Global warming update!

The master plan is simply to limit the extent and impact of changes we have already made and will continue to make. The consequences that we are currently experiencing being considered negative for far more people than they are positive. Googling “consequences of climatic change” gives NASA as the first result and plenty of reputable organisations follow.

See if you still disagree about how long man-made climatic change will last after reading this (feel free to slag off the reference guys, it’s just the first Google result)

Carbon dioxide displays exceptional persistence that renders its warming nearly irreversible for more than 1,000 y. Here we show that the warming due to non-CO2 greenhouse gases, although not irreversible, persists notably longer than the anthropogenic changes in the greenhouse gas concentrations themselves.

All this is very troubling, hopefully I’ll have kicked the bucket before the worst arrives 🙄

If this stops happening or if the oceans become a source of carbon then we are well and truly ****. The trouble is we have no real idea of when or if this will happen.

I heard 2040 as a conservative estimate? No doubt we’re totally f**ked when it does.

@Edukator. I wasn’t disputing that the timescale for CO2/temperature reversals might be thousands of years (that is very quick when looking at the big picture as shown in Ice core data records which is where I got my info from).

I’ve read about the predictions of what might happen if we continue at this rate but the alternatives are not perfect. The other options also have their predictions that don’t look good (deeper ice age or Human population increasing at a rate that sustainable living alternatives cannot keep up with; population has more than tripled in 90 years from 2 billion to 7billion)
If you compare the 3 options which one is best? It doesn’t seem too clear to me.
Some interesting debating points. I will go away and look into it some more. Cheers for entertaining my ignorant views.

Which three options?

Clearly population is the biggest problem and one that the only government to do anything about has got slated by the human rights mob. In France we’re still actively encouraged to make more babies.

The current option is “maximise fossil fuel production to fuel economic and population growth, and to hell with the consequences”.

Even the most sustainable options/solutions currently available to us will take us far beyond the climate of the last 400 000 years your graphs show. Any other option will take us further.

I’ve read about the predictions of what might happen if we continue at this rate but the alternatives are not perfect.

Life is not perfect but I am unsure as to why you want us to start to attempt to artifically control the global temperature via pollution – do we think we know enough to be able to do this? The law of unintended consequences suggest it would be an unwise move to mess with our only home in the hope it pans out as we expect

Its a fair point that an Ice age would be bad but it is some twenty thousand years away , of slow cooling, that we would need to adapt to rather than th edevades or centuries we are discussing here

As for population its a different issue though I believe Malthaus has a plan for how to deal with that one

I would agree none are “good” but 2 are natural [ pop reduction and cooling], 2 are about us being sustainable[ stoping warming and pop growth].

Folk have tried to present global warming as good thing but it is not due to the land loss and the changes to what can be grown and habitat loss etc

Could reforestation of areas, e.g. uninhabited parts of Scotland make any difference to atmospheric CO2?

Wow, this is a long thread…

For those of you who say it doesn’t matter what the UK does as our pollution is insignificant when compared to China/India etc. What about
1) Our position in the worlds top 10 economies?
2) Our permanent seat on the UN Security Council?
3) Our position within the EU (as 1 of the top 4)
4) The amount of money we give in foreign aid
5) Our membership and influence within the Commonwealth

As much as the press (and most of the population) like to say the UK is declining, crap, insignificant or all three we are actually in a very strong position to influence other countries. Either as a lone voice or as part of the EU – which has a combined population and economy far larger than the USA.

For those who support the argument that it doesn’t matter if the science is not settled and we should just tow the line about trying to build a better world without question: Hitler and most other dictators liked to think they were going to build a better world… I note that there are a few posts about population being a problem – think about the implication of that line of thought and, the types of governments who have tried to control population growth in the past.

Could reforestation of areas, e.g. uninhabited parts of Scotland make any difference to atmospheric CO2?

No we would need to plant circaa 13 billion trees per annum assuming 1 tonne per tree which is generous for a sapling

There are some carbon capture plans but it just makes us become some sort of feedback mechanism for the planet

I dont think we could actually acheive this even if we did it with the best of intentions

Also, planting trees is a short term solution, we need carbon sequestration that locks away the “excess” Carbon for millions of years. Turning it into a tree for 25/50/100 years doesn’t really help us!

Nuclear fusion is a possible solution. The science and theory is there, we just need technology to catch up.

The energy that could be potentially gained from this is simply enormous – fusing produces millions of times more energy then simply combusting natural fuel.
I think that some European countries are currently building the first tokamak (fusion reactor) that will “breakeven” in terms of energy input – If I remember correctly it’ll producen 10x over the input energy.
The problem is that converting this energy into anything useful is very difficult as I think it only lasts for a fraction of a second (If A level physics serves me correctly)
I prefer the more ecologically friendly idea of green energy and sustainble building materials and development, but I suspect that this romantic idea will not be enough to supply enough energy, even in the very long term.

I’ve been folowing the fusion saga since the 70s and noted that each time the researchers get a new accelerator the results they get show they need one ten times bigger with even stronger fields to contain the reaction. And even if they manage to contain a continuous fusion reaction they haven’t worked out how to transform the energy into a usable form such as hot water. I’m convinced I won’t see a commercial fusion reactor in my lifetime.

Yes i dont think we will either

I think we like to think our technology will save us from AGW or the lack of oil or the too many mouths to feed

I fear we are going to be rather disappointed

Maybe we will slowly run out of raw materials and energy, there will be a huge war, mass starvation and huge population loss. Then much less people will populate the Earth and they can start afresh like re-evolution, and nature can repair itself – that’s an inevitable solution if we do nothing 🙂

Population will radically fall at around 2100 if trends continue due to a food shortage – this seems like a larger short term problem, and yet again, would partly solve the energy problem – less people = less energy.

How bleak.

Food shortage my ass…. gmos will solve that and the increasing power of computers will solve fusion by 2100.

Malthusian Doomers.

Oh and after a quick gander…. according to some oxford researchers….fusions viable now….it’s just that as with many industrial breakthroughs things only get done once it’s economically viable to do so.

The french appear to be building a powerplant size reactor ready for 2020.

Fusion the fusion problem has nothing to do with computers – its a mechanical engineering problem – as in there is no physical way of using vast amounts of energy that lasts nano seconds to heat water or do anything useful.

Part of me agrees with you on the food shortage – but it’ll happen at some point, plus global warming will probably reduce crop productivity because of weird growing seasons.

Wasnt it an issue with keeping the reaction going? From what id heard a few years ago, they were saying that would be sorted by running better and better simulations etc

I dont believe for a second we will hit carrying capacity.

@Bwaarp
Yeah I think that’s ITER?It’s a joint European effort, I think it’s just built in France probably – the fusion itself works – it can produce 10 times the input energy – but the problem remains as to how to make the reaction sustainable – it only lasts for 300-500 seconds at the moment.

Whoever came up with the idea of turning harmless pdf documents into “SmartForms” needs rodgering sideways with a baseball bat wrapped in razor wire.

Then they should be shot to death, repeatedly.
Nice expression, I’m appropriating that! 😀

Could reforestation of areas, e.g. uninhabited parts of Scotland make any difference to atmospheric CO2?

Yes and no. Yes it would reduce CO2 but only very slowly after the trees are all full sized. But unless it’s tropical rainforest the reduction in CO2 is not enough to counteract the warming caused by the fact that forest cover absorbs and re-radiates a lot more heat from the sun than grassland.

Hitler and most other dictators liked to think they were going to build a better world

Yes but they acted unilaterally, with a great deal of opposition. In other words, it was obvious they were raving mad to the rest of the world. In this case, the world agrees, but everyone’s making excuses to try and avoid having to make the effort.

I find it sad, that while most people feel strongly that we need to do more to protect the environment and produce renewable energy, we as individuals do very little ourselves.
Partly because I think most of us feel our small changes have such a minute effect that it isn’t worth it.
And also because any drastic measure cannot work, because of the way society works – we need electricity to heat our homes and run our technology, which in turn we now need to communicate, learn and work. And we of course need to travel long distances so vehicles are a nessecity.

We could of course as individuals become wandering hermits, or go and live in huts – but why would we want to do that?
It is up to Government to spread the message as to how to move forward – but I think they are too worried about keeping inflation down, employment up and seeing another 4 years in power.

I think we need a slightly insane, conscientious, pro green, tree hugging lunatic with morals as a dictator, forcing everyone to grow a veggie patch and install solar panels 😉

Nice expression, I’m appropriating that!

It was said with feeling. Even though I’ve now finished it, I still have a very real feeling of malice towards that form’s author.

As for there being a food shortage, that’s cobblers. We grow plenty, we’re just very poor at making sure it gets to the right places.

Provide people with the right incentives and you don’t need a dictator. My home produces nearly double the electricity it consumes and I don’t use any gas (the car is a greedy thing if I use it though).

Compare ITER objectives with the JET objectives. They’re exactly the same except that JET has proved they were too optimistic and now realise they need something much bigger. I reckon ITER will just prove they need something even bigger again. If as much had been spent on alternative energies and reducing energy demand as chasing the fusion dream we’d be a lot nearer a solution.

They probably had a similar situation with particle colliders – until they built the LHC – they made several small accelerators before.

@Edukator – Good on you! Nice to see someone doing something proactive.

Compare ITER objectives with the JET objectives. They’re exactly the same except that JET has proved they were too optimistic and now realise they need something much bigger. I reckon ITER will just prove they need something even bigger again. If as much had been spent on alternative energies and reducing energy demand as chasing the fusion dream we’d be a lot nearer a solution.

1) I’d rather listen to the Physicists. JET was conceived in the 70’s and ITERs design is much much different.

2) Fossil Fuels were subsidized by 400 billion dollars in 2010. ITER cost 13.5 Billion dollars.

The US alone subsidizes renewable energy by about 5 billion a year. Indirectly, renewables are also being funded by research into materials such as Graphene. So your argument that fusion is somehow eating up the resources of other renewable seems to me, to be invalid.

Provide people with the right incentives and you don’t need a dictator. My home produces nearly double the electricity it consumes and I don’t use any gas (the car is a greedy thing if I use it though).

This is fantastic, how do you do it, any chance of a explanation of how you do this.

Cheers

You mean a tiny part of the tax raised on fossil fuels was given back in subsidies, bwaarp. The fossil fuel industry is a cash cow for governments, and rightly so.

Resources have to be allocated and I beleive too much is allocated to dream projects and not enough to solutions we know work. Look at the impact of subsidised/free cavity wall and roof insulation, lots of homes have been insulated. Almost none of them have insulation under the floor though. Transport uses masses of fuel but one occupant in a Range Rover in London is still affordable.

Scientists should have learned enough from JET to go for a commercial, energy-producing fusion reactor. Going for anything less is an admission they can’t do it and probably never will be able to using current thinking. The quantum leap if ever it comes will be pataphysical; someone that thinks up an entirely new approach on the back of an envelope.

So cheekyboy, may solution is a bonus-malus tax and subsidy system to discourage energy-greedy activity and raise money to subsidise more repsonsible behaviour:

Remove all taxes from the most energy-saving products and tax the most energy-greedy to the hilt. Halogen bulbs should cost more than the equivalent LED.

Tax property on the basis of m2/accupant on a rising scale.

An electricity and gas supertax on consumption above a given level per person.

Tax lanlords on the inefficiency of their property. Anything less than passivhaus is taxed with the most inefficient property being compulsory purchased if the owner won’t invest.

Want more?

So cheekyboy, may solution is a bonus-malus tax and subsidy system to discourage energy-greedy activity and raise money to subsidise more repsonsible behaviour:

Remove all taxes from the most energy-saving products and tax the most energy-greedy to the hilt. Halogen bulbs should cost more than the equivalent LED.

Tax property on the basis of m2/accupant on a rising scale.

An electricity and gas supertax on consumption above a given level per person.

Tax lanlords on the inefficiency of their property. Anything less than passivhaus is taxed with the most inefficient property being compulsory purchased if the owner won’t invest.

Want more?

You do not appear to have understood my question.
Your quote :”My home produces nearly double the electricity it consumes”

My question is: How do you do this?

Solar?
Hydro?
Wind?
AD gas plant ?

Do you have the actual figures of what you generate, I assume you export any superfluos power ?

I am genuinely interested.

Thanks

Scientists should have learned enough from JET to go for a commercial, energy-producing fusion reactor. Going for anything less is an admission they can’t do it and probably never will be able to using current thinking

What an utterly bizarre statement. By that logic, I assume we should stop researching everything then, because if we can’t do it now, then we never will. 🙄

What many people forget is the carbon cycle is an equilibrium, if you push it out of balance parts of it begin to work to bring it back into balance, the problem is this is not perfect and so you get a yo yoing between cold house and green house. What were seeing now is an accelerated hydrological cycle (it’s rained a lot), this brings additional nutrients into the photic zone, leading to greater productivity in phytoplankton and thereby greater CO2 draw down. Productivity leads to anoxic conditions in the ocean, which in turn leads to sequestration of carbon into marine sediments. That’s how oil and coal was formed in the first place, however, it’s a slow process.

Our solar panels produce around 3350kWh/year and we consume less than 2000 kWh/year (1645kWh last year).

No we shouldn’t stop research, Zokes, but pandering to the fusion scientists who always want bigger and better whilst still shying away from the real challenge which is a power producing reactor is money badly spent IMO. Finding out how the universe works is one thing and a viable reactor is another. I really don’t think finding another atomic subparticle will meet our energy needs. The focus should be on using the knowledge we already have to make a workable reactor not just scaling up something that doesn’t work well enough so it might work better but still not well enough.

Edit: Plankton, another story that needs more than a one-liner.

Plankton types respond to climate.

No we shouldn’t stop research, Zokes, but pandering to the fusion scientists who always want bigger and better whilst still shying away from the real challenge which is a power producing reactor is money badly spent IMO.

Ah right, so the scientists who want to work on the LTER have no interest in bringing fusion to market as soon as they can? Righty ho 🙄

Finding out how the universe works is one thing and a viable reactor is another. I really don’t think finding another atomic subparticle will meet our energy needs. The focus should be on using the knowledge we already have to make a workable reactor not just scaling up something that doesn’t work well enough so it might work better but still not well enough.

Finding out how to split the atom in the first place actually did quite a lot for our energy needs. What a lot of people (funding agencies too) forget is that it’s the fundamental ‘blue skies’ research that creates the primary knowledge that is then applied through applied research. Cut off the fundamental stuff because it’s not readily applied to a real world problem, and pretty quickly, you’ll run out of research to apply.

Take your solar panels for example. Should research have just stopped when they were first proved to work for use on space missions? For that matter if we’d not put the effort in to explore space or go to the moon, they might never have been invented in the first place. Innovation drives innovation. Stagnation does not.

By all means fund fundamental research that’s going somewhere. I don’t think ITER will help provide primary knowledge beyond what JET and Cern have/have the potential to do. ITER is either over funded or underfunded depending on how you look at it. It’s a half-way house that shys away from tackling the problems to be solved in reaching the ultimate objective, a fusion power plant.

The first solar panels at least had the merit of producing energy. They soon produced more energy than it cost to make them, and for years rather than a second. They are a viable solution today when combined with pump storage if people pay more for their electricity and use less.

I don’t think ITER will help provide primary knowledge beyond what JET and Cern have/have the potential to do.

I think they and their funders are probably in a much better position to make that decision than you

The first solar panels at least had the merit of producing energy. They soon produced more energy than it cost to make them, and for years rather than a second. They are a viable solution today when combined with pump storage if people pay more for their electricity and use less.

That’s not really the point I was making, and you know it. I was pointing out that the fundamental research of going into space (for what purpose? – none, other than trying to beat the Russians at that time) led to the applied outcome of a renewable means of generating electricity from the sun. Without NASA’s dollars, that leap might not have happened until much much later, if ever.

ITER is a step in the right direction, I think, at least it can actually generate useful energy, even if for a short period of time. You cannot expect for them to suddenly build a working fusion reactor – ITER is one step in the right direction in terms of development, and it’s totally different from CERN. CERN is a particle collider, designed to research science on an atomic level. ITER is an expermental fusion reactor designed to research whether fusion is possible and indeed viable.

I completely agree with you on solar panels, in the meanwhile I think we should focus on works, but it is important to invest in possible solutions in the future too…

The photoelectric effect was discovered in the 19C, Einstein wrote papers on it in the 1920s and photovoltaique panels were being made by the 1950s. The leap had been made years before and NASA refined the technology for its needs. A bit like if we had working fusion reactors producing continuous power now and NASA built one suitable for use on a trip to Mars.

I know what Cern does and was refering to it in connection with primary knowledge. Read back through my posts and you’ll note I compare ITER with JET in terms of a fusion viability project that doesn’t go far enough to be worth doing.