Krugman on Solar and Wind Power

[OlJarhead]

Volcanoes produce more than humans I'm told....so we should ban them  

[kenhill]

I'm having trouble seeing much of a correlation between Temperature increase causing CO2 increase in the chart.  There wasn't a lot of life in the Cambrian.  You could argue that the abundance of plant life in the Devonian absorbed a lot of the CO2 and converted it to oxygen.  According to this source, the net balance of CO2 contribution and sink is 4 kg x 10 to the 12th and 6.5 x 10 to the 12th per year from burning fossil fuel.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Carbon_History_and_Flux_Rev.png

The Plants and oceans had a pretty good balance of consuming what they produced.  With the rise in CO2 from the industrial revolution, nature has not been able to keep up with humans.

There is some evidence the CO2 increases is not a good thing.  Nature will self-right itself if CO2 increases have a detrimental effect.  It just may not have a beneficial effect on humans.

When leaders have challenged industry to come up with solutions, there are nay sayers that say the price is to great.  Well look at the increase in fuel mileage of cars, they produce less emissions and they last 3 time longer than they use to.  The quality of air in our major cities has improved greatly.  Get those engineers to work.  They make good salaries, increase job opportunity, will help make us leaders in the world, and we can export the fruits of their labor to other countries.  Go USA!!!

[flyingvan]

What is your source for 'There wasn't much life during the Cambrian era'?  I remember doing a research paper on the Cambrian explosion

[Dave Sparks]

  flyingvan  NICE ! 

I should add this cheery link for fans of good engineering!

http://www.ibtimes.com/california-methane-leak-heres-where-over-400-us-natural-gas-storage-facilities-are-2265607

[Don_P]

I'm as confused as everyone else seems to be on this issue. Firstly, there isn't a whole lot I can do about this other than to try to tread as lightly as possible, some days are more successful than others. It's Wed and I'm deep into at least my second barrel of crude this week. My role is that of a short term steward, not looking too good. I'm sure most of us don't want to screw things up for those who follow. 

From NOAA, volcanos worldwide produce about 200 million tons of CO2/year where we produce about 27 billion tons/year. A single volcano produces more sulfer dioxide than a couple of dirty power plants. Eruptions have a cooling effect by reflecting the sun back out of the atmosphere. I remember that was part of the global cooling scare of the 70's, smog doing the same thing. Not taking sides just straightening that out.

I worked on the highest eastern mountain in the 70's, that forest was already in trouble, it is now mostly dead. This was a remnant Canadian forest from the last ice age, trapped at cooler, higher elevation. I don't even go up there anymore, its depressing. The western front of the mountains shows similar damage now at lower elevations. The scientists have mainly attributed it to acid fog from coal fired power generation. The fog had a ph similar to vinegar, IIRC that was from burning high sulfer coal. I'd like to see us do better with scrubbing that exhaust and we have gotten better. Enough? I don't know. If we can move off of that method of producing power, even with some level of subsidy, I'm not opposed. Power came here through government subsidized long term loans, if we need to do something on my watch, that's what my shoulders are for, I don't have to like it.

From my minimal understanding of ancient history I believe most of the ancient CO2 is tied up in calcium carbonate, "sea shells" turned to limestone. When I call for concrete they are burning that limestone with ancient algae and trees, releasing that gas. Not good, my footprint increases, we can call it carbon, we used to just call it pollution which is easier for me to wrap my head around. The same scientists say that when I build a house out of wood I'm sequestering carbon by protecting that wood from rotting and it is offsetting the ancient carbon I'm digging up. That is total BS IMO. I've released 600 million year old carbon and am sequestering the timber's carbon for 100 years before the house rots and releases the wood's carbon. Feel good voodoo. I see one as "deep" carbon, truly sequestered, and the wood is "shallow" carbon, constantly recycling. 100 years is a fly fart in time. Those are two different carbon loops. Stay out of the deep carbon as much as possible and there isn't much we can, or should, do about the shallow carbon cycle. A tree rots on the forest floor and releases its carbon, the next tree scrubs it back out... plant trees. We've planted over a million, thank you for helping pay for that. When I was in my 20's I tried to take stock of how much wood had passed through my hands, I came up at over a million board feet back then. I could easily triple that number by now. Hopefully I've offset that sin... or was it yours, you live in it, I've made bigger ones. BTW a young tree eats more, in the good sense, than an old one.

Wandering deeper down that thought, we've had campfire discussions. If I wish to really sequester the carbon from that tree then my birthright may be just the volatiles in the tree. The charcoal, stable elemental carbon, gets returned to the soil as biochar. At the soil level I'm told this will help the soil and remain there for 1,000 or so years, a longer fly fart. Bury it deeply and it is there for much, much longer. If I can't use the charcoal I'm going to cut more trees to keep warm. Prior to coal the eastern forest was pretty much wiped out for charcoal to begin the industrial revolution. Instead of 50 years we would wipe the present forest in months to fuel the present need for energy using timber. We could stand to weed our garden, we just sort of turned off the switch and let it go to weeds. Balanced use. Without some outside force we tend to suck one resource totally dry, the cheapest, then go to the next. The downside of a free market.

One thought I've read is that up until the industrial revolution we pretty much lived on "current sunlight", it grew the crops and fed the people and animals. Population stayed around a billion. When we started digging up old sunlight we could support more people and more processes. The easiest way to help with that problem is to lose some population. If we act like rabbits we will at some point suffer the same problems they do. Not a happy thought.

Another thought. Grasses sequester more carbon than trees can, young and hungry. But not if you mow weekly, the roots are then always about the same size. When a grass is growing its root system is expanding, that atmospheric carbon is sent back underground. If the grass is allowed to grow several months tall and then cut, or grazed, the root system will die back to what the new top growth needs. As the grass grows again, it puts out new roots. The dead root is sequestering carbon. The grass does it again, and again, in that year. The root system expanding and dying back. It is kicking the tree's butt as far as pulling CO2 out of the air and putting it in the ground. Managed intensive grazing, MIG, is a fancy modern name for the way wild ruminants have always operated, the rest of the stuff on this planet is brighter than we are. Rotational grazing is also good stewardship of the land, we aren't pounding one parcel to death. Tastier and healthier too. I prefer to look out on a forest but there is another viewpoint.
Anyway, random OT thoughts, I don't really care who is right, you can be (each and every one of you). Lacking any more knowledge than we have, in the ways that we can actually minimize or offset our heel I think we should. Glad its above my pay grade  .

[MountainDon]

...lose some population...

I have believed for years that the crux of our problems is too many people. A thorny issue to deal with.

[NathanS]

There are some people out there trying to do agroforestry and savannah type agriculture. It is pretty interesting stuff, the hard part is that you have to tailor the type of farming to your particular climate and landscape. Animals always fit in, and can help to drastically improve soil conditions very quickly. Mobstocking/rotational grazing should be an integral part of farming in the future.

Current agricultural practices are definitely not sustainable.. and it's not just a pollution thing. Plowing destroys soil structure, releases the nitrogen into the atmosphere, causes more soil erosion than creation (net loss), mono-cultural systems are inherently more susceptible to mass failure events.. and maybe most importantly, trying to be a farmer today has to be just about the most stressful way you could live. These cropping systems can only be kept going by massive amounts of off-site inputs.

I think if we want to leave the earth in good shape for future generations, it has to start with how we make our food.

[Don_P]

My wife works for a large landholder who is part of a local group that pretty much follows the stockman grass farmer model and within our group there are non timber forest products folks getting going with forest farming...multiple levels of cropping under the canopy, neat stuff. She just called telling me to vent the high tunnel, we still have greens growing, it hit single digits last night. No better solar collector than a leaf 

[flyingvan]

I've always felt overfishing, poor soils management, and antibiotic abuse pose much bigger threats than CO2 production

[Dave Sparks]

My Grandfather who was a goldminer in the Sierra out here always told me to use fireplace ash in the garden.
In broken Italiano-english he would say "mineralies"
He also said that when they stopped the spring flooding (Flood Control) of the central valley from the Sierra mountains it really made the crops not as good.
Still lot's of crops these days from the breadbasket of the world, even with the drought, just not as good !

[NathanS]

My wife works for a large landholder who is part of a local group that pretty much follows the stockman grass farmer model and within our group there are non timber forest products folks getting going with forest farming...multiple levels of cropping under the canopy, neat stuff. She just called telling me to vent the high tunnel, we still have greens growing, it hit single digits last night. No better solar collector than a leaf 

Very cool. My goal after getting the house built is going to be small scale diversified farming.

[NathanS]

My Grandfather who was a goldminer in the Sierra out here always told me to use fireplace ash in the garden.
In broken Italiano-english he would say "mineralies"
He also said that when they stopped the spring flooding (Flood Control) of the central valley from the Sierra mountains it really made the crops not as good.
Still lot's of crops these days from the breadbasket of the world, even with the drought, just not as good !

There is some craziness going on in the Central Valley, that is for sure. Subsidence causes irreversible damage to the aquifers.

[Don_P]

This is interesting, came in today's email, a bill in VT to certify farms that practice "regenerative agriculture";
http://legislature.vermont.gov/assets/Documents/2016/Docs/BILLS/S-0159/S-0159%20As%20Introduced.pdf

The greatest threat I see today to food is Monsanto and it's allies. Untested genetic modification of our food is very dangerous. In at least one instance those altered genes have shown up in the DNA of animals that have eaten it. These altered genes are not stable, even within the DNA of the crop. For further research look up Paul Bremer's irrevocable Special Order 81 in Iraq, the cradle of agriculture and of wheat. We handed the patent rights to their plants to those companies, who will patent and take the seed off the market, replacing it with their own. The farmers will no longer be able to save seed or plant native seed, they must buy patented seed. The agribusiness giants are polluting the original genetic sources of food. Just as we have done with corn in Mexico, when we need to go back and try to fix this, the original plant material will have been tainted, we can never go back. This is the company that brought us DDT, Dioxin and Agent Orange. Interesting that those companies are also acquiring pharmaceutical companies.

a quick google, Iowa State;
"Wheat is believed to have originated in southwestern Asia. Some of the earliest remains of the crop have been found in Syria, Jordan, and Turkey. Primitive relatives of present day wheat have been discovered in some of the oldest excavations of the world in eastern Iraq, which date back 9,000 years."

[Triathlete]

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is one of the largest bodies of international scientists ever assembled to study a scientific issue, involving more than 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries. The IPCC has concluded that most of the warming observed during the past 50 years is attributable to human activities. Its findings have been publicly endorsed by the national academies of science of all G-8 nations, as well as those of China, India and Brazil.

http://www.ipcc.ch/

And climatologists from NASA, NRC, and countless academic departments around the globe have long warned us of the affects of our activities on climate.

http://climate.nasa.gov/

Despite the international scientific community's consensus on climate change, a small number of critics continue to deny that climate change exists or that humans are causing it. Widely known as climate change "skeptics" or "deniers", these individuals are generally not climate scientists and do not debate the science with the climate scientists directly—for example, by publishing in peer-reviewed scientific journals, or participating in international conferences on climate science. Instead, they focus their attention on the media, the general public and policy-makers with the goal of delaying action on climate change.

Not surprisingly, the deniers have received significant funding from coal and oil companies, including ExxonMobil. They also have well-documented connections with public relations firms that have set up industry-funded lobby groups to, in the words of one leaked memo, "reposition global warming as theory (not fact)."

[garyc]

[Adam Roby]

Yakshemash

[Dave Sparks]

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
— Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi (1883)

[flyingvan]

.....Describes the IPCC perfectly.  Could anyone be ON the IPCC if they didn't believe in man made climate change?  It's like using Bible verses to validate the Bible.   You get much further if you have access to some outside sources

[Dave Sparks]

This string is fun and since you mentioned the Bible, my newest/favorite  quote is

Even Monkeys can recite the bible given enough time.   

[Triathlete]

.....Describes the IPCC perfectly.  Could anyone be ON the IPCC if they didn't believe in man made climate change?  It's like using Bible verses to validate the Bible.   You get much further if you have access to some outside sources

Huh?  Another conspiracy theory?  Any proof of that?  Or is that just your opinion?

[Adam Roby]

I don't know anything about any of this, but it sure sounds like a debate where neither side will ever convince the other side because people's minds are already decided.  As law folk say, there's your story, my story, and then the truth.  I think the truth to all of this lies somewhere in between.  Is it even possible to have a non biased opinion or study on any subject?  I really doubt it...

Kind of reminds me of... oh, I dunno... post and beam versus full foundation debates, permits, codes, right to bare arms, laws...   

[flyingvan]

...My opinion, but I'm not alone
http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/29/scientists-say-ipcc-puts-politics-before-science-needs-reform/
http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2010/07/bias_and_ipcc_report
http://www.bishop-hill.net/discussion/post/2352447

   ...Not really a conspiracy theory.  But anytime you are attacked for a scientific opinion, it's because there is a political motive attached.  Want to discuss the septaploidy of bananas?  No one gets fired up.  You can have a scientific discussion.  Demand proof that human activity will significantly change the global climate?  People get spun up.  Proof isn't offered, just claims of 'scientific consensus'  (Since when is science about consensus?  Is truth up for majority opinion?) then increasingly dire predictions---pushing people to "Maybe we are and maybe we're not, but the consequences are so dire, why take the chance?"

    Truth requires the abandonment of all faith.  My opinion is rooted in Dr. Revelle's conclusion---the minor variances in climate are easily attributable to natural phenomena.  Adam's point is well taken, though.  Unless you can create two identical planets in two identical systems, industrialize one and leave the other in the stone age and compare global temperatures---it won't be settled.  Just need to point out none of the predictions have held up so far.

[Triathlete]

...My opinion, but I'm not alone
http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/29/scientists-say-ipcc-puts-politics-before-science-needs-reform/
http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2010/07/bias_and_ipcc_report
http://www.bishop-hill.net/discussion/post/2352447

   ...Not really a conspiracy theory.  But anytime you are attacked for a scientific opinion, it's because there is a political motive attached.  Want to discuss the septaploidy of bananas?  No one gets fired up.  You can have a scientific discussion.  Demand proof that human activity will significantly change the global climate?  People get spun up.  Proof isn't offered, just claims of 'scientific consensus'  (Since when is science about consensus?  Is truth up for majority opinion?) then increasingly dire predictions---pushing people to "Maybe we are and maybe we're not, but the consequences are so dire, why take the chance?"

    Truth requires the abandonment of all faith.  My opinion is rooted in Dr. Revelle's conclusion---the minor variances in climate are easily attributable to natural phenomena.  Adam's point is well taken, though.  Unless you can create two identical planets in two identical systems, industrialize one and leave the other in the stone age and compare global temperatures---it won't be settled.  Just need to point out none of the predictions have held up so far.

I'm not sure you have an understanding of science or academia.

(A) None of the sources you have provided are academic. The first one is utter rubbish that cherry picks and uses Tol who is a economist, not a scientist, as a source of information.  The second is a blog, not an academic source.  The third is a post.  You can't be serious?  I suppose views such as these are prevalent on lay forums.

(B)  Science is not definitive.  It is based on the consensus of independent research.  So to suggest that man induced climate change is impossible to prove because we can not replicate the conditions in an experiment with two separate planets is absurd.

Btw, Dr. Revelle was a strong believer in man induced climate change and believed in action.  The idea of natural variances has been well documented in the scientific literature as a discredited theory.

[Triathlete]

This string is fun and since you mentioned the Bible, my newest/favorite  quote is

Even Monkeys can recite the bible given enough time.

I've noticed that many of the posts on this thread have turned superficial and juvenile.  Some people don't care about the world, but others do.  Btw, a red herring is further proof of who won the argument.

And since we are off topic, let me share one of my favourites:  Don't suffer fools.

[flyingvan]

   I attended a lecture by Dr. Revelle in 1889 before he died in 1991....(It had more to do with oceanic currents but the Q&A focused of man made global warming)  Dr. Revelle was a pioneer in the research on the topic but his conclusions were clearly different than non-scientist Al Gore who called Dr. Revelle his mentor. http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2000/01/01/gores-global-warming-mentor-his-own-words.  Dr. Revelle was pretty upset by people using his name for conclusions he didn't draw, even offering a public debate with Al Gore (who turned him down, claiming he'd become a senile old man).  There was considerable strife here in San Diego when Al Gore was given the Revelle award, so much so that Al Gore refused any question or answer time---real scientists that knew Dr. Revelle had some challenges for Al Gore.   
  I think it would be very difficult to find someone who truly doesn't care about the planet or the environment.  It's a non-sequitur to assume someone with a different opinion is less intelligent, or less compassionate.  As Don pointed out the root issue is probably the population, but short of mass euthanasia that isn't changing anytime soon.  Feeding 7,000,000,000 people requires a level of industrialization old methods can't support.  Slash and Burn techniques are pretty damaging to the environment as well. 
   Maybe we can agree protecting our environment is of utmost importance.  Where we differ is, I believe human progress's impact is overstated and unproven, and none of the predicted models have been accurate so far.  I also believe future energy innovations can only come from nations with a strong, competitive free market, and taxing ourselves for 'carbon credits' is counterproductive to our common goal.