SKYcrubbers?
Seascrubber
New Nuclear
The Climate Change movement has degenerated into dozens of splinter groups, each
advocating it's own, largely non-evidence based, ideas.
Man-made CO2 emissions accumulating in the air since the
Industrial Revolution began in 1750 are the main drivers of Climate Change.
We are well beyond the point of no return - and locked on autopilot.
There are probably several climate changes worth of excess
CO2 in the air already and a half dozen more still in the ground.
If this
is so, switching from coal power plants to windmills is an exercise in futility.
Environmentalists are being as anti-science as Trump by not working to remove the "Pink Cloud" causing Climate Change.
Adding wind, solar, or nuclear energy to our daily lives cannot reduce the global warming CO2 we've already placed in the air.
Notice how as CO2 goes up, the heating curve slope increase approaches zero (horizontal).
A 2017 government climate assessment report states: "The
world has warmed (globally and annually averaged surface air temperature) by
about 1.6°F (0.9°C) over the last 150 years (1865–2015). If humans
immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world
would still feel at least an additional 0.50 degrees Fahrenheit (0.30 degrees
Celsius) of warming over this century."
- This means the (pink) slug of CO2 that's already in the air was warming Planet
Earth at the rate of about 1°F per century but now,
due to CO2 saturation, we are down to 0.5°F
per century.
CO2 saturation: Think about adding so much sugar to your coffee it no longer dissolves. It can't get any sweeter.
What this shows is that the major damage has been already done. We missed our last best chance when the environmentalists advocated large coal power plants instead of nuclear power plants. Note the brief leveling about 1980 caused by a lot of nuclear power plants coming on-line.
Notice the thermostat. Adding fossil fuel's CO2 turns the furnace up but, since the world is a big place, it will take hundreds of years before the temperature reaches the new set-point.
To turn the thermostat back down, the extra CO2 in the air and sea has to be scrubbed out, returned to the ground, and then we start over using wind, solar, nuclear, and carbon neutral combustion to make our heat and mechanical energies.
There is no other way to get the world headed back to pre-industrial environment temperatures. Switching to wind, solar, or nuclear energy now that "the horse is out of the barn" are nearly pointless gestures.
On the other hand, since the big harm has already been done, we could just keep on using fossil fuels and adapt to the slightly increased Climate Change changes that would bring.
Perspective:
"The rising carbon dioxide footprint may be troublesome, but it is a side effect
of the creation of immense benefits." - Peter Allitt, quoted by M.J. Kelly.
Energy is the master resource. Without energy
nothing happens. The more energy we have, the
better off we are. The United States is a 10,000 Watt society; Mexico, 2,000 W;
Haiti, 500W. - Sounds good to me.
Is this as bad as it can possibly get?
Unfortunately no. There are also massive natural deposits of
tundra and deep sea frozen methane that some think could be melted free by
Global Warming and enter the air. This would bring a second wave of
"Climate Change on steroids" problems. Note methane curve below.
https://www.amazon.com/Climate-Trap-Perilous-Tripping-Protection/dp/1453627030
The yellow chart below was presented by David Archibald about 2010. I did the thermostat image perhaps 2008. It was derived from a 1992 curve someone gave me. Each blue block on Archibald's chart is 20 ppm of CO2. The first block is huge because it is causing a lot of global warming. The more recent ones tiny because we have already saturated the air with more CO2 than is needed.
In my chart, the thermostat plot line is becoming more and more horizontal, at horizontal there would be no additional global warming regardless how much more CO2 was added. Again, saturation.
Those two charts are two different ways of saying the same thing - that every bit of CO2 added to the atmosphere makes the rest of the CO2 a little bit less capable of adding more global warming.
This means there is little incentive for the world to stop using fossil fuels at this stage of the game because, as Archibald puts it, "CO2 is tuckered out". Others might call the effect "CO2 saturation".
See the comment below the original image someone gave me (right).
His is more complex and inverted because it is talking about "heat flux" or heat transmission back into space as a function of methane and CO2 concentration. That 1992 chart is still the "gold standard".
I took a "D" on that weekly quiz.
We've lit the candle. Now we are watching the house slowly heat up. Only by removing the excess CO2 from the air can we get back to where we started - the beginning of the coal age.
Planet Earth is already in for a ride regardless of how many windmills, solar cells, or nuclear reactors we build.
To say again with different words and charts:
(From
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
)
CO2's
Diminishing Global Warming Effect - How much another 20 ppm of CO2 changes
things.
We are adding about 160 million tons of Climate
Changing gasses to the air every day but it won't affect the maximum temperature much.
We've gone over the cliff but it may take hundreds of years for the heat to max
out. Quitting fossil fuels "cold turkey" isn't what is needed.
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Why all the fuss about the
world's warming perhaps 2°C? Like Planet Earth, your body is an environment
for living cells that depend upon it for sustenance.
Here’s an analogy that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who helped compile some of the
climate research data for the World Bank, likes to use.
"Take the human body. If your temperature rises 2°C (3.6°F), you have a significant
fever. If it rises 4°C (7.2°F) or 6°C (10.8°F) your organs begin to fail and you can die.
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Wind, solar, and nuclear don't help
at all if they are not being used to get the pink cloud's CO2 concentration back
down to Planet Earth's normal 250 ppm.
Using clean energy now doesn't clean up yesterday's dirty sky.
I find it interesting there are no organizations dedicated to "picking away" at the problem of sucking the pink cloud out of the air and ending the very real threat mankind faces.
This lends credence to Trump's assessment that the Climate Change fuss is just a hoax.
Extreme difficulty doesn't seem to be a problem to those groups picking away at travelling to Mars and establishing a colony there.
Fighting Climate Change without nuclear energy is like boxing with one
hand tied behind your back.
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