![disaster_movie06[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/disaster_movie061.jpg?quality=83)
This is funny and sad at the same time. The funny part is the fact that none of Paul Erhlich’s doom and gloom predictions about the human condition from the 70’s on have even come remotely close to true, the sad part is that the Royal Society, whose motto is Nullius in verba, Latin for “Take nobody’s word for it”, is taking the word of this doomer that can’t predict his way out of a paper bag. The focus now? You guessed it: global warming causing “escalating climate disruption”, which is unsupportable when you look at the data. Even the IPCC in their SREX report doesn’t agree with claims of “escalating climate disruption” as Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. pointed out. Plus, Nature recently went on record with an editorial saying Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.
These facts seem to make no dent in the doomers thinking, which seems to believe we are as ill equipped as the Mayans to manage ourselves, our resources, and our environment. One wonders about their sanity.
(h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard).
Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?
10 January 2013
Title:Perspective: Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?
Authors:Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich
Journal:Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Throughout our history environmental problems have contributed to collapses of civilizations. A new paper published yesterday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B addresses the likelihood that we are facing a global collapse now. The paper concludes that global society can avoid this and recommends that social and natural scientists collaborate on research to develop ways to stimulate a significant increase in popular support for decisive and immediate action on our predicament.
Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s paper provides a comprehensive description of the damaging effects of escalating climate disruption, overpopulation, overconsumption, pole-to-pole distribution of dangerous toxic chemicals, poor technology choices, depletion of resources including water, soils, and biodiversity essential to food production, and other problems currently threatening global environment and society. The problems are not separate, but are complex, interact, and feed on each other.
The authors say serious environmental problems can only be solved and a collapse avoided with unprecedented levels of international cooperation through multiple civil and political organizations. They conclude that if that does not happen, nature will restructure civilization for us.
In a statement on his website, HRH The Prince of Wales has reacted to the paper, agreeing, “We do, in fact, have all the tools, assets and knowledge to avoid the collapse of which this report warns, but only if we act decisively now. If, though, in our evermore interconnected and complex world, we are to succeed, real leadership and vision is required. It is just possible that we can rise to this challenge, but to do so we will need to adjust our world view in a profound and comprehensive way. We have to see ourselves as utterly embedded in Nature and not somehow separate from those precious systems that sustain all life. I have said it before, and I will say it again – our grandchildren’s future depends entirely on whether we seize the initiative and prevaricate no further.”
@Henry Clark:
Gerard K. O’Neill worked out a lot of how to do space colonies. As there is a lot of raw metal in asteroid orbits, largely you just need a solar furnace to melt and form it. Rocks / soils too.
I’m hoping Rutan and space tourism get things started (at last…)
Indeed and agreed. Some types of asteroids are almost like giant chunks of non-oxidized, non-rusted stainless steel, alien to what is encountered on Earth. Other objects are rich in oil shale kerogen and ice ( http://neofuel.com ). Etc.
She’s doing her damnedest!
I am not arguing with his calculations, but Dr. McCarthy’s calculations are “equilibrium thermodynamics” or in other words “reversible” calculations. But there is no reversible process for doing what he claims to be calculating.
And what you and McCarthy claim is that energy involved in “breaking chemical bonds” or “material handling” has nothing to do with the second law? Ponder this, then. To make elemental iron/steel from iron ore is to make ordered material from disordered. That is a second law issue; and the minimum of 6MJ per kilogram of iron needed to do this in a reversible manner is a consequence of the second law. The best steel mills manage to do this expending about 3 times as much energy as the minimum because their process involves “irreversible” effects.
I am amazed that what I am claiming here causes so much rancor.
Kevin Kilty:
For iron oxide to reduced elemental iron and gaseous oxygen, 2Fe2O3 -> 2Fe + 3O2, the sum of the enthalpy of formation values on each side of the equation can be added up and the net change calculated, the same as any other chemical reaction. Fe2O3 has a standard enthalpy of formation of about -824 kJ/mol (countless references with one example being http://s-owl.cengage.com/ebooks/vining_owlbook_prototype/ebook/ch5/Sect5-6-a.html ), whereas elemental iron and O2 are their base states in terms of about zero aside from any adjustment for exact temperature. That means the required energy input to break down two moles of iron oxide is roughly around 1650 kJ. Two moles of iron oxide contain four moles of iron. Iron’s atomic weight is 55.85 g/mol. In other words, going from iron oxide to iron has an energy requirement of about 7400 joules per gram of iron plus inefficiencies.
Inefficiencies depend somewhat on, for instance, how insulated the reaction chamber is for how much it approaches being an adiabatic process. A container approaching perfect insulation would approach being a completely adiabatic process. In practice, there is no need for perfect insulation as just getting heat loss within an acceptable range is fine. Non-zero heat is conducted through the chamber walls, resulting in non-zero entropy gain from such, resulting in not being an isentropic process, resulting in not being a reversible process in that sense, but none of that is a problem. The priority to a designer is not absolutely maximizing energy efficiency but just making it good enough while minimizing overall monetary cost (which is not identical to energy cost).
That’s how reactions are actually calculated, where the energy investment comes largely from the energy associated with breaking the chemical bonds (contained in the enthalpy of formation difference) as Dr. McCarthy implied, and such is as I noted before:
“Short of unusually high inefficiencies in processing, there is no chemical compound that can not be broken down for either tens of thousands of joules per gram or less.
The preceding wouldn’t be universal knowledge automatically, but I’m used to looking up enthalpies of formation.
Accordingly, the basic picture is about whatever one does will take either a few kilowatt-hours per kilogram net or less, where each kilowatt-hour is 3.6 million joules. (I note the “less” there since some reactions, of course, release net energy; it depends what exactly one is doing with what inputs for whether more exothermic or endothermic reactions are involved).
Presently a kilowatt-hour of electricity costs several cents, while a kilowatt-hour-thermal of high temperature heat is somewhat cheaper.”
For instance, if one has a nuclear power plant which produces 2 gigawatt high temperature heat becoming in part 1 gigawatt of electricity at near a 100% capacity factor, it produces nearly 8.76 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, about 31.5 quadrillion joules, about 31.5 billion MJ. For that 31.5 billion MJ of electricity (and if approaching 50% thermal->electrical efficiency a similar figure in waste heat at the power plant), nuclear fission releases around 17 to 18 kilotons-TNT equivalent per kilogram fissioned, which, for instance, for the 17.8 kt/kg or 74.6 TJ/kg of uranium-233 bred from thorium-232, means the hypothetical nuclear power plant fissions about 0.8 tons of uranium (thorium) per year.
In return for fissioning that 0.8 tons of thorium (after Th-232 -> U-233), that hypothetical nuclear power plant’s 31.5 billion MJ per year electricity generation is plenty enough, even if one was using 10 to 20 MJ per kg of iron produced, to refine around 1.6 to 3.2 billion kilograms of iron per year. A more optimized process could be designed to also use high-temperature waste heat at the power plant instead of starting solely from the electricity which can be sent long-distance. (Or of course fossil fuels can be used too).
However, either way, for the nuclear example, the net result is that each ton of thorium fissioned produces more than enough energy, even after inefficiencies, to refine well above a million times its mass in iron. Around 100+ trillion tons of thorium exist in Earth’s crust. Even common granite rock with 13 ppm thorium concentration (just twice the crustal average, along with 4 ppm uranium) contains potential nuclear energy equivalent to 50 times the entire rock’s mass in coal, although there is no incentive to resort to such very low-grade deposits when other sources are available (like loads of Conway granite with 56 ppm thorium, of which most is readily leachable, and other sources higher still).
One typo:
2Fe2O3 -> 2Fe + 3O2 was meant to be 2Fe2O3 -> 4Fe + 3O2
But the calculations illustrated subsequently are already correct and unaffected by the typo, including where I already referenced 4 moles of iron several sentences later.