Guest post by Thomas Fuller
Like mountain fruits enjoyed out of season and shipped long distance, there are climate pleasures I need to avoid, such as piling on with criticism of 10:10, Michael Mann, Joe Romm and my beloved late, great state of California.
It’s too easy and doesn’t get the job done. Summer is the silly season and we’re having a lovely fall in San Francisco.
It’s been a lovely fall in many parts of the world, and a less than lovely spring in many parts down South. But overall, be prepared for claims of the hottest month leading to the hottest year on record.
Let’s assume for the moment that it turns out that way (I think a sharp drop starting this month means we’ll miss that dubious distinction narrowly). What really should we think if this year is the warmest on record? And if, as I strongly suspect, next year is dramatically cooler due to the confluence of La Nina and a shift in the PDO, what should we make of that?
I don’t know.
I assume this world will continue to warm slightly. I assume that we will not agree to cut our energy usage drastically. I assume we will not make a whole-scale conversion to wind, solar and biofuels.
I assume, then, that the voracious appetite for energy in the developing world will mostly be satisfied with coal, and that in 40 years we will be consuming more than three times as much energy as we do today–mostly generated by coal.
I personally consider that a grave problem for the world, no matter what it portends for global temperatures.
But if you consider what we have not done, perhaps we have no right to complain. And I’m not talking about Kyoto, Cap and Trade, blah-blah-blah.
What we have not done is enable nuclear power to be used as much as it should, due to fears of nuclear waste. What we have not done is push combined heat and power, due to their lack of lobbying strength. What we have not done is finance Waste to Energy plants, due to the pressing need for cash for, I don’t know, financing Facebook and American Idol. What we have not done is push for uprating our hydroelectric facilities, clear the way for pumped storage for a not-so-rainy day, or invest in other utility-level storage technologies.
The Green Consortium that has been yelling at us about climate change and energy has ignored all of the technologies that could make a difference. And skeptics have been too busy noting all of their errors, personal quirks and logical absurdities to notice that yes, people, we have an energy problem coming down the road.
As I’ve written here before, I believe forecasts of energy consumption by the DOE and the UN are far too low. If I’m right, and the world’s energy needs triple before 2050, the amount of coal we will burn to satisfy those needs will make skies the world over as grey as the skies over most of China’s cities today. Whatever it does to temperatures (and I do believe it will do something, warming regional temperatures and causing further misery in the developing world), the normal pollution and black carbon will amount to a problem for the world.
I’ll repeat the simple math: We used 500 quads last year. A quad is equivalent to 36 million tons of coal being burned. A straight line continuation of consumption trends puts us at 2,000 quads around the year 2030, and maybe 3,000 quads by 2075. That’s a lot of coal.
There are days when I am optimistic about our ability to prevent such a firestorm. This is not one of those days. I read the news today and saw the foolishness of the green movement, the correctness of the skeptical criticism, and sat down to write this feeling like we’re all missing the point.
Richard Lindzen and Anthony Watts, John Christy and Steve McIntyre, all bright, sincere and honest people, are correctly noting the defects of the warmist arguments. And the warmists can’t seem to string two sentences together without making a huge mistake. They haven’t done anything right in a year.
But we’re still going to be burning a heckuva lot of coal in 2030. It’s really not a good thing to look forward to. I intend to be here in 2030, a lot greyer and more irascible, I’m sure. But I don’t want the skies to be as grey as my hair.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
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Bob Highland says:
October 8, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Thankyou for that. I notice it mentions all the usual suspects when it comes to government handouts.
It does also suggest they are trying to raise steam, fascinating since the main plant. unless it is very old, almost certainly runs supercritical: it is not that you could not do that with solar power with a focused furnace, the French built one in the 1960’s.
But not with their kind of technology.
Furthermore using low pressure and temperature steam to boost the ultra low turbine cycle is not very useful. And less efficient, strange as it might seem, than trying to preheat the water.
I also note how carefully the engineering comments in the report you advised avoid discussing actual efficiencies or indeed practicalities: all fluff I would say.
It doesn’t work does it? If it did some hard figures might be useful but somehow I don’t imagine they are going to be published.
All in all fascinating and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I had no idea that this kind of scam went on. I know better now.
And will ask some questions.
Kindest Regards
Henry Pool:
There is no problem.
You have it wrong by some orders of magnitude, aren’t you?
Heh – Roger Sowell – so perhaps all us engineers will have to move to China to do neat nifty things to help move civilisation along, and leave the morons in the rich first world countries to rot in their own juices for a while. Then charge em huuuuuuuuge consultancy fees to come back when they figure out that living in a cave and shivering in the dark aint much fun!
Rabe says:
You have it wrong by some orders of magnitude, aren’t you?
Henry@Rabe
I’m not sure what you mean. I am saying if global warming is -or becomes – a problem then Co2 is most probably not what is causing it, e.g.
http://letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
I am saying it probably comes from the water vapor when it traps heat from earth or when it condenses and releases its heat into the atmosphere….
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/08/avoiding-the-guilty-pleasures/#comment-502841
Harry the Hacker: this is EXACTLY what Ayn Rand advocated in her monumental book, Atlas Shrugged. It is already happening in California. Men (and women) of ability no longer contribute much. Why should they?
California is collapsing – but like a dinosaur, it takes a long time for the tail to realize the head is dead – the dang thing is just too big. California has, among other things, hronic budget deficits of approximately $24 billion each year, crumbling infrastructure, very high state income taxes, high state and local sales taxes, high property taxes, high real estate prices, very difficult and costly government regulations in almost every aspect of life and business, massive drug problems, ineffective schools turning out illiterate graduates, unions with cushy pensions for public employees, the list goes on and on.
It will take a few more years, but California’s collapse is guaranteed. This is like watching a train wreck in ultra-slow-motion.
Like mountain fruits enjoyed out of season and shipped long distance, there are climate pleasures I need to avoid, such as piling on with criticism of 10:10, Michael Mann, Joe Romm and my beloved late, great state of California.
So now instead of leading to the loss of “all our civil rights” it’s your “guilty pleasure”? Tom, you are the one who keeps bringing it up after we’ve previously just about talked it to death, and likewise you also still seem obsessed with trying to mischaracterize the main issue, which is that ipcc Climate Science is not real science but instead only a massive Propaganda Op. directed at looting and controlling as many people as possible, which must be stopped by disabling the Propaganda Machine, which does involve effectively dealing with people like Mann and the 10-10ers’! – a necessary process which does divert Society from a rational approach to real problems, but which you now try to also blame on sceptics, when the sceptics are in fact trying to argue mightily for a return to a rational, truely scientific approach to these real problems!
So why don’t you just stop bringing it up over and over? Because by now it’s clear, imo, that you are only still talking to yourself about your own ongoing internal wrestlings with the various issues, which you haven’t been able to resolve.
You might also try to reduce the hyperbolic, disasterizing thinking.
The sustainability of world growth patterns in general is a big question. We have a persistent trait of focusing narrowly, perhaps because mental multi-taxing is impossible when too many variables are poorly known. Regardless, let’s think of the various patterns of (increasing) growth we see:
1. Population,
2. Consumption of goods,
3. Consumption of energy,
4. Consumption of food,
5. Consumption of space.
The continued significant warming of the world is true in all events only if a background of recovery from the Little Ice Age continues. If a portion of the current warming is still LIA-recovery, which the IPCC in AR4 specifically denies, then the AGW is small enough to be reversed (or at least stopped) by a counter-cyclic cooling as predicted by some for solar reasons. At any rate, the AGW increase will not be significant even with, as postulated by the IPCC, increases in population, consumption and resultant CO2. And, so far, the temperature response is at the bottom end of the IPCC range even with their pessimistic views. So the continuation of the temperature rise is not the real danger we face by 2030 or later.
Yet you must wonder: how sustainable is the increase in the other parameters? Is there enough food to be vaccumed from the planet to sustain in an increasing fashion the population growth? Drinkable water? Habitable lands? Need for infrastructure? Can there be a quad-ing of energy production in 20 or 30 years? The recent situation in Pakistan suggests the answer is “no”. The country and leaders have created nuclear power plants, weapons and vast armies to growl at India, but the international community still feels it necessary to rally behind the flood victims of this summer. Why? Because the country as a whole hasn’t the infrastructure or development ability/choices to protect its own people. And the leaders don’t care enough to put the welfare of their own citizens ahead of nuclear bombs.
The limit of just one of these patterns controls the rest. Will it be food? Population density and lack of adequate living spaces that lead to pandemics or wars? Ability to provide the basics for large increases in citizens must be there before the citizens can hope to rise to 1st world energy and goods consumption levels. Who sees this happening in the areas of “problem” population increases? Africa, SE Asia, South America – none have the state power and will of a China to make things happen. Until they do, the improvement of the rest of the world to 1st world standards is a 1st world liberal pipedream – or nightmare.
The combinations of sustainability limits is what we are looking to over the next several decades. If populations exceed food outputs, you know none of the other patterns of growth are going to continue. If high-population growth areas can’t deal with their infrastructure limitations of maintenance and development, well, you see where this all goes.
The patterns, by themselves, look likely to continue until the next millenium. Taken as a whole, however, their interactive and iterative natures suggest otherwise. Whatever happens, there will be a reckoning coming. Malthus had the concept right, but technology and timing wrong. The technologists and engineers might feel that their inventiveness will save the day as it has up to now, but if you look at even the last 50 years of population increases in the 1st world, the problems solved up to now are a shadow of what is coming in the next 50 years.
WHAT JPEDEN SAYS!! Fuller appears to be full of Fuller, and can’t give up on even ONE little point, it appears! It reminds me of the One in Washington, for crying out loud!
I got a whole lot less worried about nuclear waste when I figured out that the “25,000 year storage problem” was to return waste to background levels of radiation. But the original ORE was not at background. If you make the standard “return the waste to the level of the original ORE” you get about 250 years of storage. Not much of an issue at all.
Per all the coal to be used: Yes, but it will all be burned in China who are well on their way to being the manufacturing center of the world for everything. And that is not a hypothetical. China is buying up coal (and signing 20+ year contracts where it can’t buy outright) around the world. So New York and London will have clean skys. For the simple reason that no one will be able to buy any fuel when they live in poverty…
Doug Proctor says:
October 10, 2010 at 10:02 am
Doug, first of all, population growth slows dramatically with economic development. Data is clear on that. There are no exceptions, unlike the fairly-tale scenarios from Malthus, Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, and others. Therefore, MORE development means LOWER population growth. MORE development will mean new technologies to allow greater efficiency of food production — the increase in the efficiency of which has outstripped the need for food by population growth dramatically in the last 50 years. Or, haven’t you noticed? And that was before bio-technology, which will make Norman Borlaug’s “green revolution” look so, well, 20th Century.
If we follow what “the greenies” want, there will be LESS development (due to restricted energy use — restrictions in the use of nuclear being the most egregious and obvious example to date), and LESS development will mean GREATER population growth.
Malthusians and Luddites are so wrong for so many reasons… Stop wringing your hands and your psyche. Humanity is doing pretty darn well — in case your haven’t noticed the increase in life-span, education, reduction in hunger, etc. over the last 400 years — except for the misguided impacts from the misanthrops among us, whether religious or secular; with and from whom we will always suffer.
But, do not fear, we do have problems on which folks with your desire to improve humanity through social action (if you are incapable of technical invention) ought to focus your attention. And CO2 and nuclear bombs are not among them. How about raising your voice against the degradation of society in Venezuela being perpetrated by Hugo Chavez? How about raising funds for mercenaries to defend the people of Darfur from the rape of the Sudanese government? I could go on, but I think you get my point. Those are REAL human tragedies occurring in the real world today, not the ones of your imagination, which is what they are: imagined futures that, no, will never be as you fear because the world does not work they way you believe. It doesn’t.
As for nuclear bombs, yes, they are horrible. But, they exist; get over it. That genie isn’t going back into that bottle any time soon no matter what anyone does. The best we can do is to keep them out of the hands of misanthropes and fools (which means a strong national defense — yes, warriors and spies) and threaten anyone else with certain annihilation if they imagine using them would be in their self-interest.
The world is a dynamic cauldren of energy and change and technology that, net, has made the lives of people more meaningful, self-satisfying, and enriching for others, and which allows the good any one person can do to be spread to billions of others through global communication and commerce. Embrace it, make it better. Don’t fight against it. Doing so is tantamount to fighting against what it means to be human; unless, of course, you’d rather have us back in pre-industrial times with a societal requirement to kill anyone who dares to invent something new…. for that is the ultimate conclusion to your logic.