You are aware, I hope, that although “questioning” persists*, that is no longer a question; it has been answered definitively in the affirmative to the satisfaction of the scientific community.
*Who was it who said, “The law of gravity would be called into question if there were a financial interest at stake,” or words to that effect?
But we can. We can grow corn and tons of it. Some factories are already producing corn-based ETOH.
The problem is that not enough gas stations sell the stuff, and it’s costly to retrofit them, and so it’s not worth buying a car that runs on the stuff. Though I understand that GM is now making almost all of their new cars ETOH compliant.
But does ETOH reduce greenhouse gasses? I know it would reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and I’m all for that, but what would it do for pollution?
:rolleyes: In view of the thoroughly discredited links you posted in this thread, Azov, I have serious doubts as to whether any link you provide on this subject will be worth opening.
Actually, there was just an NAS study released yesterday on this record that provides support for most of the basic results reported by Mann et al., while noting some caveats and uncertainties. However, it is important to remember (as that NAS report mentioned) that the conclusion that the current warming is anthropogenic (and, more generally, that the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that we are causing is and will continue to lead to warming) comes from lots of independent lines of evidence, of which the temperature record over the past 1000 years is one of the least persuasive (in that it is circumstantial).
The interesting fact is that they can list most of the scientists who oppose the consensus and have any sort of publication record in the field (in most cases rather short) in a short list. As for the specific quote from Patterson regarding the correlation between CO2 and temperatures on time scales of hundreds of millions of years, I believe that result has been disputed and may also be in large part irrelevant. It is disputed because, among other things, the data for both CO2 and temperature becomes much worse once you get back beyond the time we have ice core samples for (~750,000 years). It is in large part irrelevant because on those sort of geologic timescales, there are plenty of other factors that can play an important role in climate. For example, the continents can be very different and the topography of the land can be very different. (Even something as small as the closing off of the connection in Panama between the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean is thought to have possibly had significant climate effects due to changes in ocean currents.) And, variations in the solar constant, volcanism, and so forth can also be much more relevant on those timescales. Noone has claimed that CO2 is the only factor that affects climate. It is merely the only factor that is currently changing so significantly on the sort of human timescales of interest (decades to centuries).
And, while it would be nice to have a unified theory of climate going back hundreds of millions of years, it hardly seems that it is necessary to understand all aspects of climate change on that timescale in order to predict climate on the timescales of decades to centuries. It might seem that the timescale of 750,000 years, over which we have very good data, and see strong correlations between temperature and CO2 levels would be sufficient.
I meant to add that this is something that occurred rather recently [~2 or 3 million years ago as I recall] on the sort of geologic timescales that Patterson is talking about. On the longer timescales, much greater shifts in continents and topography can occur.
Why would you want to eliminate all the co2 produced in the US?
And what are you actually getting with carbonfund.org besides a website with a picture of a windmill? There is no documentation of where the money is spent.
While I’m asking questions, how does 6 lbs of gasoline produce 20 lbs of co2?
I am not sure you can sway someones opinion when their livelyhood requires the status quo. It will take 50 hurricanes and many floods.
I am not sure you can sway someones opinion when their livelyhood requires the status quo. It will take 50 hurricanes and many floods. How does one 6 oz can of cat food produce 2 lbs of lcat poop.
Well, my guess would be that a gallon of gas may weigh closer to 8 pounds than 6 since I don’t think the density is all that different from water but I could be wrong on that.
At, any rate, the short answer to your question is that the CO2 includes the weight from the oxygen from the air that combusts with the gasoline to produce the CO2.
The long answer is that gasoline is made up of hydrocarbons. Even assuming ones that are fully-saturated with hydrogens (so 2 hydrogens per carbon), you get a molecular weight of 14 for each carbon (12 from the carbon and 2 from the two hydrogens). When you produce CO2, you get a molecular weight of 44 for each carbon (12 from the carbon and 32 from the two oxygens). Hence, you have a rough factor of 44/14, or a little of 3, increase in weight. [Hmmm…maybe 6 lbs for a gallon of gas is not such a bad estimate.]
OK, will be fishing my chemistry book out of the attic. Number accepted, explanation appreciated until proven otherwise.
I still don’t understand the quest to remove large amounts of Co2 from the atmosphere. It’s not the predominant greenhouse gas and if we switch off the hydrocarbon standard to a hydrogen standard then the byproduct would be water vapor. I suppose it could be captured in a vehicle by installing air conditioner tanks that would trap and automatically dump the water at filling stations.
And from an ROI perspective I don’t see the logic behind retiring green certificates. IMO it would be better to convert older power plants with the money. We have large supplies of coal that can be used for short term energy production. Use what we got and make it work.
I also don’t get a warm fuzzy from the various websites selling personal salvation. They’re all bark and no dog. Give us money and we will erase your all your carbon sins. If a person really wants to buy into wind farms then buy into an actual wind farm.
Well that’s my 2c. I’ve got some engineering friends that are kicking around the idea of using a closed loop well field to use water for thermal transfer. Apparently you can build a well digger capable of going down a few hundred feet. If it works out financially I’ll post the results.
Did a fair amount of reading on this a couple years ago. My impression (sorry, no cites) was that the main solution to GW will be development on non-carbon fuels. FWIW, Wikipedia’s article on Mitigation of Global Warming suggests the same conclusion.
The problem, IMHO, is economic. Corporations are not going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars developing technologies which will only become cost-competive with fossil fuels several decades from now (long after their patents will have expired). Not because they’re evil. Because they’re rational economic entities. So, it would take a societal decision that the game is worth the candle and a decision to fund research with taxes. I don’t see that happening so long as there is substantial doubt about the premises underlying the OP. And if such a decision were made, there is grave doubt whether a government-led effort would be efficient and effective. More likely, I’m afraid, it would run around in circles, spend a lot of money and develop nothing.
IOW, I’m not convinced there is a realistic solution. Let’s just hope that when the excrement starts hitting the fan in a way that removes all doubt, we prove to be extremely creative and focused to avoid extinction. And, hey, maybe the skeptics are right and this is much ado about nothing. My guess is that it’s not, but that we’ll pull the rabbit out of the hat. Hope so.
Why wouldn’t you want to eliminate all CO2 production that takes fossil fuels that have been out of the environment for hundreds of millions of years and puts them in the atmosphere?
Green certificates are supported by the US department of energy efficiency & renewable energy, including those sold by carbonfund.
Any other questions?
More energy hits the earth each hour than we use each year.
http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/Ed/sm3/ch1-general/whatis.htm
So PV cells or stirling engines will not make a big dent.
Because large amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere can cause warming. I’m not sure why removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere would be a bad thing. The fact that water vapor is the main gas doesn’t really change that putting billions of tons of new carbon into the atmosphere is irresponsible. I and others posted about the hydrogen economy problem and water vapor and it was said that swimming pools produce more water than a hydrogen economy. Besides, one of the methods of getting hydrogen will be cracking water in a nuclear plant, so no new water will be produced. The excess heat from a nuclear plant will crack water and the water will be resassembled in a fuel cell.
The green certificates are for establishing new energy sources that add into the grid from what I know. I would hope they aren’t just pocketing the money but they are sold on a website run by the US department of energy.
I assume what you are getting at is the idea that water vapor is a greenhouse gas? This is one of those statements that is true but not relevant in the way that many who use it want you to believe. While it is true that water vapor is a greenhouse gas, it is not one that we humans have much direct control over. That is both because there are such vast non-human sources of water vapor (e.g., the oceans) but, even more importantly, because the residence time for water vapor in the atmosphere is short…about a week. By contrast, the characteristic time for CO2 in the atmosphere is often said to be on the order of 100 years…and in fact there is a long-time tail going out much greater than that. As a result, CO2 can accumulate in the atmosphere as a result of our activities in a way that water vapor cannot (at least unless we vastly increase the rates at which we put water vapor into the atmosphere).
So, in the end, the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere is basically “slave” to the temperature. I.e., it seems to be roughly true that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is such that the average relative humidity remains constant. (This is not a strict law…But climate models and experimental data supporting them show it to be roughly followed.) This means that humans can have an important indirect effect on water vapor concentration: Since the saturation vapor pressure of water vapor increases rapidly with temperature, this means that as we warm the earth by accumulating more CO2 in the atmosphere, this will lead to higher levels of water vapor which, since it is a greenhouse gas, will enhance the warming. This is the most important “positive feedback effect” that enhances the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. (It is in fact the basic cycle that led to the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, although fortunately such a runaway effect cannot happen here on earth.)
Cremation adds CO2, burial sequesters carbon. How much carbon is sequestered by human burials?
I’m going to disagree with you on a couple of issues here. We have a lot of control regarding the release of man made water vapor and we can also increase that if desired. However, if we did this automobiles and did not address this issue we would be right back where we were.
And while I agree that we can control a great deal of our industrial co2 emissions it should not be overlooked that nature has a HUGE HONKING HAND in this in the form of forest fires. The Kalimantan/Sumatra forest fires of 1997/98 produced as much co2 as all of Europe did in a year. Have you ever stopped and asked yourself who was stopping these disasters in the US before Columbus arrived with a fire hose? The ratio of Co2 produced is not linear to warming cycles and should not be looked at as an end-all solution to an undefined problem. It should not be removed beyond levels of what we actually KNOW to be prevalent in times of idealic climate averages.