Still time to stop global warming?
Wed, 2008-07-09 15:40
#1
Agent 204
Still time to stop global warming?
Wed, 2008-07-09 15:40
#2
Agent 204
[url=http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/subscriber/columnists/top3/story/419656... Dyer[/url] thinks so. Let's hope he's right...
quote:
So James Hansen is spearheading a campaign to get 350 ppm recognized as the real long-term target we should be aiming at. Tricky, since we are already at 387 ppm and rising fast, but last week, when I spoke to him at the Tallberg Forum's annual conference in Sweden, he explained: "To figure out the optimum is going to take a while, but the fundamental thing about the 350 (ppm target), and the reason that it completely changes the ball game, is precisely the fact that it's less than we have now.""Even if the optimum turns out to be 325 or 300 or something else, we've go to go through 350 to get there. So we know the direction now that we've go to go, and it's fundamentally different. It means that we really have to start to act almost immediately. Even if we cut off coal emissions entirely, CO2 would still get up to at least 400, maybe 425, and then we're going to have to draw it down, and we're almost certainly going to have to do it within decades."
But there is time. The oceans and the ice sheets react so slowly to changes in the air temperature that you can overshoot the limit for a while, so long as you get the temperature back down before irreversible changes set in. Stop at 450 ppm in 25 years time, then get back below 400 in another 25, and down to 350 by, say, 2075. It could work: There is still one last exit for the Holocene.
Wed, 2008-07-09 16:41
#3
The world uses 85 million barrels of oil a day. To replace this at twice the efficiency of energy usage would require 4.1 million 2Mw wind turbines that work at a load factor of .32. Oil and coal come in addition to that.
One of the problems with doing this is the oceans contain 98% of the CO2 in the biosphere and as the deep waters well up they'll absorb most the extra CO2. I e-mailed the Bedford Institute (not nasa) about carbon dioxide in the oceans and they replyied it was beyond my imagination what some studies claim to know.
Wed, 2008-07-09 17:03
#4
Agent 204
quote:
Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
[b]The world uses 85 million barrels of oil a day. To replace this at twice the efficiency of energy usage would require 4.1 million 2Mw wind turbines that work at a load factor of .32. Oil and coal come in addition to that.[/b]
That's assuming we don't also adopt significantly greater conservation measures than we're using now. Yes, it will be necessary to drive a lot less, and to fly a lot less, and to use more efficient lighting and appliances. But your figure doesn't even consider solar, which is becoming much cheaper.
Also note that a sizeable chunk of the oil we use is for materials (especially plastics), and much less of this (not zero, I know) is turned to CO2.
quote:
[b]One of the problems with doing this is the oceans contain 98% of the CO2 in the biosphere and as the deep waters well up they'll absorb most the extra CO2. I e-mailed the Bedford Institute (not nasa) about carbon dioxide in the oceans and they replyied it was beyond my imagination what some studies claim to know.[/b]
Uh, I thought the big problem was that the oceans [i]aren't[/i] absorbing the extra CO2 as much as hoped. If they were, the concentration in the atmosphere would be lower. Stratification of the oceans, though, means that the top layer isn't recirculated with the deeps very often, and so you don't get as much gas absorption (the surface layer saturates a lot more quickly than the entire ocean would).
[ 09 July 2008: Message edited by: Agent 204 ]
Wed, 2008-07-09 17:49
#5
I wonder if James Hansen considered the potential release of the methane that is locked into the arctic perma-frost. I would feel a lot better if we cut back to essential services today and use the freed up resourses to repair the damage to our life support system.
Far too many are 'Penny wise and pound foolish'.
Wed, 2008-07-09 18:49
#6
When James Hansen gave a lcture at Ohio State a couple months back, his main projections assumed that coal would be phased out by 2030. I was very confused.
Wed, 2008-07-09 19:11
#7
I believe the science of the deep ocean currents is limited. Just how many decades it takes the whole Pacific to turn over is not known. The deep ocean upwells in the artic which is cold, unstratified, and as there are nutrients in the deep waters the artic regions have more micro plankton than the tropical deserts. So that's the mechanism and you can make out it takes along time for the nutrients to build up. The Bedford Institute sent me links to research papers on the deep ocean currents, which is what they were saying was beyond what I could imagine. They don't have data, but this will not stop people from writing about it. The figures I read is that the oceans contain 51 - 60 times as much C02 as the atmosphere. this is as you said.
[ 09 July 2008: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]
[ 09 July 2008: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]
[ 09 July 2008: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]
Wed, 2008-07-09 19:51
#8
[img]http://www.iitap.iastate.edu/gccourse/chem/carbon/images/slide2.gif[/img]
![http://www.iitap.iastate.edu/gccourse/chem/carbon/images/slide2.gif[/img]](http://www.iitap.iastate.edu/gccourse/chem/carbon/images/slide2.gif[/img]){kind=link}
Here you have a little schematic showing the main carbon reservoirs and fluxes. In my opinion, when looking at this schematic, the only way we are going to be able to correct the atmospheric reservoir is by manipulating the uptake by the biota and storing the carbon in the soil.
What is also interesting on this shematic is that the release of carbon from the warmer ocean is larger then from a colder ocean. Increasing the difficulty of making correction later, when global warming has generaly increased the oceans temperature.
Wed, 2008-07-09 21:29
#9
Good diagram, thanks for posting it. I saved it.
Mr. Calculator tells me the 85 million bbl of oil used per day is 4 of his units of 10 to the 15 gm of carbon annually.
Thu, 2008-07-10 03:14
#10
Agent 204
quote:
Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
[b]I believe the science of the deep ocean currents is limited. Just how many decades it takes the whole Pacific to turn over is not known. The deep ocean upwells in the artic which is cold, unstratified, and as there are nutrients in the deep waters the artic regions have more micro plankton than the tropical deserts. So that's the mechanism and you can make out it takes along time for the nutrients to build up.[/b]
When you say "plankton" do you mean phyoplankton or zooplankton? It makes a big difference- one consumes CO2 while the other produces it.
[ 10 July 2008: Message edited by: Agent 204 ]
Thu, 2008-07-10 15:13
#11
I meant that the fertile quality of the deep waters that upwell indicate they have taken a long time to come to the surface.
Thu, 2008-07-10 19:20
#12
Here's a bizarre story, some news. This video says there are alternative fusion reactor designs that are going unfunded. "Dense pulsed fusion" offers direct plasma to electicity creation, making it the holly grail of fusion and potentially inexpensive. Video takes about an hour to watch but tells of a potential breakthrough.
[url=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760]http://vide...
Thu, 2008-07-10 20:40
#13
I saw that earlier.
I wouldn't put good odds on it, although, to be fair, neither does the physicist pitching it.
One of the things in that video is that standard physics says it can't work because it loses too much energy via x-rays. He claims that magnetic fields capture the x-rays and shows some recalculations of experiments to show for evidence.
It is being funded now by the Chileans, so if it is not too hard to make it work we should see it in a year or three.
Thu, 2008-07-10 23:06
#14
Thanks for posting that. On one viewing it was hard to makeout what he was saying about the cooling due to x-rays. And interesting that it's now being funded.