What They Don't Tell You About Climate Change (economist.com) 624
Countries are scrambling to limit the rise in the earth's temperature to just two degrees by the end of this century. But Slashdot reader dryriver shares an article titled "What They Don't Tell You About Climate Change."
No, it is not that Climate Change is a hoax or that the climate science gets it all wrong and Climate Change isn't happening. According to the Economist, it is rather that "Fully 101 of the 116 models the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses to chart what lies ahead assume that carbon will be taken out of the air in order for the world to have a good chance of meeting the 2C target."
In other words, reducing carbon emissions around the world, creating clean energy from wind farms, driving electrical cars and so forth is not going to suffice to meet agreed upon climate targets at all. Negative emissions are needed. The world is going to overshoot the "maximum 2 degrees of warming" target completely unless someone figures out how to suck as much as 810 Billion Tonnes of carbon out of Earth's atmosphere by 2100 using some kind of industrial scale process that currently does not exist.
That breaks down to 1,785,742,000,000,000 pounds of CO2, "as much as the world's economy produces in 20 years," according to the Economist.
"Putting in place carbon-removal schemes of this magnitude would be an epic endeavour even if tried-and-tested techniques existed. They do not."
In other words, reducing carbon emissions around the world, creating clean energy from wind farms, driving electrical cars and so forth is not going to suffice to meet agreed upon climate targets at all. Negative emissions are needed. The world is going to overshoot the "maximum 2 degrees of warming" target completely unless someone figures out how to suck as much as 810 Billion Tonnes of carbon out of Earth's atmosphere by 2100 using some kind of industrial scale process that currently does not exist.
That breaks down to 1,785,742,000,000,000 pounds of CO2, "as much as the world's economy produces in 20 years," according to the Economist.
"Putting in place carbon-removal schemes of this magnitude would be an epic endeavour even if tried-and-tested techniques existed. They do not."
GMO trees... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Even 'better'... http://www.bbc.com/future/stor... [bbc.com]
Some numbers (Score:4, Informative)
According to this link [broward.org] and taking some round numbers, an Albizzia lebbek can sequester 70 lbs of CO2 per year.
Assuming a 40-year project lifetime, we would then need 637,765,000,000 trees to pull the mentioned amount out of the atmosphere.
For comparison, the Amazon rainforest has an estimated 390 billion [google.com] trees.
Dividing these two numbers indicates that the world would have to plant and grow [the equivalent of] 1.6 Amazon Rainforests for a 40 year period.
I'm not saying that this is a bad solution, only that it is an incomplete solution. We should probably plant trees in areas where it makes sense and is easy to do, but we'll still need an epic-level solution to the problem.
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And at 12 foot spacing, 200 per acre, we'd be looking at something like 5 million square miles of new forest.
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I think 12-foot (~4 metres) spacing is a bit loose. I put in a firewood plot and was advised to start at 1 metre (~3 foot) spacing, and cull the weaker specimens every few years. The idea was to end up with 3 metre spacing after 20 years.
Bio available Nitrogen (Score:5, Informative)
Designed to grow quickly and fix carbon quickly ... but need something not found in nature to grow -- thus preventing them from becoming an invasive species.
Another question about your solution, which is not at all a bad solution, is the availability of useable Nitrates.
Trees can pull Carbon out of the atmosphere, but get Nitrogen from the soil. The Nitrogen has to be in bio-available form, and there are limited places to get it on Earth (ie - fertilizer). So much so that about 5% of all the world's energy production goes into making Ammonia, mostly for nitrate fertilizers.
I'm not sure we even *could* plant that many trees and expect them to grow - the amount of Nitrogen needed is enormous, and we can't simply add fertlilzer because it costs us energy to make it. (See: Haber Process [wikipedia.org].)
Again, I'm not saying this is a bad solution, only that it is incomplete. It should be used in conjunction with as many other scaled-up solutions as we can come up with.
More importantly (Score:2)
Phosphorous is a bigger issue than Nitrogen. We are already to soon have an agricultural shortage of Phosphorous.
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Nitrogene is in the atmosphere.
Plenty of plants take it from there and put into the soil for other plants, e.g. beans, pea and lentils.
That you need fertilizer to run an agriculture is a modern myth. Sure, it is "easier" and "more productive" in a sense, but not necessary.
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Another question about your solution, which is not at all a bad solution, is the availability of useable Nitrates.
Trees can pull Carbon out of the atmosphere, but get Nitrogen from the soil. The Nitrogen has to be in bio-available form, and there are limited places to get it on Earth (ie - fertilizer). So much so that about 5% of all the world's energy production goes into making Ammonia, mostly for nitrate fertilizers.
I'm not sure we even *could* plant that many trees and expect them to grow - the amount of Nitrogen needed is enormous, and we can't simply add fertlilzer because it costs us energy to make it. (See: Haber Process [wikipedia.org].)
Providing nitrogen is a readily solvable problem. I am a bit puzzled by the assertion that "there are limited places to get it on Earth" since most air is nitrogen, and it is fixed synthetically as you note. The Wikipedia link indicates that it is only 1-2% of world energy consumption, but 3-5% of natural gas consumption. This suggests that it is really a non-problem going forward. Haber process plants are huge industrial facilities, and the carbon in the methane is currently released as CO2, but a huge cen
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Fast growing invasive Redwoods would cause lots of fun...
Re:GMO trees... - Forages (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually this is already very doable without any need for GMOing or patenting life. It's called pasture with managed rotational grazing. Trees pull about 1.4 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere a year. Managed rotationally grazed pasture pulls double that and produces a side benefit of natural, organic fertilizer spread on the land by the animals and meat to eat.
Save the planet - eat more (pastured) meat.
Some guy on the internet (Score:5, Funny)
guess what, trees are made out of carbon so when they die all the carbon they absorbed gets released back in to the environment, unless you cut them all down before they die and make lumber or paper or some other product out of them
Drat! Trees are completely unsuitable for removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Damn you "some guy on the internet", for pointing out the obvious flaw in the plan.
Now we have to come up with some other solution.
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In current carbon accounting, it is deemed that once a tree is harvested, all of its carbon is released at that moment. The thinking being that if it's made into paper, it will likely be discarded and begin decomposing within 5 years anyway. If it's toilet paper it may be much less time than that. Obviously furniture like tables last many more years than that, but ultimately 99% of tables sold in shops today will end up discarded within 100 years, probably burnt for fuel or just damaged and thrown in a dump
Re:GMO trees... (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to forget that there's this engine for replacing trees that die with other trees, thus keeping the carbon bound up on a larger scale. In the old days, we called them "forests".
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Right, so if we need to sequester XXXX amount of carbon, and we can plant enough trees to sequester X, and then rely on "forests" to continue to keep X sequestered permanently so long as we don't chop the forests down for any purpose (ever), what do we do to sequester the remaining XXX of carbon?
Realise that coal and oil, the main sources of the CO2 in the atmosphere, was buried far underground in structures that are difficult to put wood back into. And that coal and oil are both much more carbon rich than
Re:GMO trees... (Score:5, Insightful)
More forests. Reforest what's been taken for other purposes.
Also, forests have this amazing ability to increase the amount of CO2 they sequester over time, as the forest floor grows deeper. Some of the carbon in mulch is released, but not all, which makes a positive and growing difference as a forest ages.
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Re:GMO trees... (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. That's unlikely.
Coal was a result of the circumstances during the carboniferous period - when wood was a pretty new evolution and nothing had evolved that could eat it yet.
All that carbon that got trapped under ground instead of becoming CO2 again had some pretty weird results - one of which was that the O2 level of the atmosphere reached it's all-time high at over 40%.
In that environment insects and arachnids could grow way bigger than they can in our 21% oxygen atmosphere (book lungs are not very effective - so the size of insects and arachnids depend directly on how much oxygen the atmosphere holds). Hence the famous 1m long dragonfly and other giant invertebrates of the age.
Eventually, bacteria, fungi and insects evolved that could digest wood. Carbon stopped being trapped and, gradually, the atmosphere reverted to it's normal 21% oxygen level.
But new coal is extremely unlikely, even from mulch which isn't fully converted. The trees that became coal were just about 100% unconverted only the leaves got eaten. Mulch is nowhere near that resilient.
Re: GMO trees... (Score:4, Funny)
Did you know that plastic dinosaurs were made from real dinosaurs?
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Existing forests don't count either. you need all new forests reclaimed from land we currently use for other things. Forests aren't going to grow in a desert so you can't use the vast tracks of land in the south west. We cut down the North East forests centuries ago. The Amazon is turning into a net RELEASE of carbon due to it's clear cutt
Re: GMO trees... (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop eating cows.
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Forests and jungle are being cut down to raise cows and cow feed.
Stop eating cows and this will revert to a carbon sink.
So you're saying that we should "eat mor chikin".... (grin)
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Chicken and pork. Both of those creatures are far more efficient than beef in converting feedstock into usable/edible products. They will eat scraps and discarded food such as waste from your kitchen (on a small scale), and large quantities of farm produce that is otherwise un-saleable, e.g. vegetables that aren't up to supermarket fresh-produce or even canning requirements.
I've learned to do without beef, lamb, and goat since I learned that I had to minimise my iron intake.
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Nope, GP already took that into account. You need to sequester the wood somewhere otherwise you're just treading water - the amount of carbon captured by trees is equal to the amount released by the old trees, so you don't even make a dent on the effect of burning fossil fuels.
No, that is an incorrect assumption. The forest floor grows in depth over time. Much of the CO2 in the mulch is released again, but not all. As long as there's even a slight difference, and there is, the forest keeps binding more and more CO2 as it ages and the forest floor becomes deeper. An old forest can have a quite deep accumulation - all solids created from gas harvested from the air.
Peatlands have the same property. It's not a fast process, by any means, but it is an ongoing process, and net pos
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The forests also reduce temperatures beneath them, which reduces soil warming and in turn reduces soil CO2 emissions.
Doesn't have to forests but trees anywhere this includes backyards front yards, road sides etc. I live in a leafy green suburb which had statistically some of the healthiest people in the country until about 10 years ago driving around the area didn't require as much air-conditioning the house was cooler. much I can put down to often being in the shade. due to high quantity of trees. This was very apparent when the area was viewed from a distance rooftops were hardy seen. My most recent view from the dis
Re:GMO trees... (Score:5, Insightful)
Go into an tropical jungle, e.g. Amazonas. The mulch is not even 30cm thick
30 cm times the area of the Amazon rain forests is a huge volume of bound carbon. And for many other types of forests, the layer is quite substantially thicker. And has a large impact too.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... [sciencedirect.com]
Quoting Wikipedia:
The peatland ecosystem is the most efficient carbon sink on the planet,[2] because peatland plants capture CO2 naturally released from the peat, maintaining an equilibrium. In natural peatlands, the "annual rate of biomass production is greater than the rate of decomposition", but it takes "thousands of years for peatlands to develop the deposits of 1.5 to 2.3 m [4.9 to 7.5 ft], which is the average depth of the boreal [northern] peatlands".[2]
[2]: Hugron, Sandrine; BussiÃres, Julie; Rochefort, Line (2013). Tree plantations within the context of ecological restoration of peatlands: practical guide (PDF) (Report). Laval, Québec, Canada: Peatland Ecology Research Group (PERG). Retrieved 22 February 2014.
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But that thickness is not increasing contrary to your claims.
That quote is simply wrong, sorry :D
Of course, you know this better than the scientists at the Peatland Ecology Research Group who published the research. I'll take the unsubstantiated words of Random Internet Guy over them any day ... erm, no.
Re:GMO trees... (Score:5, Interesting)
Biochar.
Burn wood or other biomass in a very low-oxygen environment and you get charcoal. Dig the charcoal into the soil and you get more fertile soil, but the carbon acts as a "fertility catalyst" rather than a fertilizer - it's not consumed, and it doesn't decay. It'll be there for centuries (millenia?) unless you get the dirt hot enough to ignite the charcoal.
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Except that when they die, the carbon is put back in the ground, not in the air. Which is fine.
You do know we are not CREATING new carbon, don't you?
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Perhaps look at the CO2 levels over the course of the year. High in the fall and winter, low in the spring and summer? Why because last years growth dies and releases the CO2 into the air and the new growth recaptures it (temporarily)
Re:GMO trees... (Score:5, Informative)
No, no it doesnt (well, the actual fact is some of it does, most of it does not).
BURNING wood puts most of it back.
In case you dont realise, dirt actually holds quite a bit of carbon. Dirt is mostly rotted plants.
This is also why grasslands absorb (and hold!) quite a lot of carbon, grass grows fast and dies often.
Funny, that.
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You do know we are not CREATING new carbon, don't you?
Actually, new carbon, as in new to the biosphere, is constantly being released from the Earths interior through volcanic actions. Countering this is that carbon is constantly being sucked into the Earth through plate tectonics as continents slide under other continents. Currently this is balanced but lots of times in geological history there has been massive volcanic activity that upped the CO2, sometimes drastically.
I was just reading about the Ordovician, at one point massive volcanic activity boosted the
Re:GMO trees... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Trump will save the day (Score:3, Funny)
Clean coal is magical
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You joke about that, but in PA, we get a 50% discount on our property taxes buy upgrading our heating to coal. In 2014, I replaced both of my natural gas furnaces with coal-fired stoves. I save on heating costs and receive the property tax discount.
The coal that I get is pre-washed, so doesn't throw up dust in my house. It's a very high quality source of heat and we're very happy with the upgrade.
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A tax break to convert from natural gas to coal?
Pennslyvania, you're doing it wrong.
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Re: Trump will save the day (Score:2)
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A tax break to convert from natural gas to coal?
I don't think so. I can't find anything about any PA tax break for coal using Google, so I think the above AC is spewing bullcrap. If it was actually true, it would be all over the web, and millions of people would be taking advantage of it, since 50% is a huge discount.
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It doesn't sound like Pennsylvania understands the meaning of "upgrade".
In other words... (Score:2)
... we're screwed.
Treading Water (Score:2)
Anyone who can do math knows this. (Score:2)
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But this isn't generally what's being portrayed to the public at large by politicians all over the world (event most Green political parties aren't being honest with the public because no-one likes Debbie Downers, even if they're really more like Cassandra).
People (mainly politicians and the business elite) carry on like the Paris climate agreement is a really strong step towards preventing climate change and we just need to ramp things up a bit more. But we're actually really really far away from having so
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2020 needs to be 0.
Best of luck
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People (mainly politicians and the business elite) carry on like the Paris climate agreement is a really strong step towards preventing climate change and we just need to ramp things up a bit more. But we're actually really really far away from having solved it.
They've known it was a practical impossibility from the start. They know that humans will do the same thing they've done every other time climate (or other major events/conditions) change. They will adapt.
Meanwhile, said politicians and others with wealth & power will use it as scare-mongering to drive the public in the direction they want to further their own political/ideological agendas increase their own wealth and power.
The discussion should be centering around adaptation to changing climate, not a
Carter (Score:5, Interesting)
When Carter was president of the US (late 70's), he was trying to get Climate Change on the national radar, but then Regan got elected and he stopped any action that could have had a chance of making a significant impact.
I remember as a kid him saying something like "We need to start now, otherwise we will not have enough time". Well I guess all young people can do now is try and live on high ground and I would say various coastal cities need to re-evaluate where to build new high-rises.
Of course now it seems coastal real-estate is hotter then I have ever seen it. So, seems the future looks gloomy.
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Well, unfortunately, it was his own party which jumped on Three Mile Island to torpedo nuclear power in the USA. That pretty much -caused- climate change, when you think about it.
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On the other hand, the cost of nuclear power in the USA is pretty much 95% the fault of Democrats. Various Democrat sub-groups came up with a plan [pitt.edu] to use the courts to make nuclear power too expensive, and it worked. This has been very well known for about 3 decades now, despite nonstop gaslighting to push the myth that the cost of nuclear power is either a mystery or the natural consequence of physics or engineering.
Re:If you really cared about climate change (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, these democrats are really powerful—they managed to influence even the construction of nuclear reactors in Finland!
The Olkiluoto reactor #3 [wikipedia.org] has been a spectacular failure for years. Works started in 2005, slated to finish in 2010 for 3 billion €. Works are still unfinished, with completion slated for 2019 at 8.5 billion € (barring further fuck-ups, which at this point have become a habit).
Building the plant is not some Finnish farmer, it's Areva [wikipedia.org] and Siemens [wikipedia.org], top-notch companies in the nuclear industry. If that's what nuclear can provide, well some politicians looking for a humongous boondoggle may be happy with that, but I as a consumer and taxpayer, not so much.
Your link appears to be mostly a whining rant about how terrible it is that nuclear power plants are forced to respect minimum standards of environmental decency: this, in particular, blew my mind [my bold]:
So as long as it's not commercially harvested, it's all right to exterminate species in the ocean? The temperature may seem mild to us, but higher temperatures do reduce oxygen content in water, and for every GW of power out of nuclear power plant there are 2 GW of heat; that could have altered the ecosystem significantly. Look at the location of the Seabrook, NH plant [google.no]: it is right on the inside of Hampton Harbor, which has a very narrow inlet. Heat would easily accumulate in there over time. And boo-hoo, they had to build 2 miles of pipe, cry me a river.
I went to college with two climate scientists (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I went to college with two climate scientists (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife is a mathematician who works in coastal areas modeling waves and often works with climate scientists. I've gotten to know several of them over the years and you're right: they're scared. You get them talking about climate change and their eyes take on an almost desperate, haunted quality. When they hear someone try to say "it's all a hoax", they just get ineffably sad or angry as hell.
We were at a barbecue some years ago and a fight almost broke out between a climate scientist and an economics major who had bought into some dienialist theory about how we should embrace climate change. I was one of the people who had to step in and calm it all down. Personally it was kind of a shame because it would have been satisfying to see the economics student get laid out by a guy twice his age, but my wife insisted and I was afraid they would knock over the table with all the liquor.
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Or they have a sense of perspective.
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If the barbecue was a charcoal barbecue, it would have been carbon neutral.
Except for the transportation costs, the energy cost to manufacture the barbecue, the energy costs of all the cars that people arrived in etc. But they're the same for all parties. So no more parties.
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There was no gasoline on hand.
Re:I went to college with two climate scientists (Score:4, Insightful)
The single best thing you can do to help prevent climate change (that doesn't involve murder / suicide) is to not have children.
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The single best thing you can do to help prevent climate change (that doesn't involve murder / suicide) is to not have children.
Except as sashimi. That's energy neutral.
Re: I went to college with two climate scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this idea should be evident if you look around and see who remains having children if the smart folks stop.
Re: I went to college with two climate scientists (Score:4, Insightful)
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That is nonsense.
The countries with the biggest populations have the lowest carbon footprint per person.
The biggest impact on climate change is if idiots like the US americans reduce their personal carbon emissions. Using 4 times as much energy per person as an European, and ten times as much as an African is not necessary, you can easily solve that, but you don't want to.
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I'd say not having children just because you're scared of the future is the wrong approach. Sure if you have a kid they may not have a pleasant future ahead of them. But if you don't have a kid then they definitely have no future ahead of them.
And you never know, their kid might have been the one that figures out how to solve the problem. Or at least figures out how to engineer a biodome for us to hide in for a few millennia while the earth recovers.
(Of course I don't know you or your friends or whether
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Preppers... (Score:2)
Are those degrees C or F? (Score:2)
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Where's your juicy steak going to come from, champ?
Crying Wolf (Score:2, Informative)
The old alarmist predictions of climate catastrophe have proven false [wattsupwiththat.com] again and again and again, so why do people believe the new ones?
You would expect that a group that consistently makes inaccurate predictions would lose credibility because of that and the public would stop believing what they say. Or, well, maybe not. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Crying Wolf (Score:4, Informative)
Censored climate change report (Score:2)
more fear mongering (Score:2)
If you extrapolate current emission scenarios to 2100 with no artificial carbon scrubbing, you end up with below 1000 ppm CO2. [ipcc-data.org] Basic science tells us that even such an unrealistic scenario gives us perhaps 3C warming over current conditions. In the past, when there have been such carbon concentrations, mammalian life was flourishing and primates became established. But that scenario is unrealistic anyway because economies are already motivated to reduce emissions all by themselves: fossil fuels are expensi
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So either way the fundamental problem of too many people solves itself.
Really? (Score:2)
"Countries are scrambling to limit the rise in the earth's temperature to just two degrees by the end of this century."
Really? Which countries are doing this? Germany? Shutting down clean nuclear plants and burning dirty coal in its place? Seriously - I don't see anybody doing too much of anything about it.
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That's not to exclude you from the pool of people with more than a handful of brain cells but, rather, to point out that we're not likely to just take your word for it. Which you'd realize if those cells were present and functional, of course.
Let's not fall into the fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because it is hard, or some would even say impossible to avoid the 2 C temperature increase, doesn't mean we should not try to do our best.
If it ends up the temperature raises by "only" 4 C instead of say, 7 C if we give up all efforts, it's still a big win.
Re: The denialists have won (Score:2, Informative)
Oh please... I'm not a denailist. But let's be serious, a lot of the people promoting Global Warming also tell you (if you listen/read long enough into the rhetoric they're spewing) that their plans can't work, were never going to work, and that it's probably hopeless. You really think those dunces were ever trying to help when they're literal nihilists? No. They were trying to make a buck.
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There's an easier solution to rising water -- move further inland. Its not like the 6 or 10 or whatever it is these days foot rise will happen over night.
The bigger issue is things like food shortage -- all those plants and animals we like to eat have a good chance of not being able to survive in a significantly changed climate. It likely won't kill humans off (we'll find the species that can survive and farm the hell out of them..) but it will significantly reduce our quality of life when the only things
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There's an easier solution to rising water -- move further inland. Its not like the 6 or 10 or whatever it is these days foot rise will happen over night.
Does not work for plenty of people/countries/islands.
Look on a damn map.
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Re:Plant more trees? (Score:5, Informative)
While it's helpful for a number of reasons to plant trees, note that humans put about 40 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. That's a lot of trees -- equivalent to growing 30,000 Giant Sequoias from seed to maturity in one year, every single year.
A mature 100 acre woodland captures enough carbon annually to offset seven automobiles driven an average amount.
So while trees help for many reasons like flood and erosion control, and can be part of a strategy to reduce fossil fuel emissions (e.g. by cooling cities), they're not really a attractive climate engineering option for bulk removal of CO2. Fertilizing the ocean to increase phytoplankton production is more easily scalable, but has potentially devastating side effects.
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40 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. That's a lot of trees -- equivalent to growing 30,000 Giant Sequoias
Your math is way off. A sequoia weighs roughly 1000 tonnes, but only 500 tonnes of that is carbon. 40 G-tonnes of CO2 is about 11 G-tonnes of carbon. So that is 1.1e10/500 = 22 million giant sequoias.
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"Simple" is questionable (lot of politics there, especially with regards to land ownership) but even if you could replant the entire rain forest, I'm not sure there would be enough carbon extraction happening in a short enough time frame to correct the problem.
There's also a couple of other things to consider:
1) Anything we do has generate less carbon than its removing, or its not helpful. That includes any carbon produced from mining and manufacturing the materials and products needed as well as transport
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Unlike CO2, atmospheric H20 concentrations are determined by temperature, so if more H20 is added that isn't supported by temperature it would condense out...at least that's the laymans science version I believe.
From what I can see, water vapor concentrations are 1000x that of CO2 so it would take considerably more to have the effect. That bein
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Hydrogen, is short term at least, not a solution. Neither for burning nor for fuel cells.
Producing Hydrogen makes it nearly as expensive as gasoline. And: you need to produce it. It costs a lot of energy.
Long term it could be a solution when we have enough solar/wind power to produce it. But then again we simply can use batteries instead of building up an hydrogen infrastructure. Or create hydrogen and feed it into the gas grid.
Re:This strange stuff I heard of once... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly it seems it doesn't matter; only money seems to matter. Around where I live, I've seen at least 100 acres of forest razed in the past year to put up shopping centers and subdivisions. And yes I mean forests - there is plenty of blighted urban area around, but instead of re-using that, they are razing forests...
It's like there isn't even any consideration of how this will affect the overall environment - what happens is the city planners say "sweet, we'll get property tax revenue on 300 more housing units!" and forget about all the ancillary effects. They even gloss over the short term effects like massive increases in traffic (putting 300 new residential units in an already congested area is baffling), how can you expect them to consider effects on climate change that will manifest over 50-100 years?
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I have a possible solution. We could fight global warming with nuclear winter!
I hate to say it, unless something 'real' can be done to limit Climate Change, this could very well be the result. From what I read, a decent part of the world will be almost inhabitable and the various "bread baskets" of the work will see their yields decline a lot.
So if people star starving on first world countries you could very well see 1 or more nuclear wars.
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The problem is of course it's not possible in that many decades to cut the population by 75% without resorting to forced birth control and mass murder - which won't happen because those in charge will be sacked with extreme prejudice.
Oh, there's always the possibility of a super-epidemic. That may be even more likely due to our war on diseases - the red queen is not to be denied, and whenever we up the ante, so does evolution.
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In the 70's they where predicting a new ice age, media just report what scares people because that sells.
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Those who hold a deep green philosophy would be against nuclear, and well anything which might allow for current rates of consumption to continue. The point of cutting carbon is to force a reduction in production of, well, everything.
And of course these are people who do not live what they preach.
As an environmentalist working in carbon credits explained to me, it does not matter what the truth about CO2 may be - as long as it forces a reduction in production of everything, a reduction in consumption and gr
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Re:Another thing they don't tell you about the mod (Score:5, Informative)
You mean this Roy Spencer
https://skepticalscience.com/R... [skepticalscience.com]
right ?
What is it with the slashdot crowd and the "lone wolf" saviour thing ? Is it just the usual right wing astro turfing, or do they really think that it's normal for lots and lots of scientists to be wrong AND lie about it, but that one person is the real purveyor of truth.
Roy Spencer is right but 95% of the climate scientists on the planet are wrong ? really?
We're dumping GIGA tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, a heat trapping gas, and it's doing NOTHING ?
oh wait, I forgot it's all natural variability. oh that's awesome, i'm glad you thought of that. before Roy Spencer came along nobody thought to check to see if maybe this warming is due to natural variability. wow- what a brilliant insight !
Well, all of those lying climate scientists on their big fat research paychecks showed that it isn't natural variability, but THEY'RE ALL WRONG. and they're liars. and Al Gore is fat.
Re:Another thing they don't tell you about the mod (Score:5, Insightful)
assuming Roy Spencer is correct.
uh-huh. You get to assume that the lone wolf is correct, but if I argue that knowledgeable people, who have studied the problem are correct i'm engaging in some sort of "if all your friends jumped in a lake" argument.
"my friends" believe CAGW because knowledgeable people who have studied the problem believe it.
Make an argument on CAGW that is not an appeal to authority then I might believe you
Do you even know what "appeal to authority" as an argument means ?
if i tell you that quantum physics is real because a bunch of physicist think it's real, is that an appeal to authority ?
Description: Using an authority as evidence in your argument when the authority is not really an authority on the facts relevant to the argument.
climate scientist are, in fact, an authority on the facts relevant to the argument.
Well, we can at least halfway agree here. I'll let you ponder on which half.
No we're not agreeing halfway on anything. You make false and disingenuos arguments. we have nothing to agree about. you're denying reality because of some bullshit worldview.
Re:Another thing they don't tell you about the mod (Score:4, Insightful)
I've heard this before. It's used often as an argument, and it works now with me just about as well as it worked on my parents when I was in high school. I don't care if all your friends believe in CAGW, that just makes a lot of people wrong, assuming Roy Spencer is correct.
Why would we assume that?
Make an argument on CAGW that is not an appeal to authority then I might believe you. What would help a lot to convince me is a focus on finding solutions.
That reeks of intellectual dishonesty. Do you also refuse to believe in diseases that don't have cures?
And whose problem is it, if you don't accept the reality of CO2 driven climate change? Because it sounds like you are trying to make it our problem: a classic burden of proof fallacy. If you have some better explanation as to what happens when the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are doubled, feel free to post that explanation, along with observational proof.
Re: (Score:3)