biffvernon
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Posts posted by biffvernon
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CO2 levels have been very high in the past, perhaps because of volcanos as we don't know them these days, and there have been mass extinctions. This time it's our fault and we want to avoid a mass extinction.
Hansen has not given in to complete dispair, suggesting we might just get away with it if we build no more coal fired power stations, phase out the existing ones, and turn agriculture into a carbon sequestration industry. We have to start now, not in ten years time.
The good news is that there's not such a great deal of conventional oil left so business as usual is not on the agenda anyway, but we must not try to exploit the unconventional oils - tar sands and oil shales and coal to liquids.
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Another great idea (if several billion people cotton on).
A Letter From Bill McKibbenDear friends,
350 is the red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet. The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.
We’re planning an international campaign to unite the world around the number 350, and we need your help. We need to make sure that the solutions the world proposes to climate change are to scale with the level of crisis that this number represents. Everyone on earth, from the smallest village to the cushiest corner office, needs to know what 350 means. The movement to spread that number needs to be beautiful, creative, and unstoppable.
What we need most right now are your ideas for how to take the number 350 and drive it home: in art, in music, in political demonstrations, in any other way you can imagine. We will connect actions all around the world and make them add up to more than the sum of their parts–but we don’t have all the ideas and all the inspiration. We need yours.
We could also use your help spreading 350. Can you contact anyone you think might be interested and willing to help–in every country on earth–and send them our way?
Many thanks,
Bill McKibben and the 350.org crew.
The website, http://www.350.org/ appears still to be in its, er, developmental phase.
Background reading:
Jim Hansen et al. April 2008 (3.6mb pdf)
and
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Yes, you're asking me whether our efforts should counter those of China's, shall we say, lack of effort? I wouldn't like to comment without a full complete knowledge of the situation as I really don't know what effect it would have on our economy. I think we need a few years of monitoring climate change, to really decide what we think is happening, as we are in qutie uncertain times at the moment. China should perhaps have to deal with climate change, as arguably other countries were not aware of the problem at the time of their industrial revolution. What do you think?
When our per capita CO2 emissions are lower than Chin's and when we stop exporting our polluting maunfacuring industries but still enjoy the producs, then we might have a leg to stand on. In the meantime, it might be better to show leadership by example instead of pointing fingers.
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Oh no. Even us pretty average scientists have no difficulty understanding it.Only the worlds smartest scientists can understand this logic. -
And Gavin Schmidt has kicked off the discussion at RealClimate
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Jim Hansen et al.
New paper, summary:
Paleoclimate data show that climate sensitivity is ~3°C for doubled CO2, including only fastfeedback processes. Equilibrium sensitivity, including slower surface albedo feedbacks, is
~6°C for doubled CO2 for the range of climate states between glacial conditions and icefree
Antarctica. Decreasing CO2 was the main cause of a cooling trend that began 50
million years ago, large scale glaciation occurring when CO2 fell to 425±75 ppm, a level
that will be exceeded within decades, barring prompt policy changes. If humanity wishes to
preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth
is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to
be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm. The largest uncertainty in the
target arises from possible changes of non-CO2 forcings. An initial 350 ppm CO2 target
may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2 is captured and adopting
agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this
target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.
The next 35 pages:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf
(3.6mb pdf)
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This whole subject has always seemed very straightforward and obvious to me and I still don't quite understand why so many see it differently.
Yes, that has to be one of the great curiosities of the day, an area needy of research psychology.
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The moon's average temperature is somewhere in the region of -20C-ish, and this is determined by taking the average daily max and the average nightly min, adding them together and dividing by two. But that doesn't mean that the Moon is cold, it just means that the Moon is cold on average.
Average temperature of what? The Moon's atmosphere?
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Thank you, Roo. I was, of course, referring to Mr Sleet's chart not, Essan's.
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The chart needs a label at the Permo-Triassic boundary: "95% of fossil forming life went extinct here. You have been warned!"
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What a crazy idea that the variations in the energy from the Sun could have a greater affect on the Earths temperature than a minute increase in the amount of a harmless gas.
It sounds like a crazy idea, but only to those who don't understand the science or do not have faith in those who do.
There are plenty of much more crazy ideas that you probably don't understand such as the quantum mechanics that allows your mobile phone to work.
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One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.
In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in C02 limits.
Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02 - the most stringent in the world - should be slashed to 350ppm. He argues the cut is needed if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed".
More at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008...carbonemissions
Hansen's paper will be published at Science magazine tomorrow, I am told.
(Of course the regular flat-earthers round here will assure us that Jim Hansen is a looney crackpot and that their universe is cooling nicely.)
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I'm no China expert but I think that maybe somewhat disingenuous. There does seem to be a great deal of environmental concern within the upper echelons of the Chinese government. They don't have an easy job.
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Sorry if this has been posted before:
Good gracious! I struggled to find a paragraph in that document that wasn't complete cobblers. How did he do it? The same way the people who write about the Earth being 6000 years old or how they were abducted by aliens, I suppose. Into the bin with it.
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I'm not sure there is any close connection between whether a country is a democracy and it's effect on climate.
Compare democratic USA with monarchist Bhutan. If we were all like the Bhutanese there would be no AGW.
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There's a danger of not seeing the wood for the trees.
We burn oil and coal and increase CO2 in the air. The planet warms up. We're all off to Hell in a handcart. It's that simple.
The answer has to be to stop burning fossil fuels and start sequestering the CO2 that we've already put into the air. It will be difficult and cause much gnashing of teeth but the alternative is worse. Business as usual is not an option for our grandchildren.
To follow the car and cliff analogy, that's all you need to know - like what the gas and brake pedals do. What goes on inside the fuel management system or the differential is not required knowledge for most motorists, fascinating though it may be.
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Occam's Razor requires we assume the simple outcome.
Splat.
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There are many who would argue, that we don't fully understand what the pedals do, that the windscreen is very dirty and we can't be sure that it's a cliff we are driving over. And that applying the brakes could have detrimental effects. Not to the car but to the driver.
Right, so the windsreen is too dirty to see where you're going. And you suggest that foot on the gas is a better policy than foot on the brake. Hmmm.
Remind me not to accept a lift.
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Well I never get involved with these debates, but it's Friday and I'm feeling reckless.
The problem with your analogy (apart from the bit where you say we know what the pedals do, but I won't go there) is that it doesn't address the importance of the car continuing to move forwards.
Eh? If continuing to move forwards involve falling off a cliff I'd guess it might be quite important to stop going in that direction.
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Er...the existence of uranium (and thorium) generating radiation that is keeping the planet warm is still speculative. Our existing theories of the Earth's structure seem adequate enough without invoking radioactive elements.
Amazing! You can't possibly be denying that radioactive decay is what keeps the Earth's interior hot. There's absolutley nothing speculative about that at all, at all.
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Many thanks for your reply biff, I find this area quite interesting. In my view the dynamics between the atmosphere and the oceans have to be taken as a whole, as one entity, the absolute boundary for the climatic system being the rock/water boundary of land/air on the continents, and sea floor/ocean in the oceans and seas. To get a true feeling of what is going on all the systems, cycles and mechanics across all the disciplines be it gravity, particle, fluid mechanics, heat transference, solar input, gas properties and much more besides need to be taken into account. This reason is why I sit on the fence as I do believe we are working with only part of the whole with regard to what the climate will do next.
For sure, there is plenty yet to learn. Like we're in a car, we can see it is hurtling towards a cliff edge. We've worked out that pushing the gas pedel speeds it up and pushing the brake slows it down. But we're not too sure about what goes on in the engine. What do we do? Wait until we have a full understanding of motor engineering before risking touching that brake pedal?
barr Channel 4Yes let's bar Channel 4 after that silly swindle programme last year
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Yes there is some uranium and yes it does keep the earth hot and the iron of the core molten. There's enough to keep it that way for more millions of years than we need worry about.
Forget about the plutonium and forget any notion that the heating is going to slow down. (In fact deep rock geothermal energy may well prove to be one of our major energy sources in the future.)
Reversals of the magnetic poles happens from time to time and such events may play havoc with the magnetosphere but we're not likely to live long enough to see one of them either.
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it is fairly well known that the heat transference in the oceanic system runs from equator to the poles...
Yes, but there are very large gaps in our knowledge of ocean currents beyond the surface waters. Deep ocean circulation might justifiably be called a science in its infancy.
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Harder to measure, of course, but what really matters is not the temperature of the atmosphere, but the heat of the whole atmosphere and ocean system. If overturning ocean currents take heat below the reach of sea surface temperature measuring devices, some folk may be lured into a false sense of security.
Since we know that the increased level of CO2 is trapping more heat, if we our thermometers do not rise we should be worried.
What goes down will come up again.
'No Sun link' to climate change
in Climate Change
Posted
Hmmm. Some of us are studying the interconnectedness of a system based on economic growth and fossil fuel burning in a finite world and are concerned about the various symptoms of impending system failure.