The reality that doing this will just make the poverty worse, and contribute to corruption and the highly unequal distribution of wealth in third world societies, is beyond their belief structure.

It is all about hate and punishment.

Totally correct.

As I have said before. Socialism is a philosophy of envy.

All socialism does is bring all but the richest down to the same abysmal level, never raising the poor.

DaveE.

Joel Shore says (19:41:26) :
So, are you saying this is the united goal of most of the climate science community, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences & analogous bodies in all the other G8+5 nations, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the councils of most major scientific societies like the AGU, the AMS, and the APS? How exactly did they all get together to agree on this strategy?

Will says:
There are many motives in this saga and fraud.

There is ego and vanity.

There are carpetbaggers after money.

There is a left wing meme that sees the developed world enjoying prosperity and the third world in “poverty” caused by “unfair trade’ and ‘globisation’.

It is a ‘social justice’ strategy behind a lot of activism to rip money from the first world and give it to the third. AGW is a perfect excuse.

The reality that doing this will just make the poverty worse, and contribute to corruption and the highly unequal distribution of wealth in third world societies, is beyond their belief structure.

It is all about hate and punishment.

problem is, no matter what they do it will not satisfy the deep Green zealots

so it is a serious problem because it is feared?

so fear is the problem that needs to be addressed?

and the hysteria from the faux climate science cabal helps this how?

It is anticipated that the CO2 concentration will remain roughly the same, however.

It is not the CO2. Focus on the target: water vapor.

Thankyou. I think it must be obvious why I appreciate that.

Richard

Thankyou very much and most sincerely. I was starting to despair that anybody would address the issues raised by my essay. You have.

You make good points, and – as you say – my essay does not address them.

The AGW-scare is not about science. It would have gone in the trash can long ago if it were a scientific issue.

The AGW-scare is about money. Nationally it is about tax, and internationally it is about trade.

In my opinion, if national governments can be given the means to back-off from the AGW-scare then the trade issues will cease to exist. Of course, my opinion could be wrong but I see no method to prove the matter either way.

At present, all the problems are being manifested nationally; e.g. distorted energy, economic, financial, industrial, and aid policies. Some of the distortions are severe, expensive and harmful. Imposition of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), and immense subsidies to windfarms are obvious effects.

So, I am arguing that at this stage we need to address national politicians. And that is the substance of my essay. But your message implies that the international politics need to be engaged first. Of course, you could be right although I can see no method to do that. If you have suggestions for how to directly address the international issues then I would like to hear them.

Anyway, I am grateful for your challenge of my argument. You seem to not agree with my argument but you have demonstrated that you have considered it. And I thank you for that because few others here seem to have considered it.

Richard

Frankly, from a scientific point-of-view, your whole post is nonsense. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 may not be very high, but the path length through the atmosphere is long. In fact, many “skeptics” actually argue the opposite point that you make…i.e., they claim the absorption bands for CO2 are already saturated and hence additional CO2 doesn’t have more effect. This argument is also wrong, although for somewhat subtler reasons than yours is wrong. (Their argument does basically explain why the dependence of radiative forcing on CO2 concentration is approximately logarithmic rather than linear.)

As for all your calculations of CO2 emissions from breathing: There are large exchanges of CO2 between the atmosphere, biosphere, and oceans. However, these exchanges are very different than taking a source of carbon that has been locked away from the atmosphere for millions of years and rapidly liberating it. And, this is why the CO2 levels have shot up to 385ppm since the industrial revolution whereas they hadn’t been above ~300ppm over the last 750,000 years (over which we have ice core data) and likely many millions of years, despite the fact that there were plenty of animals living and breathing during that entire time period.

Finally, I have no clue how you calculated your 36 W number…and you are wrong if you mean to imply that the CO2 greenhouse effect violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Gerlich and Tscheuschner, the two who have claimed this in one of the most embarrassing papers ever to see the light of day in a (3rd-rate) physics journal, are either clueless or intentionally deceptive in making such a claim. One can demonstrate that all the heat flows in the atmosphere are from hotter to colder and that, nonetheless, the Earth is warmer than it would be in the absence of an IR-active atmosphere. (The basic point is that in the absence of such an atmosphere, all the heat radiated by the earth would escape to space, so the fact that any of it finds its way back to the Earth when the atmosphere absorbs such radiation means the earth is then warmer than it would be otherwise. However, there is still more heat transferred from the Earth to the atmosphere than vice versa.)

A significant driver in the KP negotiations is industrial and trade competitiveness. Both of these have been declining in the EU relative to the US and China for more than 20 years. An overt part of the EU trade policy was to use restrictions imposed by the Protocol as a way of restraining this relative trade advantage. Delegation members openly discussed it during the COP meetings in the early 2000s leading up to COP 5.

Over the years, since 1997, the EU has continued to lose ground, and its industrial base has continued to atrophy. There is just as much pressure today to secure a binding deal as there was 10 years ago. In short, Kyoto is not just about carbon dioxide, it’s about trade and competitiveness, and unless you consider these aspects, nothing done or said during the UNFCCC conferences or the G-8 makes any sense. The principal difference between then and now is that the EU is no longer governed by a series of Red-Green coalition governments. The US is.

AtB

Is it really too much for me to ask people to discuss what my essay is about?

It does not matter whether or not CO2 is an issue for climate because politicians have accepted that it is, and they cannot be seen to have changed their minds.

It does not matter whether or not people have the opinion that climate mitigation by geo-engineering will work or not. Only experiment and demonstration will prove that.

But it does matter that politicians are being forced to take harmful actions because they have accepted that CO2 is an issue for climate, and scaremongers are demanding that politicians take harmful actions on that basis.

No comment above – not one – has stated any flaw in my argument in my essay.
And no comment above – not one – has stated any flaw in my proposed policy option to remove the politicians’ need to adopt the harmful policies they are now applying.

If the commentators can see any such flaw in my argument then why have they not stated it?
And why have they not stated better alternative policy options than my suggestion if they can think of them?

Importantly, why are so many people wanting to talk about related issues and not the subject of my essay? Is it because they think I am right and they want to deflect consideration of what my essay says?

Richard

Take the infamous experiment with the glass container, a human and a heat vision camera. Oh yes, the CO2 in the container will eventually “filter out” the heat signature of the human. Sure. Once you start reaching 60, 70, 80, 90 and even 100% CO2 in the container. But with our CO2 concetration? Nothing happens. It’s so small that it’s completely insignificant.

Consider this: mankind produces 1% of all the CO2 that insects produce by breathing alone (and that is only if we assume that all insects are as small as a drosophila fly, which they clearly are not, thus insects actually produce even more CO2.)

Or, even simpler:
Weight of atmosphere: 5.3×10^15 tons
CO2 in atmosphere: 0.035% (1.8×10^12 tons)
Mankind produces 7 billion tons CO2 = 7×10^9
Which are: 0.377% of the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Or, while I’m at it:

Bear with me now. Here come a few examples of what procues how much CO2:

Humans:

Number of humans 2003 globally: ~6.1 x 10^9 humans

About 15 liters CO2/hour (physiology textbooks) with 6×10^9 humans

= 1.54 x 10^9 tons CO2/year

Cows:

Ammount globalöy = 1.3 x 10^9 (1999)

600 liters breath/hour (grazing), 4% of that are CO2 = 24 liters/hour

= 5.36 x 10^8 tons CO2/year

Pigs:

number of pigs = 904 x 10^6

180 liter breath/hour, again are 4% CO2 = 7,1 liters/hour

= 1.1 x 10^8 Tonnen CO2/year globally

Sheep:

number of sheep: 1.06 x 10^9 (2000)

360 L/h breath, of which are 4% CO2 = 14.4 liters/hour

= 2.62 x 10^8 tons of CO2/year

All countet together = 2.45 x 10^9 tons CO2/year

Which are 10% of the CO2 mankind produces. Which makes that… 0.1% of the CO2 insects produce.

Oh and organisms in the ground in Germany produce:
7.79 x 10^8 tons/year

Traffic in Germany produces:
1.7 x 10^8 tons/year

Thus organisms in the ground in Germany (both farming and forest) produce 4.6 times more CO2 than human traffic.

Those are simple calculations based on physiology textbooks and official population numbers.

As for the “hot spots”:
Let’s assume the sun heats up Earth and Earth reflects energy of 360 Watts per square meter (W/m²) into the atmosphere. In 6,000 meter altitude you’d receive 36 Watts. If this would be reflected (which it can’t, 2nd law of thermodynnamics prohibits this), you’d get a whole 0.27 Watts back on Earth. Not really an impressive number, is it?

CO2 is also important for life. Without CO2 there wouldn’t be any life on this planet. Plants need CO2. And with photosynthesis they create O2. And without O2 humans wouldn’t exist.

Conclusion can only be: CO2 is not an issue, definitely not.

In reality, the only fundamental difference that I see between this scenario and the one we actually face is that the current case has the additional flexibility that we don’t even have to wean ourselves off of the fossil fuels to the extent that we are able and willing to capture and permanently sequester the CO2.

You seem to be saying that the ends justify the means, as all AGW supporters do.
Neither cap and trade nor taxation nor sequestration will work in bringing the temperature down. Even if one believes the @#$% IPCC models all these schemes might slightly reduce the temperature in 100 years, not enough to stop anything catastrophic, if a catastrophe were in the charts. China and India will not play ball.

The end result will be the end of western civilization with the economic and technological vitality centered on India and China due to the impoverishment of the taxed and pyramid schemed ( cap and trade) western citizens and the judicious outsourcing of whatever industries are left also to India and China.

Well done, AGWs . I hope you are taking intensive Chinese.

Geoengineering approaches in general have serious problems, although there is one solution, “carbon negative” production of electricity, that is often lumped in with geoengineering, that I favor.

Changing the albedo of the earth does very little to stop acidification of the oceans, for example.

I don’t think we are smart enough to add another factor to an expanding series of vicious cycle positive feedbacks, and so bring it under control.

The thing to do, of course, is to get as much carbon out of the system as possible and put it back underground, and then allow the climate system to heal itself. A concept combining biomass fuel with carbon capture and storage underground is capable of doing this.

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

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, lowrisk, 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 [abrupt climate change-LP], pre-industrial CO2 levels can be restored by mid-century using BECS.

The best way to stop global warming, IMO, is to transform every coal fired power plant on the planet to a “carbon negative” power plant, that combines biomass or biochar fuel with carbon capture and storage. There are existing advanced power plant designs incorporating oxyfuel combustion with a “topping cycle” that are capable of compensating for the cost of CCS with increased efficiency:

EERC Technology Greatly Improves Power Plant Efficiency

March 26, 2004

GRAND FORKS, ND -Researchers at the University of North Dakota (UND) Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) say they have made major strides to improve the efficiency and dramatically reduce emissions of coal-fired power plants by burning a combination of pure oxygen and coal to generate electricity in an advanced power system. The material used in the system is the same alloy used to make F-16 fighter jet engines, and it is the first time it has been used in a coal-fired power system.

In a demonstration project conducted at the EERC, a natural gas- and coal-fired system was used to test a very-high-temperature heat exchanger, which is the heart of an advanced high-efficiency power plant-otherwise known as an indirectly fired combined cycle (IFCC). It could hypothetically have no emissions whatsoever.

“Results of previous demonstrations while firing with air prove that the efficiency of a power plant using this technology could improve by about 30%, resulting in cheaper, cleaner energy,” says EERC Senior Research Manager John Hurley.

Most coal fired power plants are located on rivers for cooling water. All of the land upstream of the power plant on these major rivers becomes a potential natural biomass and biochar collection network for biomass or biochar fuel floated down the rivers. Biomass could be burned in these converted coal fired power plants, transferring carbon back underground.

Deep saline aquifers underlie most of the country, capable of storing the captured CO2. It’s starting to look like porous “pillow” basalt rock, which underlies many geological regions including the Juan de Fuca plate off the Pacific Northwest, appear capable of chemically transforming CO2 into carbonate rocks.

Climate engineering is not the way to go, I think. We are not smart enough to sucessfully inject a new factor into an extremely complex situation that is spiraling out of control.

We need to put the CO2 back underground, no matter what the cost. Combining biomass fuel sources with CCS allows us to do that.

Don’t inject any new factors into a situation already spiraling out of control.

“Put the genie back in the bottle” instead, and allow the Earth’s climate system to heal itself.

Our modern society is dependent on energy, and there is no current viable alternative to CO2 emitting sources.

To the extent to which your statement is true (which I will get back to), the reason there are not current viable alternates is because the market is sort of fussy about solving problems that it doesn’t know exist. And, as long as the costs of CO2 emissions are not borne by the sellers or buyers of the products, the market does not know that the problem exists. It is a classic free-loading problem.

And, I don’t think your statement is really that true anyway. It is true that there is no single “silver bullet” to solving the emissions problem, but there are many different available technologies that, taken together, can likely solve the problem for the next 50 years (see, for example, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/305/5686/968 )…and there is likely to be much more developed once cap-and-trade or carbon taxes put the market incentives in place.

I think it is most helpful for the libertarian / free market types to recognize this if they simply substitute a different scenario for the one being contemplated: Imagine that instead of the current climate crisis, it turned out that there was simply much less coal, oil, and natural gas than there actually is. Would these same people be claiming that we are economically-doomed? I don’t think so. Instead, they would be extolling the virtues of human ingenuity as expressed through the market system in finding substitutes!

In reality, the only fundamental difference that I see between this scenario and the one we actually face is that the current case has the additional flexibility that we don’t even have to wean ourselves off of the fossil fuels to the extent that we are able and willing to capture and permanently sequester the CO2.