Climate project: Dr Peter Cook holds sandstone from the Otway Basin, where 10,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide has been stored underground.
Photo: Glen McCurtayne
July 7, 2008
IT IS technology vital to the Government’s hopes of cutting greenhouse emissions from Australia’s huge coal-fired power stations: capturing carbon dioxide from the polluting stations and burying it deep underground.
Australia’s first trial of geosequestration in the Otways reached its first milestone last week — 10,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide was successfully stored two kilometres underground in a depleted natural gas field.
Scientists from the Co-operative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies hope to increase that to 100,000 tonnes next year, while continuing to monitor the local geology.
The centre’s chief executive, Dr Peter Cook, who is overseeing the $40 million project, is confident that the day will come when much of the carbon dioxide produced from large industrial sources can be buried.
See the complete article here in Australia’s The Age.
Ok here is my question: What about the long term effects of such a thing? One of the biggest complaints about radioactive hazardous waste disposal is that there is no confidence in predictions of long term stability of the burial site.
Take for example water, how do we know that this formation won’t become water saturated, and that the water will dissolve CO2 into the water and carry it elsewhere only to be released into the atmosphere again? Or how do we know that the system won’t vent the CO2 back to the surface gradually due to displacement or other geologic action?
I’ll point out that CO2 is a heck of a lot more reactive and soluble than glass encapsulated nuclear waste, yet nobody seems to think a thing about it.
In my opinion, the premise of CO2 burial seems absurd not only because of the lack of supporting evidence for certain climate change, but also due to it’s lack of foresight as to the effects of the burial scheme.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
[…] STAY WARM, WORLD… Roger Carr (The quotation under the photo above comes from this paper by David Archibald) 7 July, 2008 “All levity aside, I’d hate for a repeat of Lake Nyos to occur in Australia because of a misguided attempt to sequester plant food.” A response by “swampie” on Watts Up With That? in responding to this story: Also Going Down: Carbon dioxide burial reaches a milestone. […]
“Most AGW skeptics that I know are sincere and good people, and from what I read about Anthony, he is also a good man. That is why I am somewhat puzzled about the direction of the AGW criticism…”
John McLondon
John,
Congratulations on a long and reasonable post! It deserves a considered answer.
I suppose the first point to make is that by now you can see well-entrenched positions on both sides of this argument, and under such circumstances there will always be a lot of trivial sniping from both sides – often of dubious merit. I know, I have been responsible for enough in my time! I hope you will accept that a certain amount of this is motivated by the desire to appear witty rather than to provide deep insight, and not take too much to heart.
To precis your post, it seems to me that you are concerned about ‘personal’ attacks on AGW supporters. You say that there is a consensus for AGW, and that AGW predictions have been generally true, so, although scepticism is always reasonable in all science, in your view this has descended to trivialities, is excessive and bordering on irrational. I hope that covers your main points?
Personal attacks should never be the ‘stuff’ of science, of course, but, oddly enough, neither should ‘consensus’ be. Science is about making hypotheses, gathering evidence for these and making it available to those who wish to test it . Should the hypothesis survive, it grows stronger. Straight Popper.
Now humans certainly make decisions by consensus, frequently, in their everyday lives. I walk over a bridge confidently because of consensus, rather than an examination of forces – it’s a lot quicker! In the Middle Ages bridges were built by ‘consensus’, or experience. It can work. But they also burnt witches by consensus. It can equally point the wrong way. And science is self-correcting, while consensus is hugely capable of ignoring obvious errors. You “have not seen a single prevailing scientific conclusion without consensus” – I bet you have seen a lot of incorrect ones with it. Consensus just isn’t science.
I mention this because, in the view of many readers of this site, what the AGW supporters are doing is not science. They are trying to create a consensus, which is a political beast. Critically, where they fail as scientists is in making the evidence they are gathering available for testing. An example of this claim by the AGW sceptics is the paper by David Holland (Bias and Concealment in the IPCC Process: The “Hockey-Stick” Affair and Its Implications – Energy and Environment, 2007).
As part of this political drive, AGW sceptics have been subject to incredible personal attacks. It is now a commonplace for newspapers, and Hansen himself, to accuse sceptics of taking bribes, and propose putting them on trial for ‘crimes against humanity’. Being compared to Nazis, it is hardly suprising that some people respond in kind.
The ‘truth’ of AGW predictions is an interesting point. The models used are constantly re-aligned against real-world data (and that data also seems to be re-aligned against the models output!), so at one level this is unsurprising. More importantly, as more data has come on board the AGW predictions have become lowered, until they now accept that ‘the Earth may cool for ten years’. I, too, can make accurate predictiuons in this way – the question is whether they are of value…
There is one major item you have missed in your commentary – the actual science. I can generalise this area by saying that the sceptics keep raising scientific objections to the supporters, while the supporters do their best to stop the sceptics getting any data, and refusing to answer the objections when any data is obtained. Again, this can make the sceptics a little short-tempered. Here is a recent example – http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3234.
How we got into this situation I have some idea. How we get out of it I have none. If you do not want to get involved in the science (which is often statistical maths), it is still possible to gain an opinion on whether you think my political assertions are true by examining a few incidents – say, the Wegman Report and the rejection of Steve McIntyre’s initial paper by Nature. Google by all means, but I would warn you that you will soon find a mass of fixed positions and intrangient minds, including, but not limited to, those who police Wikipedia entries. Please decide for yourself which side is more interested in moving debate away from data and towards personalities.
Why don’t we just pretend to bury it?
Run a big pump underground to a depleted gas field and just pump away.
It’s not like anyone will notice anything bad; CO2 is completely harmless. It will just leak back out and mix up with the atmosphere.
Will Peter Cook be working on this with his usual comedy colleague Dudley Moore?
John McLondon:
Your posts are too long – keep them short if you want people to read them.
It is disappointing that you with your degree in physics feel you are unable to read the primary sources, and have to rely on the opinions of others.
Read the IPCC report, for example the AR4 WG1 SPM around page 5 – 6 on temperature trends and sea level rise, and the figure in section FAQ 3.1. Then ask yourself whether this is an accurate portrayal of the observations or a misleading distortion.
Some numbers to toss around:
I work in the nuclear industry in Ontario. We use CANDUs. The new design is called Advanced CANDU Reactor (ACR). The average exit burnup of fuel from ACR is 12,000 Mega Watt days per ton of Uranium. A 1000 MW reactor takes about 12 days to use up a ton of Uranium.
Tritium production in light water reactors is pretty low. It is somewhat higher in CANDU reactors because we use heavy water moderator. CANDU reactos have a “Tritium getter” that scours the Tritium from the coolant and moderator.
As to used fuel disposal. Do some google-ing on the Gabon natural reactor. A 2 billion year old site and the evidence indicates that, in sandstone, the heavy isotopes moved not at all.
John McLondon: I think I see your problem more clearly now, after your 2nd post (the first one seemed confused, and lacking in focus).
You are, by far, too trusting of “the consensus”, and “higher authorities”. You seem intelligent, and fully capable of doing your own research, despite your belief that you are “not qualified”. Baloney! I believe you are simply afraid to, perhaps afraid of what you will find. Show some backbone, man! The AGW hypothesis has been discredited and debunked over and over by many scientists. Here is one which is a good place to start: Editorial: The Great Global Warming Hoax?
You should know that many of us started off believing AGW was true, but once we started researching it began to realize something was very wrong with it. I only started to research it in order to refute anti-AGW letters I would occasionally see, so I was actively looking FOR proof of AGW. Surprise, surprise, there wasn’t any. Not only that, but the “debate” was over, and woe betide you if you didn’t believe in the AGW doctrine. I beg your pardon? Run that by me again? Where did you say the proof was? Oh, right, I’m just a “lowly” citizen. Never mind, then. Sorry I asked.
“For the first time in human history mankind is within striking distance of doing away with the traditional causes of mass-scale human misery.”
Well said, Evan. We certainly have the technology. It will only work if we can keep special interests from hijacking the bureaucracy, with non-productive distractions like burying CO2 (that’s the polite way of saying it).
As countries’ standard of living advances, population growth slows. That will be the real key for the future. Do you limit growth with prosperity, or let people starve because of stupidity?
While I favor the former, the latter seems to have the upper hand.
“Hydrogen and stupidity” (perhaps not in that order)
Evan Jones:
Thanks. On your first long response on intellectuals and societies: I agree that scientists are also prone to bias and making misjudgments, but knowing that the general population and bloggers are more prone to those problems on scientific matters, whom should we believe? I do not really believe intellectuals are like herds, the fact that there are few scientists disagreeing with AGW shows a significant degree of independence. Even scientists who agree on AGW may disagree on other issues. To me it is very difficult to explain why such a large majority of scientists and organizations are coming out to endorse the AGW hypothesis.
By the way, Malthusian theory was not all that wrong – had it not for the green revolution he would have been shown to be correct, and such revolutionary developments were not accounted for in his formulation. Unless something changes, we are probably in it again. In fact I have seen calculations that if every Chinese change their diet to an American diet, the entire grain production of the U.S. and China (and may be even the entire world) will not be sufficient to feed the cattle in China. With finite resources and ever increasing population, we will reach a point when we don’t enough resources (unless we go to Moon or somewhere else), it may not be in 2000 – but some day.
You said: “That (acting on what we know now – my comment) depends entirely on the immediacy of the problem and the cost of proposed mitigation. I am simply not willing to sacrifice yet another generation of the world’s poor on the evidence at hand.” Sure, but the necessity and the timing for that action is also a part what we know now, it is the knowledge on which we have to act. So I do not see any problems with my earlier statement “But acting on what we know now is the only rational way to make decisions, we have to make decisions based on our current knowledge and evidence, not based on what we might find out in the future.”
On Morner and others: Here is a reference: Sea-level rise at tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean islands, Church, John A.,White, Neil J., Hunter, John R.; GLOBAL AND PLANETARY CHANGE Volume: 53(3) 155-168, SEP 2006, which states “We find no evidence for, the fall in sea level at the Maldives as postulated by Morner et al. (2004).” They talk about mistakes in previous papers in this area. I picked Morner because he discussed sea level fall.
On consensus, Evan, can you please provide one example of a scientific rule that was established without consensus (I am not trying to be critical, this is just a curiosity)? Take Charle’s law or Boyle’s law, or statistical thermodynamics, Newton’s law, or any other theory for that matter. None of these can be proven, but can be demonstrated by evidence. Someone propose a new theory, others check it and recheck it and eventually if there is a consensus, it becomes a theory. In fact when Boltzmann proposed the kinetic theory, there was a universal rejection of his belief in the reality of atoms, except by few like Maxwell and Gibbs. In fact the prestigious German physics journal refused Boltzmann to refer to atoms in his papers, knowing that atoms are the basic unit in the kinetic theory. As time went on more and people accepted his notion and theory, and now it is a well accepted theory. Science always evolves through consensus. I am happy to accept I am wrong, if you can show me a convincing counter example. CERN and black hole is another typical example, probably comparable to AGW, few physics faculty members that I know very well are very concerned about black holes forming on earth as a result of high energy impact; it is predicted by the string theory. Even Hawking predicts that, but he also says such black holes will melt away quickly – although no one has observed any melting of such black holes in the past. But when committee after committee that investigated it say that there is no danger, and again the general scientific community has developed a consensus on it, it is difficult for me to disagree with them.
In addition to gasoline, oil is essential for making medicines, plastics, etc. which are all essential (and much more critical) for the health of our society (especially in many aspects in medical care). We can replace some of them from plants, but not all of them. So, I personally would prefer (knowing the current state of technology) to leave some of the easily accessible oil resources for the future generations as well. Oil is needed for our economic development, but from what we know now, oil is absolutely essential for the simple existence of our future generations. It is sad to see two or three generations of people exploiting the entire easily accessible oil reserves to extinction.
Jeeztheadmin:
Thank you, that is fine. As you probably noticed I did not take it personally, I just wanted to give an answer. As I said earlier, I fully appreciate Anthony’s effort in keeping a healthy level of suspicion on AGW, and I support it; but I also hope Anthony could help to alleviate some of the extreme distrust generally shown by some of the (most probably) AGW critics as well. Thank you.
Pofarmer: I hate to give a Youtube link answer (why David Attenborough changed his views), but that is the simplest answer, looking only at the past.
Also, when it comes to these types of issues, it is also worthwhile to ask what kind of proof would convince someone. Unfortunately this is not something we can repeat many times in a laboratory. Also, since all those scientists I discussed earlier are endorsing AGW, I will have to assume that they have enough evidence to associate their name with AGW.
Now, on the consensus issue – just like in other fields like engineering, medicine and history, almost all scientific conclusions are reached by consensus – either by a representative group and then by the larger group and either repeating the same experiment or calculations, or by studying the logic and compatibility with other existing laws.
This may be the central issue for me on this entire AGW debate. I always thought science was determined by evidence rather than consensus. We treat high cholesterol with statins because well-designed controlled clinical trials were conducted, and the null hypothesis disproven, with a high level of statistical significance. Not because of a bunch of computer models and a consensus.
And if a pharmaceutical company ever submitted a SAS data set to the FDA with the kind of poorly documented, often hidden data corrections that Hansen keeps making to his data sets, many people would end up disbarred and unable to work in the industry.
Consensus once held that the Earth was the center of the Universe, that the Earth was flat and that all points of light in the night sky were single stars.
Challenging consensus is necessary for advancement. If the consensus is correct it will withstand scrutiny, if it is not new ideas and theories will replace the old. This is why algore declaring the debate is over was so offensive and obnoxious.
Steve,
I will have to go to my garage (storage for boxes of old college papers) and find my report. It was cited with references and documentation, using european PWR and BWR power plants. BWRs were the worst offenders by a large factor because they use nuclear steam, but they are more thermally efficient. I specialized in BWR 2-phase flow in college and worked for GE for 6 years in the 1980s.
Again, give me a few days to see if my wife didn’t claen to much out of the garage. LOL
Greg Johnson, I agree. When the theory and observations don’t match, how can it be science? Whether or not everyone is in consensus seems irrelevent. If everyone can agree the same experiment seems to have the same result then there is something to work with. Opinion doesn’t count, repeatable observation does.
I’m still waiting for real science to show carbon drives climate change and that that change has more negatives than positives. Until then, I’m not going to be endorsing any of these carbon sequestering schemes.
If there is real damage from carbon emissions it’s probably cheaper to negate the effects than to prevent the emissions. Lomborg estimates it’s 10 times more expensive to prevent one ton of carbon emissions than it is to clean up or adapt to those effects. Since I don’t foresee a 10X increase in personal income anytime soon, you can probably guess what I support as a better approach to this problem (provided there really is a problem).
Also, there are better answers than sequestration if you want to take carbon out of the system. There are several research studies being undertaken to remove carbon from the atmosphere and reprocess into fuel. These technologies should be given more support as we will need more energy and more energy sources in the future.
Greg Johnson:
Consensus is developed based on evidence. I don’t think all these scientists are basing their conclusions on a simple belief, they base it on the totality of evidence available to them. As a rule, the more convincing the evidence is, more scientists will accept the corresponding conclusion, thus better consensus. I am sure the evidence on the existence of atoms was convincing to Boltzmann, but not to most of the others. Without others checking, verifying and accepting it (with additional evidence), Boltzmann’s theory would not reached the status of a well accepted theory as it enjoys now. The epistemological question is what we are struggling with here. How do we know the truth? It seems to me that our understanding of the truth evolves through consensus, and that comes along with evidence.
Well, we can read all about the Farmington study about cholesterol, I will just say that many doctors disagree with the statin conclusion as they think that other indicators like C-reactive protein, HDL, etc. play a major role. In fact statins raises HDL a little, but many believe it raises the wrong kind of HDL.
Appropriate data correction is a common procedure, done with almost all measurements. The question is whether Hansen is correcting the data in order to obtain a certain result. I don’t believe so, since three other sources show good correlation with Hansen’s plots. If there was a significant deviation, I will have to wonder about that.
Tom in Florida:
Yes, with all the available facts, once they believed that the Earth is center of the Universe and the Earth is flat (it still is flat, locally). They were all rational conclusions reached based on available data at that time, and they acted based on those conclusions. Challenging consensus with appropriate evidence is an excellent thing to do, I agree with you completely. But our decisions now should be based on what we know now, and not based on the expectation that some specific new understanding will come up in the future.
Steve Keohane: I don’t know where the theory and observations deviate? As I posted the Youtibe clip from David Attenborough, they seem to match well. For 2008 result, we will have to wait until the end of the year.
I believe much if not all of this CO2 will ended up as carbonates. This is a seriously long term commitment. It would be one thing to give into hysteria about PPMV CO2 via a biomass method. But to give in using something so irreversible, is madness. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. At least for the purposes of humanity. Are we REALLY sure we want to do this? Are we REALLY sure we know how low is too low, and therefore, know when to stop? I fear for the biosphere.
Sequestration is on old technology. We have been using it for decades.
In western Canada, we pump tens of thousands of tonnes per day into the ground.
As for safety, they are pumped into formations that are known hydrocarbon traps, so the odds of the reservoir leaking is exactly the same as gas or oil leaking to surface.
Personally, I don’t see the need for sequestration, but, purely as a device to reduce CO2, it is the cheapest, easiest and safest method we currently have.
“Cheapest” is relative, of course, as our cost for CO2 is 60 to 100$ per tonne. Assume similar numbers, perhaps slightly lower, for the cost of sequestration.
Dodger: Well said.
Thanks.
Not at all it is a pleasure to discuss this subject with a reasonable intellectual on the other side whose primary objective is, well, the primary objective.
I do not really believe intellectuals are like herds,
Well, I am speak from the perspective of one who has been heavily stampeded by them. (Subjects: Somewhat technical nuclear weapons issues and general environmental/demographic prospects, 1975-2000.)
Morner, BTW, heartily refuted those who came to check (and refute) his work in the Maldives, and accused them of distorting and even destroying evidence. I don’t know who is right. But I do know that there is a very intense (though not widely known) controversy that I have yet to see resolved.
In any case, even if one disagrees with old Axe and goes with his opponents, sea level seem to have turned a corner, at least temporarily. (Thermal contraction which coincides with the mild ocean cooling over the past few years. Remember, the IPCC and Morner both agree that ice melt makes a relatively minor contribution to SL when compared with thermal expansion.)
On consensus, Evan, can you please provide one example of a scientific rule that was established without consensus (I am not trying to be critical, this is just a curiosity)?
I agree that for a rule to be “established” there must be consensus. But many new rules started out bucking the consensus and reestablishing a new consensus.
Scientific consensus has turned out wrong on many issues. I am betting that the mainstay of AGW CO2 theory will be falsified and that WILL be the consensus in the end.
I also agree that in the case of medicine (your profession) or engineering, there must be standards and practices.
You practice. Therefore, you MUST have standards.
But that does not apply in the same way to theoretical sciences. Climatology is not a new science, but until recently it has been a very quiet and poorly studied one. Now that it has become a sexy science, we are learning more in a few of years than the entire ‘media meteor’ that preceded it. Enrollment in climatology is up tenfold. A disproportionately vast amount of knowledge in that field still lies ahead.
By the way, Malthusian theory was not all that wrong – had it not for the green revolution he would have been shown to be correct, and such revolutionary developments were not accounted for in his formulation.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? And the neoMalthusians (e.g., the Club of Rome) utterly failed to pick up on the vast generality of the refutation. Also, if the green revolution had not been a (continually) happening thing, population would not have been growing at the rate it was in the first place. Malthus missed the very wave he was riding. At least he had the good grace in his old age to admit he was wrong and (correctly) explain why. But not the neos!
Sure, but the necessity and the timing for that action is also a part what we know now, it is the knowledge on which we have to act. So I do not see any problems with my earlier statement
But we don’t know it. Not even the IPCC speaks much of immediacy or “tipping points”. Only the most radical side of the coin does (most recently, Hansen). If you look are the IPCC AR3 version, their projected downside (both in terms of lives and wealth) pales by comparison with completely standard issues such as the casualty rate from poverty alone.
It’s as if they are considering things in a complete vacuum, with no demographic perspective whatever.
It is sad to see two or three generations of people exploiting the entire easily accessible oil reserves to extinction.
It ain’t happening. Much of what was unobtainable in 1975 is “easily accessible” today. You are making the same error as the life insurance companies: They measure your life expectancy tomorrow by the technology of today. As they profit mightily from such errors, don’t expect to see them self-correct anytime soon! But as a medical man, surely you can see my point.
It’s the same tunnel vision fallacy that made a complete mockery of the Club of Rome.
Maggie Gallagher by way of BlueCrabBoulevard:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government”
Are we there yet?
Sequestration into sandstone. You America’s Hatters are a bit credulous, ‘eh. We hear the economy up there is a bit flat just now, small wonder.
50 years ago at a poker game of Sci-Fi writers in Los Angeles, L. Ron Hubbard got the bright idea of making a lot of money while keeping it away from the tax man. We’re now seeing a new variation of this. What a wonderful way of throwing money down a hole (ok, the investor’s money is safely in the bank account of the new priesthood, only their gullibility went down that hole).
Kim made this point further up the thread, but it’s worth repeating.
1. Atmospheric levels of oxygen are currently 20.946%
2. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration states:
Human beings must breathe oxygen to survive, and begin to suffer adverse health effects when the oxygen level of their breathing air drops below 19.5 percent oxygen. Below 19.5 percent oxygen air is considered oxygen-deficient.
So, if oxygen levels in our atmosphere fall from their present 20.946% to below 19.5%, the global atmosphere will fall below the safe level set by the OSHA.
Research is already showing that atmospheric oxygen is decreasing, so why are we locking O2 up with CO2?
Isn’t that called throwing the baby out with the bath water?
Just a thought
Max
http://theerrorlog.blogspot.com/2008/07/some-thoughts-on-co2.html
The simple and easy way to sequester atmospheric CO2 is to simply take paper, mix it with water, turn it into a slurry and ram it into an abandoned coal mine using about the same technology one would use to create “rammed earth” structures. You would end up replacing the carbon taken out in coal and released into the atmosphere with carbon taken out of the atmosphere by trees and put right back where it originally came from. And who knows, in several thousand years it might even turn back in to some kind of usable energy source.
I don’t think there is a way for anyone to make millions of dollars using that method, though, so I don’t think it will likely be adopted.
Evan Jones:
My primary objective was to see what kind of response, especially the critical response, I get.
“I agree that for a rule to be “established” there must be consensus. … I am betting that the mainstay of AGW CO2 theory will be falsified and that WILL be the consensus in the end.”
Yes, the problem is we all can have our own scientific rules, some of which may be correct, some of which may be wrong. How do we know which rules are right and which are wrong? In order to show you that my rule is correct, I have to satisfy you with my evidence. If you are convinced, I will show another person, and another and a consensus emerges. We may not get total agreement (I understand we still have a flat earth society), but as long as a significant majority agree with it, we will accept that this is indeed a scientific rule.
There is a real possibility that AGW can be shown to be false and a new consensus might emerge. But that is just a possibility, until that happens. Few scientists and a number of people agree with you, but a disproportionate number of scientists disagree. When I have to make a conclusion, it is natural that I will go along with the majority scientists. But if AGW is shown to be wrong by the scientific establishment, then I do not have any hesitations in changing my views and I am sure most rational people will change their views.
“But that’s the point, isn’t it? And the neoMalthusians (e.g., the Club of Rome) utterly failed to pick up on the vast generality of the refutation. Also, if the green revolution had not been a (continually) happening thing, population would not have been growing at the rate it was in the first place.”
Such revolutions are unpredictable (see the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn – suggested by someone else) – new seeds, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, etc. etc. all came along at the right time. There is no guarantee that green revolution will continue to happen. Also, population will not be curbed due to food shortages. People will be malnourished, but the numbers can continue to grow as in many parts of the world now. Only a disease can reduce population in a relatively shorter period.
I go to developing nations a lot, and it is amazing to see what has been happening in many of their agricultural institutes (the Rice Institute for example) that were responsible for the green revolution. They have abandoned the priority for such institutes (established during the time of famine in India and Asia in general, in the 60s and 70s) and it will be difficult to bring the infrastructure back.
“But we don’t know it. Not even the IPCC speaks much of immediacy or “tipping points”. Only the most radical side of the coin does (most recently, Hansen).”
Yes, I agree. I was only presenting a philosophical reasoning on the methodology than empirical aspects on what exactly we should do. But if you ask, I will invest more in research and development – in hydrogen fuel, fusion reactors, and solar energy.
“It ain’t happening. Much of what was unobtainable (oil reserves – my comment) in 1975 is “easily accessible” today.”
May be, but that is no assurance that it will continue to happen. We cannot assume that there are solutions for every technical problem that will come up. The latest estimates I saw, we have reserves for 68 years at the present rate of production. The rate of production might go up – the hike in oil price is partly due to increase in demand. But for argument sake double, or triple the reserves estimate. Earth still has only finite oil reserves. We have several thousand years of human history, and we want to make sure we have several thousands in the future. But in 300 years or so, a very tiny period compared to historical times of past and future, we will be done with oil.
It has been a pleasure discussing with you.
Max:
OSHA tends to err severely on the side of caution. But even so, stipulating that the 19.5% oxygen danger number is correct, that gives us nearly 1 and 1/2 percent leeway. CO2 content, over the last century has gone from c. 1/35th of 1% to 1/26th of 1%. Therefore there would seem to be very little cause for alarm on that count.
In addition, the more CO2, the more oxygen-producing plants. CO2 levels increased by 6% in the last 17 years, but plant life (esp. in the rain forests) also increased 6%, and that provides negative feedback and adds oxygen back into the air.
Humans do fine working in Greenhouses, and they are often artificially maintained at 1000 ppmv CO2 levels (natural levels are 385 ppmv).
Don’t panic. there is a lot more flexibility and leeway at all levels in biological systems. If there were no “biofeedbacks”, we would have gone over one tipping point or another ages ago.