Guest post by Richard S. Courtney
There is need for a new policy on climate change to replace the rush to reduce emissions. The attempts at emissions reduction have failed but there is a ‘Climate Change Policy’ that would work.
Climate change is a serious problem. All governments need to address it, and most do.
In the Bronze Age Joseph (with the Technicolour Dreamcoat) told Pharaoh that climate has always changed everywhere and always will. He told Pharaoh to prepare for bad times when in good times, and all sensible governments have adopted that policy since.
But now it is feared that emissions from industry could cause additional climate change by warming the globe. This threatens more sea level rise, droughts, floods, heat waves and much else. So, governments have attempted to reduce the emissions of the warming gases, notably carbon dioxide.
The UN established the Kyoto Protocol which limits the emissions from developed countries until year 2012. But the Kyoto Protocol failed. It has had no detectable effect on the emissions which continue to rise. Now the pressure is on to get a successor to that Protocol for after 2012, and negotiations are being held around the world to decide the new treaty at a conference in Copenhagen in December (CoP15).
But the negotiations have stalled. All industrial activity releases the emissions. Developing countries say they will not limit their emissions, and industrialised countries have problems reducing theirs. China releases more of the emissions than any other country, is industrialising, and says it is entitled to the same emissions per head of population as the US. So, China says it intends to increase its emissions more than four fold. India says the same. The US is having problems adopting a ‘Cap & Trade’ policy that would harm American industries and force industries from America to China. The EU adopted a ‘Cap & Trade’ policy that collapsed and has not affected the EU’s rising emissions. The Australian Parliament has recently rejected a similar policy.
Politicians have been responding to the failure of the Kyoto Protocol by showing they are ‘doing something’. They have adopted pointless and expensive impositions on energy industries, energy supplies and transportation. And the public is paying the large costs of this in their energy bills.
The Copenhagen Conference will provide a decision because it has to, but that decision will have no more effect than the Kyoto Protocol. And this will put more pressure on the politicians to be seen to be ‘doing something’ with further cost and harm to peoples and to industry.
There is as yet no clear evidence that the additional climate change is happening. But environmental groups are pressing the politicians to act “before it is too late”. And politicians are responding because of the fear of dire consequences from the additional climate change.
Politicians have decided how much additional climate change is acceptable, because they have decided that global temperature must not be allowed to rise to 2 degrees Celsius higher than it was at the start of the last century. But they need a method to overcome the urgency which is forcing them to do things and to agree things which do not work.
There is an available solution to the problem. The urgency is because of fear that the effects of the emissions may be irreversible. However, the additional climate change can be reversed, quickly, simply and cheaply. This provides a complete solution to the problems.
There is no need for the Copenhagen Conference to reach a forced, inadequate, and premature agreement on emissions. The Conference needs to decide funding to perfect the methods to reverse the additional climate change if and when that becomes necessary. This decision would give politicians decades of time to conduct their negotiations about what to do to limit the emissions. So, the politicians can agree actions that work instead of adopting things everybody knows do not work.
The solution addresses the cause of the fear of the additional climate change. Every sunbather has noticed it cools when a cloud covers the Sun, and this is because clouds reflect sunlight to cause negative radiative forcing. The fear of the additional climate change is based on an assumption that global temperature is determined by net radiative forcing, and the emissions induce additional positive radiative forcing.
The forcing can be altered in many ways. An increase to cloud cover of a single percent would more than compensate for the warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the air. There are several ways to increase cloud cover, for example small amounts of sulphates, dust, salt or water released from scheduled aircraft would trigger additional cloud formation. And the carbon dioxide in the air is very unlikely to increase so much that it doubles.
And there are many other ways to reflect sunlight so it is not absorbed by the ground. Crops could be chosen for reflectivity, roofs could be covered with reflective materials, and tethered balloons could be covered in reflective material.
Each of these options would be very much cheaper than constraining the emissions by 20 per cent for a single year. So, any delay to implementation of emission constraints by use of these options would save a lot of money.
Global temperature has not again reached the high it did in 1998 and has been stable since. But it could start to rise again. If it does then use of one or more of these options could be adopted when global temperature nears 2 degrees Celsius higher than it was at the start of the last century. This would be a cheap and effective counter measure while the needed emission constraints are imposed. Indeed, it would be much cheaper than the emission constraints. It could be started and stopped rapidly, and its effect would be instantaneous (as sunbathers have noticed when a cloud passes in front of the Sun).
Until then there would be no need for expensive ‘seen to be doing something’ actions such as capturing and storing carbon dioxide. Energy and financial policies would not need to be distorted, and developing countries could be allowed to develop unhindered.
Indeed, there would be no need to deploy the counter measures unless and until global temperature rises to near the trigger of 2 degrees C rise.
The various methods for reflecting sunlight need to be developed and perfected. They each have potential benefits and problems which need to be assessed. But if the problems are detectable they need not be significant. For example, the additional cloud cover could be induced over oceans distant from land. This requires much research.
Politicians know they need to be seen to be ‘doing something’ and they would be seen to be doing something worthwhile. Each counter measure experiment and demonstration provides opportunity for media coverage.
Richard S. Courtney
Energy and Environment Consultant
Richard S. Courtney is an independent consultant on matters concerning
energy and the environment. He is a technical advisor to several UK MPs
and mostly-UK MEPs. He has been called as an expert witness by the UK
Parliament’s House of Commons Select Committee on Energy and also House
of Lords Select Committee on the Environment. He is an expert peer
reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in
November 1997 chaired the Plenary Session of the Climate Conference in
Bonn. In June 2000 he was one of 15 scientists invited from around the
world to give a briefing on climate change at the US Congress in
Washington DC, and he then chaired one of the three briefing sessions.
His achievements have been recognized by The UK’s Royal Society for Arts
and Commerce, PZZK (the management association of Poland’s mining
industry), and The British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Having been the contributing technical editor of CoalTrans
International, he is now on the editorial board of Energy & Environment.
He is a founding member of the European Science and Environment Forum
(ESEF).
h/t to Barry Hearn
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Alan the Brit (03:37:46) :
“Sunsettommy has hit the nail on the head here. From my all too brief conversations with Richard S. Courtney via Facebook, he has identifed a problem the politicians have. I believe he is one of the good guys here. When the dust settles eventually, politicians will realise their folly that they have played with their buckets & spades for too long, & dug themselves into one heck of a hole out from which they cannot climb, without looking rather foolish but then again that’s never stopped them before. (I have a soft-spot for them all really – it’s a bog on Dartmoor!) Richard has offered them a ladder to climb back up in the form of geo-engineering. This way they can be seen to be doing something, yet they will do Sweet Fanny Adams in reallity (if they know what reallity is).
One proviso, if this is mishandled in some way, we may end up providing a solution to a non-problem that leads to a real problem for which we have no solution, i.e. causing global cooling which drags us into a premature ice-age. In our feeble attempts at playing God we could really screw things up in the process, the very thing we’ve been accused of in the first place. I have a real problem with enviromentalists (empahsis on the last 3 syllables) who think that we have the power to switch climate at the flick of a switch! Anyway if it happened the UK Marxist Greens will be pleased for the polar bears & penguins, but the Marxist Socialists will be upset because 2 million people freeze to death – unemployed!”
Alan, as I have understood the scam correctly, the initiators have an Anglo-Dutch background.
It’s the Third World that is going to pay the price in human casualties.
We pay with our assets and our freedom.
It’s a scam that can backfire easily because other powers have a different agenda.
Impossible to convince our stupid and irresponsible politicians if you accept Climate Change to be a serious problem.
Sorry about the double post fellas – sticky fingers then lost the original somewhere in the ether!
AtB
The only way to stop the AGW/Climate Change madness is to prevent CO2 legislation in the USA. Without the USA Copenhagen is dead.
For this the current political establishment has to go.
Fortunately opposition is building:
http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2009/08/watch-for-signs.html
This is a bad idea, based on the false premise that climate change is a “big problem”, or at least that warming is. Cooling, on the order of another LIA certainly could pose big challenges for mankind. Yes, I understand the rationale of offering the politicians an “out”. Voting them out instead is a far preferable option, and, given people’s mood lately, is doable.
I doubt they would go for it anyway. They would simply say something like “we’re very glad that you “skeptics” finally get that there is a problem with our climate, though we may not agree on what’s causing it. There may be a place for geoengineering, and that is something certainly worth exploring. However, in the mean time, in order to avert climate catastrophe we still need to cut our C02 emissions immediately, particularly the Western countries”.
Geoengineering is crazy stuff anyway, with very likely unintended, and perhaps even dangerous consequences.
I think some of you here are still misunderstanding what Richard is trying to do here.He specifically writes at my forum “I am firmly convinced that dangerous AGW is not a problem and cannot become one. ”
He has posted comments at my forum and at Junkscience forum,making it clear that he wants the lawmakers to stop passing emission controls that are damaging the economies and at great cost to the consumers,to something else where the damage is much less,to provide a way out for the politicians who have become stuck on the emissions reductions proposals bandwagon that is not working and cause great harm.
Here is what Richard wrote in reply to a comment of mine:
“Friends:
In retrospect, I think I need to add a point of clarification to my above post.
Sunsettommy is right when he says my main reason for proposing this policy is:
“I think his main goal is to have the empty suits get away from the cap and trade and other ruinous economic proposals, to talk about Geo-engineering, as a way out of a hole they stupidly put themselves in.”
Richard”
http://www.politicaldivide.info/globalwarmingskeptics.info/forums/index.php?topic=183.msg1272#msg1272
Here I will post a link to my forum to a thread Richard started concerning this very topic.There you can read for yourself what Richard is trying to tell us there,what he envisions:
http://www.politicaldivide.info/globalwarmingskeptics.info/forums/index.php?topic=183.
Please try to understand where he is coming from.
Joel Shore 18.54.58
“ One of the ironies of this discussion is that so-called “skeptics” often seem to endorse these geoengineering schemes as a better alternative to actually decreasing our emissions even though these skeptics are arguing that we know less about climate than we think we do. Why this is ironic is that the amount of knowledge one needs of the climate system to successfully implement a scheme to “swallow the spider to catch the fly” is considerably larger than the amount of knowledge one needs to simply conclude that it is wise to reduce our emissions so that we limit further tampering to the climate system. (And, of course, this doesn’t even address other effects such as the acidification of the oceans.)”
I think you misunderstand the motivations of the “so called skeptics” as you so politely call us. The fact is that any policy which offers an alternative to the destruction of our society as we know it has to be far more palatable than what is being called for by our various nieve or corrupt governments. We also know that the excessive warming will never happen anyway and so don’t have to consider the consequences of any negative environmental impacts.
The climate scientists can have no argument with the proposals on the basis that they have already effectively suggested such remedies. They suggested that the reason for the cooling in the 60s-70s was due to aerosol emissions from power stations and we all know that that nasty chemical hole which mysteriously exists only at the south pole, presumably from penguins sniffing halocarbon refrigerants, is preventing the antarctic ice sheet from melting because that hole is sucking all the heat out. So if the climatologists are correct about their fears on anthropogenic warming, we can safely assume they are also correct on their theories of the reasons for observed cooling where it occurs and we can rest in the knowledge that the planet will be saved at the eleventh hour.
Which only leaves the greens to persuade and that is the biggest hurdle of all. With their disproportionate influence on our politicians, it means that while the proposal from Richard S Courtney is an excellent one, it will never get off the ground.
Colin Porter
I agree with sunsettommy – Mr. Courtney has posted here before and I never thought his posts were alarmist . It is encouraging that one in Richard’s position would take such a stance in the first place . That he offers an alternative , face saving out for climate “scientologists” and politicians is decent of him .
Unfortunately , it may never come to that . An alternative to Waxman/Markey was offered in the House – essentially a “Manhatten Project” for climate change which would have involved a long term study of climate and ways of dealing with it , if necessary – was shot down .
Our real hope is to get across to more people like Richard Courtney before it it too late .
I’m with INGSOC. This is junior high essay standard. Shallow, ambivalent and not at all “robust”.
It sort of implies that CC is bad without saying why. It sort of implies that human acticity is contributing to CC without estimating magnitude or mechanism.
On the other hand, its very wishy-washiness may give it some influence.
Ojala!
Ron de Haan:-)
Couldn’t agree more!
AtB
Mike McMillan says:
Except for those who actually like to breath…and don’t like acid rain. (In fact, I wasn’t sure if you were being serious or not here.) Also, since CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere but aerosols in the troposphere rain-out pretty quickly, one would have to keep increasing the emissions of the aerosols.
In the stratosphere, the aerosols can stay around longer (and cause less serious pollutuion effects), which is why the geoengineering schemes contemplate injecting them fairly high in the atmosphere.
Colin Porter says:
Except, as I noted, the effect of aerosols is not an exact cancellation of the effects of GHGs. Furthermore, as I noted, one has to have a much better knowledge of the details to play this sort of game than one does to simply play the game of perturbing the climate system less by reducing our GHG emissions.
And, in fact, the amount of cooling…or even radiative forcing… that aerosols cause is in fact a lot more difficult to calculate than the warming due to GHGs (whose radiative forcing can be estimated to about 10% precision). This is in fact the main reason why the global climate behavior during the last several decades (or even the whole instrumental record since the mid 1800s) does not provide a very good constraint on climate sensitivity, which is better constrained by other empirical data. (However, I think the estimates for radiative forcing for aerosols is better constrained when they are in the stratosphere than the troposphere since the indirect effects that they have on clouds wouldn’t be an issue there.)
Jeff L says:
Well, it depends what governments you are talking about. I think a lot are in fact considering it. However, what some people seem to propose is massive subsidies for nuclear (or maybe just having the government massively invest in such plants). To me, that doesn’t seem justified. Given that nuclear is a relatively-mature technology and that it does have some very real potential problems, it seems better to me to just increase the cost of energy from fossil fuels so that their price better reflects their real costs (i.e., includes the externalities) and then if nuclear can better compete in such a market, then so be it. However, I don’t see the argument for advantaging nuclear power over other solutions, like alternative energy (including many not-yet-mature technologies that still haven’t achieved their full potential ecomnomies-of-scale and thus have a greater justification for some subsidization) and energy efficiency technologies.
Well, I think that is a fair question. And, it is unfortunately true that political realities do tend to prevent the optimal solutions from being implemented.
Actually, whether it is regressive or progressive or somewhere in between depends strongly on the details of how it is implemented. I have not seen a study that shows exactly what the consequences are for the bill as it finally passed the House. Have you?
Alan the Brit (09:55:43) :
Ron de Haan:-)
Can I third the motion?
Personally I think Obama is way out of his depth. America, and the rest of the sane world, needs a better leader.
(Moderators: If this is too near the political bone, please snip as necessary.)
Joel Shore seems to think that “reducing our perturbation” by “reducing CO2 emissions” “makes sense”-nothing could be further from the truth. Our modern society is dependent on energy, and there is no current viable alternative to CO2 emitting sources. No amount of nonsense can change the fact that there is nothing at all “prudent” about reducing CO2 emissions. The whole idea is to reduce climate change, but climate change will continue to happen whatever we do, even by his arguments-the only difference will be our ability to adapt to inevitable changes, which will be greatly reduced in his idiotic idea of educing emissions.
You know, it is one thing to spread nonsense defenses of the “consensus” in areas of science where you think you know a thing or two, but your grasp of economics appears to be ludicrously flimsy, and I advise you to stuff it and stop embarrassing yourself.
Colin Porter (08:15:30) :
I’m afraid brother that Joel Shore and “the greens” are one and the same. Hence the problem.
Though several have touched on it indirectly, the remaining question to Richard S. Courtney concerns this notion of his that our only worry about ‘climate change’ is global warming. No sir, climate change is what has happened since earth began and it has gone BOTH ways. Given a choice between 5 degrees C warmer or 5C degrees cooler – I’LL TAKE WARMER! But that’s only my personal opinion based on the historic data that warming provides more food and and there is less disease, etc.
So what about cooling? Is there a way to make clouds go away and, if doing that doesn’t provide enough extra warmth to stop an ice age, (assuming we manage to survive without rainfall) – then what?
“Politicians have been responding to the failure of the Kyoto Protocol by showing they are ‘doing something’”
And herein lies the problem!
Politicians always need to be seen to be “Doing Something”, I can’t remember a UK election, where a party said “If we’re elected, we’ll scrap the following laws……….”
The good news is, that since the majority of the electorate have realised that temperatures haven’t risen since 1998, the chances of further legislation being rammed through are poor.
Even our own Government has admitted that motoring taxes are primarily to raise revenue.
one thing that you can be sure of, is once politicians decide that they’re aren’t any votes to be gained from standing “Against Climate Change”, then they’ll be hanging out the likes of Hanson & Schmidt to dry!
I have been wondering whether policy makers are indeed considering engineering solutions. I became suspicious as soon as the G7 suddenly changed tack from CO2 emissions to limiting temperature anomalies to 2C. The reason is not difficult to fathom. The awful truth has dawned upon them. No amount of cap & trades, home insulation and changing light bulbs is going to have a snowflakes chance in hell of reducing emissions. Are they going to destroy their countries while the BRIC economies surge ahead? I don’t think so. Just wait and see. Whether Waxman Markey gets passed or not is irrelevant because it won’t result in any emission cuts whatsover. So we get to Copenhagen in December, and I bet it will be smuggled in as plan B. Eventually, the cap & trade will be just some other tax that we have to pay while emissions continue to rise. Then plan B will become plan A.
Friends:
I am away from base with limited web access so this response to your discussion must be brief. Sorry.
I am disappointed that so few of the commentators here actually read what I wrote but felt the need to comment on something else.
Sunsettommy repeatedly tried to point out what my essay actually says but he too was ignored.
I am not suggesting that the geo-engineering be adopted. Indeed, my essay says;
“Indeed, there would be no need to deploy the counter measures unless and until global temperature rises to near the trigger of 2 degrees C rise.”
I am content with that because I am confident mean global temperature will not rise to that level for decades and probably not at all. I anticipate the AGW-scare will have faded away by then as previous scares have (few remember ‘acid rain’ unless reminded of it).
And I did not choose the trigger of 2 degrees C rise. As my essay says;
“Politicians have decided how much additional climate change is acceptable, because they have decided that global temperature must not be allowed to rise to 2 degrees Celsius higher than it was at the start of the last century.”
Furthermore, I have no fear of unintended consequences because
(a) the geo-engineering is very unlikely to be needed, and
(b) it could be started and stopped very rapidly (sulphates rain out in under three weeks), and
(c) development trials are the suggested action for politicians to be seen to have adopted.
The claims that we should continue to ask politicians to do nothing are naïve and plain dumb. The reason that has not worked is because the politicians have to be seen to be doing something in response to Green lobbying. It does not matter if the politicians are doing something, but they would lose their jobs if they were not seen to be doing something.
Saying there is not a problem that science can see ignores the fact that the politicians can see a problem they have to be seen to be addressing.
My essay attempts to overcome the political problem. Perhaps those who have commented on what my essay is not about would care to suggest another way to overcome that problem?
Richard
I expect this to be the next bill in Congress, Whitehouse wants Climate Control bill passed. LOL Obama wants to control the climate, woohoo, what power!
Sun Control bill is next
Bunch of clowns, that’s all we have now in Washington.
timetochooseagain:
To the extent to which your statement is true (which I will get back to), the reason there are not current viable alternates is because the market is sort of fussy about solving problems that it doesn’t know exist. And, as long as the costs of CO2 emissions are not borne by the sellers or buyers of the products, the market does not know that the problem exists. It is a classic free-loading problem.
And, I don’t think your statement is really that true anyway. It is true that there is no single “silver bullet” to solving the emissions problem, but there are many different available technologies that, taken together, can likely solve the problem for the next 50 years (see, for example, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/305/5686/968 )…and there is likely to be much more developed once cap-and-trade or carbon taxes put the market incentives in place.
I think it is most helpful for the libertarian / free market types to recognize this if they simply substitute a different scenario for the one being contemplated: Imagine that instead of the current climate crisis, it turned out that there was simply much less coal, oil, and natural gas than there actually is. Would these same people be claiming that we are economically-doomed? I don’t think so. Instead, they would be extolling the virtues of human ingenuity as expressed through the market system in finding substitutes!
In reality, the only fundamental difference that I see between this scenario and the one we actually face is that the current case has the additional flexibility that we don’t even have to wean ourselves off of the fossil fuels to the extent that we are able and willing to capture and permanently sequester the CO2.
Hi all-
Geoengineering approaches in general have serious problems, although there is one solution, “carbon negative” production of electricity, that is often lumped in with geoengineering, that I favor.
Changing the albedo of the earth does very little to stop acidification of the oceans, for example.
I don’t think we are smart enough to add another factor to an expanding series of vicious cycle positive feedbacks, and so bring it under control.
The thing to do, of course, is to get as much carbon out of the system as possible and put it back underground, and then allow the climate system to heal itself. A concept combining biomass fuel with carbon capture and storage underground is capable of doing this.
http://www.etsap.org/worksh_6_2003/2003P_read.pdf
The best way to stop global warming, IMO, is to transform every coal fired power plant on the planet to a “carbon negative” power plant, that combines biomass or biochar fuel with carbon capture and storage. There are existing advanced power plant designs incorporating oxyfuel combustion with a “topping cycle” that are capable of compensating for the cost of CCS with increased efficiency:
Most coal fired power plants are located on rivers for cooling water. All of the land upstream of the power plant on these major rivers becomes a potential natural biomass and biochar collection network for biomass or biochar fuel floated down the rivers. Biomass could be burned in these converted coal fired power plants, transferring carbon back underground.
Deep saline aquifers underlie most of the country, capable of storing the captured CO2. It’s starting to look like porous “pillow” basalt rock, which underlies many geological regions including the Juan de Fuca plate off the Pacific Northwest, appear capable of chemically transforming CO2 into carbonate rocks.
Climate engineering is not the way to go, I think. We are not smart enough to sucessfully inject a new factor into an extremely complex situation that is spiraling out of control.
We need to put the CO2 back underground, no matter what the cost. Combining biomass fuel sources with CCS allows us to do that.
Don’t inject any new factors into a situation already spiraling out of control.
“Put the genie back in the bottle” instead, and allow the Earth’s climate system to heal itself.
Joel Shore (19:43:48) :
I think it is most helpful for the libertarian / free market types to recognize this if they simply substitute a different scenario for the one being contemplated: Imagine that instead of the current climate crisis, it turned out that there was simply much less coal, oil, and natural gas than there actually is. Would these same people be claiming that we are economically-doomed? I don’t think so. Instead, they would be extolling the virtues of human ingenuity as expressed through the market system in finding substitutes!
In reality, the only fundamental difference that I see between this scenario and the one we actually face is that the current case has the additional flexibility that we don’t even have to wean ourselves off of the fossil fuels to the extent that we are able and willing to capture and permanently sequester the CO2.
You seem to be saying that the ends justify the means, as all AGW supporters do.
Neither cap and trade nor taxation nor sequestration will work in bringing the temperature down. Even if one believes the @ur momisugly#$% IPCC models all these schemes might slightly reduce the temperature in 100 years, not enough to stop anything catastrophic, if a catastrophe were in the charts. China and India will not play ball.
The end result will be the end of western civilization with the economic and technological vitality centered on India and China due to the impoverishment of the taxed and pyramid schemed ( cap and trade) western citizens and the judicious outsourcing of whatever industries are left also to India and China.
Well done, AGWs . I hope you are taking intensive Chinese.
CO2 is not an issue. We have 380 ppm of it in the atmosphere, that is such a low concentration that it can’t do anything. There is no “emission problem” when it comes to CO2. You think our 380 ppm are bad (that’s 3 out of 10,000 by the way)? Try Venus, with more than 60% CO2 (and being a lot closer to the sun, too.)
Take the infamous experiment with the glass container, a human and a heat vision camera. Oh yes, the CO2 in the container will eventually “filter out” the heat signature of the human. Sure. Once you start reaching 60, 70, 80, 90 and even 100% CO2 in the container. But with our CO2 concetration? Nothing happens. It’s so small that it’s completely insignificant.
Consider this: mankind produces 1% of all the CO2 that insects produce by breathing alone (and that is only if we assume that all insects are as small as a drosophila fly, which they clearly are not, thus insects actually produce even more CO2.)
Or, even simpler:
Weight of atmosphere: 5.3×10^15 tons
CO2 in atmosphere: 0.035% (1.8×10^12 tons)
Mankind produces 7 billion tons CO2 = 7×10^9
Which are: 0.377% of the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Or, while I’m at it:
Bear with me now. Here come a few examples of what procues how much CO2:
Humans:
Number of humans 2003 globally: ~6.1 x 10^9 humans
About 15 liters CO2/hour (physiology textbooks) with 6×10^9 humans
= 1.54 x 10^9 tons CO2/year
Cows:
Ammount globalöy = 1.3 x 10^9 (1999)
600 liters breath/hour (grazing), 4% of that are CO2 = 24 liters/hour
= 5.36 x 10^8 tons CO2/year
Pigs:
number of pigs = 904 x 10^6
180 liter breath/hour, again are 4% CO2 = 7,1 liters/hour
= 1.1 x 10^8 Tonnen CO2/year globally
Sheep:
number of sheep: 1.06 x 10^9 (2000)
360 L/h breath, of which are 4% CO2 = 14.4 liters/hour
= 2.62 x 10^8 tons of CO2/year
All countet together = 2.45 x 10^9 tons CO2/year
Which are 10% of the CO2 mankind produces. Which makes that… 0.1% of the CO2 insects produce.
Oh and organisms in the ground in Germany produce:
7.79 x 10^8 tons/year
Traffic in Germany produces:
1.7 x 10^8 tons/year
Thus organisms in the ground in Germany (both farming and forest) produce 4.6 times more CO2 than human traffic.
Those are simple calculations based on physiology textbooks and official population numbers.
As for the “hot spots”:
Let’s assume the sun heats up Earth and Earth reflects energy of 360 Watts per square meter (W/m²) into the atmosphere. In 6,000 meter altitude you’d receive 36 Watts. If this would be reflected (which it can’t, 2nd law of thermodynnamics prohibits this), you’d get a whole 0.27 Watts back on Earth. Not really an impressive number, is it?
CO2 is also important for life. Without CO2 there wouldn’t be any life on this planet. Plants need CO2. And with photosynthesis they create O2. And without O2 humans wouldn’t exist.
Conclusion can only be: CO2 is not an issue, definitely not.
Friends:
Is it really too much for me to ask people to discuss what my essay is about?
It does not matter whether or not CO2 is an issue for climate because politicians have accepted that it is, and they cannot be seen to have changed their minds.
It does not matter whether or not people have the opinion that climate mitigation by geo-engineering will work or not. Only experiment and demonstration will prove that.
But it does matter that politicians are being forced to take harmful actions because they have accepted that CO2 is an issue for climate, and scaremongers are demanding that politicians take harmful actions on that basis.
No comment above – not one – has stated any flaw in my argument in my essay.
And no comment above – not one – has stated any flaw in my proposed policy option to remove the politicians’ need to adopt the harmful policies they are now applying.
If the commentators can see any such flaw in my argument then why have they not stated it?
And why have they not stated better alternative policy options than my suggestion if they can think of them?
Importantly, why are so many people wanting to talk about related issues and not the subject of my essay? Is it because they think I am right and they want to deflect consideration of what my essay says?
Richard
I wholly endorse Richard’s thread here. It’s about giving the little darlings the ladder out of the pit they have dug themselves. It is always a good idea to keep ones enemies closer, & hopefully they will be grateful for the helping hand preventing them from making themselves look more useless than they actually are! That bog on Dartmoor is very big you know!
AtB