OT: Global cooling 34 million years ago

I honestly barely know what to say to people who quibble whether 5ppm of 340 W/m^2 is significant.

Surely RH is just sniping.

The question was whether fusion power was bad because it might cause extra heating.

There are billions of people on the planet whose lives could be _transformed_ if they had just the barest of mechanical help in their lives. Like a single lightbulb at night, possibly water pumped to their villages, and possibly a cell phone or radio to communicate.

Surely those would be a good thing, were it possible, and well worth the miniscule extra heating?

James Arthur

er to

e.

ice

s,

ike hazel and oak

If Rich were a geologist, talking to an audience of geologists, you might be right, but since Rich is not a geologist, and sci.electronics.design is not a geological forum it's rubbish, as you very well know.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Of course it would be a good thing.

RH is one of _those_ that I would dispose of.

In an earlier time... an Ehrlich time it was ;-)...

I would be traipsing thru a mall trailed by my four kids. The "green" village idiots would accost me and demand to know why I dared have four children. I developed a response which is still appropriate to this day... "offsets"... except I, at that time, called it offsetting the imbecile influence ;-)

Then I took to carrying my briefcase all the time... nice hard-cased Samsonite... amazing what you can do to a punk that tries to block your path (if you carry it firmly tucked under your arm and against your shoulder ;-)

Got quite a number of Hari Krishna's at the PHX airport the same way, particularly once the city council made it illegal for them to step into your path ;-)

...Jim Thompson

understood

Getting rid of the right-wing nit-wits would work just as well, and make the planet a nicer place to live into the bargain. It's a pity that it isn't a morally acceptable solution.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Jim too far gone to realise that getting rid of the right-wing nit- wits would work even better.

The question was whether lots of fusion power might be bad because enough of it could cause direct global warming, without any help from greenhouse gases. This isn't an immediate problem.

It you used wind or solar power to provide this minimal extra power, you wouldn't cause any extra heating at all, which would be even better, and the power could be generated locally, in small chunks, so you wouldn't need an elaborate grid to to hook every last village in rural India or Africa to some giant, high-tech power station.

You are welcome to make fatuous debating points, but they do tend to discourage the reader from taking you seriously.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Since we all know we're not covered with ice, the technical sense was the only sensible way to interpret what Rich meant. And he was right.

Cheers, James Arthur

That's a great calculation for people who don't believe in evolution.

John

te:

te:

ed

s -

me

bably

in

ng

ing

th

hip,

ct

Implying that you think that plant growth is CO2 limited at the moment?

It's more likely to be sun-light limited; in fact paleontology suggests that planets cut down the number of stomata on their leaves as the CO2 level in the atmosphere rises.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

oser to

And we all know that during an ice age, Canada and most of Northern Europe are covered with ice-sheets.

They aren't at the moment, so this isn't an Ice Age. Rich is wrong, and your claim that he is right is delierately wrong-headed.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I would suppose the combination of hard rock and capping concrete would help with that, but hydrogeology is out of my scope. Probably a fair bet stuff like Kr and Xe would seep up through fissures anyway (although those aren't a big deal in and of themselves, but it does imply others could get through).

Well that's the nice part about it. The idea is, it sinks low enough, fast enough, that by the time you reach the worst part of it, you're not drilling anymore, you're poking at ooze. ;-)

Tim

nderstood

Compared to what? It is a relatively small energy per unit area, but summed over a very large area. The integral of infinitesmal quantities may be of a significant order. To dismiss it as insignifcant without proof, or at least some investigation, is foolish.

understood

Compared to the other much larger heating sources in the picture, what else?

As to the integral being possibly large, it's trivial--you can multiply 100 W x 7e9 and dismiss that quantity by inspection.

Wiki the solar influx and compare. Or just read the quotes in this very reply and compute it yourself--the info's all there.

Cheers, James Arthur

Why do you say that?

Only some plants growth rates are limited by CO2 concentration. Many plants growth rates are limited by the available light intensity and/or other environmental factors like water, temperature and humidity.

You also need water and plants tend to struggle to get it reliably everywhere but in the humid tropics with daily rainfall. The result is that they vary the stomata openings for diffusion according to water stress. And the devious plants of the Crassulaceae and related C4 plants using CAM photosynthesis only open their stomata only at night to capture CO2 so as to avoid unnecessary daytime water loss.

One of the early papers of photosynthesis yield measured against CO2 and light intensity is online at:

If I have done the sums right to convert from umoles CO2/litre to ppm you can multiply by 37 so the range they tested was about 160ppm to

At high light intensities where the process is truly diffusion limited the yield tracks CO2 almost linearly, but at lower light intensities the improvement was around 10% for a doubling of CO2 concentration. This is still worthwhile enough that commercial greenhouses exploit it.

Regards, Martin Brown

And conventional farmers will exploit it too, as they select breeds that do better as the CO2 level rises. Plants are of course presently optimized for, or lagging a bit behind, the existing CO2 levels. Future-gen crop plants may have a very different response to CO2, because they will have been designed to do so.

Most agriculture can provide lots of water and sunlight and fertilizers, so adding CO2 might have substantial affects on yields. Plants may also shift to needing, say, less water if they have more CO2, which would benefit marginal farming cases.

John

What would I do with four kilowatts of continuous electric power? I can't imagine wanting anything like that, any more than I want to eat

In my budget, electricity is essentially free; I spend more on lunch. But I don't use anything like a kilowatt average; my household (3 people, four pets) doesn't average a kilowatt.

Extrapolation always leads to absurdities.

Even a few hundred average watts, to run some water pumps and purifiers, or to supply some lighting so the kids could study, or to allow cooking without hauling scarce wood for miles, could radically improve the lives of the poorest people.

Cheap and clean electric power would be a benefit to mankind. Fission could do that if it was managed sensibly.

Six orders is silly. We couldn't see at night, we couldn't toast english muffins, we wouldn't have refrigerators or forced-air heat, no running water, no TV or computing after dark.

John

AGW skeptics hurt nobody; things like cap-and-trade, and burning food to run cars, will kill people.

Hardly any countries have done anything about living up to Kyoto agreements, and China and India and the rest of the developing world will simply not restrict energy use (lots of nasty coal) for our benefit. Climate tokenism just hurts the poorest people without affecting CO2 levels (whatever consequences *that* may or may not have.)

Longterm, the best thing to do is develop those countries, which takes energy now. Development is the surest means of population control.

John

You must know nothing about the Chernobyl accident; read up on it. It was an inherently unstable reactor, without containment, being run by idiots. There are lots of modern reactor designs that could be run by idiots and that could not ever breach containment. TMI didn't. No US or Japanese or French commercial reactor ever has. It just takes good engineering.

Thousands of coal miners, oil/gas rig roughnecks, oil truck drivers, electrical linesmen, and home workshop guys are killed by electric power production every year. Not to mention those killed by particulates. Energy is dangerous. Switching from, say, coal to nukes would save a lot of lives, clean up the planet (less particulates on the snow!), far less CO2 (if that matters.)

If the AGWers were sincere, they would be wildly pro-nuke. But they aren't sincere: they have entirely another agenda, no less than the choking off of human development by all available means.

John

Wait until AGW hits ;-)

_Each_ of my A/C units is ~6KW

Some day, your prince will come, and SFO will be a desert ;-)

Just wait until carbon caps...

...Jim Thompson

In praise of carbon dioxide Posted: June 07, 2008, 12:04 AM by NP Editor

"The [satellite survey] results surprised [NASA scientists] involved in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%. [...] each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500 grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature?s fertilizer, bathing the biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2 to bulk themselves up ? carbon is the building block of life ? and release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal life."

Experiment trumps theory.

Cheers, James Arthur