In comments, Anna V reminded me of something I’ve been looking for for awhile, but forgotten about in the busy work of the surfacestations.org project. With this blog having a worldwide readership now in the thousands, perhaps one of you can help me locate it.
Anna V: Sorry, that is Edward Teller who suggested jets be equipped with gadgets that would release appropriate aerosols to compensated for the warming. If I believed in anthropogenic global warming I would be all for this solution.
REPLY: Anna, thank you for your discourse here. I’d also point out that Dr. Teller may very well single handedly be responsible for the demonization of coal.
Astute readers may recall that Dr. Teller was on the board of the U.S. Atomic Energy commission in the early 70’s. The goal of the agency was peaceful use of atomic energy, i.e. nuclear power plants. Teller was aware that the Soviet Venera 4 probe had penetrated the Venus’ atmosphere in 1967 and showed it was mostly CO2, and that among other factors led to the role of CO2 being figured into the “greenhouse effect”.
In a 1971 paper, James Pollack argued that Venus might once have had oceans like Earth’s It seemed that such a “runaway greenhouse” could have turned the Earth too into a furnace, if the starting conditions had been only a little different.
From Spencer Weart’s Discovery of Global Warming
Teller wanted to push for more nuclear power in the USA, CO2 became a tool to accomplish that. Readers may recall that in the mid to late 1970’s there were a series of magazine ads in major U.S. magazines that had a picture of a lump of coal. The gist of the ad was “coal is dirty, it produces CO2 and soot, harming our atmosphere. Nuclear power is the clean fuel”. If I recall correctly, they were paid for by the Atomic Energy Commission.
So if my memory serves me correctly, it appears the CO2 movement may have been started in part, due to a U.S. Government funded advertising campaign.
I’ve been searching for that ad, and have been combing old magazine sources for it. If anyone can find a copy, I’d be very grateful.
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on the biotic and abiotic question of oil and carbon, some answers may be here:
http://www.livescience.com/space/scienceastronomy/080213-titan-oil.html
“Saturn’s smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today.”
“The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.”
“Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals,” said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan.”
I looked through all the issues of Time Magazine from 1970 to 1980, and didn’t see any showing a lump of coal on the cover.
REPLY: You wouldn’t, its an advertisement, not a feature.
In searching for the ad Mr Watts mentions, I did find this:
http://www.ep.tc/powerforprogress/
A comic book distributed to nuclear power plant visitors.
REPLY: Interesting, that comic book has two frames with a lump of coal in close foreground and the nuclear power plant off in the distance. The frame “THE END” seems to suggest “the end” of coal.
Thanks for sharing.
Also, in 1978 there was a coal strike and the nuclear power industry played up the fact that nuclear power was immune to miners striking according to the Washington Post archives. There was apparently a marketing push by the nuclear power industry at that time so that may be the time frame when you saw that ad:
REPLY: I remember the coal strike well, but I seem to recall the ads prior to that. Of course they all stopped abruptly with Three Mile Island on March 28, 1979.
When was the last time this happened?
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-04-06-heathrow-delays_N.htm
Just a little note, it snowed in the UK on the 5th/ 6th of april 2008, with sheet ice coating the motorways.
I know its not part of this topic but interesting.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/weather/uk_and_roi/article3671174.ece
Anna V.
Thank you, you got it before me ( underwater volcanoes) I have had a more than an interest in the subject since the late 1970s.
I was ‘ crew’ on an yacht in a race from New Zealand to Australia and it was noticed that the sea water temp. had increased. The depth sounder stopped measuring at 2 miles, ( how deep it was there I do not know,) but a temp. increase of 18c was the difference at its highest point, we calculated that the disturbed water could well have been in excess of 25 miles in diameter, I have on many occasions when talking to ships Engineers ask then if they have encountered this, as seawater cools the engines, they would be the first to know. It is by their accounts a quite common occurrence, I was later transfered to southern Italy and that is where my interest became more than a hobby as it is possible to take a boat and ‘float’ over a volcano.
I believe I saw that ad in Scientific American, so you might look there.
It also may have appeared in Physics Today.
REPLY: Thanks David, I read Sci Am a lot in the 70’s, before they became politicized as they are today, so that’s a good bet.
How about Omni magazine light science and science fiction published from 1978 to 1995?
Teller’s name is a four letter word in Los Alamos because of the Atomic Energy Commission testimony he gave about Robert Openheimer. Many up on the Hill (LANL) think that he took credit for a lot of Stanislaw Ulam’s work in the thermonuclear weapon design (even though the design is called the Teller-Ulam concept).
I am a nuclear engineer and I think it is disgraceful that the nuclear industry would use AGW as a reason for power. Hitching the nuclear wagon to junk science could do more damage to the industry’s credibility than Three Mile Island.
I remember the British Astronomer Fred Hoyle put it about that the oil and coal were not buried organic matter but came from deep inside the earths mantle. I found this link to a physist called Gold who started this theory.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold_pr.html
QUOTE : “Gold still argues passionately for his “abiogenic” (not biological in origin) theory of oil. In the 1980s he persuaded researchers in Sweden to drill a hole some 6 kilometers deep into solid granite – a rock that crystallizes out of molten lava deep within the Earth, and thus should not contain any organic remains – and succeeded in finding some oil. This didn’t convince the geology community, which felt that the oil must have gotten into the granite through cracks. But Gold took it as a vindication.”
Does anyone know did anyone take this idea seriously and has it been completely rejected now? I suppose just to recall such heretical ideas is enough to get a free lifetime membership in the flat Earth Society.
There is lots of life in the deep ocean trenches, could that organic matter get buried under the continental shelves?
I did a bunch of searches, but I couldn’t find it.
I managed to come up with a 1985 (sic) copy of Soviet Life that claimed that Soviet nuclear power was so safe that the Chernobyl plant would be perfectly safe if located in downtown Moscow . . .
The biogenic vs. abiogenic debate over fossil fuels for some time now. In the case of coal there is no debate; coal is biogenic in origin and has a strong carbon-12 signature not to mention fossilized plant remains. In the case of oil and natural gas the issues are more complex with most scientists favoring the biogenic theory because of the strong carbon-12 and weak carbon-13 signatures found in most oil and natural gas deposits.
In the days of the Cold War, Pravda (http://english.pravda.ru/) the official news source of the Russian Communist Party would periodically run stories denouncing the biogenic theory of oil as a Capitalist plot to drive up world oil prices. To prove their case Pravda would sight the work of Russian scientists who found small deposits of oil with an enrich carbon-13 signatures. To this day American oil companies are allow to take depreciating allowances predicated on the assumption that oil is a finite resource and that the value of an oil field depreciates as the oil is extracted.
Abiogenic Petroleum Origin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
After the collapse of the Soviet Union the abiogenic theory was kept alive by the book The Deep Hot Biosphere by Thomas Gold in 1999. Things remained unchanged until February 2008 when the discovery of active sources for abiogenic hydrocarbons was announced in Science.
Science 1 February 2008:
Vol. 319. no. 5863, pp. 604 – 607
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/319/5863/604
Abiogenic Hydrocarbon Production at Lost City Hydrothermal Field
Giora Proskurowski, Marvin D. Lilley, Jeffery S. Seewald, Gretchen L. Früh-Green, Eric J. Olson, John E. Lupton, Sean P. Sylva, Deborah S. Kelley
Low-molecular-weight hydrocarbons in natural hydrothermal fluids have been attributed to abiogenic production by Fischer-Tropsch type (FTT) reactions, although clear evidence for such a process has been elusive. Here, we present concentration, and stable and radiocarbon isotope, data from hydrocarbons dissolved in hydrogen-rich fluids venting at the ultramafic-hosted Lost City Hydrothermal Field. A distinct “inverse” trend in the stable carbon and hydrogen isotopic composition of C1 to C4 hydrocarbons is compatible with FTT genesis. Radiocarbon evidence rules out seawater bicarbonate as the carbon source for FTT reactions, suggesting that a mantle-derived inorganic carbon source is leached from the host rocks. Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water, and moderate amounts of heat.
If the process described in Science is a source for abiogenic hydrocarbons, the next problem is to describe the process by which carbon-12 is enriched in these hydrocarbons resulting in carbon-13 depletion. One possible candidate is the thermophile bacteria proposed by Thomas Gold. Obviously addition research is required but the debate is becoming quite lively again.
For additional information see the following:
Lost City (hydrothermal field)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_City_%28hydrothermal_field%29
Google: abiogenic “Lost City”
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=abiogenic+%22Lost+City%22
Today the biogenic theory is championed by the left and abiogenic theory by the right. Abiogenic hydrocarbons are Al Gore’s worse nightmare.
Perhapse you don’t have a dinosaur in your gas tank after all! You just can’t trust the ads from BIG OIL.
Mike
p.s. The Lost City waypoint is: Lost City Hydrothermal Field (30° 7’0.00″N, 42° 7’0.00″W)
The New York Times has all of their content indexed and searchable but I did not find the AEC ad on coal or any related news report.
Indexes of Scientific American are on line since 1974 but only the stories were indexed and none of the ads.
I will keep looking.
Mike
I don’t thing National Geographic had advertizing in the AEC days.
Life, Saturday Evening Post, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Mechanix Illustrated, Field and Stream, and others of that ilk are possible.
How about a contact at NRC?
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/2000/1/2000_1_56.shtml
Has a mention of a lump being a prop in a speech.
Wonder why I always type “thing” wen I mean “think”.
And it would have been, if proper procedures had been observed. Chernobyl was a human failure, not a technical one.
I don’t see any reason why oil AND coal can’t be both Abiogenic and biogenic. For anyone to say we know all the possible ways coal becomes coal and oil becomes oil would be a charlatan.
Hi Jeff Alberts,
If you look at coal under the microscope, you can almost always see evidence of plant fossils.
How about methane hydrates on the ocean floor. What causes their formation?
Jeff said “ALL POSSIBLE ways”.
Patrick said: “ALMOST ALWAYS see”.
Don’t these to comments complement each other?
Micahel Roonayne (19:19:40)
There is another aspect to the Earth/Moon system, which was pointed out by, I think, Isaac Azimov, in an article published many years ago. First aspect of the oddity is that the gravitational attraction between the Sun and the Moon is almost four times greater than the attraction between the Earth and the Moon, while the reverse is true for all other satellites. The second is that while every other satellite in the Solar System has an orbit around the Sun that has, for almost half of the time, a negative radius of curvature relative to the Sun. On the other hand, the Moon’s orbit round the Sun has a varying radius of curvature, which is always positive. In other words, Azimov’s postulate was that we do not have a satellite, but a sister planet.
Just thought you might be interested in this little oddity.
Thanks, Patrick. It’s the “almost” that gets me. And if you find fossils of trilobites in shale does that mean the shale was created by them?
The same suggestion has been made about Mrs Thatcher – viz he pushed the global warming scam so as to make us go nuclear & thus not dependent on the miner’s union. There may be some truth to these but I doubt if they were as powerful as they are now being played.
Also it should not be forgotten that, irrespective of CO2, coal IS a dirty polluting industry which does kill people.
I found this link about abiotic oil the most interesting
http://www.gasresources.net/index.htm
it contains files of studies made in the USSR in the fifties and contains something looking like real science.
There is also material showing that Thomas Gold plagiated a lot of his material from the Russian and Ukrainian scientists.