More Global Warming Baloney
By Vladimir Posted in Energy — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Last night I watched about 15 minutes of Nova on PBS. It seems that there is a scientific consensus that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real. And that it's going to be really, really bad.
I just have this to say about that:
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It seems that we've been lulled into complacency by Solar Dimming. (No s***. I couldn't make this up.) The True Impact of AGW has actually been disguised, you see, because the sun has been getting dimmer. And if it undims itself, look out, Nellie!
To make matters worse, all our efforts to clean the atmosphere of particulate matter have removed a significant factor of negative forcing (am I getting the jargon right, pliny?) In other words, by clarifying the atmosphere, we've actually accelerated Global Warming. Ooops.
And jet contrails; did I mention jet contrails?! These are another significant factor of negative forcing (i.e., they counteract CO2's warming effect). Turns out that after nearly all jet traffic was grounded from September 11 to September 14, 2001, there was a measurable difference in the day to night temperature variation in the Continental U.S. Viewers weren't really given the opportunity to study any actual data, but they were shown a scary looking Excel bar chart where the data from those three days (yes, that's right, three friggin' days!) made a really long bar, whereas there was a nice little stubby bar before and after. Really scary.
[We're constantly reminded that weather is not climate. How can we draw conclusions based on three days' observations? But, I digress.]
Some scientists think that the cumulative effect of all this could be a 18 deg F increase in average global temp (!) by 2100. (That's not 2100 hours military time, that's 2100 years A.D. C.E.) Of course, as Greenland melts, there will be a 25 foot (or meter; I can't remember) rise in sea level in the same time frame. It will be so hot that trees will die and arable land will turn to desert. Desert, one presumes, will turn to Hell.
Now, if it's really that bad, there's not much we're going to be able to do about it. Changing from a Camry to a Prius ain't gonna do squat.
Consider, too, that 90% of our energy consumption is fossil fuels: oil, natural gas and coal. Anyone that thinks that that picture can change rapidly (say, in a five year time frame) is just smoking dope. ExxonMobil said the other day that they expect their business to be predominantly fossil fuels through the year 2030 at least. Sounds about right to me, possibly a bit on the optimistic side.
The producers of the show sidestepped a logical path of inquiry: if the impact of removing particulates is detectable after only 30 years, and the effect of removing contrails is detectable after a mere three days, shouldn't we be all about particulating and contrailing as if there were no tomorrow? [ - or, in this case, no 22nd Century.]
As for me, I plan to relax, have a beer, and wait to enjoy my soon-to-be beachfront property (currently 35 ft above sea level). If inundating the entire Florida peninsula is what it takes to finally get the words to "It's a Small World After All" out of my head, then I'm all for it.
Aerosols are already included in climate models. See figure SPM.3 of the IPCC AR4 summary section.
http://inel.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/radiativeforcingcomponentsspm2fe...
(On page 4 of summary pdf file:
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf)
Deserves a world world where the liberals are right. Seriously, that deserves being spun in a teacup for a good long time.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Big shock on the particulate data. Anyone who's lived in the northern US knows that when there's a major volcano in the Northern Hemisphere, you can count on an absolutley brutal winter, possibly two.
What I propose to do is to send up about 25 high-altitude baloons, each carrying a large payload of finely ground talc (much more relfective than volcanic dust), to be dispersed at about 40,000 feet (yes, that's an attainable altitude with a baloon). We'll wait to see what the effect is, maybe needing to send up a few more. Within a year or two the dust will settle out, and we'll send up another batch, but this is much better than a long-term "solution" that we can't reverse.
I'm figuring somewhere around $25m per year, and repeated for about 20 years (till we've moved from fossil fuels to nuclear). This is a gross profit of about $500m, plus the interest accrued on $500m paid up-front and spent over 20 years. A nice bit of profit, but then again, I'd be saving the planetary economy close to a trillion over the Kyoto protocols, so I don't think it's right to argue over the trifles.
The first step is to get hold of one of Al Gore's carbon offset brokers and set up some financing...
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"You can't save the Earth unless you're willing to make other people sacrifice" - Scott Adams (speaking through Dogbert)