Conservatives insist the rest of us live by their rules

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At any rate, a few degrees average change in either direction will require a great deal of investment from humans to adapt to local climate changes.

How you classify those changes is immaterial.

8,000 years ago, it was something like 5 F warmer than today, on average. We adapted very well to that.

On the other hand, the cooling during the period known as the Little Ice Age was, on average, about 2 F and that caused serious problems at times.

8000 years ago there were maybe 7 million humans.

The global population more than tripled during the little ice age - looks like we did just fine?

What you have here is itself a conspiracy theory, so that doesn't make you any more noble than those who believe that the push for acceptance of A.G.W. is a conspiracy.



Many scientists DO try to speak out against it, but they are either ignored, silenced or threatened with loss of career and/or funding.



Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant though. Carbon, on the other hand, is. I've noticed that so many who support this nonsense cannot even tell the difference between one and the other, using the terms carbon dioxide and carbon as though there were no difference between them. That just goes to show how shockingly ill-informed they truly are. Sceptics of A.G.W. never make this, incredibly basic, mistake.

ASSP, what do the numbers mean?

You're splitting hairs.

co2 is a greenhouse gas, and as such an emission of concern.

Carbon dioxide contains carbon; the people who are calculating carbon release and it's effects know this, and intended to lump them together. No conflation has been made.

The people who talk about "carbon sequestration" (which is a bizarre and stupid idea) are explicitly talking about carbon dioxide.

When your regulatory agencies talk about carbon emissions from your vehicle or from a power generation facility, they aren't talking about soot. When they talk about soot, they say "particulate emissions".

You're saying that people have made the mistake of conflating two separate things. You are mistaken.

This is ridiculous. One would think that if these people want others to accept that what they are telling them is true, that they would do all they could do to ensure precision, accuracy and clarity. Agree?

No.

NTs use something called verbal shorthand a lot.

Hardly anybody actually reads scientific publications. And by that i don't mean magazines about science, I mean hardly anybody actually reads a whole research paper.

And of people who read a whole research paper, only the better scientists actually understand it.

The subject of energy efficiency is of increasing importance as our population continues to increase geometrically, largely because most of our energy sources are organic in nature - meaning, literally, that they contain carbon. In fact, carbon is integral to their usefulness as energy sources.

Energy efficiency in relation to potential damage to the environment is also of increasing concern.

The efficiency of an energy solution can then be handily referenced in terms of how much carbon is released into the environment - in any form - for each joule of energy generated.

Coal, when you get right down to it, is carbon with a few impurities. And we don't need the impurities. In fact, the impurities are a big part of the problem. "Clean Coal" turns out to be coal that has been pulverized and then mixed with water and a foaming agent which causes the pyrite crystals to rise to the top. The pyrites are then mechanically removed, and the coal dust is dried and compacted into bricks or cylinders. This is only useful for coke furnaces which require a very pure coal to operate properly. It's not realistic for energy generation.

Gasoline, diesel, natural gas, propane, etc? Hydrocarbon chains. Hydrogen and carbon being the major elements there.

These are examples of energy that, millennia ago, existed in the form of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which was captured by plants and used to make various sugars, sugar polymers such as starch and cellulose, sometimes eaten by animals, and in any case eventually geologically trapped and concentrated within the earth's crust.

Ethanol? C2H6O. Two carbons, six hydrogens, and an oxygen. We get this one from yeast. There are chemical methods used, inefficiently, to create alcohols, but in truth they are just aping what we have been able to observe of how yeast does it. And how bacteria chew apart cellulose into something that yeast can eat.

And of course, the yeast get the building blocks for alcohols from plants, which absorb co2.

You can also calculate, roughly, the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by the industry required to support the creation of alcohols. This includes not just the vehicles and equipment used, but release of co2 from within soil due to tilling. Not exaggerating.

So you see, aside from nuclear sources and some chemical reactions, most of our forms of solid, liquid, and gaseous energy storage are in the form of carbon-based molecules, which can trace their origin to atmospheric co2.

But i shouldn't have to explain the carbon cycle to you.

One of the proposed carbon sequestration methods is to attempt to store co2, co, soot, etc under the sea floor where it will, on the geological time scale, eventually get converted into dolomite and limestone. Not kidding. My concern about this one is twofold. 1: Nobody has thought of a way to do this efficiently, and 2: the geological time scale is a long damn time to be worrying about catastrophic release of co2. See also: Lake Nyos, Cameroon, 1986.

Photovoltaics are interesting, but efficiencies in terms of how many joules of solar radiation strike the solar cell vs. how many joules of electricity are generated are not really that impressive, and there is a great deal of energy used (and carbon released) by the manufacture of solar cells. Ultra-pure silica glass, for example, is just killer to make.

I think we should be looking at nukes, but i expect that nobody will do this on a large scale again until fossil fuels are too expensive and/or too scarce. Which is a shame.

All of this is very complex, so for the journos and plebes and politicians, it is easier to just refer to it all as "carbon" and they are not technically incorrect.

Scientists need to be precise. Policy makers and the peanut gallery do not.

It's also interesting to look at the efficiencies of so-called efficient vehicles.

My friend Roger only drives cars made before 1972 because he feels like it. Since he has a masters degree in mechanical engineering and a lot of auto mechanic and automotive machine shop experience, he has no difficulty keeping them running well.

It's easy for people to look at a big old detroit boat with a V8 under the hood and say "That guy is ruining the environment".

But the energy consumed, and carbon released, by the manufacture of a new Toyota Prius, is far, far greater than all of the gasoline he could possibly run through it as his daily driver for the foreseeable future.

You cannot, categorically, save the environment by building a brand new car with two motors and a big battery made of highly refined metals.

^^^
I've got to make an admission - - NT's aren't the only ones guilty of that.

A number of years ago, a reporter arrived at an airport to be picked up by Edward Abbey who he was there to interview. Edward Abbey showed up in a large, old, gas guzzling, smoke belching car (I think a Cadillac). The reporter was very surprised about what Abbey was driving and asked about it.

Abbey's reply? Something to the effect of "the quicker we run out of gas, the sooner we can go back to horse and buggy."

We do understand the problems. We understand them very, very well. I must admit to being somewhat surprised that someone as well-read as you isn't aware of this.

It would be greatly preferable not to result to Global Dimming to reduce Global Warming.

Nuclear power is an absolute must when it is practical.

Yeah. I understand the concerns of anti-nuke folks, but they don't seem to care that all of their dire examples are based on 1960's technology.

greenhouse gasses aren't the issue, it's the natural balance of the co2 emission/absorption cycle being thrown out of whack

here's a video that addresses some misconceptions about climate change, with citations in the description

And even the dire examples aren't very bad. Chernobyl wouldn't have led to any premature deaths outside of the immediate blast if the Soviet authorities had handed out iodine tablets. Tame events like Three Mile Island? Drops in the ocean.

Fewer people die per kilowatt hour using nuclear power than for any other form of electricity generation.

Yes, but when they do, we know about it, and it's vivid, and that plays into a standard human irrationality.

And most people can't be bothered to defeat their own irrationalities. What they feel is more true, period.

Fukushima isn't good, and i don't know how they might fix it.

And when people bring up that disaster, my standard answer is "Yes. We should not put the storage water above the reactor core. Also, if we were smart like the US Navy, we'd build it so that coolant pressure is what keeps the control rods out of the core. Lose coolant pressure? Reaction shuts down because gravity. In general, I agree that we should never build any 1960's reactor designs again."

there's already a low-maintence safe design(pool-type reactors) that don't require the use of boiling water towers.