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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“The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.”
James Hansen goes farther out on a limb. He’s using more Nazi Holocaust vocabulary. Doesn’t he have any shame?
I’m beginning to wonder if he is a bit mad.
Oh, and btw… we have sisters working underground in CO2 atmospheres of far greater than 500 ppm. They get the powder loading and other duties, and they work just as hard as us guys. Anybody who can’t handle working at 1,000 to 2,000 ppm CO2 can’t handle working in the first place.
I prefer warmer climate too, but that’s not our problem.
People like Hansen and Gore have it upside down & backwards.
We need to prepare for much colder times ahead.
Let Hansen & Gore run somebody else off a cliff or pick on another planet.
MarcH (13:15:45)
There is a CO2 monitoring facility near Mt. Etna at an elevation of 45 meters that was reporting an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 381 ppm while Mauna Loa was reporting an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 385 ppm.
My conclusion is that volcanoes attract CO2 monitoring stations. (:-)
Ron de Haan: Thanks for the link to green-agenda.com, which everyone here should study. In effect, the rational remarks found here are considered irrelevant by the church of Gaia, as represented by the Club of Rome, the UN, Agenda 21, etc. A new pseudo-religion has been invented, and the effects will be grim. The agenda is transparent and available to anyone who spends a little time reading the remarks of the high priests.
Paul Shanahan (14:49:59) :
Berner’s Geocarb model (a crude representation of which is presented in the sketch in the top post) is just that a model. It’s a very nice one, but it doesn’t claim to represent the true atmospheric CO2 levels existing at specified periods in Earth’s history, and certainly can’t be used for assessing the discrete relationships between atmospheric CO2 and temperature in the past. Obviously, since atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations can vary on the 10,000,000 year timescale, one can’t just predict from a model, interpolate over 10 mllion year intervals, and assume that one has defined the [CO2] existing at some specified time in the past (e.g. at the time of the Late-Ordovician glaciation)!
Nor can one take sparse paleoCO2 proxy data and just “join the points”. So I don’t think there is a “scientific”graph of continuous CO2 levels from proxies in the deep past. It wouldn’t make much sense, since interpolating over millions of years of proxy-free time is unjustifiable without independent evidence that CO2 levels evolved “continuously” according to the interpolation. On the other hand there is a wealth of data in which contemporaneous paleoCO2 data and paleotemp data are compared. These indicate a rather strong link between temperature and greenhouse gas (CO2) concentrations through the last 600 million years. The review by Royer [***] compiles the data up to around 2006. Some of the more recent data is cited below[*****].
Incidentally, like much of the data that bears on this subject, the evidence supports the Late Ordovician glaciation as resulting from a drop of greenhouse gas levels to below the then threshold for glaciation, in this case via rather long-term alterations in the carbon cycle. However in the specific case of the Late-Ordovician, the data aren’t yet sufficiently strong to pin down this event and its causes (e.g. see abstract of Saltzman and Young below [*******])
[***]D.L. Royer (2006) “CO2-forced climate thresholds during the Phanerozoic” Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 70, 5665-5675.
[*****]R.E. Came, J.M. Eiler, J. Veizer et al (2007) “Coupling of surface temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Palaeozoic era” Nature 449, 198-202
Doney SC et al (2007) “Carbon and climate system coupling on timescales from the Precambrian to the Anthropocene” Ann. Rev. Environ. Resources 32, 31-66.
W. M. Kurschner et al (2008) “The impact of Miocene atmospheric carbon dioxide fluctuations on climate and the evolution of the terrestrial ecosystem” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105, 499-453.
D. L. Royer (2008) “Linkages between CO2, climate, and evolution in deep time” Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 407-408
Zachos JC (2008) “An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics” Nature 451, 279-283.
Horton DE et al (2007) “Orbital and CO2 forcing of late Paleozoic continental ice sheets” Geophys. Res. Lett. L19708 (Oct. 11 2007).
B. J. Fletcher et al. (2008) “Atmospheric carbon dioxide linked with Mesozoic and early Cenozoic climate change” Nature Geoscience 1, 43-48.
And so on….. there’s a large amount of data on this now…
———————————————-
[*******]Saltzman MR, Young SA (2005) Long-lived glaciation in the Late Ordovician? Isotopic and sequence-stratigraphic evidence from western Laurentia. Geology 33, 109-112.
Abstract: The timing and causes of the transition to an icehouse climate in the Late Ordovician are controversial. Results of an integrated delta(13)C and sequence stratigraphic analysis in Nevada show that in the Late Ordovician Chatfieldian Stage (mid-Caradoc) a positive delta(13)C excursion in the upper part of the Copenhagen Formation was closely followed by a regressive event evidenced within the prominent Eureka Quartzite. The Chatfieldian delta(13)C excursion is known globally and interpreted to record enhanced organic carbon burial, which lowered atmospheric pCO(2) to levels near the threshold for ice buildup in the Ordovician greenhouse climate. The subsequent regressive event in central Nevada, previously interpreted as part of a regional tectonic adjustment, is here attributed in part to sea-level drawdown from the initiation of continental glaciation on Gondwana. This drop in sea level-which may have contributed to further cooling through a reduction in poleward heat transport and a lowering of pCO(2) by suppressing shelf-carbonate production-signals the transition to a Late Ordovician icehouse climate similar to10 m.y. before the widespread Hirnantian glacial maximum at the end of the Ordovician.
Come on people, grow up a bit. You know that I was talking about global average concentrations of CO2, not the concentration in your kitchen when you’ve got the stove lit and you’re holding your breath and burning coal. This kind of wilful misunderstanding is all too common among deniers. It’s infantile.
Mike D – what a wonderful fantasy, in which any time it’s hot, wonderful things happen. Shame that the real world doesn’t remotely work like that.
Peter: “20,000 people die of the cold in Britain alone every winter” – not really. If it’s the cold that kills them, why is it observed that colder countries have lower winter excess mortality?
“Warmer is Better” is just banal nonsense. Tell that to the families of the 35,000 who died in the European heatwave of 2003.
This has been discussed in great detail, there are far more deaths each year from COLD than HEAT. Picking an anolomous year as proof of something has also been beaten to death.
Next Hansen, Hansenites, et al. you need to wake up to a simple fact, we are going to burn coal for the next 20 – 30 years, so get over it. Even if we start today building windfarms using all the resources of the USA’s unlimited treasury, the additional production required, mining, creation of factories, resource refining, transportation, power lines, sub stations, smart grid development, production of insulators, transformers, convertors to replace coal for electrical generation would shoot us past the 550ppm in less than a quarter decade just on the CO2 emissions from production of the alternative energy products and we we not even be at the halfway mark to our goal due to growing baseload demand.
Perhaps the DUH factor due to little or no understanding of industrial economics and innovation to production cycles and the reality of current technology and resource capacities is so bewildering to some because they are too busy trying to get the Nobel for Over-Dramatic Apocalyptic Prediction based on Models to take five minutes and get a clue! Hansen should concentrate on climate science and leave the commentary to the media who do just fine on their own.
More numerology: I’ve noticed a tendency for far more of the AGW supporters to have names of 5 or 6 characters (with the occasional 4, especially in the context of a 6) and a big shortage of longer names. Why does this matter? When people make up names, they tend not to choose long ones like Goldendigavitch and do tend toward short familiar easy to type ones… But not clearly hiding, like “DJ”. Trying to ‘blend in’ while hiding.
(I know, this is a ‘bit paranoid’; but I spent a fair length of time in security and ‘population count’ is built into the Cray as a primitive function for a reason… it’s stuff like this that turns up many security issues…)
My conclusion from this is that either we have a statistical anomaly; or some part of: Rachel, Mary Hinge, John Philip, Joel Shore et. al. are fictional for the purpose of trolling. Some will be real, but the distribution is wrong.
An analysis of ip numbers and a statistical analysis of spelling and diction choices would be enlightening. (People have favored words… a decent ‘finger print’ they have trouble hiding. For example, I like to spell behavior “behaviour” even though most of my ‘style’ is American.) Further, an analysis of ‘time stamps’ would tend to show if folks were ‘working shifts’.
This is a statistical thing, so just because my last name is “Smith” doesn’t make is suspicious; but too many “Mary Smith” and “Tommy Jones” vs the norm is suspicious…
My conclusion? Either we have AGW trolls, or they are just not willing to use their real names. (Why? Don’t ask why…)
(No, I can’t help noticing this stuff. My brain keeps track of the distribution of trends in data, like it or not, want it or not, best I can do is point it in one direction or another… It’s an Aspe thing… )
One trend? More coal means more people living. Less coal, more people die. Just turn off the electricity in Chicago in January for a graphic demonstration… And since 1/2 the electricity comes from coal, that is a reasonable example. Another? To make steel, you need coal. How many people would die if we take away the steel skyscrapers from Chicago? The cars, trucks, ships, trains delivering food and fuel? (And clothes and coats and snow shovels and medicines and…)
If you remove coal from the American economy you kill America. Maybe with a 1/2 century effort you could convert away; but anything short of that is just killing people.
Warm is good, cold is bad.
Coal is good, death is bad.
Honest is good, trolls bad.
Rachel
If you read a book such as Richard Dawkins excellent book “The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution” you will be able to trace the ancestors of man all the way back in time. These ancestors all survived whatever planetary conditions they encountered along the way, both hot, cold and in-between, with many varying rates of CO2, eventually evolving into anatomically modern humans around 100,000 years ago. Man (and our ancestors) is far more resilient that you give credit for.
Adaptation is the most important word for you to reflect upon. Adaptation. This is why man can live from the cold of Siberia to the heat of the deserts and the tropics. Adaptation. This what will enable us to survive the future changes in our climate in the coming years, be they a little bit warmer, or a lot colder (read ice age).
Although I am no follower of Hansen’s neverending “dangerous climate change” prophesies, I think we really should start capturing the CO2 emissions from coal plants and cement plants at least and we should sequester that underground or use it in agriculture/(real) greenhouses.
The technology is close to being used on a large-scale coal plant and there is at least one sequestration project which is sinking 3.5 Megatonnes per year. The technology is probably 5 to 10 years away from being proven.
The next problems are that electricity costs have to basically double to make this work and we would need to invest $500 billion or more in 1,000 different coal plants/cement plants around the world to put even a dent in the CO2 emission numbers.
Forget about cars, CFL light bulbs, solar or wind. Compared to stopping emissions from coal plants and cement plants, this is just a waste of scarce resources.
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/activity/methods/gas.php
A primary objective in gas monitoring is to determine changes in the release of certain gases from a volcano, chiefly carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide. Such changes can be used with other monitoring information to provide eruption warnings and to improve our understanding of how volcanoes work.
You cannot seriously compare climate and CO2 for much more than 50My in past. Your plot, for which there is no reference data and is just about the only one I have ever seen on the web, is irrelivant to the current situation.
look here for land positions at the time of high CO2. How configurations of land mass affected the climate cannot be guessed.
http://www.scotese.com/earth.htm
Mike
Bill Illis:
I believe that CO2 sequestered underground has so far proven to be futile, as it eventually bubbles right back up.
Now, putting CO2 to work in greenhouses, coupled with the heat from the exhaust anyways, is a great idea. Produce electricity, produce food.
Waste not, want not.
Life is good.
Bill Illis (15:42:18) :
“I think we really should start capturing the CO2 emissions from coal plants and cement plants at least and we should sequester that underground or use it in agriculture/(real) greenhouses.”
———————————————-
What is the scientific reason for your belief?
foinavon (15:32:49) :
Thank you for the information. I think what you are essentially saying is that the graph posted at the top of the page cannot be dis-proved, nor can it be proven as accurate. On that basis, I am happy to accept it as a reasonable re-creation of historical levels until something better comes forward.
Robert Bateman (14:56:57) :
I think you’re misunderstanding my post. Of course atmospheric CO2 concentrations were very high in the deep past (but nowhere near 5% at least in the last 600 million years where we have reasonably good data on the relationships between CO2 levels and temperature!). There’s no real doubt about that. In the early-Ordovician CO2 levels were very high and the Earth was a lot warmer than now. The evidence indicates that alterations in the carbon cycle resulted in cooling during the mid-Ordovician and the late Ordovician is associated with a drop in greenhouse gas levels, likely below the then threshold for glaciation (see citations in my post [foinavon (15:32:49)]).
Obviously if one goes way way further back in time (to the Archaeon, for example) methane was the dominant greenhouse gas that kept the Earth warm in the face of a very puny solar output. In fact the first glaciations on Earth 2.5 billion years or more ago were probabaly the result of the evolution of the first photosynthetic organisms that produced oxygen which (once the iron ions in the oceans were oxidised to “rust”) leaked into the atmosphere and oxidised the methane.
One can’t assess Hansen’s (or science’s, in general!) understanding of the relationship between the Earth’s greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperature without recognising the obvious fact that during periods in the past when the solar output was a lot weaker than now, greater greenhouse gas concentrations were required to maintain the Earth in an ice-free state. The evidence indicates that we’re likely to (eventually!) lose much of the ice on Earth once CO2 levels rise above around 5-600 ppm. In the late Ordovician, CO2 levels had to be higher than 2-3000 ppm to maintain the Earth in an ice-free state..
Bill Illis (15:42:18) :
Although I am no follower of Hansen’s neverending “dangerous climate change” prophesies, I think we really should start capturing the CO2 emissions from coal plants and cement plants at least and we should sequester that underground or use it in agriculture/(real) greenhouses.
The technology is close to being used on a large-scale coal plant and there is at least one sequestration project which is sinking 3.5 Megatonnes per year. The technology is probably 5 to 10 years away from being proven.
The next problems are that electricity costs have to basically double to make this work and we would need to invest $500 billion or more in 1,000 different coal plants/cement plants around the world to put even a dent in the CO2 emission numbers.
Forget about cars, CFL light bulbs, solar or wind. Compared to stopping emissions from coal plants and cement plants, this is just a waste of scarce resources.
Bill,
You agree on a 100% rise in electricity costs and building material to solve a non existing problem?
Rachel and like minded people:
If we assume that the AGW hypothesis is correct, then Mars with its atmosphere of 90% CO2, should be a tropical paradise. Why is that not the case?
I can’t think of a scientific reason for using CO2 emission & heat from Coal-fired plants, but I can think of an economical and energetic one:
Conservation of resources.
Agriculture today is petroleum intensive. Why burn it twice when you can get two for the price of one?
Forget about the C02 and get the truly toxic stuff. Let the plants eat the C02.
Maybe we can find plants that will biologically consume the mercury and the sulfur. Bury the mercury.
Anthony,
As I wrote to Benny Peiser [CCNet] a few weeks ago, the warmist/alarmist obsession with increasing CO2 levels misses out on a key observation. The only time in the geological record that the earth has had CO2 levels as low as today [Rachel’s and foinavon’s protestations notwithstanding] around 380 ppmv, was during the Carboniferous Period, some 175 million years ago.
There are now those who are proposing not just carbon sequestration but CO2 scrubbing from the atmosphere as well. PR maestro Richard Branson of Virgin fame has a multi-million dollar prize for doing just that.
What gets lost in all of this is that CO2 levels at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, at approx 260 ppmv, were amongst the lowest on record ever. The very serious part about this is that at CO2 levels below 220ppmv plants start to suffer and one of the fundamental consequences of which is that they have a hard time producing oxygen. Very low CO2 > less or no plants > less oxygen > no Homo Sapiens. Not very complicated, and something we might want to keep in mind.
Bill Illis (15:42:18) :
This is the effect of higher energy prices:
http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/news/Cold-weather-deaths-double-warn-campaigners/article-686410-detail/article.html
Hansen & Gore want cap & trade to make us poor slobs pay like serfs for the right to eat and stay warm.
Green to them is the color of mind-numbing profits (aka Greedy Green).
Green to me means using nature to solve the problem, as it was nature that gave us the oil, coal & gas in the 1st place.
Science is supposed to be making our lives better, not scaring us into crowning a new line of kings.
Peter: “20,000 people die of the cold in Britain alone every winter” – not really. If it’s the cold that kills them, why is it observed that colder countries have lower winter excess mortality?
What exactly does that mean? Lower than normal or lower than other countries not known as being colder suffering increased mortality when confronted with a sudden, extreme, unexpected cold spells. Sort of like a normally cooler country suffering a hot spell. We see that here in the U.S.- excess deaths in New York when the heat rises above 100f When that happens, we Texans just shake our heads. We are adapted to that and don’t consider it extreme On the other hand , let it drop to 0 to 10f here in portions of Texas, and we have a rise in deaths.
Simply put, extremes are dangerous to the unprepared.
E.M.Smith (15:38:14)
That is a rather paranoid post, if I may say so! John Philip and Joel Shore may or may not be real names, but what difference does it make? They write well-informed, well-reasoned and atriculate posts. One shouldn’t attempt to wash ones hands of good arguments by dismissing these as “trolling”!
I don’t use my real name on the Internet. I did a few years ago and had an unpleasant experience where someone chose to hunt down my work address and engage in harrassment that required me to reconfigure my security profiles, disappear from the web for a spell, and change my email and web addresses. I’m not anyone in particular…however I can be found on the web. So I prefer not to use my real name. I certainly have no interest in “trolling”. Whether or not someone uses their real name makes no difference to me. As with science in general it’s all about the evidence and the arguments!