From the Carnegie Institution , what looks to be a throwback to the old days of central planning has been introduced, except it is twice as good as that, ten years instead of five. The only difference between the ten year carbon and science plan and what you see in the image below, is that none of the industrial elements you see will be included.
Scientists tackle the carbon conundrum
Palo Alto, CA—U.S. scientists have developed a new, integrated, ten-year science plan to better understand the details of Earth’s carbon cycle and people’s role in it. Understanding the carbon cycle is central for mitigating climate change and developing a sustainable future. The plan builds on the first such plan, published in 1999, but identifies new research areas such as the role of humans as agents and managers of carbon cycling and climate change, the direct impact of greenhouse gases on ecosystems including changes to the diversity of plants and animals and ocean acidification, the need to address social concerns, and how best to communicate scientific results to the public and decision makers.
The first carbon science plan for the U.S., published in 1999, resulted in numerous breakthroughs for understanding the carbon cycle and how it is changing in response to human pressures. For instance, researchers discovered that the huge quantities of CO2 absorbed by the oceans are causing ocean acidification, which is harming sea life and affecting the food chain. Research also characterized the large uptake of carbon by plants and soils in the Northern Hemisphere, and found that understanding land use and disturbance patterns is integral to understanding the global carbon cycle.
The new plan is the culmination of a three-year effort with input from hundreds of scientists about the current needs of the research community. Carnegie Institution for Science’s Anna Michalak, Duke University’s Rob Jackson, Appalachian State University’s Gregg Marland, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Christopher Sabine led the work on the 2011 A U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Plan.*
“Although there has been a bonanza of new understanding about the carbon cycle over the last decade, many new questions have arisen,” remarked Michalak of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology. “A U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Plan lays the groundwork for expanding beyond a primary focus on the ‘natural’ carbon flows between the atmosphere, oceans, and plant life, to fully integrate human impacts and the role of both intentional and inadvertent carbon management decisions.”
The team developed four science elements to drive the research. The backbone of the research strategy is to strengthen the network of observations to better monitor and track carbon as it winds its way through the atmosphere, ecosystems, oceans and society, and to find out how this changes over time. Other elements include studies of the processes that control the flows and transformations of carbon, and developing numerical models to predict future behavior.
Another important aspect of the plan is its increased emphasis on communication and making research more accessible to policy makers and the general public. It is hoped that this will lead to rational and well-informed decisions on how best to manage the global carbon cycle, especially the human impacts on it.
In an era of tight budgets and with public questions about the value of science, this plan calls for an expanded role for careful, integrated, and clear science to inform and support human objectives for a sustainable environment.
*The report is published by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research supported by NASA, DOE, USDA, USGS, NOAA, NSF, and NIST. The authors are Anna Michalak, Robert B. Jackson, Gregg Marland, Christopher L. Sabine, and the Carbon Cycle Science Working Group.
The Department of Global Ecology was established in 2002 to help build the scientific foundations for a sustainable future. The department is located on the campus of Stanford University, but is an independent research organization funded by the Carnegie Institution. Its scientists conduct basic research on a wide range of large-scale environmental issues, including climate change, ocean acidification, biological invasions, and changes in biodiversity.
The Carnegie Institution for Science (carnegieScience.edu) has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research since 1902. It is a private, nonprofit organization with six research departments throughout the U.S. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.
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A very Soviet idea the ten year plan and look what happened to them.
“inadvertent carbon management decisions”
Only a technocrat can twist the language so beautifully and nonsensically.
How best to communicate scientific results to the public and decision makers?
Simple; stop lying.
. . . . . “nonprofit organization with six research departments throughout the U.S. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science. . . . . . and “””tax benefits for nonprofit organizations with six research departments U.S. Carnegie”””
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=tax+benefits+for+nonprofit+organizations+with+six+research+departments+U.S.+Carnegie&pbx=1&oq=tax+benefits+for+nonprofit+organizations+with+six+research+departments+U.S.+Carnegie&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=s&gs_upl=28000l28000l4l29078l1l1l0l0l0l0l750l750l6-1l1l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=b28a33e2348ae498&biw=1152&bih=562
just trying to be a little circumspect . . .
“As a chemist, it bugs me that a lessening of pH from 8.2 to about 8.0 could be called acidification. ”
According to Wikipedia, “Between 1751 and 1994 surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.25 to 8.14,[3] representing an increase of approaching 30% in “acidity” (H+ ion concentration) in the world’s oceans.”
Um, how do we know that the PH of the ocean was 8.25 back wayin 1751?
And how do we know it was human activity which caused the change?
The sign says
“Oilworkers – (deliver) more oil to the Motherland”
Then below
“Let’s Fulfill the five-year (plan) in 4 years!”
Like a lot of Soviet Era art, it has an ironic overtone.
Please, WHAT sea life has been harmed and WHAT food chain has been affected, by minuscule decreases in alkalinity?! More fiction… or rather… SHINOLA. GK
Stephen Brown–
“I’m engaged in a study of the effects, break-down and eventual dispersal of compounds containing carboniferous compounds as CH3Ch2OH.
I have discovered so far that the effects of this heavily-laden carbon bearing substance are multifarious; sometimes deleterious, often humorous and sometimes injurious but always micturation provoking.
More money is needed to continue as taxes have increased the price of the raw materials required.”
Stephen, although you express yourself much more eloquently than the guy who occasionally approaches me in the Safeway parking lot, I’m afraid my response to you is the same as to him–“Sorry, no, I don’t have any spare change.”
CAPITALISM vs. CLIMATE
The assessment of the state of the world by Naomi Klein is a colorful manifesto of totalitarian alternatives to a market economy and the rule of law. Fascism soon went down in military defeat while Communism sank into bankruptcy after seventy years of misrule. The manifesto has the support of Hugo Chavez, who blames capitalism for the death of an advanced civilization that once flourished on Mars. Such opinions show that if a cat has nine lives, then totalitarian doctrines have the sum of the lives of nine cats. They will be around for a long time.
The doctrine of Green activists rests on three tenets they accept with an act of faith:
We are running out of space. World population is already excessive on a limited planet and grows at exponential rates, with dire effects.
We are running out of means. The planet’s non-renewable resources are being depleted by consumption at a rate that renders further economic expansion unsustainable.
We are running out of time before tipping points are reached. Carbon dioxide emitted by economic activity causes global warming that will soon render the planet uninhabitable.
When such tenets are quantified, the contrast between true and false stands out sharply.
Is overpopulation a grave problem? The sum of urban areas of the United States is equivalent to 2% of the area of the country, and to 6% in densely inhabited countries such as England and Holland. And there is plenty of green in urban areas. If comparison is limited to land covered by buildings and pavements the occupied land in the whole world amounts to 0,04% of the terrestrial area of the planet. It has been held that 7 billion inhabitants could live a comfortable urban life on 100 000 square miles, the area of Wyoming. With more that 99.9% of unoccupied space the idea of an overcrowded planet is an exaggeration.
Population forecasts are uncertain but the most accepted ones foresee stability of world population to be reached in the 21st century. According to some, world population may begin to decline at the end of this century. Ageing populations is the real current problem. With so much elbowroom it is untenable that world population is excessive or shall ever become so.
The Green shibboleth is that ultimately a finite planet cannot support infinite growth, but ultimately no natural resource is non-renewable in a universe ruled by the Law of Conservation of Mass. In popular form it holds that “Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed.” Human usage is not subtracted from the mass of the planet, and in theory all material used may be recycled. The possibility of doing so depends on availability and low cost of energy. When fusion energy becomes operative it will be available in practically unlimited quantities. The source is deuterium, a hydrogen isotope found in water, in a proportion of 0.03%. One cubic kilometer of seawater contains more energy than can be obtained from combustion of all known petroleum reserves of the world. Since oceans hold 3 billion cubic kilometers of water, energy will last longer than the human species. Potable water need not be a limitation; nano tube membranes may yet cut energy costs of desalination to one tenth of current costs and conceivably cheap enough for irrigation purposes. Why assume that technology will stagnate at current levels?
There is no growing shortfall of resources signaled by rising prices. Since the middle of the 19th century The Economist publishes consistent indices of values of commodities and they have all declined, over 150 years, due to technological advances. The decline has been benign. The cost of feeding a human being was 8 times greater in 1850 than it is today. In 1950, less than half of a world population of 2 billion had an adequate diet, above 2000 calories per day. Today, 80% have the adequate diet, and world population is three times greater.
There is a problem with the alleged global warming. It stopped in 1998, having risen in the 23 previous years, and unleashing a scare over its effects. Since 1998 it has been followed by 13 years of declining temperatures, in a portent of a cold 21st century. This shows that there are natural forces shaping climate, more powerful than manmade carbon dioxide and anything mankind can do for or against world climate. The natural forces include cyclical oscillation of ocean temperatures, sunspot activity and the effect of magnetic activity of the sun on cosmic rays. All such cycles are foreseeable, but there is no general theory of climate with predictive capacity. What knowledge exists comes from one hundred fields, such as meteorology, oceanography, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, paleontology, biology, etc. with partial contributions to understanding climate.
Devoid of support of solid theory and empirical evidence, the mathematical models that underpin alarmist forecasts amount to speculative thought that reflects the assumptions fed into the models, in response to the political agendas of the sponsors. Such computer simulations offer no rational basis for public policies that inhibit economic activity “to save the planet”. And carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is plant nutrient for the photosynthesis that supports the food chain of all living beings of the planet.
Stories of doom circulate daily. Anything that happens on earth has been blamed on global warming: a Himalayan earthquake, the Iceland volcanic eruption, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, tribal wars in Africa, heat wave in Paris, recent severe winters in North America, the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico, known for five centuries, the collapse of a bridge in Minnesota. Evo Morales blames Americans for the summer floods in Bolivia.
Global warming is not a physical phenomenon; it is a political and journalistic phenomenon that finds parallel in the totalitarian doctrines that inebriated masses deceived by demagogues. As Chris Patten put it: “Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off”. In the view of Professor Aaron Wildavsky global warming is the mother of all environmental scares. “Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realizing the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population’s eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.”
Mr Green Genes……whilst you are conducting your research please remember that ALL experiments should be described in detail and methodologies clearly defined so that other researchers may try to replicate ( sorry!) your results.
Look forward very much to your paper.
Carnegie. Iron. Carbon. Steel. If Carnegie had no carbon we’d have no steel, no libraries in small towns, no concert hall, no lots of stuff. Carbon is our friend.
Communist dictates arriving thick and fast, looks like capitalism but aint.
Palo Alto, CA—U.S. scientists have developed a new, integrated, ten-year science plan to better understand the details of Earth’s carbon cycle and people’s role in it.
Two things (a) according to every estimate of CO2 levels over the past 600M years, CO2 levels fall year on year. There is no cycle. (b) At the rate atmospheric CO2 has been ‘fixed’ (reduced) over the last 600M years there will be no life (as we know it) on earth once it drops below 150ppm. The final extinction.
Humans and their ‘fossil fuel fetish’ may well have bought all life on Earth a few million bonus years . Remember – CO2 is not a pollutant, it is the very base of the planetary food chain. Remember, ‘a large brain’ is just another Earth experiment and may not work out. Some of the ‘largest brains’ want to legislate against our food chain – I’m thinking that the experiment may already be a failure. Funny that species have gotten smaller and smaller almost as atmospheric CO2 has fallen. Um yea – strange that.
It seems that the protagonists -so called climate scientists – and politicians are so vain and full of grand superiority complexes, in true Hegelian style, that they would take the credit for mankind, and foremost themselves for inventing the universe, if they could get away with it.
However, this folly of vanity, with quasi scientific justification to give it some pretend authority is nothing better than the madman in the harbour who thinks that all the ships are his.
How can Co2 be in the atmosphere heating up the world, and at the same time, be in the oceans making them acidic.
The mission statement starts right off with several outright but essential falsehoods, and proceeds directly to making a claim on global carbon governance. Notwithstanding the Carnegie Institute’s dreams of glory, the wheels are already coming off. JAXA’s revelations are enough to blow the whole enterprise to smithereenies, once taken on board, for example.
Carnegie would spit glowing red rivets if he came back and saw how his legacy was being perverted. That’s the trouble with Foundations: they are almost instantly captured by professional progressives who fancy themselves to be Doers-Of-Good, in fact the only real ones.
Or maybe not. He’d actually caught the rich man’s guilt complex by the time he established the Foundation. IAC, the desire to Improve Mankind with Great Works is the very tempting royal road to autocracy or tyranny. In the end, all such Vast Plans turn out to be Half-Vast.