NASA’s Dr. James Hansen once again goes over the top. See his most recent article in the UK Guardian. Some excerpts:
“The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.”
And this:
Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know. Carbon dioxide would increase to 500 ppm or more.
Only one problem there Jimbo, CO2 has been a lot higher in the past. Like 10 times higher.
From JS on June 21, 2005:
One point apparently causing confusion among our readers is the relative abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere today as compared with Earth’s historical levels. Most people seem surprised when we say current levels are relatively low, at least from a long-term perspective – understandable considering the constant media/activist bleat about current levels being allegedly “catastrophically high.” Even more express surprise that Earth is currently suffering one of its chilliest episodes in about six hundred million (600,000,000) years.
Given that the late Ordovician suffered an ice age (with associated mass extinction) while atmospheric CO2 levels were more than 4,000ppm higher than those of today (yes, that’s a full order of magnitude higher), levels at which current ‘guesstimations’ of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 suggest every last skerrick of ice should have been melted off the planet, we admit significant scepticism over simplistic claims of small increment in atmospheric CO2 equating to toasted planet. Granted, continental configuration now is nothing like it was then, Sol’s irradiance differs, as do orbits, obliquity, etc., etc. but there is no obvious correlation between atmospheric CO2 and planetary temperature over the last 600 million years, so why would such relatively tiny amounts suddenly become a critical factor now?
Adjacent graphic ‘Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time’ from Climate and the Carboniferous Period (Monte Hieb, with paleomaps by Christopher R. Scotese). Why not drop by and have a look around?
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Too bad Hansen gets almost all of the media attention, when there are much more credible scientists making news: click
Bob Tisdale (07:49:40)
Mike Bryant (07:55:57)
Siemens instruments and (Siemens Apogee) control system.
I don’t know what they’re using in Hawaii so I don’t know if it would work or not.
I monitor CO2 levels on every floor of the building independently as well as the outside air number. The outside air dampers reset from table statements programmed into the Energy Management System. I maintain 30% outside air as a minimum and begin to modulate the dampers when the indoor CO2 level rises above 400 PPM over outdoor levels until they achieve 100% flow. It works out well for us as we aren’t constantly introducing outside air into the building unnecessarily which helps with the load on the equipment (recovery) and save me dollars as I don’t have to condition all of that raw air using less energy also. Electric bills can run 100K per month so a small percentage of reduction in energy consumption really helps the budget numbers. Sometimes, (like now), I use them as a air side economizer to supplement the water side economizer system……I don’t have to use mechanical cooling.
I’ve also worked this out with our indoor air quality specialist and design Engineer and they’re fine with it.
The old way to do it was simply balance the dampers at a minimum level and lock them there (Summer and Winter)……..very wasteful. We do calibrate them periodically and they are all within 10%.
ASHRAE recommends CO2 not exceed 1000 PPM; however, those “in the know” tell me that higher levels are acceptable (but I still don’t do it).
On the topic of CO2 from breathing compared with the CO2 from fossil fuels (e.g. Ron de Haan (00:19:41) “a car driving at a speed of 30 mph produces the same amount of CO2 as a cyclist at full speed” )
Surely you have to take into account the size of the engine. I’m pretty sure a bog standard 8 litre Dodge Viper will pump out more CO2 at 30mph than a 1.5 litre Toyota Prius. So the car vs the bike is not really comparable. Sorry.
Andy M (15:20:45) :
My favourite quote of the day from Prof James Lovelock in the Telegraph online:
“To continue business as usual will probably kill most of us during the century.”
You don’t say!?!
I’m sure business as usual won’t make me kick the bucket. I’ll put a bet on natural causes (touch wood!)
Robert Wood (16:16:51) :
Sorry, my link
screwed up
Sorry Robert, think it’s still screwed up. Dead link.
Rachel has gone away since Anthony asked her to stop calling people “deniers”. Apparently “she” can’t function without a bit of gratuitous name-calling. This seems like a good way to rid the blog of nasty people.
Operating Engineer: Thanks for the information. It’s been over 20 years since I concerned myself with economizer cycles, building pressurization, air flow control, variable air volume systems, and the like. One of the last control system presentations I gave to a large group was at an ASHRAE seminar, maybe in Toronto, had to have been in 1981-82. The title of that presentation was something to the effect of “Control System Strategies That Do Not Work Or That Serve No Purpose,” and there were a chunk of them.
Are there any blogs for building operators and engineers, where they discuss control system and energy management system strategies, problems, etc.? I’d enjoy seeing what’s changed and what’s remained the same.
Regards.
To foinavon,
Since the Pangani study is such a “hodge-podge” of temperatures and CO2 …
… I’m assuming you are not going to cite the study another dozen times on this website and Hansen will quit using it as proof that the 550 ppm is the final magic tipping point for when all the ice will melt.
The CO2 numbers in the study contradict that conclusion in any event.
Antarctica glaciated over 34.5 million years ago, 2.5 million years before the CO2 numbers began to fall and Greenland glaciated over 15 million years ago, 10 million years after CO2 had stabilized at 300 ppm (10 million year lags seem a little extreme).
According to this site, coal fires account for 2-3% of the CO2 added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
So, perhaps not worth going after.
Morgan Porter (12:04:56) :
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/climate/greenhouse_effect_gases.html says “By 1998, methane concentration had risen to 1,745 ppbv; a whopping 149% increase over pre-industrial levels!” Not a heck of a lot in CO2 equivalents, you can do the math.
Levels between 1998 and 2004 were just about flat (they may have gone up some recently). The web page suggests droughts, others suggest changes in how long rice paddies are flooded.
RE: James “JImmy the Enforcer” Hansen.
Jimmy the Enforcer is scientific muscle hired by Don Al “Fat Al” Gore, head of the Gore Climate Change Crime Family, to frighten and scare the people so that they will buy Don Al’s climate protection insurance policies. Jimmy the Enforcers works out of that deli store front in NYC where he and Gavin the Grinch have been selling phony balony for 20 yrs. Jimmy the Enforcer was recently paid 250,000 cans of Heinz beans
foi his services. You have to keep eye sharp eye on Jimmy (aka the Sandwich Man) because he always has his thumb on the therometer.
Apologies if this has been posted: click
It’s George Will making fun of the 1970’s alarmists, with some good references.
Thanks for the link, Smokey.
Many AGW supporters tell us that the “consensus” of global cooling was nowhere near the “consensus” of today’s global warming. But I submit that’s mainly due to communication. There was no WWW then, no cable news, no email except late in the 70s among a small group of academic organizations, no online access to science journals, and the green movement was still in its infancy. George Will provides some excellent references, and I’m sure there are more (Such as Hansen and Schneider being two of those global coolers).
So they can’t make up their mind. From the 50’s to the 70’s it was getting too cool, and now it’s getting too warm. So at what minute snapshot in time was the globe at the “perfect” temperature? And at how many times in the past was it also at that “perfect” temperature? And how will regulating CO2 get us back to and maintain that “perfect” temperature?
I’ve never heard of a bigger fiction than “mean global temperature” in my entire life.
@ur momisugly hotrod (15:52:41)
That is a most interesting line of inquiry. First we would have to determine how much methane and CO2 are emitted by bison as compared to cows.
This study (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19930006291_1993006291.pdf#page=16) states three different numbers for cattle based on different estimates:
201 million head = 3.95 tg / yr methane
197 million head = 4.68 tg / yr methane
182 million head = 6.38 tg / yr methane
As for buffalo, they estimate 76 million head = 2.19 tg / yr methane.
Since the 201 million number above was the same source as the buffalo estimate, let’s use those numbers to compare to each other:
1 million cattle = 0.01965 tg / yr methane
1 million buffalo = 0.02882 tg / yr methane
So we see that, provided these estimates are correct, cattle produce only 68% the methane that buffalo do. I wonder if the numbers are similar for bison. At least for Indian cattle versus buffalo, each one of the former in place of the latter would reduce methane emissions by a significant amount.
I was just wondering if Mary H. remembers saying that who ever uses a Nazi reference first, loses the argument. Seems to me that “death trains” is one of those references. Back to you, Mary, …….
So CO2 doesn’t absorb infrared rays?
Warmer is Better.
Yeah, that’s why south america, africa, south asia are thriving while Europe, US, Japan are suffering.
homerule strategies…
Read this site for a while. Eventually, you’ll realize that the discussion concerns global temperature, not local variations and latitudes.
Kirk H.:
“…cattle produce only 68% the methane that buffalo do.”
Ah, but now there are more than 305 million more head of humanity in the U.S. That way more than makes up for the difference in decreased buffalo methane emissions, no?
‘Scuse me while I go out for a bean burrito…
CT tries to make George Will look wrong since his article was published on Feb. 15, however Will was referring to the info as of Jan. 1.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
Nice try CT.
Thanks for the link, Smokey.
CO2 + PEOPLE = GHOST
@ur momisugly Smokey (20:27:49)
Actually, doing a bit more looking around, here are some more numbers (humans too):
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=edD2Hnh_H78C&oi=fnd&pg=PA219&dq=bison+cattle+methane+emissions&ots=SEb1BtO2-5&sig=FImKZ0BcU7lPlZc4MiN5PPTY3Y4#PPA223,M1
humans = 0.01 tg / yr methane (everyone in the world)
wild animals = 4 tg / yr methane
livestock = 74 tg / yr methane
The number for wild animals seems incredibly low to me, but there you go. In any case, emissions directly from humans, regardless of the number of delicious bean burritos consumed, are insignificant.
Have people noticed that when the name “Hansen” is on the line, the number of responses jump to large numbers?
As if there is a rota, or a security scan “close the gap”.
As a serious cyclist, I know that humans are much less powerful than cars or even mopeds. One conversion for power is 1 horsepower = 746 watts. Lance Armstrong put out 400 watts when leaving other cyclists in the dust going up a mountain. Well trained sport cyclists may sustain 250 watts, whereas someone riding at a confortable pace to the local store might be 40-100 watts, or about 0.1 horsepower. It makes sense that top atheletes are on the order of half a horsepower, while a comfortable output is on the order of 0.1 horsepower.
Someone else can check how much power a gas burning vehicle uses, but my guess is at least a few horsepower. If a reasonably efficient car gets 30 miles per gallon (13 km/L), we could also check the energy content in kcal of a gallon of gasoline. Don’t believe every thing that is posted. A cyclist putting about 0.1 hp can be compared to a car using 100 hp. The cyclist takes 3 h to go 30 miles while the car takes 30min. This suggests that the car used more than 100 times more fossil fuel compared to the cyclist’s renewable fuel to go a comparable distance.
I compiled my opinion on Hansen’s learned experience here.
http://www.itsonlysteam.com/articles/Peer_Reviewed_Advocacy.html
How he can be in NASA and expounding on this junk when he could be looking at Massive Black Holes at the center of our Galaxy shows what he truly is … a politician.
Why anybody would chase such an obvious dead end with no line of enquiry when the resources are out there and available to look back in time at the origins of the universe but instead you look at poorly constructed decoupage in code … Hansen is either special or twisted … definately not gifted.
Bill Illis (17:37:30)
Oh dear, that’s really poor, Bill.
Pangani’s study is an excellent and careful piece of work. You messed up by mistaking a column of control measurements as global temperature data. It’s the control data that’s a “hodge podge” since it doesn’t have a systematic relationship to global temperature. You plotted the wrong column unfortunately.
If you’re going to look at data published by scientists in the scientific literature you should make an effort to find out what the study is, what the data means, and plot the appropriate data.
The post where I said that referred to someone who made a direct, not allegedly insinuated reference to the Nazi’s. The person directly linked Goebbels propoganda to the post in question. A similar thing has happened on this post with someone directly linking the Nazi’s to environmental programmes.
Taken in the context of the interview there is no insinuation in Dr Hansen’s quote to the holocaust at all. He is expressing his fears that if the burning of coal increases, as it is likely to do in India and China, then the environmental damage this would do will result in the extinction of many species (as mentioned above we are all connected so man would certainly face less productive times) and also result in inundation of coastal cities as well as loss of fresh water from the melting of glaciers (a particular problem if this happens with the Himalayan glaciers.
This is why he refers to coal trains as death trains, nothing more. To try and put it as a direct comparison to the Nazi’s is typical of the paranoia present amongst many of the sceptic crowd and again smacks of conspiracy theorists. Since winning the blog award I notice the activity of the conspiracy theorists seems to have increased considerably. A shame, but once the readership increases, inevitable.
Physics of CO2 absorption bands precludes global warming. Insuffient heat is absorbed from ground IR. Even with double the conc of CO2 to 700ppm no more heat is absorbed; it is absorbed in a shorter disstance thro the atmosphere (see Hoyt C Hottel charts for CO2 emissivities in The Chemicl Engineers’ Handbook.