Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In the run-up to the next-to-last big meeting of the UNFCCC (United Nations Frequent Climate Change Carnival) held in Copenhagen in 2009, I showed the following graph under the title “Why Copenhagen Will Achieve Nothing”
Figure 1. Carbon Emissions 1970-2006 by Region, and Global (red).
At that time it was clear that if the entire industrialized world cut back to 1980 emission levels, the climbing global emissions would scarcely change.
We are now coming up on the 17th UN Climate Change Carnival … so many clowns … so few circuses. This Carnival will be held in Durban, South Africa. How have CO2 emissions evolved since the Copenhagen Carnival? The latest figures are just in. Many electrons are being sacrificed in anguish about the numbers. “Record High 2010 Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Fossil-Fuel Combustion and Cement Manufacture Posted on CDIAC Site” shouts the headline from … well, that’s actually the self-referential headline on the CDIAC page itself. The CDIAC site says that the CDIAC site says that the CDIAC site says that a record …
Our friends at the UK Guardian newspaper enthuse that “Greenhouse gases rise by record amount.” Elsewhere the hype rises roughly proportionally with the distance from understanding what the numbers actually mean.
So how did we set this new record for carbon emissions? Figure 2 shows the information from the CDIAC site.
Figure 2. Changes in emissions from 2008 to 2010.
Hmmm …
In interpreting these numbers, it is useful to remember that carbon emissions measure what is generally called “development” —access to all of the good things that energy brings to the citizens of the country. Medicine, and food, and shelter from the sun, and heat when its cold, and transportation, and communications, and refrigeration, and farm tractors … the list is long. It’s development, and it runs on and is synonymous with energy.
So when the developed world asks India and China and Brazil and Indonesia to cut back on carbon emissions, we’re asking them to cut back on developing their country’s health and well-being and infrastructure and manufacturing … good luck selling them that line of what my step-grandpa used to call “bull-dust” …
Remember that the Kyoto Protocol expires soon. The dream of the carbon alarmists is to extend Kyoto. They want to see a new set of global binding restrictions on the increase in carbon emissions. That is to say, they want to see binding restrictions on the increase in energy use in the developing world.
Me, I think that is one of the most inhumane proposals ever floated. The great masses of India and China and Brazil and the rest are finally clawing their way out of abject poverty, and the carbon alarmists want to put binding restrictions on their access to energy?!? Get real! The good news is, they will never, never agree to that. That carbon is what is fueling, quite literally, their rise out of the mire.
In addition, consider that agreements like Kyoto keep energy use from increasing. That approach sounds reasonable, at first blush. And for the developed countries, that’s not much problem, our use is plenty high already. But for China and India and the like? It means we’re saying they can’t ever catch up with us. I can assure you that they see the rank hypocrisy in that approach.
So if Kyoto is thankfully dead in a global sense, what does that leave? Well, I hate to be crass and crude about it but the bad news is that just leaves …
Money. Euros. Greenbacks. Simoleons. Follow the Benjamins.
What will happen in Durban is that the developing countries will pull out all of the stops to convince the developed world to give them money. We’ll hear endless heart-wrenching stories of climate refugees and dying reefs and ecological zones being uprooted and moved polewards without so much as a by-your-leave. And not forgetting, people in polar bear suits. Can’t have a UN Climate Change Carnival without polar bears.
And if history is any guide, in all probability, the carbon activists and quiche-eaters and Eurotrash we have representing the developed world will be unable to bear the guilt of actually being developed, and they will cave in to the demands and promise some money some time down the line … and then, thankfully, most countries likely won’t honor the promises, leading to diplomatic complaints and strongly worded protests.
(As an aside … Dear US Congress-Persons … can we stop funding the IPCC? They’re giving away the taxpayers’ money and getting nothing in return. That’s supposed to be your job, could you at least get rid of the competition? — TIA, willis.)
I leave it to the reader to consider further implications of these numbers. The sun is shining. I’m going outside to build something.
w.
AntonyIndia says:
November 8, 2011 at 8:12 pm
I hope everybody sees that the chart above shows no such thing. It shows the CHANGE since 2008, not the total emissions.
w.
@RAYQ MCMULLEN and Willis
“Three quarters of the people in Mali live on $2 per day. Give that a try before lecturing us about energy costs.”
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People in develping countries use electricity, almost all of them, in the form of batteries for watches and little lights. They pay approximately $50 per kWH and have for decades. That is how batteries are priced. Their carbon emissions per kWH of electricity consumed are astronomical. Perhaps this is news to some.
Limiting someone’s energy consumption does not necessarily mean a drop in CO2 emitted per unit of useful power. It depends on what you ahve to limit yourself to using. The last thing I will give up is lighting.
This is one New Zealander who won’t be keen to move back to the 1950’s.
We live in a society driven by marketing of things that no-one needs nor wants in order to boost the economy.
This is so much tosh. No-one makes us buy stuff.
I’m old enough to avoid being influenced by others (I see almost no TV ads, don’t read magazines etc, so “marketing” passes me by). Yet I like having a nice flat screen TV. I like my reliable, albeit 6 years old, car. I like nice clothes. I like being warm at night. I like decent dental care even more. And that my youngest didn’t die of asthma thanks to modern medical treatment. I don’t consider any of that waste.
Get rid of the guilt. Give freely to others if that makes you feel better. But enjoy what you have.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Someone asked why CO2 bubbles form at the bottom of champagne. They don’t. They form on the sides. It is partly in order to avoid excessive bubble formation that champagne is usually drunk in flutes (historically it was drunk in wide flat glasses).
The CO2 forms around impurities. The smoother and cleaner your glasses, the less bubble will form.
Mooloo writes: “This is so much tosh. No-one makes us buy stuff.
I’m old enough to avoid being influenced by others (I see almost no TV ads, don’t read magazines etc, so “marketing” passes me by).”
I am also old and ignore marketing. However your answer is contradictory. You know full well that the young and impressionable are influenced. The whole point of marketing is to try and arouse interest where none lies. That is why associations such as sex are used. So much unhappiness is created along with the insatiable demand. It is insatiable because the person will be delivered something quite different to what they were promised. Match McDonalds and Coke ads and see that they promise happiness. They deliver bad health.
Ray Tomes says:
November 8, 2011 at 7:53 pm
What has any of this got to do with high energy use? We live in a society driven by marketing of things that no-one needs nor wants in order to boost the economy.
What have my comments on your alleged purism and perfectionism got to do with you controlling people’s energy use from on high by dictate according to your own somewhat arbitrary, vague, and emotionally backed ideas? Ray, your opponent is called the Market, based upon the free choice of each individual in it and their right to benefit from their choices and work, through the protected legal ownership of every step accordingly. That’s how wealth is created and the standard of living increases, as it has done massively in the U.S., for example, under its system of Constitutional Capitalism.
On the other hand, it’s not your right to tell people what they want or need, or to distribute or redistribute “wealth” or the “means of production”; and what you are implying as a solution is called Communism, where the State or Party owns everything, including you; and which never works. See North Korea vs South Korea, or check out the results of European Socialism with all of its emphasis on Energy control and redistribution in order to achieve its allegedly perfect vision.
Again, if you were in your ideal environment of wants and needs in the ’50’s, why did you leave it when no one was forcing you to? You probably actually chose to do so and you are probably better off for it. Thank the Market.
You might also ask yourself where you would have been in the ’50’s and where you will be in the future without the system which produces the progress that got you there and here to begin with.
Ray Tomes says:
November 8, 2011 at 7:53 pm
We live in a society driven by marketing of things that no-one needs nor wants in order to boost the economy.
Well, you do have a good point there, Ray, but especially as it relates to the Gov’t trying to sell us things not many people want or need, such as a “gigantic deficit-spending stimulus”, “green energy”, “worth”-based instead of best Healthcare, and houses they can’t afford. Not to mention the selling of elected officials themselves to the public, where here in the U.S. the latte’ Communists are trying to sell candidates to the public solely on the basis of “perception is reality” is reality, which also currently necessarily includes the totally vacuous Alinskyite smear campaign against Herman Cain.
At 10:42 PM on 8 November, JPeden had mentioned:
“Alinskyite” it most certainly is, and a “smear campaign” as well, but considering the fact that we’ve been living for several decades now in a “Title 9” sociopolitical environment (“Sisterhood is victimhood is powerful!”), Herman Cain’s response to this smear campaign has been extraordinarily inept.
What is not “totally vacuous” has been Mr. Cain’s public reception and absolutely stupid comments thereupon. These reflect damningly on his real ability to handle himself in a crisis.
Not that this makes “Gardasil Rick” Perry or Mitt the Plastic Mormon look one goddam bit better as a candidate for the Red Faction’s top-of-the-ticket slot.
I’ve minced not a word in my support for Dr. Ron Paul in that role. I know the man, and – especially unlike Herman Cain – he’s been battle-tested by more than three decades espousing decidedly unpopular but entirely lawful adherence to the U.S. Constitution. The MSM hate his guts, and have been striving throughout those decades to find something in his personal and professional past history on the basis of which they can hang him.
And they’ve found nothing with which to accomplish that.
Heck, the worst they’ve been able to call him is “unelectable.” Their favorite descriptor (“kook”) went out the window in 2008 when the economy came crashing down as the result of precisely those fiscal irresponsibilities against which Dr. Paul has been campaigning throughout his career in the Congress.
Considering that the last thing our left-“Liberal” biased media root weevils want is a strong Republican presidential candidate capable not only of kicking their Mombasa Messiah out of the White House but also enforcing the Bill of Rights as the law of the land, just what the hell credence do we place in their “unelectable” condemnation, anyway?
Ron Paul in 2012, people. We need to fix this goddam mess.
That’s your argument? That you don’t think you were impoverished even though you were? So the entire WORLD economy must change because you “think” that the “The majority of energy is used to quite literally produce rubbish.”
Given the heights your CV might suggest, I would have expected a better argument.
Tucci78 on November 8, 2011 at 3:39 pm said:
The CDIAC estimates being what they are, just why in the hell is Australia now suffering under Julia’s “carbon
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Tucci seems to think carbon taxes travel back in time. The tax will be introduced next July.
Fred H. Haynie on November 8, 2011 at 3:36 pm said:
I don’t think anyone is actually measuring emissions. The inventory is based on the measured amo
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I believe satellite measurements are also performed.
Forget numbers,”Carbon”, “CO2”, “Science” and precision is immaterial because the moving goalposts which started at Global Warming, etc. are now being realigned at Climate Apartheid and Climate Justice-with Wealth Equalization and Reparations visible at the edge of the field.
Kumi Naidoo, the Durban civil rights activist (and recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship; PhD in Political Sociology) head of Greenpeace is constantly airborne to actions and negotiations with industry CEO’s anxious to find “how they could avoid Greenpeace’s wrath, whether it’s a ranking on a polluter’s list or being subjected to direct action. My colleagues are very keen to get you to the table, so that they are not on your menu.” The Cost of Doing Business.
Although experienced in many notably worthy causes, Naidoo appears to have no interest in science, debate or democratic process..only movement.
“Civil disobedience is the most powerful maker of change.” Perhaps, in fact, it is “the only maker of real, fundamental, major change.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903918104576500641559480306.html
He blew through town last month to nod at Greenpeace founding (now “a bureaucratic money machine” said original co-founder Paul Watson) in Vancouver 40 years ago. You can hear him blame the drought in the Horn of Africa and the 50yr old genocidal Arab/Black slaughter in Dafur on the developed nations at 5’30”.
http://www.cbc.ca/onthecoast/episodes/2011/09/14/greenpeaces-40th-anniversary/
He levered Coke to change their refrigerant. Wonder if he will try the Chinese on the HFC-23 scam? Can guilt move China?
Olen says:
November 8, 2011 at 8:01 pm
Three quarters of the people in Mali live on less than $2 per day. You’ll likely have to notify them about how they’ve received so many things from the West, jobs and equipment and the like. They may not have noticed how fortunate they’ve been.
w.
With regard to the people of Australia suffering under Julia Gillard’s bloody hideous “carbon tax,” at 10:43 PM on 8 November we’ve got LazyTeenager snarking:
The productive sector of Australian society has been (and will continue to be) adjusting to the hammering inflicted upon them by Juliar’s “green” malignancy since the prospect of her “carbon taxes” first became inexorably unavoidable.
Those taxes have already begun doing damage because business people and other entrepreneurs are planners who anticipate in order to adapt and thereby – hopefully – overcome adversities.
Lazy Teenager, have you even the most remote familiarity with the concept of a business plan? Or how an annual budget is prepared? Or how revenue is projected?
Jeez, have you ever so much as gotten laid off?
Thanks again, Willis. The CSIRO must be madly preparing for Durban with another media release about a paper in Science suggesting all the problems we are having or are likely with ‘warming seas’, this link is my response: http://pindanpost.com/2011/11/09/pseudoscience-continues-paid-from-your-taxes/
Peter Dunford says:
I take it when the graph says “carbon emmissions” we’re tlking about “carbon dioxide emmissions”
A common bait and switch. If it’s the latter any numbers really need to be multiplied by 3/11
Mark says:
November 8, 2011 at 11:00 pm
Bait and switch?!? No way. The CDIAC is quite up front about what the units are and why (emphasis mine).
w,
Hey, don’t knock quiche. It’s only what we used to call a flan, flaunting its trendily Frenchified name, and it’s OK.
Ray Tomes says:
November 8, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Well I was a kid in New Zealand in the 1950s. Were we living in abject poverty then? I don’t think so.
One more thing, Ray: a great many people in the U.S. are in “poverty” but don’t think they are, because they know they are doing pretty well as to basic needs and satisfaction with their lives. And they enjoy America’s freedom and the progressive availability of cheaper goods arising exactly from our Constitutional Capitalism, which then raises their standard of living. Here, WalMart rules! Along with many other of the dreaded Big Corporations, and the newly “rich” small businesses.
But at another level, you’re right, I am technically “poor” and so is my best friend here and her family. But we aren’t! Thanks to the Market and my freedom, I’ve built up enough “infrastructure” over the years, but not much money. And she’s got some good infrastructure but still works 3 jobs with her husband holding down 1. We’ve both got family and friends, too, as back up reservoirs, including even some of the evil “rich”. Life is good! But everyone certainly knows what real poverty is, along with the essentially Totalitarian political oppression that often accompanies and helps to cause it.
So the idea of limiting the energy use of people in real poverty is manifestly absurd. They already have a real “catastrophe” going on in situ right where they live.
Ray Tomes says:
November 8, 2011 at 11:17 pm
I agree, Ray. However, inexpensive energy is required to eliminate poverty, and the carbon alarmists want to eliminate inexpensive energy.
w.
petermue says:
November 8, 2011 at 7:11 pm
I’m not an expert too, but I think the word “used” is fallacious here. It should be “burned”.
Lots of fossil fuels are not burned but used for other products, like plastics or pharmaceutical prodicts.
==================
You’re right of course. Some carbon does go into “permanent” products like 2x4s and plastics. I looked at that once superficially. I think that the amount is fairly small and is somewhat confined to a few countries with massive petrochemical complex if you consider production rather than consumption. Unfortunately, I didn’t come up with much hard data. There are some numbers at
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=7&ved=0CFQQFjAG&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.plasticsconverters.eu%2Fdocs%2FBrochure_FactsFigures_Final_2009.pdf&ei=Pi26TtqtFcugtwf8qu3BBw&usg=AFQjCNGLhhlasHjCdd4wr55CNb9-8thW5w&sig2=V7SpuhrBigoBTwmW0iVErA
but nothing that we could use to adjust Carbon emission figures.
Overall, it looks like maybe 5% of Carbon “used” is actually sequestered in “plastics” at least temporarily (i.e. maybe 30kg of plastic consumed per person per year vs 3000kg of CO2 released per year which is probably about 750kg of carbon if I haven’t made any mistakes). Wood? Too complex to even think about as most will eventually be burned or decay. Use some Kentucky windage if you really want a number.
Mooloo says:
November 8, 2011 at 9:53 pm
Hey! I’ve found my second research project this month: Examining the behaviour of CO2 in champagne with a changing climate. The first was to lie around on tropical beaches. This one looks like it could be combined with the first quite easily.
Send research funds soon!
Mark ro says:
November 8, 2011 at 6:14 pm
“Did you mean Rousseau?”
That I did, sorry for the typo.
My original question to RiHo08 still stands, though. Voltaire was the quintessential Enlightenment figure, a civil libertarian and a champion of free trade while Rousseau was the 18th century’s version of a back-to-nature authoritarian, not that different from the warmists of today.
Ray Tomes says:
November 8, 2011 at 7:53 pm
JPEden, my argument is not emotional. I merely point out that 50 years ago we managed without today’s high energy use without ever feeling that we were in poverty. I do have some rubbish to dispose of because so much stuff comes wrapped in pointless packing, but I do my best to avoid these. Also I avoid as much modern medicine as possible. And I often walk to the shops about 1.7 km away and further. My computer is an old XP one that I have no plans to replace. What has any of this got to do with high energy use? We live in a society driven by marketing of things that no-one needs nor wants in order to boost the economy. It makes no-one happy and so called developing nations are foolish to copy it.
You sound like a friend who tried to argue that people were healthier in the ’50’s, “because they didn’t have all these operations.” Well I was there too, as a child, and I saw many suffer.
I have an 84 year old friend who has had 3 hip replacements (no, she only has 2 hips!) and one finger joint, and has a dicky ticker. She still composes songs that singers and audiences enjoy. Another acquaintance has recently had a shoulder joint replaced. I have a rather nasty scoliosis (almost 90º spinal curvature) which messes up lots of things internal and external.
All of us avoid as much modern medicine as possible, but if you want the ’50’s back, sunshine, you’re welcome to them.
At 2:06 AM on 9 November, Allan M had reported:
Gawd, you call “almost 90º spinal curvature” merely “rather nasty,” do you? What the hell cluster of malpractitionate mortar-forkers allowed your condition to get that bad without some kind of definitive mitigation?
Having had patients with similar but not so severe degrees of rotoscoliosis (and much more commonly purely sagittal thoracic kyphosis as the result of the vertebral body fractures to which the elderly are predisposed by progressive osteoporosis), I gotta wince at reading your post and the fact that I’m pretty much completely unable to offer you any assistance even in the form of advice.
Damn.
The bubbles definitely formed at the bottom of the champagne flute, I spent a good while observing this and just to be sure repeating the experiment.
In the interest of sound science I will conduct more tests this evening.
Zac says:
November 9, 2011 at 2:19 am
The bubbles definitely formed at the bottom of the champagne flute, I spent a good while observing this and just to be sure repeating the experiment.
In the interest of sound science I will conduct more tests this evening.
The bubbles will form where the liquid is most warmed, reducing solubility of CO2 which tips the balance. The narrow flute has more surface area per volume of liquid. That’s my hypothesis, which needs testing.
The experiment still needs to be done.
I do hope they’ll remember they have these objectives when the AGWDesolators descend on Durban.
jh says:
November 8, 2011 at 2:30 pm
Eurotrash? Qu’est-ce que c’est?
_________________________________
Unelected European Union Bureaucrats lining their pockets with other peoples money all the while they are claiming it is for “The Environment”
Just a passing thought–since the effect of carbon dioxide is supposed to be logarithmic, it *might* be interesting to see graphs of the log base two of the carbon emissions relative to an estimated natural carbon emission level. I think of this as a plot of the log base two of the carbon emissions, not a log scale plot of the carbon emission values.
At 7:04 AM on 9 November, Spector had written:
Damn, that’s a nice idea. I am – of course – mathematically inept, and therefore could not with any reliability undertake such a chore, but it’d be awful sweet to see some kind of graphic representation of the real degree to which this “We’re All Gonna Die!” anthropogenic CO2 might possibly – maybe, coulda, y’know – cause “trapping” of solar heat energy within our planet’s atmosphere.
“What, you mean that’s all that could even possibly happen? WTF?”