"Progress" on Reducing Carbon Emissions

Bob, first I'd like to say that your patient replies to posters with divergent views is impressive, as are your command of facts and reason.

I gather your main concern for mankind revolves around the burgeoning world population and its future energy and food needs. I'm wondering how your thoughts relate to our own country, where the population has grown remarkably over the last couple of hundred years, yet we produce more food than needed and have more vegetation, including trees (I've seen reported), than we did back then.

 

I can't believe this! How many times have I proven his points as bogus? Whooo, world overpopulation is a problem... Great analysis. Really earth shattering stuff...

 

Fibb, CNG does not have a lower carbon footprint than petrol as a vehicle fuel.

Anyway, I wanted to stand up and be counted as one of those annoying greens who thinks climate change is human driven and real, and that the US will have to take extreme steps in the near future after two decades of pussyfooting around the problem, even if the water buffalo continues its unregulated emissions.

 

I was giving Bob the benefit of the doubt on that one.

Natural gas power plants are less CO2 emitting than coal, I understand. If you divert CNG from electrical generation to transportation, what fills the gap, more coal?

But Picken's seems to think it's a good idea, but is that just because it's domestic and/or he stands to personally profit from the adoption of CNG.

This says that there could be a 25% reduction in CO2 with a CNG vehicle.

Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles Data Center: Natural Gas Vehicle Emissions

More info please.

 

Pickens wants to offset NG consumption with wind power and then use that unused NG for the transportation sector. Not necessarily a bad idea. A better idea would probably be using CSP w/thermal storage in addition to wind. He wants wind because a.) there's lots of it in TX and b.) it's already quite cheap, cheaper than NG.

I like this part of his plan. I don't think that CNGV make a lot of sense because NG has a lot of production pressure on it already and in the coming decades there will be less and less of it. PHEV/BEV, I think are a better way to go.

 

fibb, my earlier statement than NG has the same carbon footprint as 'gasoline' is not exact:

gasoline is ~ [CH(2)]n, while most (average 87%, but varies by deposit) of NG is methane or CH(4)
One mole of fully oxidized gasoline gives one mole CO2, and two moles H(2)O, while
one mole of fully oxidized NG give one mole CO(2), and four moles H(2)O.

Oxidation of the C-C bond in petrol has not been accounted for, but it is less than the two additional hydrogen bond oxidations in methane.

And that, sorrowfully enough, is the limit of how much chemistry I remember.

 

In your mind your inadequate, snarky responses to Bob's measured arguments constitute proof?

You think CO2 produced by mankind has placed the world in a crisis situation due to AGW. There are plenty of scientists who disagree, and the evidence (regardless of the promulgations of the politicians of the UN IPCC ) favors the skeptics.

You think this is settled science. It is not.

Global Warming Petition Project

Roy W. Spencer: Global Warming and Nature's Thermostat

Whooo, you might wish to comprehend what you read before hauling out the sarcasm. There are also plenty of people more intelligent than you or I who do not perceive an overpopulation problem. That is why I directed a query toward Bob.

Overpopulation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It would be nice if you'd ratchet back the superior tone and realize how much you really have to be humble about.

 

I'm not so sure the best way to reduce emissions is with another vehicle. Yes, it would help, but so would many other things. For example, planning communities where everything's within walking distance would drastically reduce the need to burn fuel. They do exist - I was lucky enough to have been born in one, and have never commuted by car on a regular basis. With more attention to zoning, we could reduce the need for travel.

As for CO2, my wild nice person guess is that it's just a trigger for the methane. Once all that permafrost melts and the oceans have absorbed as much as they can, things will really begin to heat up. If nothing else, it may cool off the climate change deniers.

 

It is settled, sorry.

 

May I ask again (since you didn't answer before) - where is the crisis? Global temps are declining, sea level rise is slower than the first half of the 20th C, antarctic ice extent is at record highs, arctic ice extent, while low, is recovering this year and the recent reduction was attributed primarily to air & water currents, not AGW. This year is going to be one of the coldest globally in years. It seems that the "crisis" has been averted without our intervention. So I guess you are right, it has all been "settled"!

 

With all due respect to you and your hobby of cherry picking climate data, I'll wait until the IPCC tells me that we are out of the woods, before I believe it. Up to now, all I see is that the global warming trend is ahead of their most pessimistic predictions. ES&T Online News: Models underestimate global warming impacts

And if I may quote myself:

 

Changing air and water currents are part of climate change. And by 'recovering', do you mean this was only the second worst year for Arctic sea ice coverage we've ever known, as opposed to last year?

 

Cherry picking would be saying something like "the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is 'collapsing'" while ignoring the fact that the Antarctic continent as a whole is colder and has more ice mass than ever. This is something that happens continually in the media -- with constant attribution of every temperature blip, precipitation change, and local climate variance being attributed to "global warming".

I too will be interested in the IPCC next report. It will be fascinating to see how they will square empirical evidence of broadly flat to declining global temperatures with projections of unabated temperature increases.

So again, with all due respect to you and your hobby of alarmism, please spell out for me where today's "crisis" caused by global warming is?

 

If you would like to present evidence that CO2 has caused the present changes in the arctic air and water currents, please do. I have not seen such research, but would like to see it if it exists.

By the way, for historical reference, you might consider this (below). The truth is, the evidence that this is the "second worst year for Arctic sea ice" is strongly prejudiced by an extremely short satellite record.

 

Part of the reason global warming should be characterized as a crisis is because 1) it has the capacity to ruin our standard of living (if not human civilization)* and 2) we aren't doing any meaningful yet to combat it.

This is a time sensitive problem and to solve it with the least amount of pain, we should have started reducing emissions decades ago. The longer we wait the more economic disruption there will be. (It will still be a bargain compared to the economic costs of doing nothing).

We must put a price on carbon and break our world-wide reliance on fossil fuels. And we will.

* Some of the future impacts of continued warming:

- sea level rise and 100's of millions of climate change refugees,
- habitat loss and mass species extinctions,
- increasingly larger wild fires, beetle infestations,
- thawing of permafrost and tundra,
- disappearing plankton - the bottom of the food chain,
- more severe weather events,
- increased spread of infectious diseases.

That's your crisis in a nutshell.

 

What about the thousands of years of evidence from pollen grains encapsulated in the ice? Or five thousand year old objects dropping out of the melting ice? Oh, of course, neither of us have been around long enough to witness these changes personally, so obviously they aren't happening. Besides, we're both much smarter than all those stupid, biased scientists. Yeah, it's all just a big conspiracy.

 

Hmm - a meteor impact could 1) ruin our standard of living and 2) we aren't doing anything about it. So I disagree with your definition of crisis. I think the likely impacts of increased levels of CO2, while measurable, are far from a crisis. But we can agree to disagree.

- The sea level rose at a slower rate in the 2nd 1/2 of the 20th Century than the first (14.5 mm/decade). That is hardly a crisis.
- Habitat loss from man's other activities is likely a much greater threat than is loss from CO2 induced climate change.
- Wildfires are symptomatic of forest service policies and drought conditions (beetle infestations are likely closely related to drought conditions to). But the Palmer drought severity index shows no long term trending in the western U.S. that would be consistent with global warming. So neither beetles nor fires appears linked to CO2.
- Thawing of the permafrost could be problematic, but atmospheric methane levels have been flat for 10 years so there is little evidence there is a risk here. It should be watched, but in any case, the atmospheric life of methane is very short and most of the methane emitted by biological mechanisms is quickly destroyed by UV. Furthermore, because ocean temperatures appear to be declining (and oceans are far more vast than permafrost) the oceans would likely absorb any excess CH4 from permafrost release, should it occur.
- Not sure I understand the plankton comment. Plankton absorb CO2. Increases in CO2 are not causing plankton decline.
- Linking extreme weather events to CO2 is tenuous at best. Ask hurricane expert Chris Landsea.
- Spread of infectious disease much more likely due to overpopulation, poor sanitation, and global trade and travel than CO2. For instance, Paul Reiter, “a medical entomologist who heads the Insects and Infectious Disease unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris says that scare stories about global warming spreading malaria are "complete bull”. He “ quit the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calling its approach unscientific, but had to threaten a lawsuit to get his name taken off the IPCC reports.”

 

An early study of the various components of the Greenland, Antarctic and Canadian Arctic ice-cap cores (Koerner,1989) suggested that during the last interglacial period, the Greenland ice sheet suffered massive retreat and Canadian ice caps melted completely. Since then, modeling has helped support this interpretation (Cuffey and Marshall, 2000). Ice-core records of stable isotopes, melt layering and chemistry from the same Canadian ice cores, and others from the Russian Arctic islands, Svalbard and Greenland are presented as evidence for a more modest, but still substantial, retreat in the early Holocene. The sections representing the first half of the Holocene in many cores have less negative δ18O values (δ values) and a higher percentage of melt layers than recently deposited ice, suggesting that temperatures were 1.3-3.5°C warmer than today. Given that glacier balances are slightly negative today, they must have been substantially more negative during the early-Holocene thermal maximum, leading to retreat of the circumpolar ice caps. Evidence is presented to suggest that, with the exception of Academii Nauk ice cap, the ice in the Russian Arctic islands and Svalbard must have almost disappeared. In the Canadian Arctic, the larger Canadian ice caps retreated but survived. The cooling trend that followed this thermal maximum promoted re-expansion and new growth of most of the ice caps in the Russian Arctic islands and Svalbard.

Or:

Based on these data, we propose that the extent of sea ice cover during the last interglacial was generally reduced over most parts of the Arctic Ocean compared to the present day pattern.

 

While it would be devastating, the chance of an asteroid or comet hitting the earth is small. So there is no crisis there.

CO2 content in the atmosphere is 35% higher than at the start of industrialization. That's real with real effects.

I didn't list all the potential negative impacts of global warming. If I did, I'm sure you would be able to discount them all with a few more keystrokes.