What can we do about Climate Change?

[Rednick]

Every single produce industry destroys a portion of their crop every year to keep market price high. People are only going to buy so much broccoli, so they mine as well sell it for as much as they can. My hometown dumped 25 tons of crop last summer.

But they didn't receive government subsidies for what they didn't produce, right?

It is basic Economics, there was a stable/efficient market for the production and consumption of Broccoli...
At some point line A (aggregate value of crop) intersected line B (maximum value of crop) -which would be a horizontal line or ceiling.

At least they were burning Broccoli and not books.

 

[Nor'Easter]

We have been over this before, solar and wind and other "green" technologies are as or more viable, as or less expensive, and less controversial. Nuclear was not the answer 50 years ago and it is not now. Until Fusion is practical, and that will take time and be very expensive to get off the ground but very cheap energy once it is going.

 

[Rednick]

We have been over this before, solar and wind and other "green" technologies are as or more viable, as or less expensive, and less controversial. Nuclear was not the answer 50 years ago and it is not now. Until Fusion is practical, and that will take time and be very expensive to get off the ground but very cheap energy once it is going.

The only thing I can say to that is 'magnitude'.
Have you read the EIA Annual report yet?

And I wouldn't hold my breath on fusion...Given how long it took the Cern reactor to be up and running.

 

[Nor'Easter]

One state's worth, a state the size of North Dakota, is all it would take. Put that many windmills in the midwest and you power the country. Put in a similar area in the SW and same thing. Do them both and you have even less area required. Surely with many people or communities all around the country doing it, combined with offshore wind and tidal, and you would have more capacity than we use now. Nuclear is just the easy way out, or it seems the easy way out until you start to fill up area after area with hazardous waste, and eventually run out of places to put it. Then you ship it into space and some aliens get pissed off and eliminate the human "child race". Well it could happen, and sustainable energy could happen even easier!

 

[bentom187]

( i am answering the original question)plant more weed,it filters the air,i think the exchange rate is higher than any other plant ,i read it somwhere i dont remember the source i think it was on OG,there for it could be a good defense against global warming.the other thing we could do is stop throwing your crap on the ground it just ends up in the water,witch is becoming a scarce source. and what coud it hurt to recycle everything you can.

 

[Rednick]

One state's worth, a state the size of North Dakota, is all it would take. Put that many windmills in the midwest and you power the country. Put in a similar area in the SW and same thing. Do them both and you have even less area required. Surely with many people or communities all around the country doing it, combined with offshore wind and tidal, and you would have more capacity than we use now. Nuclear is just the easy way out, or it seems the easy way out until you start to fill up area after area with hazardous waste, and eventually run out of places to put it. Then you ship it into space and some aliens get pissed off and eliminate the human "child race". Well it could happen, and sustainable energy could happen even easier!

Nuclear is now...er, or at least 20 some years in the future, because it takes a lot of time to build new reactors. Something not done for some 20+ years...thanks Jane Fonda. But we can thank Bush for the Hydrogen economy plan.
That is the coolest thing about Hydrogen, at the superheated temperatures of a NGNP (next generation nuclear plant), the hydrogen molecule can leave the oxygen molecule without electricity.
The waste, is minimal...everyone makes a big deal about half-life, but doesn't know what it means. You can bury that shit in a mountain out in the middle of nowhere in the states no problem.
Coal has already the infrastructure and resources available for a long, long time in this country. It makes up most of our energy, and will continue to do so for some time.
It takes a lot of time for a society to transition between energy sources.

In the end it will take a mix of many sources to fulfill the hungry American appetite.
But look at CERN it will take a long time to realize fusion.

If you did not take the time before, please read this important message from your anal-retentive friend. Digest and fink about it.
This is just the overview. But they also have the Abstract and Full Report available, depending on your time and technical constraints.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/overview.html

Facts not fiction.
Different forms of energy are known as substitutable resources. Where they differ and why we can't use all as one source, is because of the structural (i.e. mining, transportation, distribution (length of travel/difficulty) inefficiencies of just using one source.

 

[Nor'Easter]

I did not read all of that yet, but what I get out of it is that renewable energy is a minor part of the energy mix at present. I know that. It is not because it is inferior but because we have allowed coal and big oil to dominate our energy policy far too long. If renewable energy got the same level of subsidies oil and other rich corporates get, it would be an important part of the mix. Solar especially is farther along than nuclear fusion right now and we will do just fine with renewable sources until fusion comes on line. Like you or someone else said earlier, concentrated solar is very promising. I'd rather see nuclear fission than continued use of oil and coal, but only if it is absolutely necessary. I think renewables can do the job alone.

 

[milehimedi]

"Climate change"... yes the climate is changing. Just as it has been since the Ice Age ended. Climate change caused by humans is a lie manufactured by the Democrats. They made up this lie so that they could tax and control the most valuable resource on the planet>>>energy.

It can be difficult to accept the idea hat we have been lied to, and believed it for years. Everyone needs to swallow their pride and realize that we were duped. At least I was, along with most. If you're doubting me, google "climategate"

Ya dig?

 

[ArcticBlast]

stop using SF6 in gas-electric circuit breakers...that shit is 36000x worse than CO2

ArcticBlast

 

[cork144]

"Climate change"... yes the climate is changing. Just as it has been since the Ice Age ended. Climate change caused by humans is a lie manufactured by the Democrats. They made up this lie so that they could tax and control the most valuable resource on the planet>>>energy.

It can be difficult to accept the idea hat we have been lied to, and believed it for years. Everyone needs to swallow their pride and realize that we were duped. At least I was, along with most. If you're doubting me, google "climategate"

Ya dig?

yea it makes me wonder how these people assume an ice age happened, and the melting of it, then the refreezing, then the melting, then the refreezing, can go on and on,,

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

lol @ climategate

What do the 'Climategate' hacked CRU emails tell us?


The skeptic argument...
Hackers have broken into the database of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit - and put the files they stole on the Internet. The 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving scientists pushing the man-made warming theory, suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. (Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun)

What the science says...
While some of the private correspondance is not commendable, an informed examination of their "suggestive" emails reveal technical discussions using techniques well known in the peer reviewed literature. Focusing on a few suggestive emails merely serves to distract from the wealth of empirical evidence for man-made global warming.

In November, the servers at the University of East Anglia in Britain were illegally hacked and emails were stolen. When a selection of emails between climate scientists were published on the internet, a few suggestive quotes were seized upon by many claiming global warming was all just a conspiracy. So just what do these emails tell us?

Some of the emails are certainly embarrassing for the authors. One email responds in poor taste to the death of a well known skeptic. There's scathing discussion of skeptics such as Steve McIntyre and Roger Pielke, including imaginings of violence. However, the crucial question is whether these emails reveal that climate data has been falsified. To determine this, some understanding of the science discussed in the emails is required to avoid taking isolated quotes out of context.

"Mike's Nature trick" and "hide the decline"
The most quoted email is from Phil Jones discussing paleo-data used to reconstruct past temperatures (emphasis mine):

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
"Mike's Nature trick" refers to a technique (aka "trick of the trade") used in a paper published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann (Mann 1998). The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.

The most common misconception regarding this email is the assumption that "decline" refers to declining temperatures. It actually refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960. This is known as the "divergence problem" where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed in the peer reviewed literature as early as 1995, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature. More on the hockey stick divergence problem...

Trenberth's "travesty we can't account for the lack of warming"
The second most cited email is from climate scientist and IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth. The highlighted quote is this: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." This has been most commonly interpreted (among skeptics) as climate scientists secretly admitting amongst themselves that global warming really has stopped. Trenberth is actually discussing a paper he'd recently published that discusses the planet's energy budget - how much net energy is flowing into our climate and where it's going (Trenberth 2009).

In Trenberth's paper, he discusses how we know the planet is continually heating due to increasing carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, surface temperature sometimes shows short term cooling periods. This is due to internal variability and Trenberth was lamenting that our observation systems can't comprehensively track all the energy flow through the climate system. More on Trenberth's travesty...

The full body of evidence for man-made global warming
An important point to realise is that the emails involve a handful of scientists discussing a few pieces of climate data. Even without this data, there is still an overwhelming and consistent body of evidence, painstakingly compiled by independent scientific teams from institutions across the world.

What do they find? The planet is steadily accumulating heat. When you add up all the heat building in the oceans, land and atmosphere plus the energy required to melt glaciers and ice sheets, the planet has been accumulating heat at a rate of 190,260 Gigawatts over the past 40 years (Murphy 2009). Considering a typical nuclear power plant has an output of 1 Gigawatt, imagine over 190,000 power plants pouring their energy output directly into heating our land and oceans, melting ice and warming the air.

This build-up of heat is causing ice loss across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Both Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice at an accelerated rate (Velicogna 2009, ). Even East Antarctica, previously thought to be too cold and stable, is now losing ice mass (Chen 2009). Glacier shrinkage is accelerating. Arctic sea ice has fallen so sharply, observations exceed even the IPCC worst case scenario. The combination of warming oceans and melting ice has resulted in sea level rise tracking the upper limit of IPCC predictions.

Rising temperatures have impacted animal and plant species worldwide. The distribution of tree lines, plants and many species of animals are moving into cooler regions towards the poles. As the onset of spring is happening earlier each year, animal and plant species are responding to the shift in seasons. Scientists observe that frog breeding, bird nesting, flowering and migration patterns are all occurring earlier in the year (Parmeson 2003). There are many other physical signs of widespread warming. The height of the tropopause, a layer in our atmosphere, is rising (Santer 2003). Arctic permafrost, covering about 25% of Northern Hemisphere land, is warming and degrading (Walsh 2009). The tropical belt is widening (Seidel 2007). These results are all consistent with global warming.

What’s causing this heat build-up? Humans are emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - 29 billion tonnes in 2009 (CDIAC). Greenhouse theory predicts that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will trap heat energy as it escapes out to space. What do we observe? Carbon dioxide absorbs heat at certain wavelengths. Satellites over the past 40 years find less heat escaping to space at these wavelengths (Harries 2001, Griggs 2004, Chen 2007). Where does the heat go? Surface measurements find more heat returning back to the Earth's surface (Philipona 2004). Tellingly, the increase occurs at those same carbon dioxide absorption wavelengths (Evans 2006). This is the human fingerprint in global warming.

There are multiple lines of empirical evidence that global warming is happening and human activity is the cause. A few suggestive emails may serve as a useful distraction for those wishing to avoid the physical realities of climate change. But they change nothing about our scientific understanding of humanity’s role in global warming.

 

[Rednick]

First off, anyone who thinks that humans don't impact this planet at 8 billion strong is an idiot!
Second, to focus on CO2 alone is getting dangerousely close to 'group think' among the climate scientists. Remember the 'Bay of Pigs', anyone? Let us give another Nobel Peace Prize to the next politician to make a movie about climate change.
Or, dangerousely close to 'Data Mining'. The results look good, I just worry about how you got there?
Being a climate change scientist has become like being in HR, it is an easily defendable position..it is an easy place to hide..and to the rest of us, we debate how much value you are really adding to our company.
Third, I would like to see all those people who are on the climate change bandwagon 'practice what they preach'. It is called Hipocrasy and you will not change anyone's perceptions about it until you become Ghandi-like. Driving 3,000 miles to protest about this or that doesn't seem to be the most Earth-Friendly option in my opinion, but hey whatever makes you feel good about yourself.
Fourth, Al Gore's and others ideas about Carbon Sequesterization...It is a sad day in Amerika when people cannot see that is a problem...or how it is no different than burying nuclear waste at Yucca Mtn....Well it is different, at least if a 700kilo-ton warhead hits Yucca, it's blast radius will affect only Amerika and it could become a wildlife refuge one day (like Rocky Flats or Chernobyl). But if angry Aliens (terrestrial or otherwise) send a warhead to the carbon-filled salt mines of the Deep South, then the whole world is fucked.
Fifth, if all those scientists spending untold dollars and resources trying to gather 'inconclusive' evidence of climatechange and change the minds of others. If instead they spent that time, money, and expertise on developing better energy, we might already have your answers.

New York city is the 'greenest' big city in the world.............Per Capita.
But on aggregate it is still a polluted stinking mess.
Give me enough numbers and I can make them say whatever you want.

The thing that should be more scary than climate change to all of us on this forum, is the Carbon Tax.
Take your energy costs for sub-terranian farming, multiply by 4 or 5 (unless you already live in Germany, then no adjustment is needed), and re-work your budget. While you are doing that, you may want to raise some of your other input costs. Lighting, plastics, media,ect...'cause those are all manufacturing related, and they will get the shit taxed out of them, too.

You should only listen to people about climate change who don't already have a vested interest ($$$) in the current solutions provided in a Carbon Tax.
"The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer...that is cause you don't know how to play the game, well I play the game", should've been written by Al Whore. He knows how to play the climate game...and he is going to get richer and richer, while we get poorer and poorer, when we finally realize his solutions were not all they were cracked up to be.

Edit: If you don't like the warhead analogy, then substitue 'bunker buster'.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

How would bombing a carbon sequestration site be any different than bombing a coal mine or oil field? Comparing carbon sequestration to nuclear waste storage is either ignorance or propaganda.

 

[JQP]

Climate change is on us, and there is not much we can do other than knee jerk reactions.

We all knew this was coming. When I was a biology major in college in the early 70's a lot of people didn't figure the planet would hold on past 1984, let alone 2000. That was because we could see what was coming. Over population, scarce resources, pollution.

Remember the hole in the ozone? That was pretty cool. We could fix that problem (mostly) by eliminating certain kind of chemical sprays. It worked! That's a lot different than the current problem.

I learned about albedo 40 years ago. White reflects (you know, like in your grow room) and black absorbs. The receding ice fields around the globe have exposed more and more "black" heat-absorbing areas that intensify and accelerate the process. I'm afraid it's pretty much a global function, and I'm not even sure we had much to do with it. If we did, it's too late to reverse a cycle that has such a good start. It's called a negative feedback cycle.

We'll all suffer in the future from stupid laws that will do next to nothing in response.

About 35 years ago a internationally acclaimed ecologist proposed (somewhat tongue in cheek) that maybe man's purpose was to cycle carbon stored in the earth back into the atmosphere. Hmm.

Personally, I'm enjoying climatic change. It sure makes for great conversation don't you think?

Enjoy your day.

JQ

 

[cork144]

Climate change is on us, and there is not much we can do other than knee jerk reactions.

We all knew this was coming. When I was a biology major in college in the early 70's a lot of people didn't figure the planet would hold on past 1984, let alone 2000. That was because we could see what was coming. Over population, scarce resources, pollution.

Remember the hole in the ozone? That was pretty cool. We could fix that problem (mostly) by eliminating certain kind of chemical sprays. It worked! That's a lot different than the current problem.

I learned about albedo 40 years ago. White reflects (you know, like in your grow room) and black absorbs. The receding ice fields around the globe have exposed more and more "black" heat-absorbing areas that intensify and accelerate the process. I'm afraid it's pretty much a global function, and I'm not even sure we had much to do with it. If we did, it's too late to reverse a cycle that has such a good start. It's called a negative feedback cycle.

We'll all suffer in the future from stupid laws that will do next to nothing in response.

About 35 years ago a internationally acclaimed ecologist proposed (somewhat tongue in cheek) that maybe man's purpose was to cycle carbon stored in the earth back into the atmosphere. Hmm.

Personally, I'm enjoying climatic change. It sure makes for great conversation don't you think?

Enjoy your day.

JQ

the entire earths population could fit in austrailia with a quarter acre of land and there would still be half of queensland left.

overpopulation is a lie used so that we wont feel bad about starving africans

 

[milehimedi]

First off, anyone who thinks that humans don't impact this planet at 8 billion strong is an idiot!

That's a strong statement. Calm down.

Are you familiar with the Global Cooling scare of the 1970's? Science is a work in progress. I cannot find good reason to tax trillions of dollars based on questionable science. I am open to explanations, but am skeptical. Usually, in order to tax something, you must at least be able to prove that it exists.

They are not as concerned with developing new energy as they are with controllingthe energy we already have. They are not on our side Rednick!

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

The cooling scare of the '70s, eh?

Did scientists predict an impending ice age in the 1970s?

Link to this page
The skeptic argument...
"The media had been spreading warnings of a cooling period since the 1950s, but those alarms grew louder in the 1970s. In 1975, cooling went from 'one of the most important problems' to a first-place tie for 'death and misery'. The claims of global catastrophe were remarkably similar to what the media deliver now about global warming." (Fire and Ice).

What the science says...
1970s ice age predictions were predominantly media based. The majority of peer reviewed research at the time predicted warming due to increasing CO2.

What was the scientific consensus in the 1970s regarding future climate? The most cited example of 1970s cooling predictions is a 1975 Newsweek article "The Cooling World" that suggested cooling "may portend a drastic decline for food production":

"Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend… But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century."

A 1974 Times Magazine article Another Ice Age? painted a similarly bleak picture:

"When meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe, they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age."
However, these are media articles, not scientific studies. A survey of peer reviewed scientific papers from 1965 to 1979 show that few papers predicted global cooling (7 in total). Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming (Peterson 2008). The large majority of climate research in the 1970s predicted the Earth would warm as a consequence of CO2. Rather than 1970s scientists predicting cooling, the opposite is the case.


Figure 1: Number of papers classified as predicting global cooling (blue) or warming (red). In no year were there more cooling papers than warming papers (Peterson 2008).

In the 1970s, the most comprehensive study on climate change (and the closest thing to a scientific consensus at the time) was the 1975 US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Report. Their basic conclusion was "…we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate…"

This is in strong contrast with the current position of the US National Academy of Science: "there is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring... It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities... The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action." This is in a joint statement with the Academies of Science from Brazil, France, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom.

In contrast to the 1970s, there are now a number of scientific bodies that have released statements affirming man-made global warming. More on scientific consensus...

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Environmental Protection Agency
NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Physics
National Center for Atmospheric Research
American Meteorological Society
The Royal Society of the UK
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
American Association for the Advancement of Science
So global cooling predictions in the 70s amounted to media and a handful of peer reviewed studies. The small number of papers predicting cooling were outweighed by a much greater number of papers predicting global warming due to the warming effect of rising CO2. Today, an avalanche of peer reviewed studies and overwhelming scientific consensus endorse man-made global warming. To compare cooling predictions in the 70s to the current situation is both inappropriate and misleading.

 

[MarquisBlack]

Omg just die, lol!

I'm picturing a beheaded chicken. Just when you think it can't possibly still be alive, it flops around a few more times..

 

[Rednick]

How would bombing a carbon sequestration site be any different than bombing a coal mine or oil field? Comparing carbon sequestration to nuclear waste storage is either ignorance or propaganda.

At the volumes needed to make a difference in the NET amount of carbon. Sequestering would have to take place on a Massif scale ya? So if we take a+b=c and subtract 'a' we have then b=c+a. So when the tunnels burst, our world gets double fucked. Cause now we have a+b+c=were fucked.

Recycling carbon into the natural system would be ideal. But the few ideas so far presented have limited capacity, and great expense.

If carbon is soooo bad, then what is wrong with Nuclear.

I am glad you could explain to me my ignorance about Al Whore's pet projects...I guess I just thought he was after more fame and money.

@milehimedi: I was only stating that yes we have an impact. When I go camping in NW Montana, I have an impact. I may not see another human for weeks, but I still have an impact.
Throughout history man has reached 'critical' population limits for its; resources, technology, territory, ect.
We have found answers!
No one would have thought that the world could hold so many people in the 1700's. Many people don't think the world can hold more people today. We can, but there are costs and opportunities. The question is should these opportunities be best explored with money (people's time, effort and resources) gained from a politician's tax and handed out as such...or are they our problems and deserving of our effort, instead of just saying 'Oh, the government will take care of it'.

I think this is a great thread, and like the human race, I hope it never dies.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

like I said... anyone comparing spent uranium to sequestered carbon is either confused or pushing propaganda.