I understand Behe to support #2) The challenge for ID is to identify and demonstrate one or more ways to distinguish between #1 versus #2 and/or #3. Then to develop a descriptive/predictive theory. (PS DH Edited to clarify #2 and/or #3 for Big Tent approach.)DLH_{May 3, 2008
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Dave Scot wrote: "we’re using the carbon energy that plants store for us faster than they’re storing it. We’re drawing down an energy store that took millions of years to build up". Do you realize that Brazil is coming to rely almost exclusively on alcohol from sugar cane to fuel their vehicles. I think virtually all of the several million cars sold there each year now are flex fuel and can run on pure alcohol. They pay a fraction of what we pay for fuel. Of course, as you would expect, there is a prohibitively high tariff on brazilian sugar cane coming into the U.S. NYTimes: With Big Boost From Sugar Cane, Brazil Is Satisfying Its Fuel NeedsJunkyardTornado_{May 3, 2008
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Dave Scot: I agree with everything you say. Nonetheless there is no way you can, like JGuy suggested, increase atmospheric oxygen by burning fuel. You either have a pair of oxygen atoms as an O2 molecule or you have it bound to carbon in a CO2 molecule. No plant, however fertilized, is capable of introducing additional oxygen into the biosphere.Liberatus_{May 3, 2008
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DaveScott Climatologist Roy Spencer is calling for More Carbon Dioxide to help feed the world. PS on your 3% CO2 is anthropogenic, any links/papers on how to distinguish and quantify anthropogenic CO2 vs natural?DLH_{May 3, 2008
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"Only about 3% of the total atmospheric CO2 is manmade." Dave The figure is about 30%. See for example http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87 for an explanation. There really is no doubt about this figure. Possibly you are confused by: * percentage of total carbon flow between atmosphere and earth which is due to burning of fossil fuels * percentage of greenhouse effect due to man-made CO2 both of which are in the order of 3-4% CheersMark Frank_{May 3, 2008
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vj This quote from your first link: "We don't have an energy problem," says Hans Müller-Steinhagen, of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). "We have an energy conversion and distribution problem." is essentially accurate but it understates the distribution problem. Electrical transmission lines are expensive, prone to failure, and become very inefficient as distances increase. That's why we don't have huge centralized electrical generation. The U.S., for instance, generates most of its electricity from coal and has about 25% of all the coal in the world in the northeast sector of the country. Yet we ship the coal all over the country for local electrical generation instead of generating the electricity near the coal mines. The distribution problem is HUGE. Centralized generation of electricity won't solve the problem unless we develop some really cheap high temperature superconductors for use in an electrical grid. So far, after decades of trying, malleable high temperature superconductors remain a pipe dream. Basic discovery is required there and you can't put discovery on a schedule. For that reason it has been my position for decades that the long term solution is orbital solar-electric. No discovery is required. It's strictly an engineering problem. Solar power satellites can be positioned so that they are visible by the entire globe. Solar flux in orbit is constant, much higher in power than at ground level, and panels or mirrors don't get dirty or harmed by inclement weather in the vacuum of space. Power can be beamed down to earth via microwave transmission with relatively low transmission loss and collected close to where it will be used by small antenna farms. It's doable right now and has been doable for decades. Progress however is glacial. Nowhere near enough time and energy is being put into development of a low cost means of moving mass from ground to orbit. We're running out of time. Another avenue I really like to solving the problem, but there's still some discovery required, is what Craig Venter is doing in the way of customizing bacterial DNA. Once you harness a few basic things found in bacteria and extremophiles and can have self-replicating hordes of bacterial slaves doing things they already do but at your behest - things like turning water, CO2, and sunlight into ethanol (Venter's first goal AFAIK). Stored in recyclable organic containers and ready to use as fuel, shouldn't be much harder. Grown in a garden almost anywhere. Might not be very far away but you have to have some faith in science at this point. What really intrigues me about this is how fast it's happening and how close to being an engineering-only problem. Progress is anything but glacial. Near as I can tell the cost/performance of automated lab equipment that's enabling the reverse engineering of simple cells is following Moore's Law. That's awesome. I've been a fan of nanotechnology since I read Drexler's "Engines of Creation" in 1987. The biggest single milestone seems to be getting close and Venter is my bet for who's the first to get there. DaveScot_{May 3, 2008
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Dave Scot: "If we don’t have a replacement for [fossil fuel] within this century civilization will collapse." How about this? http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,550544,00.html See also: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/04/14/solar_electric_thermal/index.html What about cars, I hear you ask. OK, what about this? http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4237853.htmlvjtorley_{May 3, 2008
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Liberatus Only about 3% of the total atmospheric CO2 is manmade. You should also keep in mind there's a reason fossil fuels have "fossil" in the name. Like the oxygen in the atmosphere, ancient plants also produced the oil in the ground, hence "fossil" fuel. In this perspective the burning of fossil fuel is simply taking carbon produced by plants in the distant past, oxygen produced by plants in the distant past, and recombining them into CO2 (while harvesting the energy in the exothermic reaction), and putting the CO2 back in the atmosphere where plants (with energy from the sun) break it back down into carbon and oxygen again. It's a virtuous cycle. The only bad thing is that we're using the carbon energy that plants store for us faster than they're storing it. We're drawing down an energy store that took millions of years to build up. When it's gone, that's when you can start the hysterics and I'll join you because our civilization, and our ability to feed 6 billion people, depends on fossil fuel as a necessary factor. If we don't have a replacement for it within this century civilization will collapse. DaveScot_{May 3, 2008
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@JGuy: There will be no more oxygen due to increased plant growth. Plants do not produce oxygen out of nowhere. The oxygen plants release is the O2 from the CO2 they take in. Thus, it is the very oxygen our car engines and power plants consumed to produce the CO2 in the first place.Liberatus_{May 3, 2008
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