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Why Sustainable Power Is Unsustainable
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Feb 07, 2009 09:44 PM
from the what-will-the-market-bear dept.
from the what-will-the-market-bear dept.
Urchin writes "Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, the most advanced 'renewable' technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources including indium and platinum —
resources that could dry up in 10-15 years if they were widely used in the renewable energy market."
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[+]
Hardware: PC's Waste Heat Could Add To Processing Power 134 comments
Urchin writes to tell us that physicists working in a new field called "phononics" claim that waste heat from a processor could actually be used to add to its power. "Crunching data coded using photons — photonic computing — is one example, and in 2007 researchers built the first workable optical transistor. But now the idea of computing using heat flow is gaining popularity among applied physicists. Heat travels through solid materials by means of phonons — ripples of vibration passing through a series of atoms. Those ripples can be used to send and store data in digital form: one temperature is read as 0 or 'off' while a second, higher temperature is interpreted as 1 or 'on.' Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated, it can keep its temperature — and data — intact for a long time."
Submission: Why sustainable power is unsustainable by Anonymous Coward
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Wind? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's even narrower than that (Score:5, Insightful)
Take it even further. Neither nuclear nor geothermal suffer from this supposed problem. And not even all solar power systems face it--molten salt and biomass-mediated systems, for example, won't suffer either.
So really we're down to a potential problem with photo-voltaic solar power, and only then on the assumption that no systems based on plentiful materials are waiting in the wings.
Bah.
--MarkusQ
Parent
Because you can't make a magnet without neodymium? (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad we don't have any other way to make magenets...oh wait.
Don't you love the impartial scientific tone here? And the sheer illogic of this statement is staggering. If you know you are going to have large amount of episodic oversupply there are all sorts of useful things you can do with it. Make ice. Melt salt. Run pumps. I wouldn't be surprised if the "giant toaster" is some clever over supply utilization system being ridiculed by TFA's evidently clueless author.
--MarkusQ
Parent
Re:Because you can't make a magnet without neodymi (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm, I think you missed the point there.
Making ice, melting salt, and running pumps are methods for storing energy (like a battery) so when you are making too much power you can save up the excess and extract it later when you are producing too little power.
The poster wasn't suggesting that power companies become molten salt salesmen.
Parent
Re:Because you can't make a magnet without neodymi (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure you missed his point entirely. They aren't running "another business" but instead finding some temporary storage place for the excess electricity. That's why the GP said "over supply utilization system".
Melting salt sucks up power and then generates it when you use that trapped heat to make steam later. Running pumps lets you store power with gravity. Pump water up higher, it releases the potential energy when it comes back down. And there are many other methods.
Parent
Re:Electricity cables? (Score:5, Funny)
But there's no easy and efficient means of stepping the power down.
Why not? You could just wire Germany, France and Italy in series.
Parent
Re:rtfa (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, no, it's not right in the article. It's in the comments. And we all know what comments are worth.
C'mon, at least try to be effective in your deliberate deception.
Parent
Re:Wind? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because something is not found in plants doesn't make it a non-viable energy source... or do you really mean to tell me that because nature never found a way to burn petroleum or coal for energy that they aren't effective? Heck, almost nothing except for humans even uses FIRE for energy, and that one's dead obvious.
That fallacy aside, think about what would actually be required for a plant to use wind or tidal power effectively in terms of habitat and engineering. Wind would actually require free-moving parts just to function, and they'd probably use solar too (it works well, so it would be a distinct disadvantage NOT having it as an energy source). Tidal would require plants to grow, essentially, semi-submerged along open coast, vulnerable to things like crashing waves and migrating sand... even seaweed has trouble growing along beaches because the habitat is so turbulent and marginal.
That said, I agree that solar is by far the most obvious and readily available renewable energy source we have, and I still don't get why we're so concerned with the others when so little has been done so far with that one.
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"Why Sustainable Power Is Unsustainable" (Score:5, Insightful)
ore supplies and reserves are *always* limited (Score:5, Interesting)
Who would pay for an exploration team to go around, looking for new sources of a material that was already abundant? Answer: no-one. As a consequence, a lot of "rare" minerals only have a known source that will last a couple of decades - or less. Until they become scare and the price rises, there's no profit in spending money looking for new reserves.
In the 70's the big scare was that there was only 15 years worth of (known) oil reserves left. Hey, we didn't run out. When the price went up, that incentivised people to go out and find new sources.
Same when I was doing electronics design in the early 80's - there was a scare that we'd run out of tantalum (for capacitors).
Scares aren't new and tend to have a way of working themselves out. Even if one metal did become to prices - i.e. scarce, no doubt processes will be invented to use a different material.
Nothing is fully renewable that... (Score:5, Insightful)
.. is suitable for realistically providing power for the typical modern life.
Nuclear is clean, safe and practically inexhaustible. The latest advances could provide small nuclear "batteries" the size of a hot tube that could provide power to an entire neighborhood decentralizing much of the power systems (and huge networks of wires) we've come to think of as unavoidable. Making our power systems virtually fool proof. For too long we've lived in the fear from the propaganda of the illiterate press. It's time to start using the miraculous energy source we uncovered and made practical nearly 3/4 of a century ago. It's there, it's understood, it's completely doable and for a hell of lot less money than the democrats want to steal from the people of the US right now.
Go nukes! Go nukes! Go nukes!
Re:Nothing is fully renewable that... (Score:5, Informative)
WHERE THE HELL DO YOU PUT THE WASTE?
Nuclear waste isn't magically dangerous. There are nuclear materials that are super "hot", emitting scary amounts of radiation; these have a half-life that is very short. Given a few years, they radiate themselves down to about nothing. There are nuclear material that have a half-life of 10,000 years or so; and they are hardly radioactive at all, much less of a threat than the radioactivity that goes up the chimny stacks of a coal power plant every day. There are NO nuclear materials that are scary hot for tens of thousands of years. Its one or the other.
Various posters here on /. have made the claim that if we use "breeder" reactors, that we can re-use much of what is called "waste" now. We can re-use it over and over, and what is left will be a small amount of waste that isn't hard to manage.
Remember also that the best thing about nuclear power: you don't need very much fuel for the amount of power you get. With coal, you need tons and tons of the stuff every day, and that means tons of ash flying out of the chimny stacks (much of that ash radioactive). If you could filter out the ash, instead of putting it in the air, you would then have tons of ash waste to dispose of every day. The nuclear waste is comparatively nastier and harder to dispose of, but there is oh so much less of it.
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Why are there so few responses to the easy fixes? (Score:5, Informative)
We need research into different energy sources, it's true, but what boggles my mind is why people don't address the simple things in their own lives, if they're concerned about energy conservation. The funniest thing I can see in this particular arena is the moron who rails against the oil companies and middle eastern governments, terrorists, and whatever else, then gets in his Explorer to commute to work by himself, getting 3 mpg, while babbling on his phone about how bad the energy situation is. If you drive a truck (no, I don't use the euphemistic 'SUV'), then shut the F up- you're part of the problem.
There is so much BS going around about alternative energy sources, but we could make a big difference now. I haven't ever owned a car that got less than 25 MPG, and I work half of my time from home; when I don't, I often ride a train. I doubt there are many alternative energy advocates that are close to my carbon footprint, but they put their faith in technology that doesn't exist instead of getting their supersized butts out of their trucks. And people listen to them anyway.
Real sustainable power available since decades (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, IRTFA. Sheesh, talk about using bazookas to swat flies. Is this anything more than FUD to scare people back to coal? Let me spell it out:
Solar-thermal plants using mirrors, steam turbines, and if you want 24/7, underground heat reservoirs. Completely buildable using some of the more common materials on the planet: sand, steel, concrete, copper, salt, etcetera. Who cares if they're inefficient compared to the super-fancy super-rare stuff in TFA, just build lots of them.
Maintenance? Bugger all in comparison to a coal plant, the bloody things run on sunshine. There's no toxic+radioactive coal dust/ash/soot getting into everything, no gas-guzzling trucks and trains leaving said dust billowing in their wake over nearby towns and farms as they go between mine and plant... blah blah bloody blah.
There are only three real reasons that the countries with plenty of sunshine (e.g. my own) haven't gone this route long ago: vested greed, common ignorance, short-term thinking.
non-re-new-able (Score:5, Insightful)
The situation with renewable energy is different. Yes when it takes energy to manufacture biomass into fuels. But if is done right, we are taking carbon out of the atmosphere one year, and putting it back in the next, creating a steady state. Clearly there are some issues now, but that is political. In the US, instead of using weeds, the corn growers, which have been pushing the US for years to a deadly philosophy of monoculture, is using food crops. On the other point, I don't think that biofuels is causing food prices to increase any more than lack of oil is causing the current high prices at the pump. demand for luxury food is increasing, the economic expansion of the past several years means that people are buying more, and there is much less focus on the needs of those that have no food.
As far as rare metals, these are not consumed. All these products can be remanufactured. The issue is political. In my US town, trash is picked up once a week at every house, but recycling is picked up only every other week at some houses. Houses are allowed to throw away dangerous materials without any fine. The only way to send electronics for remanufacture to go to the drop off on a work day. Of course a lot of this has to do with the costs involved. it is cheaper to mine new material rather than reuse old. for these materials the economics might be reversed, and we might the trend reversed.
a lot more platinum is coming... (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA is complete BS, at least in terms of platinum.
I work for a company which is in the process of adding several centuries' supply of PGEs (platinum group elements) to proven reserves. Platinum and fuel cells are going to get a lot cheaper, within 10 years.
We know where PGEs are, but it's often in politically unstable places, or those that are busy strangling their domestic exploration industry (e.g. Canada).
This global recession will likely help finally unjam a lot of political roadblocks. When people are hurting, they don't tolerate environmental protests as much, and aren't as willing to turn a blind eye to eco-terrorism, which has wracked the industry in the last decade. Even the first world is finding it harder to ignore potentially adding a hundred billion to one's GDP for decades.
Asteroids (Score:5, Interesting)
One small nickel-iron type asteroid will also yield plenty of platinum, iridium and similar metals. Heck, there's still some disagreement over what they're mining in Sudbury, Ontario, [wikipedia.org] is there because of magma upwelling after the original impact (circa 2bya) or remnants of the original impactor.
Separating them out can be done in space with a number of processes using large reflectors and solar heating. (Zone refining, fractional distillation, carbonyl extraction, etc..)
If we'd had the guts to start moving towards that when some people first started suggesting it seriously, we'd be there or nearly so by now.
One word (Score:5, Insightful)
Duh!
Anyone who has believed otherwise has been caught drinking too much of the spiked Kool-Aid.
We live in an effectively finite ecosystem with finite resources. Had we not allowed human population to explode as it has, particularly in the last 200 years, virtually none of what we consider "crises" would even be problems worth noting yet. We would still have had to address them eventually perhaps, but we would have had centuries more to learn before then. Unfortunately the species is very adept at burning the candle at both ends. What we're experiencing now is not much different than the crash of withdrawal after binging on some hallucinogen. The morning after is always a bitch.
Again, human overpopulation is the 800-pound Samsonite gorilla in the room. Until we deal with that, none of the rest is anything but posturing.
Wind, waves and water (Score:5, Insightful)
The WWW is the solution.
Wind, waves and water can be harnessed for renewable enegy without exotic metals.
The premis of the title is wrong as it makes the assumption that the only way to get good energy is through current solar cell technologies.
No exotic metals here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I'm saying conspicuous consumers should cut down a little. If one commutes less distance or drives a more efficient vehicle, for example, is one therefore poorer?
And I'm also also that everyone can benefit from energy savings. That does not make us poorer... it makes us richer. What do you think the whole "Green IT" thing is about? Does big enterprise really care about environmentalism, or are they thrilled about cutting the huge energy costs for traditional data centers?
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Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
My new windows reduced my heating bill, but don't detract from my standard of living.
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Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Funny)
*ducks*
Parent
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
aka "be more poor".
Righto.. Because this past year I bought a new fridge that uses 1/5 the energy of my old fridge and replaced all the bulbs in my house with CF ones. This year I'll insulate my home (it currently has very little).
So in your opinion I'm now "more poor" than I was before? That's a bit odd, because all those decisions were purely economic ones, and I expect the fridge to pay for itself in 5-6 years. The lights are harder to calculate, but they shouldn't be more than a couple years. The insulation will pay for itself in one winter. So in my case using less energy makes me LESS poor because it winds up costing me less money.
Parent
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but that's a bullshit answer.
I use about 150 gallons of gasoline a year for my 2 cars. Why? We ride bikes. Pretty much everywhere. The only time I actually drive is on road trips. And we do a lot of those.
There are a lot of ways you can save without being "more poor". You can save and "be richer".
My solar water heater gives me enough hot water for my family to take showers without running out of hot water - as we used to with only the electric heater. We have "always on" computers because I run multihead off the main server, saving the powerbill for individual computers. You want a computer? Turn the monitor on. No boot time, no waiting. I could go on and on. A little bit of care and though and you can save and be rich.
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Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Feel free to review the evidence yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
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Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
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they're less agreed on what to do about it (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreeing on the cause is one thing, and as you point out, there is pretty good agreement on it. There is much less agreement on the proposed solutions. What effects would lowering carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2009 have vs. not lowering them? And what amount would they have to be lowered by to have some particular desired outcome? Is lowering emissions going forward even a useful option at this stage, or do we need some sort of active reversal of existing damage in addition (or instead)? The answers to all those questions seem pretty up in the air.
I'd personally like to see an IPCCC-like document outlining proposed best practices, which currently available scientific evidence suggests would, if followed, have some desirable outcome or prevent some undesirable outcome. Or at least giving some odds on each of the major proposals. But we still seem to be a bit off from that.
Parent
Do the right thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Trashed econmomy."
BS. Seriously. We buy new cars anyway, so why NOT more efficient ones? Besides, if everyone drove dramatically more efficient vehicles it ALSO mean reducing (or eliminating) our trade deficit in oil. How does THAT trash the economy?
Eliminate dependence on foreign oil, and it also means we don't have to spend billions sending our kids off to die every time the Middle East hicups. How does THAT trash the economy?
And there are as many economic OPPORTUNITIES in doing the right things as there are not doing them. Solar cell have to be manufactured and installed. Wind turbines constructed. And so on. That spells jobs.
Less polution. Reduced environmental impact. Economic growth. Reduced trade deficit. Eliminate dependence on foreign oil. And perhaps, taking out some insurance on our planet. There are many, many, many reasons for making the investment.
And practically none for NOT doing so...
Parent
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the IPCC says that humans are the cause, it is their job to say that:
The IPCC's job is to study human-induced climate change, so their jobs depend upon finding human-induced climate change.
Parent
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it...." is regularly attributed to Joseph Goebbels. However, I have found no evidence that he said it. Everyone quotes everyone else, but no one ever gives a source. See: http://www.bytwerk.com/gpa/falsenaziquotations.htm [bytwerk.com].
"A lie told often enough becomes truth" Vladimir Lenin.
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Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter, if we keep repeating that Goebbels made that quote, then people will believe it.
Problem solved.
Parent
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
Climate scientists are not in complete agreement. It is always possible to find a few scientists that disagree with consensus opinion. Sometimes these mavericks are even right. See and the continental drift hypothesis. [wikipedia.org]
However, many of the commenters above appear to be using some disagreement to deny climate change (forgive me if I'm reading too much into the comments. Attacking the consensus is a common tactic of deniers).
I would suggest that people look at the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [wikipedia.org]. This is a United Nations effort with a very large number of scientists involved. So many, from so many different countries, that I would suggest that the information represents consensus opinion and should be listened to very carefully.
Let me quote their latest major report from 2007 (taken from Wikipedia).
" * Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
* Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.
* Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the timescales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized, although the likely amount of temperature and sea level rise varies greatly depending on the fossil intensity of human activity during the next century (pages 13 and 18).[34]
* The probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5%.
* World temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 ÂC (2.0 and 11.5 ÂF) during the 21st century (table 3) and that:
o Sea levels will probably rise by 18 to 59 cm (7.08 to 23.22 in) [table 3].
o There is a confidence level >90% that there will be more frequent warm spells, heat waves and heavy rainfall.
o There is a confidence level >66% that there will be an increase in droughts, tropical cyclones and extreme high tides.
* Both past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium.
* Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values over the past 650,000 years
"
Parent
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Interesting)
"75 of 77 climate scientists who are active publishers on climate change said yes." Re-read that sentence. Read it again, carefully. One more time, please. Can you see now, that only certain select scientists are being held forth as an example of some "consensus"?
You do realize that there can be lots of people who earned a degree studying climate & meteorology, then moved on to be weatherman (or something) and stopped giving a crap about scientific research, right? Well, that's why you just ask the scientists are are publishing. Research and publishing go hand in hand. They're the ones that'll know the most. Did you major in any field of science? Because if so, you should have known that. Anyway, you appear to have not read the article you yourself cited.
In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change [...] Of these specialists, 96.2 % answered "risen" to question 1 and 97.4% answered yes to question 2.
The bold part there should have been a clue for you. Scientists who actively publish are doing real scientific research. If you're doing scientific research on something, you're gonna know more about that something than people who don't.
Parent
Nope, no ice age. [Re:Wrong Premise] (Score:5, Informative)
... these same climate experts were also spouting off that there would be an ice age not so long ago.
Citation needed.
Try this one: Study Debunks Global Cooling myth of the 90s [abcnews.com] (or here [usatoday.com])
"The supposed "global cooling" consensus among scientists in the 1970s -- frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can't make up their minds -- is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era....
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends. The study reports, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales."
Parent
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether global warming is true or not really doesn't matter much. We still need to take precautions to prevent pollution and switch to cleaner energy sources. It will benefit our own health and safety as well as be a matter of prudence.
Parent
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
YES IT DOES, RTFA!!!!
Also the UK government didn't buy any salt for the snow we had this week because they thought global warming wasn't going to make it cold enough. Another example of why it matters when people lie about global warming.
To say repeating the same bullshit line has no consequences is just moronic.
Please stop turning the global warming debate into a religion, you're being part of the problem including your silly little precaution speech.
Here's another speech, Why not believe in God just to be sure you're going to heaven even though there is no data either way?
See how you're saying the exact same thing?
Parent
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Those that bother to look at the math instead of the politics, at the history instead of the hype, are agreed.
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Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
They are NOT agreed.
Yes. They. Are.
According to this recent study [uic.edu], 97% of specialists and 82% of scientists in general agree with anthropomorphic climate change.
So, what's your evidence that scientists do not agree? Put up or shut up.
Parent
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
hence the statement "scientists are agreed" is not true, assuming the statement is meaning "all scientists" as opposed to "most scientists".
Nobody without an agenda (or a fondness for excessive pedantry[1]) uses the "absolutely all X" definition of "agreed" when talking about large groups of people, because you never get 100.00000000% agreement. If a large majority of scientists and an overwhelming majority of specialist scientists agree it's both reasonable and accurate to say that "scientists are agreed".
[1] I do have a fondness for excessive pedantry, but I try to keep it under control.
Parent
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Desterification is happening in California, Africa, and Madagascar. Lake Chad drying up is directly attributable to human activity, though not necessarily due to CO2. It's a form of anthropogenic climate change, in any case. And it's also happening to Lake Superior [thedailygreen.com].
Meanwhile, Oceans are acidifying [wikipedia.org] all over (the chemistry involved is directly attributable to CO2). Polar caps are melting, putting pressure on the polar bear population. Being the alpha predator of the region, this will remove the ecosystem's ability to keep prey species in check, causing far-reaching problems elsewhere.
None of this is from some sketchy model formed up by some graduage student as a doomsday scenario. It's stuff we can go out and directly observe right now.
Parent
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
You may wish to double check those ice core data.
The ice core data is legit. You're not a climatologist. You're not a paleoclimatologist. They did their homework. Don't pretend that you somehow know more than they do unless you've got your own data and methods to publish.
At least twice in history, CO2 levels have shot up higher than they are today[...]
Not within the last 400,000 years covered by that chart it didn't. Before then, many millions upon millions of years ago it has, but that Earth is a very different Earth. You don't want Paleozoic CO2 levels imposed upon present day ecosystems in less time that it could have occurred naturally. It's bad in terms of evolution. Even IF CO2 didn't cause warming, it will cause other problems (ocean acidification, and many plants will likely have difficulty retaining water as elevated CO2 can cause the pores in the leaves to transpire more). Evolution works, but only so quickly.
CO2 levels have shot up higher than they are today, in very short periods of time.
Not in as-short periods of time as we've had present CO2 shoot up. The slope of that line is higher than any slope elsewhere. If you don't believe me, you can download CO2 concentrations from several places, throw them all into a spreadsheet, and calculate the delta-CO2 ppm. All the data is publicly available as txt files.
Something that isn't clear, is whether CO2 levels preceded temperature increases, or the other way around.
Oh not at all. It's quite clear. You just don't know what you're talking about. It's also abundantly clear you don't study climatology, environmental science or physics. You are actually entertaining the idea that the Earth first retains more heat than normal, THEN the heat-trapping gases follow. Please explain the physics that would allow for such a thing to be remotely plausible.
It is indisputable that our fossil fuels account for the increase in CO2, as the correlation with the industrial revolution is damning. We also know that CO2 is opaque to thermal radiation. We can take a thermal camera, put it behind a glass container of CO2, and not see heat through the camera. I'm pretty sure we've never magically seen thermal radiation get blocked by a tank of warming air, then seen the CO2 concentration in that air spike as a result. Admittedly, I could be wrong since magic, sorcery, and thermodynamic witchcraft aren't fields I research in.
And, no, solar activity has NOT been dismantled. It HAS been cast into disrepute by the "consensus". But, popular opinion does not make science.
Nobody here suggested popular opinion made the science.
The popular opinion of the scientific community makes the science (as established through years of peer-reviewed published literature). That's how science works. If you've got a more scientific approach to global warming than those people did, by all means, enlighten us.
Parent
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
When your pretty graph goes back "millions" of years, then you might have a point, but 400k out of 3.5 billion years, this is about as useful as grabbing a handful of random people from a barney the dinosaur concert and using them to stereotype the other 6.5 billion people on the planet.
You overestimate how far back you have to go to realize the rate of increasing CO2 is a problem (not so much the level of CO2 as much as the speed at which we get there). The fossil fuels come from ancient organic matter that's formed and been sequestered underground over many millions of years. It happened very very slowly. Humans have taken millions of years worth of coal and oil, and reintroduced all that ancient carbon back into the biosphere. We'll have returned all that ancient carbon into the environment within a mere couple hundred years. That's pretty damn abrupt in geologic time scales, and a shift in carbon levels will have never occurred that quickly before.
And yes while CO2 concentrations for millions of years ago are interesting (such data has been reconstructed for the Phanerozoic at least, that I know of) it describes a vastly different world. The more you shuffle the continents to where they used to be, the less like our world it is. A focus on the more recent half-million years is warranted over the last 500 million. For example, we want to know what melting glaciers will to THIS Earth's albedo, not the Triassic Earth.
Also, your CO2 graph is not the same as many others available in your average google search.
Cite them. I'm willing to bet they're simply in different units, use a different range or scale, or may even use a different proxy for CO2 concentrations than ice cores. Keep in mind, that graph was compiled from multiple sources of data (sources of data correspond to the color of the line). You don't need to use an ice core to tell you what the temperature was 20 years ago.
I don't disagree that humans are spewing shit in to the atmosphere, and common sense says this can't be good, but as others have pointed out, there is a whole lot more to this climate change than just CO2.
We also put out lots of methane and other greenhouse gases besides CO2 actually. CO2 just happens to be the primary cause of the warming because we put out so much more of it than other gasses.
Parent
Almost, but not quite (Score:5, Informative)
As it happens, we have one (1) known occurrence of similarly abrupt increase in CO2 level. At the end of the Permian, a volcano system known as the "Siberian traps" set huge coal beds afire (think pacific "ring of fire" meets middle east oil fields). A large percentage of the worlds coal was burned in a geological eye-blink.
The was immediately followed by the Permian mass extinction, the largest mass extinction event in the worlds history, when pretty much every living thing on Earth died and only a handful of species (think things like cockroaches) had enough surviving members to struggle through.
--MarkusQ
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is Mars warming? (Score:5, Informative)
...Mars is also undergoing global warming...
Mars [realclimate.org] is not warming.
Falcon
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Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
But, now we need to determine HOW MUCH he has contributed. For those who have missed it, Mars is also undergoing global warming.
Let me tell you something about the Mars climate change. Its cause is due to albedo changes due to dust on Mars, and has nothing to do with climate change on Earth.
I happen to know the gal who write that Mars global warming paper. In fact, she's one of my best friends. So I certainly didn't miss it. I also didn't miss it when she told me that people who hold up her paper to deny anthropogenic climate change on Earth are "clueless" and probably didn't read past her title, either.
The whole "Mars is warming" thing is crap. You are looking at a tiny amount of data, from a couple of spacecraft that aren't even really designed to measure that.
Sorry Charlie, it's not crap, either. Those couple (three actually... was four for a while until MGS died) of spacecraft are designed and used to measure surface temperature, albedo, and all kinds of other nifty properties. It's amazing what you can do with spectrometers, IR imagers, and bolometers. And the data we have on Mars isn't exactly tiny, either. But as I said above to the other guy, the reasons are albedo change due to dust patterns and have nothing (NOTHING!) to do with the Earth.
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Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Funny)
than carbon emissions affecting pirate population.
Funny you should mention pirates. We get pirates seizing tankers of oil and boatloads of weapons, and London gets a blizzard.
Coincidence? I think not. This is simply additional data points to demonstrate the centuries-old connection between pirates and global temperatures.
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Re:indium (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been hearing about indium and platinum shortages from chicken littles for a couple of years now. In fact, there is 3 times more indium than silver in the Earth's crust and I haven't heard anyone shouting about a silver shortage - especially since digital camera's became popular. When the price goes high enough, more money will go into mining, extracting, and refining both minerals. And only solar cells, out of the currently common "sustainable" technologies, require these rare minerals.
The Indium Corp couldn't be biased. [indium.com]
It's an open market, so it must be true. [openmarket.org]
Back in 2006 this blogger noticed we use indium. Scroll down a bit. [wordpress.com]
The price is going up, but hey, copper prices sure fell. [siemens.com]
I'm not worried. This just someone wanting some attention and web page hits.
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