Upper Limit On Emissions Likely To Be Exceeded Within Decades 324
An anonymous reader writes "A panel of expert climate scientists appointed by the United Nations has come to a consensus on an upper limit for greenhouse gases. The panel says we will blow past this limit in just a few decades if emissions continue at their current pace. 'To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels and thus avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change, the panel found, only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere. Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than 3 trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels.' You can read a summary of the report's findings online (PDF). It says plainly, 'It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming (PDF) since the mid-20th century.'"
Meh (Score:2, Insightful)
I will be dead by then. Good luck to the rest of you.
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Re:Meh - Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Hang the fact that it has been rising all long.
Actually, it's been falling for almost 10,000 years.
I take that as an admission that, "Let it change, but slowly enough that it does not bother me. My decedents can take care of themselves."
Sometimes simpletons don't understand the difference between stopping a speeding car with the brakes and stopping a speeding car with a brick wall.
In this case it isn't make it slow enough so that it doesn't bother me, it's make it slow enough so that natural systems aren't pushed into another mass extinction event, because that won't be good for any of us. At some place between 4 and 6 degrees above the baseline, most of the world is going to need new ecosystems. That replacement will be much easier on us, if nature has 1,000 years to adapt than if it has 30.
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Too late [wikipedia.org].
Re:Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
"We'll be able to stop before the looming disaster actually happens, we're smart enough to see the key indicators and get out in time!"
Where have I heard this before? It was quite recently from another bunch of people who really should have known better and led us off a cliff into disaster because they just couldn't stop...
This isn't about science and hasn't been for a long time. It's about human nature. We don't like change, so when we've got an established way of doing things and no reason obvious enough in our daily lives to switch to a different way of doing things, we won't do it. In many cases, when we finally get it through our stupid thick heads that we need to change, it's far too late.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't about science and hasn't been for a long time. It's about human nature. We don't like change, so when we've got an established way of doing things and no reason obvious enough in our daily lives to switch to a different way of doing things, we won't do it. In many cases, when we finally get it through our stupid thick heads that we need to change, it's far too late.
What is clear is that changes are coming*. If we're not willing to change ourselves voluntarily then climate change and it's effects on the natural world will force change on us whether we want it or not. The choice is ours, proactively address the issue in a comprehensive fashion or let the natural changes drive us to address the effects piecemeal.
*To be honest the changes have already started but so far the effects are relatively small.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
*To be honest the changes have already started but so far the effects are relatively small.
Really though we have a problem of the boiling frog principle. We'll bitch and moan that next year is hotter, colder, wetter, dryer, and more gloomy than the last depending on which area you're in but for the most part we won't care. It's getting warmer, time to upgrade the AC unit. It's getting colder better invest in a heater. Personally with the amount of flooding we've had in our area I've changed my renovation plans and raised my house of the ground.
We as a people will not react. I or you as a person will react, but we will react in a way that makes a measurable difference to your life. If you're uncomfortably hot you'll do something to cool you down and not go out and buy a Prius and sit around hoping some billion other people in the world make the same choice so that next year it'll be more comfortable.
In short as a species we're doomed. As a side note our newly elected government is about to repeal the carbon tax. Way to go forward in a country with one of the worst emission per capita figures...
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More like: we could spend $trillions trying to prevent it and fail, or we could spend $billions counter-acting it and succeed. According to the alarmists, we have already unintentionally manipulated the climate twice: once with CO2 to warm it up, and again with aerosols to cool it down. We could be a lot more effective if we actually did something intentionally. Trying to limit CO2 emissions will fai
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Dollar a gallon gasoline can be made from 1-2 cent electric power. Ground solar looks like it will bottom out around 8-10 cents per kWh. Space based solar power could get down to
Um what TF? (Score:2, Insightful)
Do they honestly believe there is some total quantity of emissions that can be tolerated? I mean as opposed to a rate of emissions - like annually. We know that the system recycles carbon taking it out of the atmosphe
Re:Um what TF? (Score:5, Informative)
The rate of natural sequestration is so slow that for the purposes of planning within the next century, we can use a fixed amount. Technically you're correct but natural sequestration is hardly fast enough to be relevant to our civilization.
Re:Um what TF? (Score:5, Interesting)
Expect to see more and more "un-natural" sequestration soon, as knowledge of manage intensive rotational grazing [wikipedia.org] spreads among the peoples who inhabit damaged range lands. Allan Savory describes the process (along with some pretty amazing before & after photos) in this TED Talk: How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change. [youtube.com]
Definitely an "idea worth spreading."
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So clearly, the only truly viable long term solution is to regulate emission standards so that the total emissions are below the natural sequestration rate.
You're right about this but not the next two points. Cheap and efficient solar panels (which would become the cheapest source of energy, once introduced) could provide near-zero-emissions energy which could help bring total emissions below the natural sequestration rate, or close enough that the difference could be covered by artificial sequestration.
Sufficiently cheap and efficient solar panels could solve global warming by accident.
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No, they could not... Not unless we reduced our energy requirements. Substantially.
Taking the amount of solar energy that actually reaches the surface of the earth, you'll get maybe 1kw/square meter on a completely cloudless day even at 100% efficiency. On average, taking into consideration typical cloud cover and the fact that the sun is only up for roughly half of the time, the actual amount of power you'd be able to get from solar is somewhere in the vicinity of about 160 watts per square meter,
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Desert PV plants combined with rooftop PV could give a lot of surface area...my boss covered his roof with solar panels and is now only pulling 1/10th of the power from the grid he used to, and he's still giving away excess energy instead of selling it back. The house doesn't use heat or AC but is pretty similar to an average American home otherwise.
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How are you going to distribute that power? Remember that the further you are away from an energy source the more energy you'll lose in transmitting it.
Solar energy looks very attractive to many people, I know... But the reality is that it can't hope to sustain the industrialized world based even on current energy demands, let alone the doubtless larger energy demands of the future.
Nuclear is the only viable way.... Or something else which has not even been discovered yet.
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160 w/sq meter is more than enough to meet the energy demands of my household, even on a .1 acre lot. Which is 400 sq meters. Which gets 64kw per hour.
Per the wikipedia page on solar energy, the earth receives enough energy every hour to meet the worlds needs for a year.
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I Thought It Was Clear (Score:4, Informative)
Do they honestly believe there is some total quantity of emissions that can be tolerated? I mean as opposed to a rate of emissions - like annually. We know that the system recycles carbon taking it out of the atmosphere, and we know that the rate it's removed increases as the concentration increases. So if we assume there is a limit, it should be on the rate of carbon emissions and not the total emitted over time.
If you read the "Summary for Policymakers" PDF document linked in the summary, there is no talk of "total quantity of emissions tolerated" or any of this trillionth ton idea. Instead it appears to be talking about . In fact, it appears to reside solely in that New York Times article that very clearly says:
To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels and thus avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change, the panel found, only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere.
Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report.
(emphasis mine) So to answer your question: The trillion tons is an estimate of what we would need to burn in order to hit an internationally agreed limit that would likely produce the worst effects of climate change. The number of tons we burn is even an estimate. It's all estimates because we don't have parallel Earths where we can keep controls and change one variable to see what happens. If you don't accept the ability of making estimates with levels of certainty, there is no way to make any statements about the effects of putting carbon into our atmosphere on a global scale.
These guys are looking dumber all the time.
I suppose it would appear that way if you only get your information from The New York Times and throw away everything they're actually saying.
Re:Um what TF? (Score:4, Informative)
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There is no doubt that *eventually* natural carbon sequestration will remove the excess carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere. The problem though is that the natural rate of fossil fuel formation is roughly 10 barrel of oil per day. The amount of oil we are burning is about 10 million barrels of oil per day. So yes, in a few million years it will all change back into oil, and the amount of CO2 will be back to where it is today. I'm glad that is a comfort to you, I'm sure your children will take com
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High Certainty. (Score:4, Insightful)
What did my physics professor always say? If you don't know how accurate your measurement is, you haven't made a measurement.
It gets worse. The discrepancy between models and actual reality continues to grow [climateaudit.org]. Surely this makes the science more uncertain, not less. Yet somehow the IPCC find themselves increasingly confident that they're right, even as everybody else becomes increasingly confident that the models they use are wrong. The whole thing is an absolute farce.
Re:High Certainty. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is something, but it isn't science.
Science has data and experiments. There's data to demonstrate there may be changes occurring, but there's no model backed by experimental results to explain why that may be. The earth's climate system is very complex, and it may be impossible to model in any sort of long term fashion.
The inability to model drives the risk. We don't know. The prudent thing is to reduce impact; sure. How do we best do that? More policy.
It is reasonable to hypothesize that human activity is causing the changes. Based on those assumptions it may be even be reasonable to implement policy to mitigate risks.
Don't front it as science, though. It's not.
Re:High Certainty. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the law of unintended consequences might trip you over there. For example, "we need energy security" became "we need ethanol" which became "we've reduced global grain supply by 5% and forced up food prices". What an absolutely terrible policy. The best thing for government to do is almost always absolutely nothing.
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Perhaps, but policy impacts are things politicians can debate until they're blue in the face.
My problem is all this is being presented as science. It's not science. Worse, it is impacting what laypeople think science is!
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A false dichotomy straight from the alarmist playbook.
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true. All life on the planet will die, just not at the same time. How about we simplify it. Do nothing, die. Do something, die. I'd rather do something then nothing.
Re:High Certainty. (Score:5, Informative)
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I think if you study the analysis at Lucia's [rankexploits.com] and also Steve McIntrye's [climateaudit.org], you'll understand why it must be so.
Re:High Certainty. (Score:4, Informative)
30 years is the classical climatological period as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. [wmo.int] That is long enough for many cyclic things like ENSO and solar cycles to average out so the long term climate trends are discernible. Of course there are many climatological effects that take place over far longer periods such as the cycles of glaciation/deglaciation that have been occurring for over a million years but a 30 year average is long enough to define the current state of the climate.
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Funny. The IPCC puts its certainty at 95%, which is somewhat confusing as it's unable to show any accounting for that figure. According to Professor Judith Curry [judithcurry.com], the figure is arrived at by getting a load of climate scientists into a room and asking them what their certainty is!
What did my physics professor always say? If you don't know how accurate your measurement is, you haven't made a measurement.
It gets worse. The discrepancy between models and actual reality continues to grow [climateaudit.org]. Surely this makes the science more uncertain, not less. Yet somehow the IPCC find themselves increasingly confident that they're right, even as everybody else becomes increasingly confident that the models they use are wrong. The whole thing is an absolute farce.
I stopped reading or listening to the bastards years ago. It's a religion to people at this point. I've never seen a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist get as foaming at the mouth rabid as some of the climate fundamentalists do. It's shocking to see how the discussion as devolved into what it is now.
I literally have friends that think the world is going to end within the next 5-10 years thanks to Al Gore and Prince Charles running around the world screaming that the sky is falling.
Climate science right now
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Your friends who think the world is going to end aren't listening to science any more than you are. The report says that at current rates of CO2 emissions we will reach the agreed on limit of 1 trillion tons in 2040 but if we were to get serious about reducing the carbon intensity of our civilization we move that date out further into the future easing the rate of change somewhat. On the other hand If we do nothing but keep increasing CO2 emissions we move the date sooner in our future.
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Funny. The IPCC puts its certainty at 95%, which is somewhat confusing as it's unable to show any accounting for that figure.
It gets worse. The discrepancy between models and actual reality continues to grow [climateaudit.org]. Surely this makes the science more uncertain, not less. Yet somehow the IPCC find themselves increasingly confident that they're right, even as everybody else becomes increasingly confident that the models they use are wrong. The whole thing is an absolute farce.
Your post is misleading: the 95% is the certainty that climate change is man-made. That has exactly fuck-all to do with how accurately can previously created models predict the rate of said climate change.
Those models, by the way, are being updated constantly, as we learn more about climate's behavior. Science isn't un-changing - quite the opposite! Science changes according to what is learned and what experiments show. Unlike religion, for instance.
Re:High Certainty. (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is, there is no calculation which spits out "95%".
It is a made up statistic.
Re:High Certainty. (Score:4, Informative)
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Honestly (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm no global warming denier, but at this point I think there's a simple harsh reality to accept: it doesn't matter how efficient we make things that run on fossil fuels, we're going to burn them all. At best with all of our "green initiatives" we might spread out burning those fuels over an extra few decades - a century at best, but over geologic timescales any delay we induce is pretty meaningless. Every bit of it is going to be burnt and released into the atmosphere.
Once they're all gone, THEN we'll be forced to adopt new more clean sources of energy. We just have to pray that by the time all the fossil fuels are burnt the planet isn't screwed up beyond any hope of recovery (ie, still habitable).
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Yep we are absolutely going to burn them all, hopefully not before humans start colonizing space...but it will all be used. Renewable-powered artificial carbon sequestration may have to be used to compensate.
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Quite right, Jevon's paradox is a harsh mistress.
However, slowing it down is a Good Thing. If we slow down the rate of generating carbon dioxide, there may be hope that we can match or exceed that rate of removing it - through some combination of natural elimination (plants? oceans? or some sort of clever geoengineering. Something along the lines of a solar powered CO2 remover would be most excellent.
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Why have a solar powered CO2 remover when we could use solar (or wind, or tidal, or geothermal) energy and never release the CO2 in the first place? Continuing to burn fossil fuels is unbelievably stupid.
Re:Honestly (Score:4, Interesting)
Because there's still many situations in which fossil fuels are a much better power source than solar/wind/hydro/etc. So it may be more practical to use fossil fuels in northern and cloudy climes and run solar powered CO2 scrubbers in sunnier climes to counterbalance it.
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Northern climes - thermo
Cloudy climes - hydro
Sunny climes - solar
Windy climes - wind
Combine as local weather patterns dictate.
Re:Honestly (Score:4, Interesting)
Only if you keep your current governments that are causing this (apparently on purpose to gather power).
We have guys like Branson who say, "I'm going to fund the development of a planet full of integral fast reactors that will safely clean up all of your existing nuclear waste while providing all the carbon-free power we need as a planet for the next century," and the nuclear regulatory agencies (and politicians) won't even talk to him.
And he's only picking up up the ball that Clinton/Kerry/Gore/O'Leary intentionally fumbled ... we should be well on our way out of this hole by now, not still slipping into it. Cui bono?
We have a technological fix in hand, but technology can't fix a problem while politics is stopping it. I guess it's like Vietnam - you've got to destroy the planet in order to save it. As long as the psychopaths are in charge, there's little to be hopeful about. As long as we have a psychopath's wet dream of a mechanism in place to regulate society, we have little hope of getting rid of those psychopaths.
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But clean technologies are taking off quickly. [greentechmedia.com]
Like they say, the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. We just have to get to a point where fossil fuel recovery is more expensive than solar and wind (and solar and wind power stored in batteries.)
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I find it extraordinary that even a web site with a keen interest in technology has so many posters who have been swayed by the side of the debate that says change is going to destroy prosperity and therefore it must be resisted.
Climate change science has determined that existing power sources are almost certainly driving a global pollution source that is largely responsible for a hyper rapid change in the environment that will generate huge risks for human and non human ecosystems.
So instead of saying 'wel
Turn back the tide, Canute! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Turn back the tide, Canute! (Score:5, Insightful)
The panel only determined an upper limit for avoiding the worst of global warming... they never said anything about it being some kind of physical limit. How about a bad car analogy? If you're driving down the highway in an area with a lot of speed traps, 60mph might be the upper limit to avoiding speeding tickets. There's nothing preventing you from doing 80mph, but 60mph is roughly what you can expect to get away without any major consequences (IE: getting pulled over and ticketed). Now you can argue that we're more in control of a car than we are of global warming, but the truth is that we still have a fair bit of control over how much carbon is tossed into the atmosphere.
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At one point, when everything you do to stop global warming fails, you'll come to realize that perhaps there are forces far greater than man at work.
That's loser talk. Your brain is the most complicated, organized structure in the known universe.
Properly realized there is potentially no greater force in the entire universe than sentient, self-learning brains. We have several billion of them on this planet and I have zero doubt that properly motivated, planet scale engineering and far beyond are well within
Re:Turn back the tide, Canute! (Score:4, Insightful)
The warming is not up for debate
The anthropogenic crowd keeps saying that. All science is up for debate all the time, you just need to present a better hypothesis. Saying "it's not up for debate" shows just how afraid you are of the weakness of your argument.
Nuclear is the only viable solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Mass adoption of nuclear energy is the only option.
The green crowd have fantasies of state taxation and control; the problem is enterprises see through this immediately and apply their financial resources to make sure it doesn't happen.
Brass tacks; modern civilization and economic growth needs high quality energy sources and has an accelerating demand for energy. The only fuel that provides thermodynamic high-quality energy for base load that we have available is carbon and nuclear. The energy requirements of our society are epic. They will become more epic in the future!
The green movement needs to realize that the driver for economic activity trumps everything. Period. The energy is required to sustain the society we live in. If there isn't a rapid move to nuclear, we are going to burn every drop of oil, every ton of coal, and every liter of natural gas. That's the path we're on now.
I have hopes that we'll be able to fix the mess later - with technology being driven by clean energy sources. We need a push to get fusion reactors figured out. We know how fusion works; it powers those bombs everyone forgets don't exist. If people are so in arms about nuclear energy, why are they not freaking out about the pre-packaged critical nuclear reactions sitting on top of fueled missiles, only under control of a computer to avert disaster?
The lack of understanding of thermodynamics and energy is really epic; people advocating for restricting co2 production just don't understand how much energy is required.
Eventually the planet is going to suffer a catastrophe. A caldera volcano will explode; an asteroid will strike. The climate will change in a catastrophic means, just as it has done over and over again in the geologic record.
The sooner we have unlimited amounts of clean energy on tap to fix things, the better. The answer is staring at us in the widespread adoption of nuclear energy.
Until then.. go away, get off my lawn, and I'll continue to vote for people with energy polices grounded in reality.
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Sure looks ready to me.
Work on modern fission designs should be happening now, and in sane countries, like China - it is, as fast as is possible.
That should be used to buy time to advance thorium and hopefully, fusion designs.
Shutting off Japan's nuclear industry so they can run the country off natural gas and diesel and coal - brilliant stuff. I will have to calculate what the total tonnage of co2 (and natural source radiation from coal burning) released is from those decisions.
I'll take a small risk of a
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China is not sane. I just heard this week on npr
"What is certain, say Yang and his colleagues, is that synthetic gas production will be carbon intensive relative to conventional gas. Burning conventional natural gas to produce power releases two to three times less carbon into the atmosphere than when burning coal, but burning synthetic gas will be 36 to 82 percent dirtier than coal-fired plants." Quoted from this article [carbonnation.info]
So while other countries even attempt to limit fossil fuel emissions, China is hell be
Re:Nuclear is the only viable solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck that,
It was ready in the '80s when France did it.
Why isn't it ready now?
Re:Nuclear is the only viable solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Thorium lacks weapon applications. The emperor is not interested.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Nuclear power is a dead end, Thorium-232 is not fissile, it must be first breed into U-233 (which is fissile), that process takes an enormous flux of of free neutrons(U-235, Pu-239). It's a chicken verses the egg problem.
Note: Breeder reactors are far more dangerous and operate much closer to the edge. They incorporate fewer safety features, (metallic fuel instead of ceramic oxides, etc), in order to maximize neutron flux.
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Note, for the ignorant, that "critical nuclear reaction" means "neutrons are being produced as fast as they are being consumed".
Which is more or less equivalent to "turned on" for a nuclear power plant.
Alas, it is nearly completely meaningless when talking nuclear weapons, since the design goal is to produce a "super-critical" situation (more neutrons are being produced than being consumed).
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I guess it's OK, so long as we only put thousands of potential super-critical reactions on top of missiles, then. My bad. :-)
Re:Nuclear is the only viable solution (Score:4, Informative)
Economic progress *is* social progress. It allows people to allocate labor and resources to educating their children (and themselves), feeding the hungry, curing disease and curbing pollution.
There is a reason why developing nations are focused on development: it brings a better life to their people. And it's finally paying off in several regions of the world.
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Economic progress *is* social progress.
No. It is enabled by social progess.
It allows people to allocate labor and resources to educating their children (and themselves), feeding the hungry, curing disease and curbing pollution.
Theoretically, sure. In practice, it does none of those things. Let's go from the bottom. Curbing pollution is achieved not solely through technical progress, but also through social progress. In general we have technologies to avoid pollution long before they are used, and only when people wake the fuck up and demand them are they in fact implemented. For example, particulate and carbon filters to trap small particulates and volatile organic compounds. We knew about them
Re:Nuclear is the only viable solution (Score:4, Insightful)
No. It is enabled by social progess.
You have that backwards. Women's liberation was driven by washing machines, dishwashers, and store-bought food and clothing.
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Who said they aren't?
1 unit carbon burned = ? units co2? (Score:2)
If one unit of carbon is burned, how many units of co2 is created?
I recall reading somewhere that it would be > 1 unit of co2 due to the binding with a pair of oxygen atoms / molecules, but I'm not up on chemistry.
I guess if there are 3,000,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon left in the ground and we were to burn a total post-industrial-revolution quantity of 1,000,000,000,000 tonnes, that should be more than a trillion tonnes of co2 release?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The formula tells you.
CO2 = 1 atom of carbon, two atoms of oxygen.
Carbon has atomic mass 12 (well, most of it). Oxygen has atomic mass 16.
If you burn 12 tonnes of carbon you'll take 32 tonnes of oxygen and produce 44 tonnes of CO2.
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If one unit of carbon is burned, how many units of co2 is created?
One, but you're thinking of tons, not units.
If you take a pure carbon from the ground, that carbon is going to be 12 grams per mole. If you combine it with two oxygens, that's 12+16+16 = 44 grams per mole. So, one ton of C will produce (44/12) = 3.66 tons of CO2.
Not everything that's burned is pure carbon, but if you can figure out the relative atomic weight of the molecules you can get pretty close. And there are very complex functions (s
There's a bright side to everything (Score:2)
We will consume less heating oil.
Re:There's a bright side to everything...not (Score:2)
Make more Greenhouse Gas (Score:2)
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All the people will die - The planet will get better and keep on going. Problem over.
Why wait when you can take the first step and off yourself. We'll all follow your lead, I promise. Go ahead, we're right behind you.
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Re:Make more Greenhouse Gas (Score:5, Insightful)
Under no plausible scenario will greenhouse gas emissions cause humans to die out. At worst, rising temperatures will cause some short-term disruptions, migration, inconveniences, and costs.
Long term, even a complete melting of all ice caps (which would take a couple of thousand years), and global warming of several degrees Celsius, would result in a climate that's significant'y different from ours but is still quite nice (if not arguably nicer) for humans and mammals.
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Well yes, humans will survive, or at least a fair chunk of them. But the geopoltiical ramifications will be enormous. If previous climate shifts are any indication, we will see massive migrations as people try to get from where they're starving to where they think there is food. You will have wars and all the economic, political and social volatility that goes along with that. You will have nations that were previously capable of producing sufficient food to feed their population suddenly have to import, as
Meh (Score:2)
Just drop a giant ice cube in the ocean and the problem will be solved, once and for all!
Not the only important trend (Score:3, Insightful)
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Nuclear technologies can keep the party going indefinitely.
The more human genetic capital we have, the better, particularly if we can get education and literacy rates up. We need engineers and scientists to figure out fusion and other advanced energy sources.
We've already thrown the dice; the easy energy is gone; might as well see it through. Just need to start... now.
And yet ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Until it gets bad enough so everyone has to participate in the solutions, its just a poorly hidden wealth transfer scheme.
Another cry of wolf (Score:2, Flamebait)
The whole website 350.org was created what now... 6 years ago? Because Bill McKibben said that 350 ppm CO2 was a "safe upper limit" for CO2 in the atmosphere in 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/350.org [wikipedia.org]
http://350.org/ [350.org]
Since we are now well past 350ppm CO2 in the atmosphere: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ [noaa.gov]
The IP-Cry-Wolf organization has to create a "new" upper limit. It's just more bullshit. They have no idea what any "safe upper limit" for CO2 is, they guess and publicize scary numbers ev
pointless, deal with it (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it's getting warmer. But there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that we are going to do anything about it through emissions limits.
What we should do is to avoid interfering with rapid economic development because developed nations can actually easily deal with climate change and rising sea levels (just look at the Dutch, a large part of their country is below sea level).
We should also stop subsidizing (implicitly and explicitly) fossil fuel extraction. Right now, many nations are adopting policies that, on the one hand use tax dollars to subsidize fossil fuels, then on the other hand use more tax dollars to support alternative energies; the entire scheme is a gigantic give-away to industry.
In addition, we should give up our silly opposition to nuclear. The best way of reducing carbon emissions is to make it easy to deploy efficient, modern nuclear plants, the kind that actually burns almost all the fuel.
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last i read the western countries were mostly reigning in their emissions and its the developing nations that are polluting the most now. except for a few exceptions like canada and norway who have large fossil fuel industries
The USA is reigning in Emissions? LOL!
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Please keep facts out of here. This topic and space is for climate deniers who insist that the whole global warming thing is financially motivated. Don't you feel sorry for those poor starving petrochemical companies and their noble scientists?
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it is ironic that the people who believe in this nonsense are the ones buying the expensive graphics cards that suck up lots of electricity and running their computers 24x7 on bittorrent or home servers or whatever that happens to dump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere
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The scam isn't the warming, the scam is the proposed solutions. Then again the best and brightest climate scientists we had in 2007 predicted no ice at the poles by 2013 so some of the measures we've taken last year must be working pretty damn well.
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No, they didn't. You're just an idiot.
They predicted more droughts, floods, massive storms. Exactly like we've had since 2007.
Exactly like we've had since the beginning of recorded history, you mean.
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I wouldn't say all Americans. In Georgia, we are seeing strange bedfellows (the Sierra club, the Greens, and the Tea Party) all banding together to push for solar energy. Here, solar has stopped being a "hippie" concept, and seeing mainstream use. In fact, solar is becoming a "why not" rather than a "why" question in building installs. One can even buy and wire up roof shingles (Dow Powerhouse is one example) now so one doesn't have to worry about panels.
One has to separate US citizens and residents fro
Re:so who is doing the polluting? (Score:4, Informative)
Dude, for the last time, you can't cite the crazy street hobo as a legitimate source.
Depending on which data set you use and which source, the US comes in around 12 per capita for carbon emissions. What's more, is that it has slowly decreased over the past 20+ years whereas many other companies have exploded upwards in the same time frame. Now, most of those countries with higher per capita emissions are much smaller countries than the US and we're still near or at the top of total emissions, but that doesn't change your crazy street hobo wrongness about per capita.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita [wikipedia.org]
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Ok, that should be 12th per capita and countries, not companies... I hate mornings.
Re:so who is doing the polluting? (Score:5, Informative)
12th per capita, pre-ceeded by the economic power-houses of:
Quatar
Trinidad and Tobago
Dutch Antilles
Kuwait
Brunei
United Arab Emirates
Aruba
Bahrain
Luxembourg
Falkland Islands
Austtralia.
Ok, Australia is almost a real place, but the rest of them are jokes.
The EU average is less than half of US emissions per capita.
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And it shows the stupidity of ranking it this way.
China has ~1/3 the output per capita of the US. But 4x the capita. So it's actually putting out more. Even though it's not ranked in the top 50, per capita.
Re:so who is doing the polluting? (Score:5, Insightful)
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USA is getting more and more of its fossil fuel from withing the American continent (and just offshore) rather than from the middle east.
The increase in demand for middle eastern oil is from Asia mostly
There was a big article in NatGeo magazine a couple months ago.
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Don't worry, the price of gas will be adjusted to maximize consumption/profits.
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Why don't we ever get articles like this one [bloomberg.com] on slashdot?
I would say "because it's bollocks", but that isn't a credible reason, many articles posted on slashdot are bollocks.
Re:Global Warming articles (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't we ever get articles like this one [bloomberg.com] on slashdot?
Because it is solly based on a false premise.
Global warming has slowed since 1998 even though humans spewing ever more greenhouse gases are almost certainly to blame for damaging the atmosphere.
This statement is based on, they say a report summary...
That’s according to a 36-page summary of a report from a United Nations panel released in Stockholm today concluding Earth’s temperature since 1998 has increased at less than half the pace of longer-term averages since 1951.
... which they cleverly never cite directly or link to. Here is the link...
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5-SPM_Approved27Sep2013.pdf [climatechange2013.org]
The statement made by the article is never explicitely made in this report. On the contrary already on page 3, it is explained why a statement such as the one made in the article is, while true in a specific context, is missleading due to local variations in observed trends. If you look carfully at figure SPM-1 and the statement made on page SPM-3 (3), you will not only see that the author of the article missunderstood the statement made, but even inverted completly its interpretation and meaning.
The report states that the trend evaluate between 1998 and 2012 is slower thant the rate evaluate between 1951 and 2012. This trend variation is fully explained by a local change in temperature variation due to a strong El Nino over the 1960-1990 period and has nothing to do with global warming.
Ironically, the journalist missunderstood (deliberatly or not) the explanation why the use of local trend is missleading in understanding climate change and used the missleading trend stated as example of trend not to use to base is thesis on. I couldn't write "Wooooosh" loud enough.
And we should see more such nicely writte article on /. Yeah, that would be awesome.
Go read the report and learn something.