BY ROBERT L. BRADLEY, JR. of the Institute for Energy Research
“The current annual cost to extract all of the annual emissions [of CO2] is of the order of $1,000 per person per year in developed countries, about $600/person/year on global average. Extracting all current emissions is a realistic approximation of the need, as the allowed carbon budget to keep warming in the range specified by the Paris accord is nearly exhausted.”
– James Hansen and Pushker Kharecha, “Cost of Carbon Capture: Can Young People Bear the Burden?” Joule, August 15, 2018.
What Al Gore called “the central organizing principle of civilization” marches on. Premised on population, affluence, and technology (PAT) as the scourge of the natural environment, anti-industrial activists effortlessly jump from alleged market failure to recommended government correction, program by new program.
What is the latest public policy push regarding global warming? According to scientist/activist James Hansen, the time has come to construct new-technology industrial plants to generate “negative” carbon emissions to “stabilize” global climate. Versus carbon-dioxide tax proposals around $40 per metric ton, this new program would cost between $150 and $200 per metric ton.
Background
James Hansen is a force for climate activism. Not only did his 1988 Congressional testimony launch the global-warming scare, his carbon tax (“fee and dividend”) advocacyis the policy centerpiece of the national lobby group Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
Hansen has long warned of a shrinking timetable for significantly reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Back in 2006, he announced a ten-year window to “alter fundamentally the trajectory of global warming emissions.” In 2009, he reported that “the dangerous threshold of greenhouse gases is actually lower than what we told you a few years ago.” He added: “If the world does not make a dramatic shift in energy policies over the next few years, we may well pass the point of no return.”
Game, set, and match fossil fuels. The steady growth of natural gas, coal, and oil has busted beyond Hansen’s “point of no return.” With a US-led global boom in oil and gas extraction, business-as-usual is being redefined upwards for hydrocarbons worldwide.
“Global energy demand grew by 2.1% in 2017, and carbon emissions rose for the first time since 2014,” reported the International Energy Agency in its latest Global Energy and CO2Status Report. More than two-thirds of this increase was met by fossil fuels, IEA added, with increasing usage of coal (1 percent), oil (1.6 percent), and natural gas (3 percent). “Fossil fuels accounted for 81% of total energy demand in 2017,” IEA’s press release ended, “a level that has remained stable for more than three decades.”
Continued growth in fossil fuels is the base forecast for all of the major forecasting agencies (IEA, EIA, BP, ExxonMobil). Predictions of Peak Demand have grown about as quiet as talk of Peak Supply.
Meanwhile, the great hope of (politically correct) renewable energies hangs by government threads. With subsidy fatigue growing around the world, the bubble industries of industrial wind and on-grid solar could burst. And nuclear? The environmentalist civil war over the one large-scale carbon-free electricity source has been joined by the costly failure of new operational designs (such as Georgia’s Plant Vogtle).
Renewables: “Grossly Inadequate”
With the Paris climate accord going the way of the Kyoto Protocol (both described by Hansen and Kharecha as “precatory agreements, wishful thinking, which do almost nothing to address the fundamental problem”), the economic/political reality would seem to be free-market adaptation to the human influence on climate.
After all, Hansen himself decried the renewables movement as hopelessly unrealistic. “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole,” he stated, “is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”
But no. The new plan is a grand leap into the technologically controversial, no-not-what-cost world of carbon capture and storage to create, in effect, carbon-neutral hydrocarbons fuels.
The New Imperative
Hansen and Kharecha premise their case on certain knowledge, absolute grounds:
“In view of our long-standing knowledge of the threat posed by climate change, we find it morally repugnant and reprehensible that we, the older generations, have not developed, tested, and costed the known technological options for addressing climate change, so that today’s young people and future generations will have viable options for addressing climate change.”
If nuclear power was Plan A for low-carbon energy given the limitations of wind and solar, negative emissions is Plan B for the failure of CO2 emissions mitigation. We already owe money in this regard, according to Hansen and Kharecha: “The average citizen in developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, has a debt of over $100,000 to remove their country’s contribution to climate change via fossil fuel burning.”
Hansen and Kharecha do not have the answers. They simply report the results of a new paper estimating the cost of negative emissions via direct air capture by an industrial plant. In “A Process for Capturing CO2 from the Atmosphere” (Joule: August 15, 2018), authors David Keith et al. report:
“We describe a process for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere in an industrial plant. The design captures ~1 Mt-CO2/year in a continuous process using an aqueous KOH sorbent coupled to a calcium caustic recovery loop…We report results from a pilot plant that provides data on performance of the major unit operations…Depending on financial assumptions, energy costs, and the specific choice of inputs and outputs, the levelized cost per ton CO2captured from the atmosphere ranges from 94 to 232 $/t-CO2.”
Versus a wide estimated range of CO2 capture between $50 and $1,000 per metric ton, this paper reports the results from an actual (pilot) project.
But the mid-point of the above estimate, $163 per metric ton of CO2 captured (storage would add $10–$20/tCO2 more), is three times the Obama-decreed social cost of carbon of $42 per metric ton. And as a pilot project, the authors rightly caution about its results “prior to its widespread deployment.”
Boondoggle, Cronyism Alert
“Estimated costs, exceeding $100 per ton of CO2 without including the cost of CO2storage, are lower than some prior estimates, yet are so high as to strongly support the need for rapid reduction of fossil fuel emissions,” state Hansen and Kharecha. But this window of opportunity has all but closed with the clash of economics versus politics being won by energy economics.
Remember the U.S. Synthetic Fuel Corporation (1980–86)? Remember the Kemper County carbon capture and storage project most recently? The latest from carbon capture should be treated with great caution, certainly guilty-until-proven-innocent.
Expect pushback for having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too from environmentalists who just don’t like cake.
And expect an upsurge of corporate cronyism. In fact, with the recent formation of the Carbon Capture Coalition, and ExxonMobil’s big talk (greenwashing to critics) about fuel-cell CO2 capture, taxpayers are put on notice.
When it comes to man-versus-nature, there seems to be no cost too high to pay according to the scientist emperors. The last word belongs to Nathan Confas, et al. who recently wrote in American Sociologist:
“There is a strong possibility that conservatives are not opposed to, or skeptical of, science per se. Rather, they lack trust in impact scientists whom they see as seeking to influence policy in a liberal direction.”
The Malthusian litany of false alarms justifies such skepticism.
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Only a dead planet is carbon neutral.
Carbon capture creates a hazard where there was none. Think Lake Nyos. That said, I swear they are fanatical enough that they’d remove all CO2 from the atmosphere if they could.
Look at Hansen’s photo at the Senate stunt where he delivered the opening lines of the climate mania.
It is clearer and clearer that he he was crazy wrong then.
This latest paper indicated he has not gotten the treatment he desperately needs.
His pathetic delusional obsession about confusing Earth and Venus and blaming humanity for his confused state has not gotten better with time.
James Hansen was one of the first computer climate modellers that in 1988 predicted warming scenarios. Because he actually published 2 papers in 1981 on CO2 forcing and went to Congress twice to testify in 1987 and again in 1988 in favour of global warning you may accurately say that he James Hansen is the father of computer climate modelling . However he is the father of a scientific discipline that started with a scam as Willis has pointed out and has had to tell one lie after another just to keep the scam going. Billions have been wasted on this scam and billions more will be wasted before the scam ends.
The only consolation we skeptics have is that each one of us is contributing the hastening of that end. I ask everyone I meet “Have you seen global warming yet? I have been looking for it for 30 years and cant seem to find it. Do you know where it is? If they mention something like the Arctic or Greenland I give them statistics that I have learned in 9 months of studying this for 8 hours a day.
TELL EVERYONE YOU MEET THAT IT IS A SCAM AND WHY.
1 WUWT contributer said, this scam in comparison makes Bernie Madoff look like a petty thief. Bernie Madoff in the end caused losses 0f ~$7 billion to his investors. As least they had a choice to invest or not. The world’s poor DO NOT have a choice. They are paying for James Hansen and others’ scam every day so that the end result might be $7 trillion down the drain before it is all over.
Now for some comments about James Hansen
It boggles the mind how truly deranged this man is. He is completely unstuck mentally and a bonafide nut case, devoid of any common sense or rational thought. To think he was the director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies(GISS) a division of NASA for a large % of time of the 32 years that he worked there. Before he retired in 2013, he turned that agency into an agency of global warming. He was arrested 5 times for protesting illegally for green causes.
Some of his predictions and some statements in his own words, and hallmarks of his life are as follows:
1) In 1988 he predicted that the Hudson River would overflow because of rising sea level caused by CO2 and New York would be underwater by 2008.
2) In 1986 he predicted that the earth would be 1.1C higher within 20 years and then by
3) 1999 he said that the earth had cooled and that the US hadn’t warmed in 50 years
4 He had also said that the Arctic would lose all of its ice by 2000.
5) In december 2005, Hansen argued that the earth will become “a different planet” without U.S. leadership in cutting global greenhouse gas emissions.
6) He also said that global warming of 2C above preindustrial times (~ 1850) would be dangerous and that mankind would be unable to adapt.
7) In 2008 he coauthored a paper that said that unless mankind limited the CO2 to 350ppm that we would have not have the same planet that we grew up with. Well 10 years later we are at 410ppm and the planet looks the same to me.
8) in 2009 Hansen called coal companies criminal enterprises and said that Obama had 4 years left to save the planet.
9) In 2012 Hansen accused skeptics of crimes against humanity and nature.
10) Hansen is involved with a 2015 lawsuit involving 21 kids that argues that their constitutional rights were interfered with by CO2
11) He then said in march 2016 that the seas could rise several metres in 50 to 150 years and swamp coastal cities .
12) in 2017 he has admitted that CAGW does not happen with burning fossil fuels.
“One flaw in my book Storms of My Grandchildren is my inference you can get runaway climate change on a relatively short timescale. ”
“Do you think that’s possible on a many-millions-of-years timescale?
It can’t be done with fossil-fuel burning.”
13) Then he said “But if you’re really talking about four or five degrees, that means the tropics and the subtropics are going to be practically uninhabitable.”
He doesnt seem to know that their average temperature is 28C.
14) But then he said that climate change was running a $535 trillion debt
15) He has been quoted many times that equates climate change to all sorts of extreme weather events. No database in the world shows any more than there ever were.
16) Hansen has published way over 100 fraudulent climate studies with almost all of them using results from computer climate models that are woefully inadequate and that have never been validated except by the human modeler.
17) In 2018 he made this quote in a study “The average citizen in developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, has a debt of over $100,000 to remove their country’s contribution to climate change via fossil fuel burning.”
Obviously the man just doesnt know when to shut up.
I totally agree! One question however; Who benefits from the sc@m? Hansen? I think not!
As director of GISS he was paid handsomely all those years plus someone is funding his studies.
“It is clearer and clearer that he he was crazy wrong then.”
He he. Always wrong, never in doubt!
The two most consistent characteristics of the “Climate change” cult, like all such cults, is its constant non stop, never pausing for a post [ non ] event analysis, a concentration on “predictions” of imminent and dangerous Nature and civilisation destroying events arising from the aforesaid “Climate change” unless “we do something”.
The second such characteristic of the climate change cult [ and “renewable energy”, another direct and unaffordable civilisation disrupting consequence of the Climate Change cult ] is a whole bucketful of extremely dubious and usually just plain straight out highly misleading and even straight out f—–dulent numerical calculations based on those aforesaid Climate change predictions, which purport to show how seriously the Climate change claims and the claims of its adherents must be treated.
Rarely if ever do we see any serious analysis other than wild hand waving claims coming from the Climate change cultists themselves on the non eventuating but previously “predicted” climate change events and their supposed “predicted” consequences.
The self importance and hubris of these people is just galactic.
I’ve looked and looked and looked and failed to find a thing I found ages ago.
It was a real experiment conducted in a field in South West Scotland. I remember it because it would have been barely 45 minutes drive from my old place.
Basically a farmer had ploughed a tired old pasture field and was going to leave it ‘fallow’ for 12 months
Researchers took the opportunity to plant some CO2 flux meters in the field for the 12 months.
As it happened and due to the less than clement weather in that part of the world, the meters were running for 2 years.
Just sitting on some bare ploughed field. at 55+ degrees North.
They recorded that for both of the 2 years, that bare soil was releasing 10 tonnes per acre per year of CO2
Does ‘World Farmland’ extend to 1,200 million acres, roughly.
Work it out. Compare to fossil emissions….
No matter until you see this, (something I did properly bookmark and is *still* there. Nice.)
http://flux.aos.wisc.edu/~adesai/documents/Desai-AFM-Multisite.pdf
It describes how they did the reverse experiment – looking to see how much CO2 an actively growing and mixed tree-age forest, at reasonable latitude, absorbed.
Just eyeballing their Fig 2, I’d guess that their forest was soaking up about 5 grams of carbon per square metre per day over the 3 months of summer. Nil otherwise.
I get that to be just shy of 5 tonnes of CO2 per acre per year- which stacks up *perfectly* with a figure someone here quoted about Douglas Fir forest growing on Oregon.
I calculated then that it would need 720 acres of Douglas Fir to soak up 1 hour’s worth of output from the wood-burning exercise currently going on inside Drax Power Station. Even before they get all of Drax burning wood and thus quadruple that figure.
See the ‘problem’…
Acre for acre, ploughed dirt is releasing twice as much CO2 as forest is absorbing – the *difference* amounting to 1,200 million acres at 5 tonnes per acre = 60+ gigatons annually
(From my experience of livestock farming and grazed dirt and what our (now disappeared) contributor – RGB@Duke – used to say= ‘Goats make deserts’…..
(A desert being defined as a place with low to zero soil organic content)
…I would assert that grazed farmland is producing just as much CO2 as ploughed farmland)
In light of that, are Fossil Fuels a problem – is there anything to worry about or get into a blind panic about, as is patently happening now amongst scientists and politicos…….
PS I take ‘farmland’ to be 10% of entire Earth surface, hence= 10% of 5E14 square metres
https://www.producer.com/2017/11/worlds-farmland-total-bigger-expected/
Satellite figures show 15 % more farmland they they thought.
The answer is 4.62 billion acres are farmland.
After a crop started growing ; the soil would not release as much CO2. However you are correct that the IPCC is surely underestimating the land use component of CO2 emission to atmosphere. Mankind is now emitting over 10 GT of carbon or 36.7 GT of CO2 per year. The US DOE has vastly underestimated the landuse component and the IPCC just blindly copies as usual.
According to your calcs your number should have been 6 not 60 . However with the true total of farmland at 4.62 billion acres at 5 tonnes CO2 net per acre emission , the total would be 23.1 billion tons of CO2 or 6.29 GT of carbon because of farmland. However some of that farmland is orchards and never gets ploughed. % of orchards in Europe is 0.25% so subtract .1 to give you 23 GT of CO2 or 6.267 GT of carbon .
However your premise is correct. You are brillant. You have just found the reason why the CO2 in the air is increasing by a net of 1/2 % per year. It is land use. Since the IPCC says land use is 29% of total that means per year actual farmland (IPCC figure ) emits 2.9 GT of carbon or 10.6 GT of CO2. However your figure is 6.267 GT of carbon or 23 GT of CO2. Even just adding 15% more farmland and disregrading your figures for a moment would give 3.335 Gt of carbon(revised IPCC figure) or 12.24 GT CO2(revised IPCC figure) which is 1.64GT CO2 more which is 0.435 GT of carbon more or 1.596 GT CO2 more. That represents a revised IPCC figure which is 4.35% higher .
However adding your revised figures to this revelation we get 6.267 – 2.9 = 3.367 GT Carbon or 12.356 GT CO2 more. Your figures give 33.67 % more . Some of that is because of the 15% more farmland and some of it is because of your figure of net 5 tonnes CO2 emission per acre per year is obviously way more than what the IPCC says.
***************************************************************************************
Both AGW and CAGW are busted. Amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
On 2nd thought the alarmists are going to argue that no matter whether it is farmland or fossil fuels or cement making the CO2 is going up because of man. So I guess it isnt a bust but it sure makes the IPCC look like a grade schooler who hasn’t learned to do the experiments on CO2 emissions and hasnt learned to use the info on satellites.
Delete the phrase “or 1.596 GT CO2 more”. and delete the sentence “That represents a revised IPCC figure which is 4.35% higher . ” Add the sentence That represents a revised IPCC figure from all 3 sources of manmade emissions which is 4.35% higher .
Okay AGW and CAGW are not necessarily busted from this but it sure raises questions about the accuracy of the carbon cycle. Here is a corrected copy of the above.
https://www.producer.com/2017/11/worlds-farmland-total-bigger-expected/
Satellite figures show 17 % more farmland they they thought.
The answer is 4.62 billion acres are farmland.
After a crop started growing the soil would not release as much CO2. However you are correct that the IPCC is surely underestimating the land use component of CO2 emission to atmosphere. Mankind is now emitting over 10 GT of carbon or 36.7 GT of CO2 per year. The US DOE has vastly underestimated the landuse component and the IPCC just blindly copies as usual.
According to your calcs your number should have been 6 not 60 . However with the true total of farmland at 4.62 billion acres at 5 tonnes CO2 net per acre emission , the total would be 23.1 billion tons of CO2 or 6.29 GT of carbon because of farmland. However some of that farmland is orchards and never gets ploughed. % of orchards in Europe is 0.25% so subtract .1 to give you 23 GT of CO2 or 6.267 GT of carbon .
However your premise is correct. You are brillant. You have just found a big hole in the carbon cycle. It is land use. Since the IPCC says land use is 29% of total that means per year actual farmland (IPCC figure ) emits 2.9 GT of carbon or 10.643 GT of CO2. However your figure is 6.267 GT of carbon or 23 GT of CO2. Even just adding 17% more farmland and disregarding your figures for a moment, would give 3.393 Gt of carbon(revised IPCC figure) or 12.45 GT CO2(revised IPCC figure) which is 1.81GT CO2 more which is 0.493 GT of carbon more . That represents a revised IPCC figure which is 4.93% higher for all sources of mankind emissions.
However adding your revised figures to this revelation we get 6.267 – 2.9 = 3.367 GT Carbon more or 12.357 GT CO2 more. Your figures give 33.67 % more . Some of that is because of the 17% more farmland and some of it is because of your figure of net 5 tonnes CO2 emission per acre per year is obviously way more than what the IPCC says.
Okay AGW and CAGW are not necessarily busted from this but it sure raises questions about the accuracy of the carbon cycle. Here is a corrected copy of the above.
https://www.producer.com/2017/11/worlds-farmland-total-bigger-expected/
Satellite figures show 17 % more farmland they they thought.
The answer is 4.62 billion acres are farmland.
After a crop started growing the soil would not release as much CO2. However you are correct that the IPCC is surely underestimating the land use component of CO2 emission to atmosphere. Mankind is now emitting over 10 GT of carbon or 36.7 GT of CO2 per year. The US DOE has vastly underestimated the landuse component and the IPCC just blindly copies as usual.
According to your calcs your number should have been 6 not 60 . However with the true total of farmland at 4.62 billion acres at 5 tonnes CO2 net per acre emission , the total would be 23.1 billion tons of CO2 or 6.29 GT of carbon because of farmland. However some of that farmland is orchards and never gets ploughed. % of orchards in Europe is 0.25% so subtract .1 to give you 23 GT of CO2 or 6.267 GT of carbon .
However your premise is correct. You are brillant. You have just found the reason why the CO2 in the air is increasing by a net of 1/2 % per year. It is land use. Since the IPCC says land use is 29% of total that means per year actual farmland (IPCC figure ) emits 2.9 GT of carbon or 10.643 GT of CO2. However your figure is 6.267 GT of carbon or 23 GT of CO2. Even just adding 17% more farmland and disregarding your figures for a moment, would give 3.393 Gt of carbon(revised IPCC figure) or 12.45 GT CO2(revised IPCC figure) which is 1.81GT CO2 more which is 0.493 GT of carbon more . That represents a revised IPCC figure which is 4.93% higher for all sources of mankind emissions.
However adding your revised figures to this revelation we get 6.267 – 2.9 = 3.367 GT Carbon more or 12.357 GT CO2 more. Your figures give 33.67 % more . Some of that is because of the 17% more farmland and some of it is because of your figure of net 5 tonnes CO2 emission per acre per year is obviously way more than what the IPCC says.
Oh well, I suppose it’s back tothe drawing board for the Alarmists!
Late 1940s to mid 1950s, we were all going to hell in a handcart because of nuclear war! Didn’t happen!
Mid-late 1950s to mid 1960s, we were all going to hell in a handcart because of chemical/germ warfare! Didn’t happen!
Late 1960s to mid 1970s, we were all going to hell in a handcart because of Global Cooling. Didn’t happen!
Late 1970s to present day, we were all going to hell in a handcart because ofGlobal Warming. Isn’t happening!
What’s next? I suppose they could always cling to the claim that aliens trillions of miles from Earth are boringly watching us, with a view to invading us to prevent us destroying the planet! They haven’t got around to that one yet, have they…………………? 😉 (They ruined aperfectly good classic sci-fi movie with its predicably crap remake ………..Keanau Reeves is no Michael Rennie imho!
Twitter/Facebook etc. I see them everywhere in transport hubs like Town Hall in Sydney, Australia. 80% not looking where they are going, just gawping into their “smart” phones! Sheesh!
“The environmentalist civil war over the one large-scale carbon-free electricity source has been joined by the costly failure of new operational designs (such as Georgia’s Plant Vogtle).”
Nothing like cherry picking the biggest flop. That new operational design is being built all around the globe – China has their own replica that they can build at a cost more than twice as cheaply as Westingthouse can in the U.S., which was done in by dependency upon a Chicago steel works that had no capability of building a reactor. Westinghouse is building that same reactor in China in several locales and has no problem getting quality steel work from Chinese suppliers.
BUT the biggest ignorance is that the new molten salt reactor designs are not even mentioned.
Aside from eliminating any and all complaints about tradtitional nuclear power, thee small modular reactors are easy andcheap to build- in factories, and require minimal site preparation. They can be located ANYWHERE and do not require cooling bodies of water. Costs are roughly half that of a typical nuclear reactor and can produce th echeapest power of any technology.
Can also burn Thorium, an inexhaustible fuel source. When “energy experts” realize that molten salt reactors are the future of power, perhaps they will stop creating these stupid future scenarios that will never exist.
did they factor in the cost of inhaling and exhaling?
old white guy
Nope, just cow farts.
What Hansen and his cohorts are suggesting is climate numptyism on steroids combined with financial numptyism on steroids. You can smell the desperation, though. Their beloved anti-human, anti-science and anti-life ideology is dying, and they know it. COP24 will be an even bigger farce than Paris.
Bruce Cobb
I smell numptyism.
“We describe a process for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere in an industrial plant. The design captures ~1 Mt-CO2/year in a continuous process using an aqueous KOH sorbent coupled to a calcium caustic recovery loop…We report results from a pilot plant that provides data on performance of the major unit operations…Depending on financial assumptions, energy costs, and the specific choice of inputs and outputs, the levelized cost per ton CO2captured from the atmosphere ranges from 94 to 232 $/t-CO2.”
The described system sounds much like the caustic recovery system as used in Kraft pulp mills. The problem is in producing the calcium caustic recovery loop. Chemically:
KCO3 + Ca(OH)2-> KOH + CaCo3.
The CaCO3 needs to then be recovered by roasting giving
CaCO3 + heat ->CaO + CO2
CaO + H2O -> Ca(OH)2
The process of recovering the caustic calcium releases the CO2 that was absorbed in the first place so it appears to me to be an exercise in futility.
Can anyone explain the mechanism being described, ‘an aqueous KOH sorbent’ etc? I use NaOH granules to adsorb CO2 in my anaesthetic system, when exhausted they have to be discarded as hazardous waste: what will have to be disposed of ( without releasing CO2) in the suggested method?
If Peta of Newark is correct. See his and my post near the bottom . Then there is a big hole in the carbon cycle. It amounts to 3.367 GT of carbon or 12.357 GT CO2. Plus there is another 1 GT carbon or 3.67 GT CO2 that mankind has increased over the past couple of years that the carbon cycle diagrams have not incorporated. Thus there is now a missing amount of ~ 4.36 GT of carbon or ~16 GT CO2. Where has it gone? The oceans maybe , but the IPCC likes to say that the oceans and atmosphere are perfectly balanced in a trade of CO2. This is a lot of CO2 ; over 33% of all of mankind’s emissions per year. The net emissions from all sources to the atmosphere are still 4 GT carbon or 14.68 GT CO2 but that figure is showing no increase in % over time. For the last 10years ; It is now 0.617% higher than a year ago which was 0.484% higher than previous year which was 0.745% higher than previous year which was 0.753% higher than previous year which was 0.549% higher than previous year which was 0.512% higher than previous year which was 0.669% higher than previous year which was 0.494% higher than previous year which was 0.601% higher than previous year which was 0.526% higher than previous year. The alarmists will look at that data and say the graph shows a slight trend upwards. Perhaps, but if that is their idea of CAGW, then spare me the marmalade.
Another thought. Cows according to the IPCC are thought to cause 18 % of global warming all by themselves because of the methane release. So we have 11.8 Gt carbon equivalent of emissions before the revised figures of Peta of Newark and myself are taken into account. If you add in the new land use figure for farming of 6.267 GT carbon plus the 1.8 GT carbon for the cows to the 10 GT carbon listed in IPCC figures you then have a total of over 18 GT carbon of which 8.067 is agricultural caused which is 44.6 % of global warming emissions. Yup the farm sector is the highest man made emitter followed by fossil fuel burning and then cement making. So does this mean we ban farming or at least put a carbon price tax on farms?? I can see all the farmers lining up now to lynch every climate scientist they can get their hands on. I have to admit I would be hard pressed to attempt to stop them.
What’s the per person cost to pump CO2 up to 800-1200ppm?
I don’t think we have enough fossil fuels to get CO2 up to those levels.
Maybe we could we mine the seabed clathrates, just pump them up and flare them off – not try to make it commercially viable? Something government could do …
Use nuclear power to disassociate limestone.
Then make more cement. We could have all the CO2 we want.
Someday this Ice Age is going to end.
Let’s look at the technical aspect of CO2 absorption from the air. “… a continuous process using an aqueous KOH sorbent coupled with calcium caustic recovering loop..”
Calcium caustic is obtained by calcium carbonate ignition followed by quenching calcium oxide with water. Clearly, calcium caustic could not absorb more CO2 that was discharged from initial carbonate. It turns out that for CO2 from fossil fuels only KOH remains.
In order to absorb billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, it is necessary to electrolyse billions of tons of KCl, while utilizing billions of tons of toxic chlorine and billions of tons of soluble K2CO3. The project is absurd and technically unworkable, not to mention the doubtfulness of the goal.
Off the wall proposal for no reliably good reason. Followed by discussion on how the proposal might not be that off the wall and the possibility that the reason could be good if you changed the circumstances and the certainty levels. Responded to with a discussion of the possibility of different circumstances and certainty levels. Net result is an off the wall proposal for no reliably good reason gets wider notice while seeming worth serious consideration. Sorry, no time to play today.
they lack trust in impact scientists
Where can I get a degree in impact science? Oh, wait, maybe crash-test dummies own that.
The talkabout by climate change action advocates is similar to confabulation by people suffering from cognative impairment. Ridiculous, unrelated, incorrect, true, false–everything dumped into the diminishing scrambled neural network to conclude nonsense.
Negative emissions? We’d need to populate the tropopause w/mini black holes. Well, not 100% negative — there’s the Hawking radiation they emit.
Idealistic gloom and doom priests seldom talk about real, on the ground solutions except in the very broadest terms. A few of them certainly know their pie in the sky solutions will never come to fruition. Still so long as the public doesn’t understand they can keep preaching while raking in the personal praise and if they play it right lots of big donations. Now with progressive billionaires willing to throw money at the preaching, though seldom any real proposed solution, the high priest keep preaching. The problem Hansen, et al, face is that in many places the public is getting a good taste at just how expensive the “solutions” being propose really are.
Mr Hansen wants “negative carbon/CO2 emissions”? Easy, peasy, PLANT TREES. LOTS of lovely, lovely trees. Make them fruit trees, so that hungry people can have work, and food to eat, at harvest time.
But that doesn’t fit in with the PC One World Order Gooberment Talking Points and Socialist/Communist Control Agenda.
“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole,” he stated, “is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”
— I wonder how Hansen would explain the world’s fascination with fighting global warming through a combination of:
1) subsidies for windmills and solar panels
2) higher taxes
3) wealth transfers
4) grants to people who do modeling
5) weekend cocktail confabs
Just what does all that say about what people on his side actually believe?
Well, most of the CO2 on the planet is bound in sea water. If one thinks CO2 is harmful, something I doubt, should you not extract CO2 from this sea water instead and not from the air?
“…the central organizing principle of civilization…” Ah, political corruption.
I must post a reply to Mr. Bradley’s assertion that Plant Vogtle is a “costly failure.” Costly, yes, failure no. It is still under construction, not having yet been abandoned. And the “new operational design” is now in operation in China since the the first AP-1000 has started up. Now the V.C. Summer plant is a better poster child for costly failures because the construction of both of the new units has been abandoned and has become a political football for the government of South Carolina.
CO2 sinks perfectly scale with CO2 concentration, making all global warming disaster scenarios impossible.
http://i736.photobucket.com/albums/xx10/Oliver25/co2%20sinks.png
http://i736.photobucket.com/albums/xx10/Oliver25/co2sinks.png