Hansen on "death trains" and coal and CO2

Stevenson: you should seriously reconsider your knowledge of physics… CO2 is responsible for several percents of the greenhouse effect

And this Holdren kook is not any saner.

Nature will claim at least 10 billion lives by 2100!
Yes, we are all going to die – no matter what we do.

I fully agree with most of the comments here. It truly is a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, world. My father suffered from dementia & passed away some years ago as a result. My mother is now in a home in a sadly similar condition. I do hope Dr Hansen will be given the appropriate treatment & care he needs as his condition deteriorates in the coming years. The advocation of acts of violence to his fellow man by his fellow man is surely the rantings of a disturbed mind? I suspect Gorey Al is of a similar disposition by advocating acts of civil disobedience in the name of Global Warming. I thought we were seeking a peaceful world in which to dwell not one of anarchy.
So Dr Hansen, Dr Pope, Gorey Al, et al, if the science really is settled as they claim, end of storey, & all you publicly funded (taxpayer) AGW believers & alarmist scientists & activists out there, won’t have the slightest objection to governments devastating your budgets, & making a fair few redundancies & early retirements on reduced pensions, in an effort to help the public purse in these financially strained times? Clearly they’re are all surplus to requirements if the science is settled?

I am coming to the conclusion that we might actually benefit from encouraging Hansen and a few others to really speak their minds and make the political agenda more transparent.
Here in the UK we have many ‘distinguished’ people (and not a few organisations) proposing ideas that would seem to make it inevitable that our ‘grandchildren’ will not have much to look forward to. Jonathon Porrit for example, an upper class greenie from way back, seems convinced, according to his public utterances (that the population of the planet needs to be drastically reduced for humanity and, by inference, biodiversity) to survive. There are many like him. A quick review of the information available on the Optimum Population Trust web site (last time I looked) offers some insight.
Given that natural population replacement levels (absent population redistribution via what we refer to socially as emigration/immigration) is pretty much flat lined or going negative in the ‘industrialised’ world one wonders who the targets of Porrit’s statements – and by inference the others including Hansen – might be.
Add in the proposed urgency that Hansen ascribes to the problem and one has to assume that what is proposes would require some draconian decisions whichever way one cuts it.
In the UK we have a relatively benign climate and historically always have had in the last 10,000 years or so but with a few cold blips now and again. Survival even in the cold time is probably not too difficult compared to, say, Canada. Or Texas. Or even places like Chicago with huge temperature extremes to deal with.
Take away the coal (or possibly a nuclear replacement) from the immediate future and you are going to kill people by proxy on a scale not previously experienced in human interactions. It could easily make the early 20th century flu epidemics look like a benign experience. There are times, and I hesitate to write this, when I wonder if the DDT banning exercise in Africa (notably) has been perpetuated as an experiment to see what effects the act of NOT saving lives might have on population growth, displacement and social changes. Presumably it also keeps the global population a little lower than it would have been. Could coal be the industrialised world’s DDT experiment?
So the choice seems to be, absent any time for breeding re-education along Chinese lines, business as usual and watch humanity struggle a few decades from now, maybe, or more direct action and enforce the struggle now.
Quite how one would persuade people not to dig up coal that would help them to survive I am not sure. I guess one would work that out in the process of persuading China. India, Brazil, et al. that they should abandon coal for their energy purposes. That’s not a snide remark but a simple application of logic based on Hansen like arguments about urgency.
Porrit seems to be suggesting that massive population reduction is required in the next 30 years or so. About one generation period in the ‘third world’, two lifetimes in the ‘developed’ world.
So the third world would be achievable simply by mass sterilisation. Perhaps it could be made selective as well to improve the prospects for any future progeny produced from the survivors. Given the continuing early death rates from disease, conflict and all that we claim to want to eliminate from the harsh lives of the third world yet seem unable to achieve, simple sterilisation and abandoning any attempts to improve health and conditions should work just fine and fit into the 30 year project cycle rather neatly.
The developed world is a bit more of a problem. People obviously live too long for any ‘natural’ cycle to work effectively and the problem is that much greater, apparently, due to our rates of energy and materials consumption.
We might take a few steps that would fit with the easiest path for the third world. As a start our focus on health and keeping people alive at any cost, whether in terms of medical support or health and safety in the workplace, seem to be at odds with a population reduction policy. In any case the potential disruption of energy supplies might make the provision of medical support very challenging and must surely conflict with current health and safety policies. With the proviso that immigration is curtailed and breeding is discouraged (one might assume that such change would be natural for a society in reduced circumstances but that would seem to be too risky to let it go unmanaged) it should be possible to reduce life expectancy by a suitable amount and ensure that replacement levels are held within targets.
However I am not sure that those steps would provide the level and speed of reduction that the OPT and the Hansen’s see as necessary. So the fallback plan, perhaps to be activated after 10 years if the population models suggest that the rate of change is not fast enough, would be to eliminate parts of the population. This is perhaps a concept we should discuss to be prepared for when the time comes.
To put it into a current context (removing any variables about what the prior steps may deliver since they cannot be known and may not work anyway), consider your immediate family and assume a requirement for a 50% cull. Who gets to go?
I am, of course, assuming that such a decision would be offered in democratic form, unlike the original death train concept. This may not be the case – it would be more likely some form of draft. People NEED to have control.
Now, if one accepts that the level of population may indeed become unsupportable (and the natural world experiences such things all the time does it not?) humanity could well be forced to adapt and reduce numbers in time. But there is a huge difference between natural (though not necessarily pain free) adaptation that becomes inevitable and something that is forced upon people based on minority social philosophies and unprovable predictions.
In order to deliver a Hansen/Porrit ‘solution’ in the time scales they seem to think are required I am reasonably sure that widespread human pain and suffering will be the order of the day. In fact it is pretty much guaranteed since without it there will be no progress towards the objective.
The ‘business as usual’ alternative, with the ‘as usual’ component modifying and adapting as science, technology, health and social attitudes change (Why DOES it seem that prosperous, developed countries end up with a flat or declining population whereas undeveloped experience large population growth …. rhetorical question.) would seem to be a far more moral position to adopt. Where is my logic lacking?
Of course I recognise that at my age I might not live to see the results well developed by either scenario should either be adopted. Hansen has a few years on me so I guess he would not expect to see them either, whether or not they occur as quickly as he seems to think necessary.
It might just workout for Porrit though.
Surely this whole debate will not reduce to a case of salving egos will it?
It seems clear that some of the conditions that led to the deployment of the original death trains and the like around the world – groupthink, a critical mass of herd mentality – pre-exist today with different targets in sight.
There have been a number of experiments in the last few decades that seem to show how relatively easy it is to convince people to act in ways that one might not expect them to before conditioning. (Yes this might be called ‘training’ and one clear example would be in the military. But the point here is that people will, in many circumstances, follow a ‘leader’s’ suggestions willingly without having to be hard trained. Gentle preparation is enough.)
So, since I think most people will agree, some grudgingly, that we cannot know the future climate or predict what its effects will be with any real skill, we are left with the choice of pretty much guaranteed pain in the near term (one might actually conclude right now) or some possible discomfort leading, perhaps, to greater disruption in the longer term.
To put it another way – will the grandchildren exist at all or might we expect them to exist but maybe need to be adaptable?
Choices, choices.
Or not, it would seem, if some people have their message accepted as policy.

foinavon,
The Late-Ordovician glaciation 440 million years ago occurred when CO2 levels were 3,500 to 5,000 ppm.
The most likely cause is that the super-continent of Gondwanaland moved across the South Pole. Think Antarctica times 10.
Where were half of the continents 300 million years ago during the next major glaciation event. South Pole again not surprisingly.
Whenever a continent is over one of the poles, there is glaciation. When more than half of them are locked together over one of the poles, there is an extended cold climate on Earth.
Right now, there is one continent over the south pole which has been glaciated for 35 million years, one big island close enough to a pole to have been glaciated over for the last 15 million years and we have two big continents which are close enough to the poles so that they are half frozen over about 90% of the time over the last 2.5 million years.
The climatologists need to take some geology classes.

Pierre Gosselin (04:13:32) :
You try to give the misleading impression that the conditions are static. THEY ARE NOT! And they never have been.

Please don’t put words into my mouth, I have never said conditions are static, of course they change through time. The point here is the rate of change and an organisms ability to respond to rapid changes. Past history shows us that extinctions occur when rapid change happens and organisms do not have the
time needed for evolutionary change.

tallbloke (02:34:25) :
You’re right! It must have been the dinosaurs holding BBQ’s and riding round in SUV’s!

More accurate to say it was a combination of asteroid strike and the lav outflows from the Deccan Flats. With you it seems impossible to distinguish what are flights of fantasy and your own beliefs, just though I’d clear this up in cas anyone was confused.

It was 20 times higher 500 million years ago, around 8000ppm. Just when the ‘explosion of life’ happened.

So you don’t think it has anything to do with increased free oxygen levels? How much of the life from 500,000,000 YA is stiill around?
This goes back to what should be an undisputable fact, an organism is adapted to the current conditions of its niche. An organism can adapt to changes to conditions of its niche as long as it has the time to do so. For bacteria this can be weeks or days, for larger more complex animals the necessary adaptation may take tens or hundreds of thousands of years (barring the usual few biological exception of course!). Sudden changes to an organisms environment can make it more prone to disease. The more specialised organisms are those more at risk, those able to cope with changes by having a more varied diet for instance, or adapting their environment have the greater chances of survival initially. The loss of the more specialised organisms could be devastating to food chains. An example would be the loss of one species of orchid could wipe out the Brazil Nut. (There is only one bee species able to pollinate the Brazil Nut flower, this bee is dependant on one species of orchid to obtain the pheremone the male needs to court the female. You lose the orchid you lose the nuts. This example shows how everything is connected.

Ron de Haan (00:19:41) :
Regarding your link to the youtube presentation and your query:
Who is going to verify the figures?
Some time ago I came across a small document by one David Cotton (DPhil in Chemistry from Oxford and has worked in data analysis for the last thirty years) entitled:
Comparison of the CO2 exhaled from our lungs with the carbon dioxide released from burning coal, oil and gas in the UK
He calculates, based on an average daily intake of 2,500 kCals per day, that each human being breathes out 894 grams of CO2 per day.
My link to the document no longer works but I guess that figure is a reasonable starting point. Mr. Cotton is far more qualified than I am. It would be interesting to find other calculations.

Robert Austin (18:17:03) :

foinavon:
Thank you for your contributions. I for one appreciate your efforts.
I have am dubious of the ability of proxies to give us good data about the temperatures and atmospheric conditions of the very distant past. On the other hand, if one really is able to show correlation between CO2 and temperature, one has not proved cause and effect. Your expectation that 500ppm to 600ppm CO2 would lead to loss of most of earth’s ice would appear to depend on substantial positive feedback in the GCM’s. I do not think the science to date justifies assigning any particular feedback number. Without positive feedback, CO2 is a spent force beyond present concentrations due to the logarithmic absorption relation.

I would say that there’s a substantial amount of empirical data that supports a climate sensitivity near 3 oC (plus/minus a bit) per doubling of atmospheric CO2.
The expectation that relatively low CO2 levels (5-600 ppm and higher) will result in very substantial ice sheet melt, comes also from analysis of the relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels, Earth temperature and onset of glaciation throughout the Eocene-Oligocene transition (Oligocene covers the period 33.5-23.5 MYA the early stages of which saw the first substantial build up of ice sheets in the “modern” era). So the evidence indicates that the Eocene atmospheric CO2 levels were relatively high (>1000 ppm) but drifted downwards towards modern levels by the end of the Eocene, with ice sheets starting to build up a little over 30 MYA when atmospheric CO2 levels dropped below around 5-600 ppm.
So one can just play these scenarios in reverse. Very substantial ice sheet formation was associated with atmospheric CO2 levels dropping below around 5-600 ppm. Going in the other direction (increasing atmospheric CO2 levels above these values) is likely to put us back towards a low ice Earth. Of course these phenomena take a long time to accrue. Likewise there is a bit of hysteresis in the comparison of forward (lowering greenhouse gas concentrations below the threshold for major glaciation) and reverse (raising greenhouse gas levels above the threshold for major deglaciation), since albedo effects “resist” the phenomena in both directions. But we’re very likely setting ourselves up for a long, slow (hopefully!) melt.
see for example:
M. Pagani et al (2005) Marked Decline in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations During the Paleogene Science 309, 600 – 603.
The relation between the partial pressure of atmospheric carbon dioxide (pCO2) and Paleogene climate is poorly resolved. We used stable carbon isotopic values of di-unsaturated alkenones extracted from deep sea cores to reconstruct pCO2 fromthe middle Eocene to the late Oligocene (45 to 25 million years ago). Our results demonstrate that pCO2 ranged between 1000 to 1500 parts per million by volume in the middle to late Eocene, then decreased in several steps during the Oligocene, and reached modern levels by the latest Oligocene. The fall in pCO2 likely allowed for a critical expansion of ice sheets on Antarctica and promoted conditions that forced the onset of terrestrial C4 photosynthesis.
and there’s quite a lot of recent analysis of the greenhouse gas “thresholds” for the onset of glaciations during many periods:
DeConto RM et al. (2008) Thresholds for Cenozoic bipolar glaciation Nature 455 652-654.
Author(s): Fletcher BJ et al (2008) Atmospheric carbon dioxide linked with Mesozoic and early Cenozoic climate change . Nature 1, 43-48.
Abstract: The relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and climate in the Quaternary period has been extensively investigated, but the role of CO2 in temperature changes during the rest of Earth’s history is less clear(1). The range of geological evidence for cool periods during the high CO2 Mesozoic ‘greenhouse world'(2,3) of high atmospheric CO2 concentrations, indicated by models(4) and fossil soils(5), has been particularly difficult to interpret. Here, we present high-resolution records of Mesozoic and early Cenozoic atmospheric CO2 concentrations from a combination of carbon-isotope analyses of non-vascular plant (bryophyte) fossils and theoretical modelling(6,7). These records indicate that atmospheric CO2 rose from similar to 420 p.p.m.v. in the Triassic period (about 200 million years ago) to a peak of similar to 1,130 p. p. m. v. in the Middle Cretaceous (about 100 million years ago). Atmospheric CO2 levels then declined to similar to 680 p.p.m.v. by 60 million years ago. Time-series comparisons show that these variations coincide with large Mesozoic climate shifts(8-10), in contrast to earlier suggestions of climate CO2 decoupling during this interval(1). These reconstructed atmospheric CO2 concentrations drop below the simulated threshold for the initiation of glaciations(11) on several occasions and therefore help explain the occurrence of cold intervals in a ‘greenhouse world'(3).

The Outside Air CO2 Level (Right Now) In Downtown Washington D.C. Is 391.56 PPM (Pennsylvania Avenue).
The Indoor Level Of CO2 (Highest Reading) Is 655.03 PPM.
We Won’t Start Introducing Any Larger Quantities Of Outside Air Until The Indoor Level Reaches 400 PPM Over The Outdoor Level (Current Setpoint Is 791.56 PPM).
No One Has Dropped Dead Yet From The CO2 Levels (As Far As I Know) And We’ve Been Operating This Way For Many Years.
Postscript: The Indoor Plants Are Very Healthy. Wouldn’t Want To Practice Species Discrimination You Know!

Addendum: I Failed To Mention That The Above Conditions Are For A Commercial Office Building.