Re: Hitting The Global Warming Button

Unlikely to be true. It's definitely been warming since we started collecti ng satellite data, and the numerous different methods for inferring histori cal global temperatures all support Mann's tree ring data.

The warming over the last century is significant, and too big for any warmi ng cycle we know about.

It has been.

It may be good for the world, but it's going to change it in ways that will disadvantage us. There's some six metres of sea level rise tied up in the Greenland ice sheet, which is losing mass rapidly, and will eventually slid e off into the sea.

There's about 60 metres of sea level rise in the Antarctic ice sheet, which is also losing mass. Most of that ice sheet is going to remain mechanicall y stable, but bits of it aren't, and are expected to deliver some 4 metres of sea level rise somewhere between 200 and 900 years from now.

The changes in where we can grow our food are going to be more serious, and will create more problems, but it's harder to predict exactly how and wher e.

The climate models are crude because our computers are still too small and too slow to model fine-grain detail, like cloud formation. They aren't "abs urd", merely less precise than we'd like.

That's not climate scientists, but media reporting.

Nobody is yet doing enough, but that's politics and economics. Sea level ri se is going to destroy the value of a lot of real estate - essentially ever y port city is eventually going to have to be rebuilt - and once the proper ty owners realise this, the economic arguments for slowing down anthropogen ic global warming are going to have real teeth.

So what? He could delay the climate catastrophe by a whole second if he opt ed to have a smaller personal carbon footprint. His political contribution will have been a lot more substantial.

The joke is that we are eventually going to have to stop getting our energy by burning fossil carbon. There's only so much of it in the ground to dig up, and digging it up is getting progressively more expensive. We can dig u p and burn enough to warm the planet by a few degrees and make it a very di fferent place, but we really shouldn't.

Sufficiently large scale solar power generators are already close to breaki ng even with fossil-power burning, and another factor of ten increase in th e size of the renewable energy sector will halves it's capital cost per kil owatt hour again, making it definitely cheaper.

d too slow to model fine-grain detail, like cloud formation. They aren't "a bsurd", merely less precise than we'd like.

Exactly how is fine grain detail going to help modeling climate change. I t will help with predicting weather, but not with climate change.

rise is going to destroy the value of a lot of real estate - essentially ev ery port city is eventually going to have to be rebuilt - and once the prop erty owners realise this, the economic arguments for slowing down anthropog enic global warming are going to have real teeth.

Extinguishing underground coal fires would be a relatively cheap way to red uce a lot of CO2 from being released. But there is no money to be made doi ng that.

gy by burning fossil carbon. There's only so much of it in the ground to di g up, and digging it up is getting progressively more expensive. We can dig up and burn enough to warm the planet by a few degrees and make it a very different place, but we really shouldn't.

I thought we had enough known coal reserves in the U.S. to provide all the energy used in the U.S. for about 300 years.

king even with fossil-power burning, and another factor of ten increase in the size of the renewable energy sector will halves it's capital cost per k ilowatt hour again, making it definitely cheaper.

Sounds like an argument that we do not have to do anything. Economic fact ors will cause the end of using fossil burning.

Dan

Given a chaotic system with unknown forcings, atomic level wouldn't be good enough.

We aren't going to do anything, execpt some countries are going to waste a lot of capital trying. The coal that you don't buy, China and India will appreciate.

So find something else to get upset about.

and too slow to model fine-grain detail, like cloud formation. They aren't "absurd", merely less precise than we'd like.

It will help with predicting weather, but not with climate change.

Why do you think that? IEEE Spectrum begged to differ.

l rise is going to destroy the value of a lot of real estate - essentially every port city is eventually going to have to be rebuilt - and once the pr operty owners realise this, the economic arguments for slowing down anthrop ogenic global warming are going to have real teeth.

educe a lot of CO2 from being released. But there is no money to be made d oing that.

Not a lot of CO2 is being released by underground coal fires, and putting t hem out isn't all that cheap. Get some numbers if you want to disagree.

ergy by burning fossil carbon. There's only so much of it in the ground to dig up, and digging it up is getting progressively more expensive. We can d ig up and burn enough to warm the planet by a few degrees and make it a ver y different place, but we really shouldn't.

e energy used in the U.S. for about 300 years.

Correct, but it wouldn't be a good idea to dig them up and burn them. Clima te change and extreme weather events make the economic advantage of doing i t rather negative.

eaking even with fossil-power burning, and another factor of ten increase i n the size of the renewable energy sector will halves it's capital cost per kilowatt hour again, making it definitely cheaper.

ctors will cause the end of using fossil burning.

But not before we've flooded all our coastal cities, if we are short-sighte d enough to continue with business as usual. Eventually the long-term econo mic consequences of business as usual will become obvious to even the dimme st of right-wing nitwits, but it would be nice to start minimising the long term damage earlier rather than later.

and too slow to model fine-grain detail, like cloud formation. They aren't "absurd", merely less precise than we'd like.

It will help with predicting weather, but not with climate change.

Sadly, John Larkin can't understand that while weather is chaotic, climate is tolerably predictable.

el rise is going to destroy the value of a lot of real estate - essentially every port city is eventually going to have to be rebuilt - and once the p roperty owners realise this, the economic arguments for slowing down anthro pogenic global warming are going to have real teeth.

reduce a lot of CO2 from being released. But there is no money to be made doing that.

nergy by burning fossil carbon. There's only so much of it in the ground to dig up, and digging it up is getting progressively more expensive. We can dig up and burn enough to warm the planet by a few degrees and make it a ve ry different place, but we really shouldn't.

he energy used in the U.S. for about 300 years.

reaking even with fossil-power burning, and another factor of ten increase in the size of the renewable energy sector will halves it's capital cost pe r kilowatt hour again, making it definitely cheaper.

actors will cause the end of using fossil burning.

China is burning the cola it gets progressively more efficiently. Eventuall y they'll start capturing and burying the CO2 produced. They have more to l ose from run-away anthropogenic global warming, but they want to start conv erting to renewable energy sources only after they've got got a bigger econ omy to support the changeover.

Probably rather short-sighted advice.

l and too slow to model fine-grain detail, like cloud formation. They aren' t "absurd", merely less precise than we'd like.

e. It will help with predicting weather, but not with climate change.

Well here is a quote from someone that thinks climate change is easy to mod el and predict.

Sadly, John Larkin can't understand that while weather is chaotic, climate is tolerably predictable.

reduce a lot of CO2 from being released. But there is no money to be made doing that.

them out isn't all that cheap. Get some numbers if you want to disagree.

I just want to point out that you are not informed and yet you post as if y ou knew the facts.

In China, though, the main concern regarding coal fires is not environmenta l, but economic. "China's coal fires destroy millions of tons of coal every year," says Carsten Drebenstedt, a surface mining professor from Technisch

In fact, the country's coal fires consume 20 million tons of coal annually and render ten times that amount inaccessible.

According to Prakash, "China's coal is the best-quality coal in the world. It's pure anthracite. So when it burns it is greater economic loss." She es timates that the total economic loss due to coal fires and the deposits the y render inaccessible is over 1.25 billion dollars.

energy by burning fossil carbon. There's only so much of it in the ground t o dig up, and digging it up is getting progressively more expensive. We can dig up and burn enough to warm the planet by a few degrees and make it a v ery different place, but we really shouldn't.

the energy used in the U.S. for about 300 years.

mate change and extreme weather events make the economic advantage of doing it rather negative.

breaking even with fossil-power burning, and another factor of ten increase in the size of the renewable energy sector will halves it's capital cost p er kilowatt hour again, making it definitely cheaper.

factors will cause the end of using fossil burning.

ted enough to continue with business as usual. Eventually the long-term eco nomic consequences of business as usual will become obvious to even the dim mest of right-wing nitwits, but it would be nice to start minimising the lo ng term damage earlier rather than later.

So you are saying that it will take years before large scale solar power ge nerators are economically feasible? And yet in an earlier post you made it sound is if large scale solar power was just around the corner.

Dan

Nutrition! All advice about what to eat seems to be dead wrong 20 years later. Margerine and skim milk are out, butter and whole milk are in.

Genetics, too. The neo-Darwinists dominated genetic thinking, and were wrong.

It looks like just about all science is seriously wrong until corrected by experiment.

Coastal subsidance too, often caused by pumping groundwater.

The problem with GPS is that it will take decades to measure the actual sea levels.

and too slow to model fine-grain detail, like cloud formation. They aren't "absurd", merely less precise than we'd like.

Bill, you have obviously not seen the compute power pricing available from Google and other cloud providers. Makes the big massively parallel supercomputers quite pointless.

?-)

That was advice concocted by the food industry. There was as much real scie nce behind it as there is backing up cosmetics ads today.

Really? How?

So astronomy isn't real science, and Potlemy could well be right ...

Tell that to the Pacific island states, whose coral atolls aren't much abou t sea level. They are already in trouble, and will vanish with an century if the GRACE-satellite mass-losses from the Greenland and Antarctic ice she ets remain the same.

In reality, the ice sheets are going to become mechanically unstable at som e point - the East Antarctic ice sheet is claimed to have already hit that point, but it isn't going to do anything dramatic for at least 200 years an d could hang on for up to 900 years. That will be good for about 4 metres o f sea level rise when it finally floats away.

Actually you can do enough using energy balance through an imaginary sphere drawn around the Earth to demonstrate why AGW is real.

It doesn't stop ignorant dittoheads and deniers for hire from pretending it isn't happening though.

Phlogiston was a reasonable explanation for the time. Science progresses by finding better explanations for the observations and trying to find new experiments that break the orthodoxy.

Laviosier and Priestly both played their part. Lavosiers problems stemmed more from being executed in the French revolution because of his tax collector connections with Ferme Generale than phlogiston.

The whole point of science is that you do experiments to determine how the world works and *NATURE* is the final arbiter.

That is the US junk food industry selling their miracle products to a credulous consumerist population. If you really think that rotting your childrens teeth with gallons of fizzy pop laden with azo dyes and high fructose corn syrup then you need your head examining. Type II diabetes is another serious manufactured US disease of the junk food era.

What on Earth do you mean by that? Genetic inheritance is a major part of evolution and selection pressures then determine which ones survive.

Do you *really* think Lamarkism or Lysenkoism is superior?

Epigenetics and methylation of DNA under stress is a minor factor but the main bulk of characteristics comes from the parental DNA with perhaps just a handful of minor non-lethal transcription errors.

All science is an approximation to reality that gets better with time although not always monotonically improving towards that reality.

Scientists are human and some of them have big egos. The battle between Fred Hoyle for Steady State and Martin Ryle over Big Bang cosmology being a notable example where it became very bitter. Newton and Leibnitz is another (thank goodness we use the latters notation).

We now know that Ryle overstated his case because the radio telescopes of the day had sidelobes that saw the brighter radio galaxies more than once resulting in a higher count of fainter ones than was correct. He was still right though despite that experimental flaw.

Satellite radar imaging gives the best overall surveying of the sea surface. Other methods just provide a few spot heights.

IEEE Spectrum begs to differ. The right kind of massively parallel computer - specifically tuned for a particular problem - can be a lot more cost-effective than general purpose hardware.

That is less than 1 percent of China's coal consumption.

sounds like he's thinking long term.

all and too slow to model fine-grain detail, like cloud formation. They are n't "absurd", merely less precise than we'd like.

nge. It will help with predicting weather, but not with climate change.

odel and predict.

Since nobody thinks that, the absence of the quote is understandable.

e is tolerably predictable.

to reduce a lot of CO2 from being released. But there is no money to be ma de doing that.

ng them out isn't all that cheap. Get some numbers if you want to disagree.

you knew the facts.

You'd like to think so. This isn't the first time the nonsensical claim abo ut underground coal fires has come up here.

As has been pointed out by another poster that's about 1% of the coal now b eing burnt in China per year.

tal, but economic. "China's coal fires destroy millions of tons of coal eve ry year," says Carsten Drebenstedt, a surface mining professor from Technis

s. In fact, the country's coal fires consume 20 million tons of coal annual ly and render ten times that amount inaccessible.

. It's pure anthracite. So when it burns it is greater economic loss." She estimates that the total economic loss due to coal fires and the deposits t hey render inaccessible is over 1.25 billion dollars.

r energy by burning fossil carbon. There's only so much of it in the ground to dig up, and digging it up is getting progressively more expensive. We c an dig up and burn enough to warm the planet by a few degrees and make it a very different place, but we really shouldn't.

l the energy used in the U.S. for about 300 years.

limate change and extreme weather events make the economic advantage of doi ng it rather negative.

o breaking even with fossil-power burning, and another factor of ten increa se in the size of the renewable energy sector will halves it's capital cost per kilowatt hour again, making it definitely cheaper.

c factors will cause the end of using fossil burning.

ghted enough to continue with business as usual. Eventually the long-term e conomic consequences of business as usual will become obvious to even the d immest of right-wing nitwits, but it would be nice to start minimising the long term damage earlier rather than later.

generators are economically feasible?

That's not what I said. They are feasible now, and being built, but they ar en't any cheaper than fossil-carbon fueled power stations

r was just around the corner.

It is. Australia is already getting 1% of it's electricity from solar power , and it's about half the price of power supplied from the grid (where you have to pay quite a bit for the cost of the grid that gets conventionally g enerated power from the power stations to your house). Germany does a bit b etter, but by virtue of heavier subsidies. There's not as much sunlight aro und in Germany, and the grid doesn't have to move the conventionally genera ted power as far.

And the Germans haven't had a badly designed privatisation scheme which res ulted in a lot unnecessary investment in beefing up the grid - not exactly Enron, but the Australian free market in power transmission didn't work the way it should have done.

Bill Sloman, Sydney

Exactly:

Imagine switching to diesel to improve the air!

At least this decision was tested by experiment.

be

This isn't actually about science but rather about urban transportation. Boris Johnson doesn't know any more about science than John Larkin does - p ossibly marginally less since he read classics at university.

London's air quality is a lot better than it was when the British heated th eir houses with coal fires, producing the famous "pea-souper" fogs, that ki lled lots of people whenever they happened.

The city needs to go over to electric cars and trucks. It won't do much for the national CO2 figures, but for the other emissions power stations can p ut scrubbers their smoke stacks and make their chimney's high enough to dis perse what gets out to below dangerous concentrations.

Same thing is happening in Pennsylvania US, for quite a while now.

the people who live over the fire refuse to move out, which is how I know about it. some consider them radicals for not letting Mommy governemnt give them new houses dopwn the street, or whatever.

Try it, money or not. This ishit is just burning, open it up to the air and you got a BIG problem. It's actually smoldering.

Know what they say about if you think there is a fire in the house, about opening doors ? Well apply that in spades. The local fire department surely has a paer on that, even in third world countries. You give it oxygen, you will be burnt.

One of the options is presumably to give it enough CO2 so that any oxygen diffusing in will get pushed back out before it can get to the coal.

Some electronegative halocarbon gas - as used in computer-room fire-extinguishers - might work even better, but enough to make any significant difference would probably be much too expensive to be practical.

That's reasonable in theory but given the sizes of these fires would be impractical. The thing is, that these smouldering coal deposits have an enormous product of temperature times thermal mass and a (compared to that) a tiny thermal dissipation to ambient (earth in the absence of aquifers is not all that thermally conductive). Even if it was technically feasible to pump a mine full of Halon at enough pressure to keep any oxygen from diffusing in (which would be a considerable feat in itself), one would need to maintain this state by pumping in more Halon until all that thermal mass cools down below the self-ignition point of carbon in air, before any air could be let back in.

With only the thermal conductivity of the surrounding ground (assuming most big fissures accessible from outside being plugged to conserve Halon gas and therefore gas flow being kept to a minimum) the process of that cooling down could literally take years. If CO2 is used, the process would still not be significantly different. Although CO2 is much cheaper, one would still need to limit the gas flow (otherwise the quantities of CO2 getting out would accumulate and make a large area uninhabitable for anything except plants), and that would still need to continue for years until the temperature has dropped sufficiently. In any case, pumping the burning mine full of gas (of any type) is hardly a practical way to get it extinguished if it has accumulated enough thermal energy by burning for years.

A more reliable way would be to pump it full of water instead. That surely needs a lot of water but water has the highest available specific heat of vaporization and its boiling point is conveniently lower than the ignition temperature of carbon in air. Flooding the mine would likely drop the time needed for the coal masses to cool down sufficiently from the "years" timescale to the "weeks" (or at the most "months") timescale. That would make the extinguishing attempt at least somewhat practical in principle. Even then, short of diverting a river (provided a nearby one even exists), the firefighting is still a formidable task. Safely handling large amounts of a carbon monoxide and hydrogen (that would be produced at the initial stage when the temperatures in the mine are still very high), let alone having to pump all that water out of there again when the firefighting is over, would hardly be considered "easy" (probably still more realistic than using a gas).

Regards Dimitrij