OT: nuclear fusion might not be quite as far off in the future as we've thought.

years.

loads of olivine, grind it down to a fine dust, extract any saleable minera ls and truck the rest off ...

bstratum? There have

site: I know which transport

nitrogen?

he harder bit of the job.

If you store all the H2O underground as hydrocarbons, where will you get th e D2 to power the fusion reactor? I guess you take that out first and save it for the day the oceans are dry, salt flats. At least we'll have the ju ice to power the all-electric, supersonic racers zooming around the new, po st-oceanic salt flats.

--

  Rick C. 

  +++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  +++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

A lot of CO2 might be trapped at point-of-generation, but a more universal answer is an air filter that absorbs only CO2, and (at some energy cost) releases it on demand. The release energy can come in bursts from sunlight or wind, whenever it's cheap. The cost per ton is lower if you recover before atmospheric dilution, of course.

Cost estimates of $30/ton are promising, $3000/ton are discouraging, and $300/ton seems achievable. Alas, it's a ripe-for-investment opportunity now, so one would want a chemical engineer to evaluate the projections.

"Their scheme calls for sequestering 0.61 metric gigatons (a gigaton, abbreviated Gt, is a billion metric tons or 0.67 billion tons) of CO2 per year by 2030, 5.51 by 2050, and 17.72 by 2100. Human-generated CO2 emissions were around 40 Gt in 2015, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."

None of this makes sense. Humans released 40 Gt in 2015. Capturing 0.61 Gt is impossible and an insignificant reduction. What other manufacturing process handles 0.61 Gt per year?

Planting trees is a nice thought. What happens after they die and release carbon back into the atmosphere?

What happens when permafrost melts and releases methane back into the atmosphere? What about the methane on shallow seafloors as the seas warm up? Methane is much worse than CO2.

We need to face the inevitable. Temperatures will rise. I don't know what they mean by "tipping point", but it doesn't sound good.

Capturing 0.61 Gt was merely the first stage in the program to get up to 5.5 Gt by 2050. It is to be hoped that human emissions will be cut back from 40 Gt emitted in 2015 to something less suicidal by 2050.

The oil refining and fuel manufacturing industry does handle more than 0.61 Gt of product per year, as should have been obvious.

Other trees grow in their place.

But it turns into CO2 fairly rapidly - thehaf life in the atmosphere is about 7 years, at the moment.

If we can cut back our CO2 emissions, the temperature will rise more slowly, and if we cut them back enough it might even start declining. There's nothing inevitable about anthropogenic global warming.

Temperatures are rising. They don't have to keep on rising.

Australia's current forest fires have released about 0.9 Gt of CO2,about two years worth of "normal" CO2 emissions.

Since climate change has played a part in making this year's forest fires particularly extensive, it's a case of climate change feeding more climate change. "Tipping points" are where positive feedback gets big enough to run away - at least for a while.

Once all Australia's vegetation had burned up, there wouldn't be any more carbon to be released, so that particular bit of positive feedback can't run away forever.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Twaddle.

There is no credible way to correlate an alleged 0.9 deg C average planet surface temperature increase with a forest catching fire.

In Physics for a claim of "settled science" one has for example, a 5 sigma level of verification for the Higgs Boson, i.e. 1 in 3,500,000 that the finding is in error. even then, one would still be hard pressed to find a Physicist that would actually claim "its settled science".

For the effects of climate change, for which repeatable experiments are simply impossible, all of this goes out of the window. Its equivalent to licking ones finger and sticking it out of the window.

Apparently, the main cause of the fires are lightning acting on dry forest. Its simply ludicrous to claim that an average temperature going from say, 35 deg C to 36 degC, or 40 deg C to 41 Deg C and so forth, lead to say, a times

10 increase in the probability of fires. If a forest is dry (not wet), it will catch fire with lightning, whatever the temperature.

The question is. If the planet had not experienced the alleged 0.9 deg C increase, is it credible to claim at a 95% confidence level, that say, fires have increased by 5 times, i.e. a claim that the majority of the fires are due to climate change. If fires have only increased say, 10%, then its essentially a non issue, and statements form the like of Boris Johnson claiming that the forest fires are overwhelming evidence of the damage of climate change is, twaddle.

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

We have the same situation in California. What grows here must eventually burn. It's been that way for millennia.

What we do now is use massive resources to put out small fires, which guarantees future huge fires. And we build flammable houses and towns in harm's way.

A little more CO2 makes plants grow a little better, which will translate into more fires.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Don't be silly; that assumes you are not doing a statistical analysis based on multiple fires (Great Dismal Swamp, Australia, western US, Brazil, and Russia in 2010), and completely ignores that there were PREDICTIONS being fulfilled, not at all the same as creating a theory from a single observation.

When great fires exceed historic norms, it's not about '5 sigma', it's about tossing out theories that don't account for the excess. You don't need

5 sigma thresholds to downgrade a fringe theory of 'no human-caused warming'.

Climate change, and its anthropogenic origin, are the last credible candidates.

Makes no sense. What does make sense to explain big fires is using bulldozers and airplanes and helicopters and fancy flame retardants, and banning logging, to put out small fires and build up killer fuel loads.

Many areas of California used to burn about every 10 years, before european technology arrived and started putting the mostly small fires out. The natives walked away and the trees liked having the brush cleared. Natives did controlled burns, too.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

s

Correct, as far as it goes. The connection with climate change is indirect.

Australia's climate is influence by the Indian Ocean Dipole

which is similar to the El Nino/La Nina alternation in the Pacific Ocean.

A higher global temperature shifts the mark-to-space ratio, and give Austra lia a higher probability of droughts, which make bush-fires more likely, an d a long enough drought period - like the one we've just had - dries out a reas that previously never got dry enough to burn.

A 2009 CSIRO study presciently observed that Australia's bushfires would ge t worse from 2020on if the current warming continued (as it did).

This isn't it, but it illustrates the evidence being looked at.

ma

97% of the Climate Science community is convinced - 290 out of the top 300 climate scientists, according to a study published a few years ago in the P roceedings of the (US) National Academy of Sciences. I think I can identify four of the holdouts, and none of them have rational reasons for rejecting the hypothesis.

If you don't know much about the subject, you might think that. John Larkin doesn't understand observational sciences either.

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That is an absurd claim. Average temperature doesn't come into it - the tem perature that matters is the temperature at particular bit of forest.

The actual problem isn't so much the local temperature as the local rainfal l and climate change is making prolonged droughts more likely.

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It's perfectly credible, but you do have to understand a bit more about the connection, which is more through rainfall patterns rather than local temp erature rise.

Sadly, your argument looks a lot more rational than it is. You mention that a forest has to be dry before it can burn, but have failed to notice that climate change can change rainfall patterns, which does happen to be the cr ucial connection.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

There's no direct connection. What happened in Australia was that climate change influenced the behavior of the Indian Ocean Dipole, which produced a particularly long drought, which made the forests more inflammable.

It's fairly obvious that it is the local temperature and rainfall which make a particular forest more or less flammable, and the global average temperature only matters to the extent that it drives local variations.

Fuel reduction burns didn't do anything to prevent the recent forest fires here. There were a lot of them through last winter, but once a forest gets dry enough, avoiding fires is very difficult.

You can do something about that, but people don't like it.

A little more water vapour in the atmosphere also helps plant growth.

Whether a forest catches fire has more to do with how wet it is than the amount of vegetable matter available to burn.

A prolonged drought makes forest fires pretty much inevitable.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

There were loads of fuel reduction burns around Sydney last winter as evidenced by frequent episodes of smoke haze.

John Larkin's hypothesis is falsified.

What mattered was that there was a prolonged drought - lots of towns are running out of water - and forests which had never been dry enough to burn became inflammable.

It helps in normal fire seasons, but once the forest gets dry enough all of it can burn.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

That applies to California, perhaps, but not eastern Washington, the Great Dismal Swamp, etc. Global problem, gotta look at global fact sets.

And, it only 'perhaps' applies to California. Blaming 'them' for some vague flavor of mismanagement is appealing to some, but it does NOT SOLVE A PROBLEM. The Donald is trying to fire all the scientists, so mismanagement is on the rise, you know.

whit3rd wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Some cap hill jerk from Georgia was making mumblings about "forest fires" and how the nation needs to manage the forests to keep them from happening.

This is from a guy in the part of the nation where I used to go to the Dan'l Boone Nat'l Forest *every* weekend *with fireworks* in hand. Maybe it is a little more wet in Kentucky's southlands.

I, effectively, said you would hard pressed to find a Physicist that would claim that the Higgs boson is absolutely settled science.

Similarly for QED, Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. Essentially, no main stream Physicist is going to claim that any part of Physics is settled science.

Indeed, all main stream Physicists know that QM an GR contradict each other.

Thus the difference between scientists that actually understand what science says and not says, with climate "scientists"

I know enough about solving non-linear, partial differential equations. What they are modelling don't matter.

Nope. The implication here, is what are climate simulations capable of predicting, in principle.

It's impossible to predict specific local temperatures from alleged CO2 warming. Weather equations are chaotic, that is ill-conditioned to errors in variables. Thus it is impossible to link CO2 caused temperature rise to a particular forest fire. Period.

I agree, that in principle, it may be possible to take a simplified model of

*global* *average*, *long term* temperature change from CO2 concentrations. However, making any relatively specific predictions of temperature, or the effect of that temperature change is twaddle. A gnat farting in Switzerland could cause a hurricane in New Zealand.

Sure.

Maybe, maybe not.

Ho hummm.... connections of a connection of an inference of a proxy ... is nothing...

Sure, when the climate changes, it can change rainfall. Wow.

However....connections of a connection of an inference of a proxy ... is nothing...

Is it possible... sure... can a *rational* *scientist* claim that it

*does*... no....

its a maybe....

Of course, a maybe doesn't mean that one shouldn't try an minimise the risk.

Its quite rational to to take steps if there a 1% probability that the Earth will be destroyed if no action is taken, because of the severity of the consequences. Its not rational to claim that its 90% certain that climate change has, essentially, caused the Australian fires. As in, I won't even contemplate trying heroin even at a 0.1% change of death, or climbing a large rock. Its stunning that any "scientist" can make such claims.

Again, as someone that actually knows about simulation, the claims made for weather simulations, are truly ludicrous.

In the old days.... one handed someone a computer printout and said... the computer says this.... so it must be true... yeah... pull the other one....

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

Twaddle.

Twaddle.

$hit happens.

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

Yeah... read some of that. Its twaddle. Self-engendered "lets give answers that will get as funding".

Typical its "Here we show that the frequency increases linearly as the

level (statistically significant above the 90% confidence level)..."

Total twaddle, as impressive sounding as it is. For example, they note that out of 13 models that they use, 11 predicted a increase.

If this was a Physicist claiming that he had 11 models for the existence of the Higgs boson, but all with different actual results and 2 that contradicted them he would be laughed out of the auditorium.

I have run, literally, millions of spice simulations, with models verified to extensive precision. They still have this inconvenient habit of failing to predict oscillation in the real world.

Weather simulations are orders of magnitude more unreliable. They are nonlinear, statistical partial differential equations. They have hundreds of parameters, with no way of accurately measuring them.

Maybe a 1 deg raise does that or this, maybe it don't. Any scientist that claims otherwise, knows, essentially, nothing about what science is or is not.

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

That only means that two or more ludicrous claims exist; it is not an indictment of simulations, just a finding of two uninformed or devious voices on the topic.

It also isn't testable, because 'the claims' are not specified.

That's an arrogant dismissal, and looks like a claim that all professional work is tainted somehow. Get a job, tell us again after you've done some real work for pay. Skeptical philosophy isn't useful in making ANY predictions, and utility does matter.

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That's an absurd claim. What you are modelling drives how you model it.

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They don't predict anything specific - the butterfly effect guarantees that . They generate possible solutions which, taken together, tell you where th e system is going to end up, on average. John Von Neumann saw Hadley cells in his first - very crude - simulation of the earths atmosphere.

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People who know a lot more about it than you are convinced.

C increase, is it credible to claim at a 95% confidence level, that say, fires have increased by 5 times, i.e. a claim that the majority of the fire s are due to climate change.

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To somebody who hasn't got a clue about the details of the subject.

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It's rather more direct than that. The Indian Ocean Dipole - like the El Ni no La Nina alternation in the Pacific Ocean - flips between two states, and one of them is associated with drought in Australia. Higher global tempera ture makes drought in Australia more likely and more likely to last long en ough to dry out forests enough to let them burn.

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It wouldn't be rational for you to make such a claim, because you don't kno w enough about the subject to understand the basis for the claim.

There are better informed people around.

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I've being doing that for a while now - the first occasion was in 1970.

I posted two links in my response to you

They don't show up here.

You need to read them before you to post another attempt at making a pig-ig norant ass of yourself.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney