From the European Association of Geochemistry | Wally Broeker, the first person to alert the world to Global Warming, has called for atmospheric CO2 to be captured and stored underground. He says that Carbon Capture, combined with limits on fossil fuel emissions, is the best way to avoid global warming getting out of control over the next fifty years. Professor Broeker (Columbia University, New York) made the call during his presentation to the International Carbon Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, where 150 scientists are meeting to discuss Carbon Capture and Storage.
He was presenting an analysis which showed that the world has been cooling very slowly, over the last 51 million years, but that human activity is causing a rise in temperature which will lead to problems over the next 100,000 years.
“We have painted ourselves into a tight corner. We can’t reduce our reliance of fossil fuels quickly enough, so we need to look at alternatives.
“One of the best ways to deal with this is likely to be carbon capture – in other words, putting the carbon back where it came from, underground. There has been great progress in capturing carbon from industrial processes, but to really make a difference we need to begin to capture atmospheric CO2. Ideally, we could reach a stage where we could control the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, like you control your central heating. Continually increasing CO2 levels means that we will need to actively manage CO2 levels in the environment, not just stop more being produced. The technology is proven, it just needs to be brought to a stage where it can be implemented.
Wally Broeker was speaking at the International Carbon Conference in Reykjavik, where 150 scientists are meeting to discuss how best CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere as part of a programme to reduce global warming.
Meeting co-convener Professor Eric Oelkers (University College London and University of Toulouse) commented:
“Capture is now at a crossroads; we have proven methods to store carbon in the Earth but are limited in our ability to capture this carbon directly from the atmosphere. We are very good at capturing carbon from factories and power stations, but because roughly two-thirds of our carbon originates from disperse sources, implementing direct air capture is key to solving this global challenge”.
The international Carbon Conference takes place in Reykjavik, Iceland, from 25-29 August 2014. Conference website, https://www.or.is/en/projects/international-carbon-conference-2014
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He’ll have to overcome reality though, and the reality is that these schemes have failed, in what was called in the U.K. as “descending into farce” sort of like the Edsel
Bonkers idea thinking man can do something that makes a difference observable never mind verifyable against natural variation over 100k years
Mankind has risen in technology to the point where we CAN affect the climate, both accidentally and deliberately. I think we all sense this power subconsciously and worry we will cause harm.
If we follow these plans, we WILL cause harm. Earth-life is carbon-based. Furthermore the (blessed) increase in carbon dioxide probably come mostly from the killing of earthworms and other soil organisms, more than fossil fuels. Burying the carbon then means a permanent reduction of the carrying capacity of the Earth for life.
Fortunately, this guy has the same Achilles heel as algore: he is recommending something for which he would make a lot of money and we can scream that up.
I think Wally is a very apt name for this character.
We can capture CO2 easily.
Plants with lots of fertiliser.
If we choose the right ones we can sell the produce for a profit. This could really change the world.
Am I the first to come up with this idea?
no but it is correct – plant a tree
On my 10 acres in the PNW America, they plant themselves. Damn things are growing like crazy!!!
They seem to like CO2 at 400 PPM… The sound of a chainsaw is in my very near future, like this weekend.
I’ve first read about it in the book “From Eros to Gaia” written by Freeman Dyson in 1992. Don’t know if there’s anything earlier.
http://books.google.nl/books?id=Iem53rmNYAIC&pg=PT184&lpg=PT183&focus=viewport&vq=topsoil&hl=nl
Cheers!
Pour a concrete dome over DC. Problem solved. Do the same for Brussels for good measure.
“Pour a concrete dome over DC”
A dome? Wouldn’t it be more effective if it [were] filled solid?
I’m not sure how it would contain CO2, but it would certainly contain a lot of hot air.
“Plants with lots of fertilizer.”
It would certainly work. That’s what plants do.
But then, plants would show that they LOVE the CO2. And grow faster.
Or, the point of the burial is to show that CO2 is BAD, BAD, BAD!
That’s even more important than the burial itself.
M Courtney said:
Am I the first to come up with this idea?
No, Prof. Freeman Dyson alsao suggested it. So you are in very good company.
Dyson told the NY Times:
To the planet, the rising carbon may well be a striking yet ultimately benign occurrence in what is still “a relatively cool period in the earth’s history.” The warming, Dyson says, is not global but local, “making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter.” Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious — a sign that “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse,” because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields. “Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now,” he contends, “and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.”
And here is an interview in which Prof. Dyson explains what M Courtney suggested.
Also, here is another Dyson article on global warming, well worth reading.
Maybe, but I read about a project for capturing co2 from industrial processes in Belgium. And what did they do with the planet-killing gas? Sold it to gardeners for use in their greenhouses. And some say that the greenhouse-effect does not exist!
Yegads….why didn’t I think of that first?
And at what cost? Concentrating something as rarified as 400 ppm would mean having to process one Sh*tload of atmosphere….What kind of energy would that take? Ironic that they chose Iceland…one of the big emitters.
The CO2 in your beer, soft drinks and dry ice came from a fertilizer plant or refinery off-gas. In air separation units it’s eliminated at the front end purification stage. People living near ASUs die by the truckload due to all the oxygen being sucked away (not to mention getting the bends because of all the waste nitrogen dumped back into the atmosphere). Liquefying gases is pretty cool stuff.
Easier to pump all the Co2 into an alternate universe using Hopium for fuel.
Hopium…is that the official name for unicorn farts.
Even if it were a good idea to do this, there is a much cheaper way.
Grow plants.
Cut down plants.
Bury plants.
No fancy technology needed.
Of course govt cronies won’t get rich doing this, so it will of course be done the hard way.
They beat you to it
http://www.cbmjournal.com/content/3/1/1
Don’t even need to bury them, just plant fast-growing trees (and bamboo, perhaps?) then harvest their wood. Create massive stockpiles of wood.
Of course, all of this takes energy to do and will generate considerable CO2… probably too much to compensate with sequestration.
Where do you think coal comes from?
Grow trees. Cut down trees. Build stuff with the wood from the trees.
Go back to landfills.
“Lead to problems over the next 100,000 years.”
Even by the wacky standards of ‘climate science’, even this is a bit of a stretch.
I guess none of these clowns have thought through the concept of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and how much money and energy this would require, and that’s assuming we actually had the technology to do it.
Still, we mustn’t let facts get in the way of a good idea.
Oh the technology exist. Its called rain. And it stores carbon underground in carbonates and the like Another good technology is called ‘green plants’ They also take CO2 and store it underground.
You can do it with limestone too. You take te limestione, burn it with coke to remove the carbon dioxide, which you then emit into the air, and then you run power stations flue gasses through it to extract the carbon dioxide you just released earlier, and then bury it back in the ground where you first got it. ;-)#
Or you simply compress the gas and pump it under ground, because it has been proved that unlike solid uranium, plutonium and their heavy metal decay compounds or a tiny fraction of hydraulic fracturing fluid gaseous carbon dioxide is safe in the earth’s crust for billions of years.
Mind you that’s a thought. Use liquid CO2 supercooled as a fracking mix..
And that will delay the next Ice Age surge for 100,000 years?
If he could prove it, I’d be all for it.
Wild west carbon chasers. Come on! What next?
The articles about AGW are becoming more and more bizarre.
They’re already starting to do stuff like that. Next month, about 15 miles from where I live they’re going to start work on FutureGen which is a coal powerplant that will capture and store it’s CO2 emissions 2 miles underground. I’m all for it, not because of the carbon sequestration, but for the jobs and the money it will bring into our stagnant local economy.
The only problem is that the plant will cost 60% more and produce 40 % less power. So you will pay twice as much for electricity. I am a plant designer and this is what we sell these plants for – this is not including the cost of the drilling for the disposal well and infrastructure.
A bad idea is a bad idea. You need to think a bit beyond your local economy. Think of who is actually paying for that nonsense. (Hint, it isn’t “FutureGen”).
Easier??? Wow that is some comment- We use organic solvents to trap CO2 (amines) they will react with Oxygen (600% excess air in a turbine – so is a lot of HOT air with some CO2) so it may be “easier” to do it because is less diluted- but the gas is hot. Oxidation will degrade the solvent anyway. Very expensive
You better hope all that “carbon” sequestered doesn’t get released suddenly. The 1986 disaster at Lake Nyos killed people up to 15.5 miles away.
Exactly my concern as well.
Heather here is what follows sequestration:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/co2-leaks-worry-sask-farmers-1.977078
Peter, agriculture does it every day. The largest most efficient system of carbon on the planet is green plants. And, while I do not think abiotic oil is completely mistaken, the amount of proven biotic oil and coal shows that it has worked with great efficiency for more than half-a-billion years.
He seems to suggest that we have enough fossil fuels in the ground to last 100,000 years.
At last, some really good news!
Terrific point!
Mr. Broeker also seems to think we must act quickly for we don’t have much time:
100,000 years is a “tight corner”.
“… human activity is causing a rise in temperature which will lead to problems over the next 100,000 years.
‘We have painted ourselves into a tight corner. We can’t reduce our reliance of fossil fuels quickly enough, so we need to look at alternatives’.”
Why not compress it and make diamonds? My wife would love it.
I envision a contraption on the top of a coal fired plant that captures CO2 compresses it send it down to bottom so the plant can burn it again ! Perpetual energy the Greens should love especially Obummer
Check with me again in 10,000 years. Until then this is just BS from the first BSer.
If this were desirable – IT IS NOT – then capture of CO2 from its high concentration in flue gases would be more sensible than from its low concentration in the air.
Importantly, why would anybody be concerned at “human activity is causing a rise in temperature which will lead to problems over the next 100,000 years”?
Richard
We won’t even BE here then. How’s THAT for a forecast.
Most power plants are combined cycle – excess air in a turbine is around 600% – very diluted and hot gas.
EF
Some power stations are are combined cycle units. Most are not.
Steam cycle boilers don’t use much excess air. Also, commercial and industrial boilers don’t operate power stations.
Capture of CO2 from its high concentration in flue gases would be more sensible than from its low concentration in the air. But the collection would not be sensible: it would be daft.
Richard
Power stations are typically 12% CO2 in the expelled gases. Most of it is Nitrogen, of course.
” to really make a difference we need to begin to capture atmospheric CO2. ”
What’s wrong with a tree, may I ask?
He was presenting an analysis which showed that the world has been cooling very slowly, over the last 51 million years
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Where did he get that?
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo1.png
Since your graph only goes back to 50,000 years ago…How about here?
[img]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#mediaviewer/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png[/img]
Dang, sry didn’t insert that image right. Yes it is a Wiki page but the image wasn’t created there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#mediaviewer/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
….Oy
If you click on the little X you will see the image…
Anyone want to give me a tutorial on inserting images on the new format? 🙂
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#mediaviewer/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
Maybe without the img tags.
Nope
Is this the one?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
Just as a point of information, the black line at the right side of the graph roughly represents the last 50,000 years in Latitude’s graph. The box on the x axis that contains “PLT” is about 2,000,000 years wide. The temperature trend since the Eocene has indeed spanned about 50,000,000 years.
So plastic bags last forever and must be banned. They contain carbon. Why not make them mandatory and bury them. Not that any of it makes any sense and the whole thing is silly. We should let the greens declare victory and leave the field (mercy rule). Of course if we look around there is ebola, southern border, churches going apostate, national debt, Ukraine, Isis, the lost middle East across North Africa all the way to India, etc. so we would still have something else to think about. Toss in failing school system, collapse of our infra structure, health care debacle, militarized police force, sky rocketing entitlement numbers, and corrupt IRS as well as Justice department and one could get depressed. Maybe we do need to worry about climate change and the associated kleptocrats if for no other reason that it diverts us from reality.
+ 1
Plastic bags contain carbon and last forever.
My Safeway in downtown Portland, Oregon used free paper bags for years with no problem — then the city mandated plastic to save the trees. Then two years ago mandated a return to paper because the plastic bags were filling up the dump and the paper could be recycled. Supermarket bags were mandated to be made out of recycled paper. It rains an awful lot in Portland and if rain hit those recycled bags your groceries immediately hit the ground. They would fall apart as you held them.
Safeway realized that according to the law the supermarket could not GIVE you free plastic bags but it could still SELL them to you — like any other product in the store. Safeway now charges 20 cents for a plastic bag that they probably pay 1/10 of a cent for if that much. Highest profit item in the store. They sit prominently right next to the free recycled paper bags the clerks use if not told that you want plastic.
If carbon capture becomes big I am sure the city will mandate plastic again and bury all that ever lasting plastic in our dumps. But I bet Safeway will still be charging us for those plastic bags. Liberal idiots.
Snowsnake,
I love your take on things.
So well said.
The feeling is mutual.
Dave H
I want to know if this highly intellectual fellow has a clue where on God’s Green Earth we can store that much carbon dioxide… That’s not likely to be possible.
Norway abandoned their carbon capture programme. It was supposed to be their “Moon landing”, but according to their energy minister: “At both the national and international level, the development of technologies to capture and store CO2 has taken longer, been more difficult and more costly than expected”.
Heh – govt programmes are ALWAYS “more difficult and more costly”; look at obama”care”.
According to BBC: The [CO2 sequestration] process was patented back in the 1930s, and it is reckoned to be one of the most important technologies available for tackling greenhouse gas emissions.
Why the heck was there a CO2 sequestration process in the ’30s? And if it is “one of the most important technologies…” and Norway was not able to implement it, why does this Wally fellow think that there should be another attempt made?
It must be like what leftists say about communism – it just hasn’t been done right yet.
TOTAL lunacy.
If I had to guess, the process patented in the 1930’s was likely for extracting CO2 with an eye to using it for some commercial purpose, not simply to bury it in the ground. IIRC, CO2 has been used in oil field enhancement to boost flow. I’d guess basically you wouldn’t provide an “up” pipe and leave it trapped there. It’s all madness anyway; I think that something like 30% or so of the output from a coal-fired electric plant would be required to capture and compress a reasonable percentage of the CO2 it produces.
Tell him to go stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon. You’ll see several hundred millions years of carbon sequestration in the vertical walls of the limestone rock. Those thick limestone layers go on for several hundred miles in the western US and there are limestone deposits all over the world. Most of that CO2 was in the atmosphere at one time. Mother nature is still busy sequestering CO2 in warm shallow seas and will continue to do so whether we want her to or not.
Use areal spraying to nock down microbes and insects an additional 6% and you’ll have accomplished the equivalent of anthropogenic emission in its entirety.
They have been doing this for a long time.
https://www.google.ca/search?output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=carbon+capture+and+storage&btnK=
Use ariel spraying to knock down microbes and insects; an additional 6% and you’ll have accomplished the equivalent of anthropogenic emission elimination in its entirety.
There must always be an n+1 tip of the iceberg of idiocy.
The slack jawed idiocy of an educated man making any sort of assertions about 100,000 years is beyond parody. It is beyond jumping the shark. In a field most notable by its ability to make allegedly intelligent smart people make stupid claims, this is possibly the most extreme example.
Then one can wonder away from the wreckage of the 100k year foolishness and take a look at the mind numbing stupidity of the idea that underground CO2 sequestration is needful, practical or viable as a solution and wonder who paid for this tripe?
Who paid for it? Why, you and I did…
It’s not who paid for it; it’s who gets paid to do it–the guys who is suggesting it.
Too late to bomb Reykjavik ? You can always say you thought it was the Bardarbunga volcano.
Can’t wait for this loon to discover that all of us exhale gas which is 4% CO2. That’s about 40,000 ppm. The neighborhood commissar will be around issuing mandatory collection masks for all members of your household. Non-compliance will be treated harshly. Be warned!
Time to invest in collection masks . With this president & co in power it soon could be a hot item.
The ‘combustion inefficiency’ of a human is about 1.6%, meaning the CO/CO2 ratio is 0.016. Once people are over the shocking fact that we run on carbon and exhale CO2, they will have to deal with the fact that we also exhale significant amounts of toxic carbon monoxide (CO). It is positively harmful to babies, the WHO says, even though those babies are also exhaling CO themselves! There is just no end to the alarm.
The only viable solution to all this pollution is to ban both exhaling and inhaling.
Heh.
Reykjavik, Iceland, in August.
They do pick some of the most beautiful and exotic locations for their “Save The World” conferences.
“Reykjavik, Iceland” … ahh, a new variant of the Gore effect. What could be a volcanic equivalent of a sharknado (volsharknado? snarknado?) is shaping up around Bárðarbunga, at the same time these CO2-shifters (all a bunch of hot air) are nearby.
How about saving time and trouble, and put the alarmists to work in caves (naturally with food, water, and Mr. Ed reruns) keeping them busy, and hopefully productive.
Time to take their pie-in-the-sky-precautionary-principle-pessimism and spend the money elsewhere,
where it will do some good….
Oh, the irony….storm tack to Iceland:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/storm_graphics/AT04/refresh/AL0414W5_NL+gif/203538W5_NL_sm.gif
Isn’t interesting that the same people who want to ban the trivial injection of liquids in fracking want to inject huge amounts of gases into the ground. If fracking is so dangerous how could CO2 sequestration not be a disaster? And it always comes from the mouths of PhDs. Is there anyone with a brain left in academia?
Excellent rhetorical questions. Since the fracking issue is simply ignorant folks getting overwrought about a minor engineering challenge [ensuring good seals around the well head and piping], it’s pretty clear they are asserting a straw man against fracking.
The rent seeking that is involved with the continuous stream of conferences in high end expensive locations is truly annoying. The hypocrisy of bloviators like these telling all of us to suffer as they jet set to locales (on our dollars) to pontificate about our obligation to do what they want because we are damaging earth 100,000 years in the future is an insult and sign that we are held in no regard at all.
the International Carbon Conference in Reykjavik
Don’t look now but real close to you, Mama Gaia may just show you what she thinks of storing her CO2 underground by burping up a bunch to be recycled later.
Burping from over and under …. storm track (typoed before…) shows storm hitting Iceland Sunday-ish….leets will probably be on their way home by then….shake, bake, rattle and roll…hope not…
Why would we bury it? What if it turns out we need it back?
I think we should just build a huge freezer in Antarctica. It is almost cold enough there to freeze CO2 into dry ice, so with only a small amount of energy to power the freezer and cool a feew more degrees, we could store gobs of CO2 as dry ice. Energy to be supplied of course by a nuclear reactor so as not to generate any CO2 emissions running it. Then, if it turns out we’ve made a mistake by taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere, we can just turn the freezer off.
The above is my idea and any use if it by government, private or other organizations is strictly prohibited without first obtaining a license to do so from me. Bidding for use of this idea begins at $1 Billion and will be open until such time as I make the decision to accept a bid, regardless of time frame involved.
If you want to save the $1 billion plus the cost of the freezer and nuclear plant, you may opt for just planting trees as several people above have suggested, but foolishly failed to assert their intellectual property rights when expressing the idea. Now anyone who wants to plant a tree to sequester CO2 can, for free. You could even use the wood to build housing for the poor all over the world, thereby sequestering CO2 and providing shelter for the homeless at the same time.
😉
I forgot to add, that the trees for houses for the poor idea does have one drawback in that if it turns out that we need the CO2 back, we’d have to burn all the poor people’s houses. This makes my freezer idea vastly superior and well worth the $1 Billion dollar opening bid price.
Yep – as PM Tony Abbott says, if you are worried about CO2, plant trees. And, being one of the founders of the Australian Green Corps project, he knows whereof he speaks. IIRC standard for GC volunteers was something like 200 trees per person per day? Provides employment, but holds no attraction for the gravy trainers.
Trouble is that you will produce co2 running the freezer. Isn’t life a b——d.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
The irony is, in their zeal to fix a problem which never really existed, they would create one far larger with the probable removal of far too much CO2 from the atmosphere – that is, if this far-fetched scheme was even remotely plausible.
Another one who need a muzzle and a suicide pill.
Wow! How on Earth did this make it through moderation? Surely on par with this comment: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/perlwitzcomment_dead.png
If anything needs to be done with CO2 its use not capture. What needs to happen is CCU (Carbon Capture and Use) not CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage). Best place to use CO2 is in greenhouses. Just attach the big pipe from chimneys and feed it into greenhouses where nice big tomatoes can be grown.
The U.S. petroleum industry has been producing and re-injecting CO2 from naturally occurring CO2 gas field reservoirs into oil reservoirs during secondary recovery operations for over thirty years. They’re not common, but two of the largest are located in Texas and Colorado and pipelined to various secondary oil recovery operations.
No doubt, for the right price, the greedy oil maggots can open the wells to the atmosphere if it gets too hot. /sarc.
Isn’t there a large one being built in Mississippi? I read about some boondoggle thereabouts that plans to run a combined cycle power station then sell/pipe the CO2 to wells.
Really a 100,000 year corner is tight?
Welcome to Wally world.
Hey! Under the right circumstances, not such a bad idea. In fact, very excellent science. Let’s build a system to extract and store twice man’s emissions, say 12 GtC/yr. That will change the sign of man’s contributions, and that has to mitigate the fears of the policymakers, i.e., the Obamas and the Gore-likes. “Global warming”, meaning AGW, will be twice gone.
And in a year, we will have sequestered 12 GtC. That’s 1.6% of the CO2 in the atmosphere, fully two times over man’s emissions, and 0.03% of what’s in the ocean. AR4, Fig. 7.3.
A year will be plenty, and we’ll find that – oh, oh! – there’s no significant change in the atmospheric concentration of CO2. That ought to convince enough policymakers that man has had, and can have, no effect on the natural fluxes of CO2, which are due to Henry’s Law (not used by the IPCC), and not the Industrial Revolution (used by the IPCC).
The experiment should have been cheaper, and a heck of a lot more humane, than continuing the shutdown of the US economy in pursuit of votes from the left/illiterate coalition, and of the nonsense in the guise of science.
‘Ideally, we could reach a stage where we could control the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, like you control your central heating.’
Heh, let’s aim big. None of this small fry stuff. Let’s change the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. I’d say move it out about a couple hundred thousand miles and then the sun’s energy reaching us will be diminished enough to counteract any warming from CO2. You got a problem with that?
“Global warming pioneer calls for CO2 to be taken from atmosphere and stored underground”
===============
She’s been doing that for millions of years.
For free.
There already is a solar powered Carbon Capture device and it’s free low maintenance it’s called a tree
Wally Broeker WOW really.
This guy is almost as smart as the congressman who suggested to many people on one side of an island could tip it over.
Remember him.
does this dumb $!# even have the slightest clue that sequestration of C02 requires energy.
Where do you think we will get that from.
A coal fired plant.
Oh I digress.
Listen Mr Wally word.
We need c02 the more the better.
This is a green gas not a green house gas.
Our lives and the lives of every living thing on earth depend on it.
I would like to see 1000 ppm.
Thats not just me either.
Water vapor makes up 99.9percent of the green house gas on earth.
The little bit of c02 or methane is a joke in its ability to do ANYTHING global warming wise.
just a side note.
and I ask this question.
if you had a football stadium filled with 100000 people and gave each a sign to hold up at half time representing the gases of the atmosphere.
you would hand out how many signs that said c02 on them.
well my friends it would be 40 out of 100000.
if you had all hold up the signs and panned around to count the c02 you would be very hard pressed to even find a few.
I hope this puts it in perspective.
Remember the only thing left to tax is the air and that is the agenda nothing more.
Dave
What we need is lots of trees and beavers. A single beaver can cut down 200 trees a year.
Didn’t do a lot of research on this but…
..” the leading cause of death among beavers is getting hit by a tree they just cut down.”
Didn’t do any research on this but “a single tree can cut down 200 beavers….” 🙂
(sorry…)
In defense of Edsel Ford his car did do what it was designed to do; move people. Looks might have been improved on a wee little bit, but it did not require “infinite money” to make it work,
Cheers, Kevin.
“Wally Broeker, the first person to alert the world to Global Warming”
The person has neither an english nor a German wikipedia page. Must be a legend in his own mind.
This person OTOH http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Schwab
has mentioned Global Warming through CO2 in his book Der Tanz mit dem Teufel (The dance with the devil) in 1958. The German original can be found on the Internet. In the book, CO2-induced Global Warming is one of the devices that the devil mentions with which he wants to destroy humanity. Amongst many other schemes. Schwab was an Ur-Green and member of the original Green party of Germany which ran the country for 12 years.
The name seems to have been misspelled:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Smith_Broecker
Thanks.
First guy etc….Ha ha ha ha.
This guy is either a narcissist or suffers from Munchhausen Syndrome. Seriously nuts!
Time to pull a Spanish Shuffle. Buy anthracite coal for about $40 a short ton at the mine, take it ten miles down the road, pour it into an old quarry pit, collect a carbon sequestration credit fee of $160 or so per metric tonne of carbon.
But unlike the solar panel trick, this one gets more profitable. For the next round, you “strip mine” the loose coal, then move it a quarter mile to the neighboring pit for more sequestration. Five years later, move it back again.
Then after the global cooling sets in and everyone is desperate for energy and forgets about sequestration, you can sell the coal for ten times what you paid for it. Feel free to keep some for your own use, it’s paid for.
Brilliant.
“calls for CO2 to be taken from atmosphere and stored underground” …. Don’t plants already DO that???
What kind of professor is he. Certainly not an engineer.
We may have to wait until CAGW pioneers are stored under the ground before sanity can resurface.
Broecker simply blows me away. You might want to have a gander at his 1998 stimulus:
THE END OF THE PRESENT INTERGLACIAL: HOW AND WHEN?
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~jortiz/paleoceanography/broecker.pdf
“(1) Were previous intervals of peak interglaciation terminated by abrupt global coolings?
(2) How close are we to the end of the present interval of peak interglaciation?
(3) Will the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases alter the natural sequence of events?”
On Broecker’s first point, subsequent research suggests that glacial inceptions can occur in as little as 70 years. As far as I can tell Broecker has not addressed this since his 1998 “stimulus”.
Ditto on point 2. Continuing research pretty much suggests that the Holocene has probably shot its wad and we now live in the Anthropocene extension of the Holocene interglacial. I do not see where Dr. Broecker has returned to or resolved this question anywhere. Are we to assume that the Holocene would just have continued to run blithely along, forever, were it not for our AGW disturbance?
Broecker’s most recent emanations would seem to suggest that there is no longer a concern related to the length of the Holocene. His point 3 answer is that “the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases” will alter the natural sequence of events. Up.
I simply cannot tell you how relieved I am to know, Dr. Broecker, that even though “peak intervals of interglaciation” have indeed been terminated by abrupt coolings, we needn’t worry about that happening to the Holocene. Because if we hadn’t warmed it up at its half-precession cycle age, the Holocene would just run on and on and on…..
It is also quite the relief to know that we are nowhere close to “the end of the present interval of peak interglaciation” because if that were in any way true “the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases [might] alter the natural sequence of events” and end-up extending the Holocene. This is impossible, of course, because the Holocene was never going to end in the first place, right?
/sarc off
Dr. Broecker, if I can give you any advice whatsoever, you should stay away from pretzel logic. If that entails staying away from pretzels altogether, so be it.
Meanwhile enjoy the end extreme interglacial………………while it lasts 🙂
Wally has gone bonkers in his old age. He used to say that within 1000 years the earth would adapt to the extra carbon dioxide humans injected into the air. Now he’s worried about our effect on the next 100,000 years, ie late in the next ice age glaciation?
Too many years of drinking his own carbonated Kool-Aid, I guess.
All I can do is agree.
“The debate is false. One of the main drivers of ice ages was the CO2 content in the air. When the CO2 was lower it got plenty colder. So, as we add CO2 it’s going to get a lot warmer.
Prof Wally from this interview at Columbia a few years back
http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/summer12/features4
Shawn,
Please you did not just say that.
Where is the warming for the last 17 plus years?
C02 kept rising feeding millions and greening the earth.
Deserts are shrinking.
Anyway warming is also good depending on where you live.
Tell people in Siberia its too hot and I think they will take the thermostat control away from you.
Dave H
No no. When CO2 was at its lowest point it got warmer, much warmer.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Milankovitch_Cycles_400000.gif
“…. but that human activity is causing a rise in temperature which will lead to problems over the next 100,000 years.”
This is the most sensible timescale I’ve heard about AGW problem.
So if we are not into a new glacial in, let’s say, 20,000 years time and human civilisation still exists ( most unlikely ) lets have another look at CCS.
That’s it Shawn and Greg. In a nutshell. You got it. Pass it on.
I think before to long these nutters will need some very big holes in the ground…. To hide in from lots of very angry people who have payed loads of money to no result!
James Bull
http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/summer12/features4
“They call me a ‘junk scientist’ to my face,” he says.
Nevertheless, he insists, “The debate is false. One of the main drivers of ice ages was the CO2 content in the air. When the CO2 was lower it got plenty colder. So, as we add CO2 it’s going to get a lot warmer.
=====
Oh what? The Al Gore ‘inconvenient’ fallacy all over again.
From someone who has spent his life working paleo that can be nothing more than deliberate misdirection. And he wonders why he gets labelled a ‘junk scientist’?
“One of the best ways to deal with this is likely to be carbon capture – in other words, putting the carbon back where it came from, underground.”
NO! It actually came from the atmosphere. Geological and biological processes have been stripping CO2 from the atmosphere and locking up in rocks – limestone, dolomite, chalk, shale, in fact, all calcareous rocks – for literally eons. Fossil fuels are puny by comparison. Atmospheric CO2 is in fact at extremely LOW levels on geological time scales. Any lower and it will become critical for plant life.
What an idiot this Broecker is.
And now we know how all those “fossil fuels” were created. Dinosaurs simply channeled CO2 underground. Could be that’s the real reason they went extinct since they eliminated their food source (CO2)?
I have not read the comments, or the article, but nature has found the solution, namely trees, plants and vegetation.
If people want carbon capture, just plant some forests on scrub land. Preferably trees that have a long life expectancy.
Sequester the carbonloon “scientists”. Problem solved.
I didn’t know you could gain a professorship in suicidal idiocy. Are they giving them away in boxes of Fruit Loops?
Whacky loons like these guys don’t seem to understand the basic tenets of chemical thermodynamics.
While burning the carbon fuels that produces CO2 liberates the energy society needs, reversing the process to pull carbon from CO2 so we can bury it requires the same energy that was liberated in the first place.
Obviously he understands nothing about the mechanics and limitations of carbon sequestration.
[snip – over the top, but funny -mod]
Closing comments are nearly complete.
The conference is about to come to a close. All goals and objectives (I trust) have been met.
Time to fire up those big jet engines and head off to the next International Climate Summit To Save The Planet from “Atmospheric Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Driven Catastrophic Global Climate Disruption”.
I think airspace over Iceland is closed due to the volcanic eruption. With luck it will last months and these idiots can “cool their jets”, literally.
“He was presenting an analysis which showed that the world has been cooling very slowly, over the last 51 million years, but that human activity is causing a rise in temperature which will lead to problems over the next 100,000 years.”
Ive tried telling this first part to people I debate this with. If we actually do have the power to raise the earths temp, we very well might save not destroy the earths balance. This planet is slowly freezing to death.
How to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in the ground:
1. Mine coal. This creates huge cavities in the ground.
2. Burn the coal. This releases CO2 to the atmpsphere.
3. Plant trees. This takes CO2 out of the atmosphere.
4. Use the trees for two things
4a: Building materials. This keeps the CO2 out of the atmosphere for a very, very long time.
4b: Paper
5. Take waste paper and waste wood and pulp them into slurry, then using tech much like “rammed earth” construction, pack this slurry into the cavities created by coal mines. This puts the carbon right back where it came from and pound for pound at likely a higher carbon content than what came out. In fact, you might be able to increase that carbon content even more by pre-processing or “burning” that pulp and burying the ash only.
6. Under no circumstances recycle paper / wood. Recycling paper results in fewer trees being farmed to produce paper and actually reduces the amount of CO2 taken out of the atmosphere. But tossing paper into conventional landfills increases the rate at which they fill up. So — use the great big cavities we have created from mines. Fill them back up with the carbon we took out.
Broeker is a respected climate scientist but his advocacy of CAGW is disconnected to his scientific works. None of his works provide solid evidence for CAGW. But by making silly statements like the climate beast, his research gets funded. As Lindzen once said if you want to study cockroaches, link it to climate change and you will get funding.
An early CAGW warmist discredits himself, without help, and reveals his own nuttiness.