OT: Something rotten in Denmark?

The developing countries know how desperate the US and european politicoes are to sign something so that they can declare victory and rake in big cap-and-trade bucks. So they are playing their cards.

The Chinese have a good point: they have just as much right to per-capita CO2 production as anyone else on the planet. A billion Chinese and a billion Indians and a billion Africans all driving SUVs will be have interesting effects.

John

On the price of petroleum products not least.

Graham

The Chinese have no need (or desire) to go through the "big sedan with tail fin" stage. As technology provides comfortable vehicles with decent performance, good fuel economy and low emissions, these will be their entry point into the road culture.

But the Chinese are smart. They will be the ones to build these cars. And sell them to us. The same goes for solar and wind generation technology.

But with three times our population, even small cars will burn a lot of fuel. And they need all the other trimmings of middle-class life: heat, light, refrigerators, air conditioning, communications, computers.

John

China is not that stupid..to take our worthless paper..

There is _that_ much iron?, _that_ much coal to melt it into steel sheets? Hell, the cars do not have to be driven after the exhausts of the mining equipment and the making of the steel; for the CO2 created will exhaust all of the oxygen..

I don't doubt they will sign something with a great flourish at the end of this pointless political jamboree. But I doubt if it will do anything useful or whether the promises made will be kept.

You can't blame some of the island states that are only a few feet above sea level for being pretty worried about their future.

Mostly on the price and availability of oil. But outside the USA most city dwellers do not want to own an SUV and in many of the worlds major cities with decent transport infrastructure you don't need to own a car. It isn't for nothing that the Smart car sells well to urbanites.

The next generation saloon cars are already capable of close to 60mpg. We still don't have adequate battery technology for electric cars or the infrastruture to recharge them sensibly.

Regards, Martin Brown

Uh, are you an engineer? Do the math on that.

John

They built an entire island system in Dubai, by dredging sand and pumping it up from barges.

It wouldn't be an unreasonable engineering project to add a couple of mm per year to a tropical island.

John

True enough and Dubai is now utterly bankcrupt from its pointless building spree and having to be bailed out by the other UAE states.

The Japanese pioneered the technology for Kansai airport. I still remember the fake April 1 Japan Times front story ca 1994 with a picture of the sea lapping over the runway which nearly became a diplomatic incident. They are adding a new runway and another 300M m^3 of rock.

Depends how far away you have to go to get the sand. The other really big problem for them is ingress of saltwater into the island aquifers - same problem also potentially affecting Florida. Then you need desalination plants as well for drinking water.

At the moment the least bad option for the first world is to take all the no-regrets energy saving measures we can (which is roughly 10% of base load in Europe) I don't know what it would be in the USA but certainly higher since you could clearly double vehicle mpg with present technology and maybe even triple it with careful aerodynamic design.

Regards, Martin Brown

onday

it is extreme expensive and only possible because they had oil money to burn on it and now they have stopped building on it because they ran out of investors.

But I think one of Bj=F8rn Lomborgs points is that he believes fixing the problems that come from global warming will be cheaper than trying to prevent it. and getting funding to fix a problem is probably alot easier than getting it for prevention of something that might happen.

but some kind of global agreement on reducing e.g. oil consumption might not be such a bad idea, before 2 billion asians want an SUV etc. and everyone begin to start more wars to get what they need

-Lasse

Hmm..3*10^9 cars times (wild guess) 10^3 pounds of iron gives 3*10^12 pounds of processed iron. It takes a bit of time and a fair amount of energy burning oil (in form of gasoline - the production of which takes burning coal) to dig out iron ore, and then more energy burning coal to process the ore; all creating CO2. I do not know enough of the energy requirements of all of those processes to estimate how much carbon would be converted per pound of processed iron. But..CO2 is one part carbon at scale 6 and 2 parts oxygen at total scale of 16, meaning the consumption of 6 pounds of carbon will "eat" 16 pounds of oxygen. So..if it took the equivalent of one pound of carbon to do all of the processing steps per pound of iron, one would consume 1.6*10^13 pounds of oxygen. (yes, wild hand-waving) How much does this atmosphere hold?

It's easier: has building all the cars now in the world depleted our oxygen? Would building twice as many use it all up?

Not an engineer!

John

Lastest number I heard being bantied around much was 385 PPMV.

For PPM by mass, I consider it to be very reasonable despite oversimplified to multiply this by 44 / ((.78 * 28 [for nitrogen]) + (.21 * 32 [for oxygen]) + (.01 * 39 [for argon)), amounting to about 585 PPM by mass/weight.

Multiply .000585 by 14.7 pounds per square inch "standard atmospheric pressure", multiply by 144 square inches per square feet, multiply by 5280 squared square feet per square mile, multiply by 283 million square miles of Earth's surface horizontal-consideration-only being in existence...

I get 9.77 E15 pounds of CO2 in atmosphere. Due to about 30% of our planet's surface being above sea level, I would reduce that figure by a couple to lower-few percent, maybe around 9.5 E15 pounds of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere when CO2 is/was 385 PPMV.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Something we agree on at least.

Incidentally thanks to paramagnetic analysers oxygen measurements are good enough to get 5 significant figure accuracy on the O2/N2 ratio in the atmosphere and monitor the corresponding decrease in O2 that balances the combustion equation for fossil fuels. eg.

That is a really difficult measurement compared to CO2. They have been able to do it for a couple of decades with sufficient precision and speed to show both the long term trends, seasonal and daily variations.

Regards, Martin Brown

Interesting that CO2 is increasing by about 1 PPM per year as a fractional atmospheric component, whereas O2 is declining by about 100 PPM per year (ie, declining 19 PPM per year as the O2:O2 ratio.)

I don't understand the chemistry. How can we burn fossil fuels such as to use 100 PPM of oxygen to make 1 PPM CO2?

John

Come on, John. The AGW crowd is compressing air to seperate the oxygen from the other gasses, and storing it to convince people their CO2 lies are real. :)

Minor arithmetic error here -19 per meg = (x - 200000)/(800000)*10^6 Taking O2 = 20% as a N2 = 80% as a lazy baseline and x as the unknown O2 conc. in ppm (should be 21%, 79%)

So x ~ -0.8*19+0.2 ppm v = -15 ppmv

I must admit I don't much like delta per meg or delta per mil but that is how the stable isotopes people tend to report their findings. It would be nicer to have graphs plotted in easily comparable units.

Some of the O2 is being used up to weather rocks and rust cars (and any other refined metals that will surface oxidise). I am a bit surprised how much appears to be being used up this way if we have interpreted the numbers correctly.

The reason that the diurnal and annual peak to peak variation is larger in O2 than CO2 is that most plants respire continuously, but can only split water to generate oxygen by photosynthesis during daylight hours.

But even so taking the co plotted data for La Jolla which is semi tropical I don't understand why the annual peak to peak variation in O2 is ~100per meg and the corresponding annual peak to peak in CO2 is at most 25 ppm.

The trends are easier to see on the Samoa data and I get by eye something like -19per meg for (ie 15ppmv) O2 and +3ppmv for CO2. Only about half of the CO2 we emit stays airborne and the rest dissolves in the sea.

My understanding of photosynthesis is that there should be a roughly 1:1 correspondence of O2 released and CO2 consumed. Obviously on the burning side you burn at 2 x O2 for every CH4. Which gets another factor of two (but less than that for coal, and about 1.5x O2 for oil).

I will ask an expert next time I am in the right sort of lab. Interesting question...

Regards, Martin Brown

Well, it's over. After investing 15 hours of his valuable time to save the world, O can come home from the blizzard in Copenhagen to the blizzard in Washington.

"Obama may eventually become known as "the man who killed Copenhagen," said Greenpeace U.S. Executive Director Phil Radford."

Funny how the Democrats eat their young.

John