madmax, have i told you lately that i love you. and honestly, there's no one else above you. in fact, you fill my heart with kindness while at the very same time you are able to take away all the sadness. basically, you ease all my troubles, that's what you do.
as i ponder this lovely message from you, i'm reminded of butterflies and unicorns next to shimmering lakes.
And how can you not like Irish Punk after this <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/qaRfjbhRW3Y&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/qaRfjbhRW3Y&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Huh? The "natural cycle" shows a 50% rise and fall of atmospheric CO2. The last 20,000 years have witnessed a 100% rise in CO2. Here's a nice 650,000 year slice of the 2.1 million years you mention. Could it be a coincidence? Yes. Would Occam's Razor support that notion? No. Could it be that CO2 levels simply follow the temperature? That temperature is the horse, and CO2 the cart? (that's the causation versus correlation argument that some would say is central.) Here's the problem that everyone keeps ignoring. We know, and we know exactly, What CO2 does when hit by sunlight. It absorbs the radiation and heats the atmosphere around it like a mofo -- it does this to a much greater extent that N2 and O2 (the main components of the atmosphere.) You can run that experiment in a lab. So we know that having more CO2 will mean more heating. We can argue extent, and various models explore that. We can argue whether or not added heating will save us from the next ice age, and so forth. But I find "CO2 isn't necessarily a contributor to temperature" fundamentally flawed. It is necessarily a contributor, which is not to say the only contributor.
Baylor guys are typically a little soft, if you know what I mean. Always have a case of the "overly nice guys"
The "won't be so one-sided next time" and other such frustrated comments reminded me of a legion of doom comment after losing to the superfriends. Spoiler (language warning)
Let's say that we magically stop ALL CO2 emissions from occuring. OK, great, now what do we do with the other 98% of greenhouse gases? Of course, the world's economy would be dead at that point, so it's moot. Friends, the question is whether it's worth $4,000 per American family to chase the latest environmental conjecture. And even if you do, without global cooperation, it gets you nowhere. What's the point then? Atmospheric CO2 levels are near historical lows -- they've been as high as 7,000 PPM, now they are less than 400. So it's laughable that people cite that as evidence. When the oceans warm, CO2 is released. So it's a lagging indicator. WARMING = FIRST, CO2 RELEASE = SECOND. To conclude from that that CO2 is causing the warming is like saying flies congregating causes garbage to collect. Has it ever dawned on anyone that the very hot, fiery star that is the source of light for our solar system (called THE SUN) is responsible for temperature variations? Wow, who would have guessed it?
Good grief, is there a lawyer on the BBS that can tell this guy to go make some copies or freshen up the coffee pot? His attempts at derailing threads are getting a bit... played out.
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Sounds like climate change bill negotiations hit a major roadblock last night, as the Dems were negotiating with themselves. It's up on Drudge now... ...just wait until we get our message out...
Hey Grizz, I'm in Calgary next week, doing my best to safely contribute massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere. If you want to meet up for a beer after work one day, email me through my profile.
His Ted talk in this clip was given in late 2007 and it’s really since then that his air scrubbing technology has taken off. Are you a chemical engineer, or do I have that mixed up with someone else? Here are some slides from a fairly recent presentation he gave on his scrubber technology. It’s very science heavy, however, and the text of his talk isn’t included, so it’s probably mostly of interest to chemical engineers. http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/Misc/AC technology Feb 2009.pdf Here’s a fairly recent article from the Economist on air capture. There are a few other groups working on air capture as well and Klaus Lackner is another who has been getting a lot of press over the last year or so. I believe that Keith’s process is quite a bit cheaper at this point, around $100/tonne, but at $30/tonne Lackner’s projects to be cheaper in the long run. http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13174375 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126901.200-can-technology-clear-the-air.html?full=true On a possible treaty, I suspect that at this point most countries would agree that they don’t want another country going solo and trying to engineer the global climate, but if we put this off and some countries start to take the lead in this kind of research then they may well become be much less interested in giving up their ability to act unilaterally. What Keith is proposing is really just common sense, but it’s important to note that he’s not just being opposed by the right wing wingnuts. He’s also being opposed by highly political and self-serving groups like Greenpeace, who are literally putting the world at risk through their actions. Keith talked about how un-PC it became to even talk about geoengineering in the 90s, and even now you can see the impact of this kind of pressure in almost every article on the subject. The issue of moral hazard is often used as a defence, but there is another kind of moral hazard that comes from systematically lying to the public and trying to block research that could potentially save the world. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105483423&sc=fb&cc=fp As a footnote, it’s disturbing that a number of one time do-good NGO’s have become in many respects the opposite of what they started out to be. PETA and Greenpeace are two of the more high profile examples, but if you go back I think you can see this in morphing of Students for a Democratic Society into The Weather Underground in the late 60s as well. I’m waaaaay off topic here but I think this will be one of the biggest challenges for our generation’s leaders, how to keep movements on track and keep them from becoming corrupt. To do that I think we need to have a close look at the movements and NGOs that went wrong and try to understand how it happened. Is anyone looking for a research project?
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Are you willing to give Congress $4,000 per year in order to lower global temperatures by .18 degrees by 2100? I'm not. The Big Chill Congress shouldn't fight global warming by freezing the economy. By PETE DU PONT Two months ago this column offered an analysis of the Waxman-Markey global warming bill, its enormous cost and its practical impossibilities. Sometime in the next few weeks Congress will begin consideration of the bill, one of the priorities of the Obama administration and the Al Gore enthusiasts who think that Earth will die unless the governments of the world regulate our electricity, energy, autos, economies and backyards. They do not seem to believe that energy is of any significance to our economy or our people. But the truth is it matters to all of us--to those who drive, heat our houses and run businesses, cities, towns, hospitals and schools. So they have put together the "cap and trade" bill, the goal of which is to control the annual amount of CO2 emissions that will be permitted. First comes setting the "cap," the amount a business is permitted to emit, and then "trade," allowing them to buy permits to emit more CO2 or sell permits if their emissions are lower. It will be the largest and widest intervention by government into the lives of Americans since the 1940s. The Manhattan Institute's Jim Manzi concludes that the benefits of Waxman-Markey would not be much. Historical data show that the average rate of warming in the 30 years from 1977 to 2007 was just 0.32 degree Fahrenheit per decade. The expected warming in the next hundred years is estimated to be about 0.50 degree Fahrenheit per decade, and the new bill is estimated to lower global temperatures by about 0.18 degree Fahrenheit by 2100. Manzi estimates the additional economic costs of the bill would be 0.8% of gross domestic product, while the economic benefits would be just 0.08%--so the costs would be 10 times the benefits. The cost of reducing emissions turns out to be greater than the cost they impose on societies. According to a 1999 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimate, the emissions cuts the Kyoto Protocol would have required in 2010 were likely to reduce America's GDP by $275 billion to $468 billion, or $921 to $1,565 per person, and of course Kyoto does not apply to fast-growing developing countries such as China and India. An April study by Charles River Associates tells us that if the Obama proposal to reduce CO2 emissions becomes law, it will have a serious impact on the availability and cost of energy. By 2025, just 16 years from now, the cost of natural gas would rise 56%, electricity 44% and motor fuel 19%. Annual household purchasing power would annually decline by an average of $1,827. And America will lose 3.2 million jobs. There are alternatives. Earlier this month the National Center for Policy Analysis (for which I serve as policy chairman) issued a global warming analysis titled "10 Cool Global Warming Policies." Among them: eliminating energy subsidies and barriers to nuclear power, establishing biotech crops, reducing automobile pollution and developing new technology. The starting point is the scope of our government's existing energy subsidies. They total nearly $17 billion annually--including $4.9 billion for renewable energy (wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric), $3.3 billion for coal, $2.1 billion for natural gas and petroleum liquids, $1.3 billion for nuclear power, and $1.2 billion for electricity. Many of these subsidies actually encourage carbon emissions by reducing the cost of energy from coal and petroleum. Eliminating them would be a good first step in letting the market, as opposed to the government, control energy emission costs. Nuclear power is the only emission-free energy technology that can significantly reduce carbon emissions. America's nuclear plants avoid nearly 700 million metric tons of CO2 emissions each year. But the government has made the construction of nuclear plants almost impossible. Of those currently operating in the U.S., the newest one was built starting in 1977. Of the 45 nuclear power plants now under construction world-wide, only one is in America. Energy use is of course a source of greenhouse gas emissions. As the study says, "Petroleum used in transportation and industrial production accounts for 44 percent of energy related CO2 emissions; coal accounts for 36 percent, and natural gas for 20 percent." Unfortunately the popular modern energy priorities--corn based ethanol (which government subsidizes at 51 cents a gallon for the 36 billion gallon production the Congress has required by 2022) instead of reducing carbon emissions increases them over time, and wind and solar power--good ideas that we should keep working on--only supply electricity 30% to 40% of the time. Energy development and creation have been essential to America's success over the past several centuries, and they are important for America's future. But the Obama-Waxman-Markey legislation has it backwards: By reducing energy availability, their proposals would kill jobs, reduce purchasing power, shrink the economy, and raise the cost of every fuel we use. All of which would have almost zero impact on global warming. America cannot go forward successfully with this kind of thinking. We need nuclear power, more oil and gas to support our increasing energy needs, and a clear understanding that depriving us of energy, as this bill would do, would be a very substantial mistake. www.wsj.com
