Many members of the ACS were outraged, and a large number of them wrote letters expressing their disgust at his actions.

In addition, the American Physical Society has decided to revisit their stance on global warming, after fifty-four of their members protested the statement.

The lessons from this are:

1) “Official” statements by a scientific organization often only reflect the views of a few of the members.

2) The “consensus” is not falling apart … it is simply being revealed that the “consensus” never existed.

3) Your claims that we need to act now, right now, to make a meaningless dent in CO2 production are not supported by the science. The truth is that, as in many young sciences, we don’t know the truth …

w.

China alone is currently emitting 30% more CO2 than the U.S. They have made no secret of the fact that they are constructing an average of 1 – 2 new coal-fired power plants every week — and that they intend to continue building coal-fired power plants at that pace through at least 2024.

In only seven more years China will be emitting double the amount of CO2 than the entire U.S. emits. They won’t stop there, either, they will keep ramping up their CO2 emissions as they continue to industrialize.

India is doing exactly the same thing. As are Russia, Brazil, and most of the 100+ countries in the UN. Only the U.S., because of misguided people who believe the sky is falling, is seriously considering doing something so incredibly stupid.

Seriously hobbling our economy by the pointless and utterly stupid burying of a completely harmless, beneficial trace gas, while the rest of the world pours many times the U.S.’s total annual CO2 emissions into the atmosphere each year, is a fool’s errand. It will make no measurable difference whatever, and it will cost $Trillions. How stupid is that?

Why are you so insistent on the U.S. shooting ourselves in the foot? That makes you appear to hate the U.S. Why the hatred? I can not find one comment out of all your posts where you show the slightest bit of concern over the completely unchecked emissions by the rest of the world. That means you have an unstated agenda [or you really are nuts]. Otherwise, you would express concern about the global situation, and use your energy trying to convince China, India, and other countries to adopt your swell ideas. You probably don’t, because you know they would laugh in your face before walking away. Most international leaders don’t tolerate fools. Only the U.S. seems to put up with them.

The rest of the world knows that carbon sequestration [except when used to economically extract more oil from the ground] is the most preposterously stupid idea to ever come along in the whole history of stupid AGW ideas. That’s why none of them will do anything to bury their own CO2 emissions. Why should we commit economic suicide for no legitimate reason?

Nothing you have written changes the fact that our CO2 emissions are becoming an ever smaller part of the global total. Why should we go to the enormous expense and effort of burying a completely harmless, beneficial plant food? It’s insane. You might find a lower cost way to dig that 10X10X10 foot hole, but it’s still completely wasted effort, no matter what the cost.

Leland Palmer (13:06:35) :
Hi Willis- …

and then go off about something I never said. Given how wrong you are about other things, I guess this is no surprise.

For example, you seem to think we don’t believe in your solutions, aluminascale-forming oxide and CCS and the like, so you think you need to send citations on those. That’s not the issue.

We don’t believe in your underlying claim, that CO2 is a problem.

w.

It takes huge amounts of energy to strip CO2 from the air, then liquify it, then pump it underground under pressure — and the only efficient energy source [outside of nuclear] is the burning of even more very expensive fossil fuel. [Forget windmills and other ridiculous greenie power generation schemes; they produce far too little energy for such a monstrous undertaking.]

Simply untrue. By the way, my “fevered imagination” seems to be producing scientific papers and links to them, that back up my position, too. :)

Yes, if you want to strip CO2 from the air, this is difficult because CO2 is only present in very small amounts, in the 380 ppm range, right now.

But oxyfuel combustion of biomass or biochar produces a stream of exhaust gas that is 70 percent (700,000 ppm) CO2, and all it requires is cleanup, stripping out the water, and compression to be ready for deep injection.

Many other sources of CO2, including oil refineries and ethanol plants, produce almost pure streams of CO2, approaching 100 percent pure, certainly pure enough for deep injection.

Vattenfall, the Swedish owned utility that has a lot of coal fired power plants, plans to reduce their CO2 emissions by 50 percent by 2030. And they plan to do it mostly by using oxyfuel combustion and CCS. Here is a link to Vattenfall’s next step, following the construction of their oxyfuel pilot plant, they are planning a 250 MW demonstration oxyfuel/CCS power plant:

http://www.vattenfall.com/www/co2_en/co2_en/879177tbd/879231demon/879320demon/index.jsp

Demonstration plant in Jänschwalde

The first demonstration plant on Oxyfuel capture technology is investigated at Jänschwalde in Germany. The scale-up from the size of the 30 MW pilot plant at Schwarze Pumpe is the last development step before the technology could be commercially introduced. The new Oxyfuel boiler at Jänschwalde would be of 650 MW thermal (around 250 MW electric), which is about 20 times more than Vattenfall’s 30 MW pilot plant under construction and compares to today’s largest Oxyfuel test rigs of 0.5 MW. With this milestone, Vattenfall is taking another step towards development of commercial CCS concepts. Also Postcombustion capture technology will be demonstrated at Jänschwalde.

The existing lignite fired 3000 MWe power plant at Jänschwalde was taken into operation in the 1980-ies and was modernised in the 1990′s. At each of the six blocks two 250 MW boilers produce steam to one joint steam turbine. This makes the site excellent for conversion into a double CCS demonstration plant.

So, the Swedes and the Germans can do this, but we can’t.

By the way, I think that Vattenfall could do better, and increase the efficiency of their oxyfuel process, if they were willing to add the National Energy Technology Lab’s IFCC process to their new oxyfuel plants. Once the demonstration plants are open, they will need to do something with their 30 MW pilot plant. Why not add NETL’s IFCC process onto it, and increase its thermal efficiency from roughly 35 percent or less to 50% or more? This should be enough extra efficiency to compensate for the parasitic CCS energy loss, and give them essentially free CCS:

TESTING OF A VERY HIGH-TEMPERATURE HEAT EXCHANGER FOR IFCC
POWER SYSTEMS
John P. Hurley
University of North Dakota, Energy & Environmental Research Center
PO Box 9018, Grand Forks, ND 58202-9018
jhurley@undeerc.org
Nathan J. Kadrmas
University of North Dakota, Energy & Environmental Research Center
PO Box 9018, Grand Forks, ND 58202-9018
nkadrmas@undeerc.org
Fred Robson
kraftWorks Systems, Inc., PO Box 115, Amston, CT 06231

ABSTRACT
Laboratory and pilot-scale tests of a very high-temperature heat exchanger (HTHX) that could be used to produce pressurized air at up to 2000°F for an indirectly fired combined-cycle (IFCC) power plant were performed while three coal–biomass blends were fired. An IFCC using this type of heat exchanger has the potential to reach efficiencies of 45% when firing coal and over 50% when a duct burner is used to additionally heat the gas entering the turbine. Because of its high efficiency, an IFCC system is the most appropriate power concept for employing oxygen enriched combustion in order to make carbon dioxide removal more economical.

In this paper, we summarize economic analyses of IFCC systems operated under an oxygenblown near-zero-emission scenario. The calculations show that the cost of electricity is similar to that of an emissionless integrated gasification combined cycle, whereas the operation of an IFCC is much better understood since it is essentially the same as current pulverized coal (pc)-fired systems. In addition, we summarize the results from initial joining tests of MA956, an aluminascale-forming oxide dispersion-strengthened alloy that is a candidate for construction of an HTHX.

If we don’t hurry up, we will be buying this technology from the Swedes and Germans, and so will the rest of the world, even though we invented all of this stuff here in the U.S.

You seem impatient to burn mountains of money for the very silliest of reasons: carbon sequestration.

Since we don’t really have any choice, commercially motivated propaganda sniveling aside, can’t we for Christ’s sake get on with it?

No. Carbon sequestration [except when used to economically extract more oil from the ground] is the most preposterously stupid idea to ever come along in the whole history of stupid AGW ideas.

It takes huge amounts of energy to strip CO2 from the air, then liquify it, then pump it underground under pressure — and the only efficient energy source [outside of nuclear] is the burning of even more very expensive fossil fuel. [Forget windmills and other ridiculous greenie power generation schemes; they produce far too little energy for such a monstrous undertaking.]

So we burn fossil fuel — which emits beneficial and completely harmless CO2 — then we burn lots more fossil fuel for the energy necessary to strip the CO2 out of the air, liquify it and pump it underground under pressure. Then, we burn even more fossil fuel to take that CO2 out of the air… and all the while, the BRIC countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China] are pouring several times as much CO2 into the air as the entire U.S. emits, laughing at us the whole time, knowing CO2 sequestration is a fool’s errand that will hobble us economically, for no benefit whatever.

Could there be a more stupid idea in creation than carbon dioxide sequestration??

Collecting necessary and beneficial carbon dioxide, and storing it underground at enormous financial and energy expense for no good reason, makes every bit as much sense as digging a 10X10X10 foot hole in your back yard, then moving it twenty feet away every six weeks. You feel like you’re accomplishing something, but normal people look at you like you’re completely nuts [but you and I know it's just a manifestation of your crazy cognitive dissonance].

A couple of things would happen if we actually passed a law requiring the underground storage of CO2: we would end up sequestering for the most part CO2 produced by the BRIC countries, for no sane reason at all. And it would give true conservationists a good reason to visit the well heads at night to liberate that CO2 for the good of planet Earth — which you personally seem intent on sabotaging based on the deluded, completely unproven idea that more CO2 is harmful in trace amounts. It’s not. CO2 is entirely beneficial, no matter what your fevered imagination tells you.

Why not start digging those holes in your back yard? While you’re digging you won’t be driving your fossil fuel burning car, and you can feel just a little less like a hypocrite for badmouthing CO2 while you’re emitting it by burning fossil fuels. [One of the benefits of cognitive dissonance is that it lets you rationalize your glaring hypocrisy.]

For my part, I’ll be daydreaming about the best way to liberate that sequestered CO2. Because more CO2 is better; and a lot more CO2 is a lot better for life on a planet starved of beneficial and necessary carbon dioxide.

Leland, you still want to dick around with carbon and make energy even more expensive than it is, the following quote could have been written specifically for you.

The average African life span is lower than it was in the United States and Europe 100 years ago. But Africans are being told we shouldn’t develop, or have electricity or cars because, now that those countries are rich beyond anything Africans can imagine, they’re worried about global warming. Al Gore and UN climate boss Yvo de Boer tell us the world needs to go on an energy diet. Well, I have news for them.

Africans are already on an energy diet. We’re starving!

Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year. And those anti-electricity policies are keeping us impoverished. […] Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities. Hypothetical global warming a hundred years from now is worse than this? Telling Africans they can’t have electricity and economic development – except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels – is immoral. It is a crime against humanity.

Fiona Kobusingye, a coordinator of Congress of Racial Equality Uganda and the Kill Malarial Mosquitoes Now Brigade.

According to me, and Pamela, and the Africans themselves, you are condemning Africans and poor people around the world to death through your asinine policies.

Now, that’s your choice … but lecturing us while you are killing people, spouting platitudes about how moral your path is while spending billions on failed policies, accusing us of “commercially motivated propaganda sniveling” while your hero Al consumes a nation’s worth of energy, and telling us how we don’t care about the earth and you do, is pitiful, pathetic, and deeply offensive.

As you pointed out, I don’t make the rules here. I suspect it’s a good thing I don’t. So you have two choices here. 1) Keep your electronic pen capped and your ears open, and have people suspect that you’re a petulant, whining, unpleasant fool … or keep on writing and remove all doubts forever.

Reducing carbon emissions, on the other hand, will not make any measurable difference even if the AGW supporters are right (which grows less and less likely as our understanding of the climate increases).

Not so, Kimosabe. Renewables will certainly help reduce the growth rate in carbon emissions, which I agree is not enough at this point. But the Waxman/Markey bill does take some preliminary steps in the right direction, IMO, and cap and trade was much more successful for reducing sulfur based pollution than was originally predicted.

Industries lie. Corporations have whole departments called public relations departments, that routinely lie about how good their products are and how minimal their environmental impact is. Institutionalized lying to Congress is a multimillion dollar lobbying industry. Part of the lies that corporations routinely tell Congress are encoded in biased studies that project huge costs for any substantive change. So, cap and trade is likely much more effective than its opponents claim.

While wind and solar are still small parts of our electricity production, the growth rate is tremendous. If I was working for a fossil fuel company, I would look at the growth rate of wind energy, for example, as a threat to my company profits.

So, Waxman/Markey will help, but is not the complete answer.

There are, however a group of “carbon negative” ideas that would take the technology of “clean coal” and combine it with biomass or biochar fuel, resulting in carbon negative power plants.

The problem with carbon emissions now is that they are all one way. Carbon negative energy ideas seek to put carbon back underground, and do so in a cost competitive way:

http://www.etsap.org/worksh_6_2003/2003P_read.pdf

Bio-Energy with Carbon Storage (BECS):
a Sequential Decision Approach to the threat of Abrupt Climate Change

Peter Read and Jonathan Lermit

Abstract
Abrupt Climate Change (ACC – NAS, 2001) is an issue that ‘haunts the climate change problem’ (IPCC, 2001) but has been neglected by policy makers up to now, maybe for want of practicable measures for effective response, save for risky geo-engineering. A portfolio of Bio-Energy with
Carbon Storage (BECS) technologies, yielding negative emissions energy, may be seen as benign, low risk, geo-engineering that is the key to being prepared for ACC. The nature of sequential decisions, taken in response to the evolution of currently unknown events, is discussed. The impact of such
decisions on land use change is related to a specific bio-energy conversion technology. The effects of a precautionary strategy, possibly leading to eventual land use change on a large scale, is modeled, using FLAMES. Under strong assumptions appropriate to imminent ACC, pre-industrial CO2
levels can be restored by mid-century using BECS.

The ability to put carbon back underground while generating electricity has a huge, synergistic effect on whole problem. Combining biomass, or biochar, with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), is an effective way to fight climate change.

What I advocate is converting existing coal plants to oxyfuel combustion and CCS, as has been done by the Jupiter Oxygen Corporation and Vattenfall, with their German oxyfuel/CCS pilot plant. I then propose burning biochar (charcoal) in the coal plants to make them carbon negative.

There is also a technology called HIPPS or IFCC (Indirectly Fired Combined Cycle) that has been developed by United Technologies and NETL (the National Energy Technology Laboratory). I propose adding a HIPPS or IFCC topping cycle onto these converted coal plants, to increase their efficiency enough to pay for the conversion and the parasitic efficiency losses due to the CCS. IFCC (aka HIPPS) alone can convert a 35 percent thermally efficient power plant into a 50 percent thermally efficient power plant, and it can be retrofitted onto existing power plants.

We have a lot to do, and we don’t have any choice, IMO. Business as usual is pointing us directly at a methane catastrophe, with a high probability, IMO.

We have coal fired power plant to convert into carbon negative power plants. We have solar thermal power plants with heat storage to build. We have wind turbines to build, biofuels to make, geothermal energy to develop.

Since we don’t really have any choice, commercially motivated propaganda sniveling aside, can’t we for Christ’s sake get on with it?

I’ve been a practicing environmentalist since I read Rachel Carsons book … when she first published it, likely before you were born. You know nothing of my life or my motives, and your assumption that you do is puerile. You have a habit of ascribing motives to others that does not serve you well. I’m not a “scared child cowering in a corner”, that’s a projection of your own fear.

For example, you say “… the economic arguments against taking action on climate change have a touch of insanity to them, IMO.” But that’s your own fear talking. For a man who is not worried about say a meteor strike (which has happened many times in earth’s history), you seem terrified about the infinitesimal chance of a runaway temperature.

Next, you have this fantasy that I don’t think we should take action regarding the climate. That’s on you, bro’, I’ve never said that, nor do I believe it. I do think we should take action.

What action should we take? I prescribe “No Regrets” action, that is to say, action which will have beneficial effects whether or not the climate warms. The key is to understand that every single predicted disaster from a warming world is with us already. All of them.

We already have a surfeit of storms, and droughts, and floods. Sea level has been rising for a hundred years. We have insect borne disease, and tornados, and cyclones. We have late frosts and early winters, we have dry springtimes and wet harvest times. We have all the biblical plagues that climate brings, and they’ve been here as long as humans have been on the planet.

The action we should take is action to lessen the effects of those climate catastrophes. If they get worse we’re better prepared, and if they don’t … we’re better prepared.

Reducing carbon emissions, on the other hand, will not make any measurable difference even if the AGW supporters are right (which grows less and less likely as our understanding of the climate increases).

So no, I’m not afraid of an economic disaster, find one place that I’ve said that.

What I am concerned about is that every dollar spent on reducing CO2 is a dollar not available to spend on helping Africans fight drought or people along the Indus fight floods. As a man who has spent a large chunk of his life working on village level development in some of the world’s poorest countries, that’s a tragedy.

You can sit in your nice home with plenty of food, and gas to warm you when it gets cold, comfortably insulated from almost all climate disasters, and talk about how you want to spend billions on some infinitesimal chance of future disaster … but many, many people out there don’t have your layer of monetary fat to sustain them. They need the money to face the real daily threats to their kid’s lives, while you want to piss it away on imaginary threats that might happen in 50 years … and you have the balls to lecture us on your great compassion and economic brilliance?

In Africa they have a saying, “You have to be white to be green”, and it could have been invented for you. Your profligacy in a futile quest for an improved tomorrow is killing people today, and you want to lecture us on morality? Really?

Your arrogant and uncaring attitude about real problems today, masked in a cloak of purest shining green, turns my stomach. Go spend a half a year with the poorest of the poor if you have the balls. I guarantee you’ll come away with a much more realistic set of priorities regarding how we should spend money fighting the dangers that climate brings, the dangers that are with us today and every day.

Coming from you, Smokey, that really means a lot. Yes, I am wonderful, thank you for confirming it. Thanks a lot. :)

Hi Willis-

Umm … that would be trying to keep clue-free folks from ruining the economy in pursuit of a failed solution to a non-existent problem.

Considering the huge number of free goods and services that we receive from the biosphere, including clean air, clean water, sunlight for food and fuel production, a limitless supply of clean energy from sunlight, huge biomass production, and so on, the economic arguments against taking action on climate change have a touch of insanity to them, IMO.

Without the economically valuable goods and services we receive from the biosphere, we are paupers. Not to mention dead, if it gets bad enough, and it’s looking pretty grim at the moment, IMO.

A little reasonable caution is in order.

And no, it won’t ruin the economy.

General Motors did not go broke producing hybrid cars, for example.

The Prius really has economically ruined Toyota, hasn’t it?

You sound kind of like a scared child, cowering in a corner, afraid of space aliens, when you talk about the economic disaster that tapping into an almost limitless supply of clean energy would create, Willis.

Archer, D. (2007). “Methane hydrate stability and anthropogenic climate change” (PDF). Biogeosciences 4 (4): 521–544. http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2007.hydrate_rev.pdf. See also blog summary.

Connor, Steve (September 23, 2008). “Exclusive: The methane time bomb”. The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-the-methane-time-bomb-938932.html. Retrieved on 2008-10-03.

Connor, Steve (September 25, 2008). “Hundreds of methane ‘plumes’ discovered”. The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/hundreds-of-methane-plumes-discovered-941456.html. Retrieved on 2008-10-03.

As far as James Lovelock goes, he really is the author of the standard model of climate science, these days. His Gaia hypothesis, at first ridiculed, has become the standard model, although it is called climate system science, or something equally bland, rather than “Gaia”. He really is one of the 20th century’s most influential scientists, and has a truly nasty habit of being both first and right.

I believe that the self-regulating properties of the climate system are good, but not infallible. In fact, I think that most of the major mass extinction events are due to runaway global heating during massive methane release events from the methane hydrates.

There are quite a few mainstream peer reviewed papers on this “clathrate gun” or “methane catastrophe” model of mass extinctions. There appears to be a telltale isotope signature left in the rocks when trillions of tons of isotopically light (C13 depleted) methane is dumped into the atmosphere – a sharp simultaneous drop in C12/C13 and O16/O18 isotope ratios deposited in the rocks laid down at those times.

Here is a list of links, from the Wikipedia article on the clathrate gun hypothesis, some of which I provided before:

Martin Kennedy, David Mrofka and Chris von der Borch (2008), Snowball Earth termination by destabilization of equatorial permafrost methane clathrate, Nature 453 (29 May), 642-645
http://earthscience.ucr.edu/gcec_pages/Kennedy%20et%20al%202008-Nature-Methane.pdf

Benton, Michael J.; Richard J. Twitchett (July 2003). “How to kill (almost) all life: the end-Permian extinction event” (PDF). TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution 18 (7): 358–365. doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(03)00093-4. http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/Benton/reprints/2003TREEPTr.pdf. , cited by 21 other articles.

Thomas, Deborah J.; James C. Zachos, Timothy J. Bralower, Ellen Thomas and Steven Bohaty (December 2002). “Warming the fuel for the fire: Evidence for the thermal dissociation of methane hydrate during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum” (PDF). Geology 30 (12): 1067–1070. doi:10.1130/0091-7613(2002)0302.0.CO;2. http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~jzachos/pubs/TZBTB_02.pdf.

Notice that the peer reviewed scientific papers are talking about three different mass extinction events – the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum, the Permian/Triassic mass extinction (the greatest mass extinction of them all), and the Precambrian “Snowball Earth” termination . Each of these events has a similar isotope ratio signature, fully consistent with the release of a few trillion tons of C13 depleted methane from methane hydrates into the atmosphere, resulting in a methane catastrophe.

So, yes the self-regulation of the Earth’s climate is good. No, it does not appear to be perfect.

Our atmosphere is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, as Lovelock, in his work for NASA pointed out to them. Life has left its signature on our atmosphere, which is full of highly reactive oxygen which would have long since combined with carbon and metals to form CO2, carbonates, and metal oxides if there was no life. Our atmosphere is far from thermodynamic equilibrium, kept there by life itself, Lovelock pointed out to NASA in many years ago, a huge anomaly potentially detectable at astronomical distances.

What would happen if we return to thermodynamic equilibrium, the true lowest energy state of our Earth’s climate, and therefore the preferred state of the climate in the absence of life?

Think Venus.

Other than blocking the development of a social consensus and preventing the necessary technological change to deal with this problem, what are you doing to help?

Umm … that would be trying to keep clue-free folks from ruining the economy in pursuit of a failed solution to a non-existent problem.