Alert readers will have noticed the fewer-than-normal postings over the last couple of weeks. This is related mostly to pressures associated with real work (remember that we do have day jobs). In my case, it is because of the preparations for the next IPCC assessment and the need for our group to have a functioning and reasonably realistic climate model with which to start the new round of simulations. These all need to be up and running very quickly if we are going to make the early 2010 deadlines.
But, to be frank, there has been another reason. When we started this blog, there was a lot of ground to cover – how climate models worked, the difference between short term noise and long term signal, how the carbon cycle worked, connections between climate change and air quality, aerosol effects, the relevance of paleo-climate, the nature of rapid climate change etc. These things were/are fun to talk about and it was/is easy for us to share our enthusiasm for the science and, more importantly, the scientific process.
However, recently there has been more of a sense that the issues being discussed (in the media or online) have a bit of a groundhog day quality to them. The same nonsense, the same logical fallacies, the same confusions – all seem to be endlessly repeated. The same strawmen are being constructed and demolished as if they were part of a make-work scheme for the building industry attached to the stimulus proposal. Indeed, the enthusiastic recycling of talking points long thought to have been dead and buried has been given a huge boost by the publication of a new book by Ian Plimer who seems to have been collecting them for years. Given the number of simply made–up ‘facts’ in that tome, one soon realises that the concept of an objective reality against which one should measure claims and judge arguments is not something that is universally shared. This is troubling – and although there is certainly a role for some to point out the incoherence of such arguments (which in that case Tim Lambert and Ian Enting are doing very well), it isn’t something that requires much in the way of physical understanding or scientific background. (As an aside this is a good video description of the now-classic Dunning and Kruger papers on how the people who are most wrong are the least able to perceive it).
The Onion had a great piece last week that encapsulates the trajectory of these discussions very well. This will of course be familiar to anyone who has followed a comment thread too far into the weeds, and is one of the main reasons why people with actual, constructive things to add to a discourse get discouraged from wading into wikipedia, blogs or the media. One has to hope that there is the possibility of progress before one engages.
However there is still cause to engage – not out of the hope that the people who make idiotic statements can be educated – but because bystanders deserve to know where better information can be found. Still, it can sometimes be hard to find the enthusiasm. A case in point is a 100+ comment thread criticising my recent book in which it was clear that not a single critic had read a word of it (you can find the thread easily enough if you need to – it’s too stupid to link to). Not only had no-one read it, none of the commenters even seemed to think they needed to – most found it easier to imagine what was contained within and criticise that instead. It is vaguely amusing in a somewhat uncomfortable way.
Communicating with people who won’t open the book, read the blog post or watch the program because they already ‘know’ what must be in it, is tough and probably not worth one’s time. But communication in general is worthwhile and finding ways to get even a few people to turn the page and allow themselves to be engaged by what is actually a fantastic human and scientific story, is something worth a lot of our time.
Along those lines, Randy Olson (a scientist-turned-filmmaker-and-author) has a new book coming out called “Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style” which could potentially be a useful addition to that discussion. There is a nice post over at Chris Mooney’s blog here, though read Bob Grumbine’s comments as well. (For those of you unfamiliar the Bob’s name, he was one of the stalwarts of the Usenet sci.environment discussions back in the ‘old’ days, along with Michael Tobis, Eli Rabett and our own William Connolley. He too has his own blog now).
All of this is really just an introduction to these questions: What is it that you feel needs more explaining? What interesting bits of the science would you like to know more about? Is there really anything new under the contrarian sun that needs addressing? Let us know in the comments and we’ll take a look. Thanks.
Ray, IFR; look at Barry Brooks’s site. Going that direction hits serious political problems — it wipes out a lot of value for the hard rock miners, it freaks out the self-labeled environmentalists who don’t understand ecology, among others. And although IFR won’t blow up or melt if briefly neglected or misunderstood, it can still be screwed up in a nasty longterm way by a sufficiently ingenious or malicious idiot.
But the numbers on renewables just don’t seem to work, for the next century or two.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/06/11/an-inconvenient-solution/
> numbers on renewables
here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/06/03/sa-sets-a-33-renewables-by-2020-target/
My question is this: If you accept Darwinian evolution, AND you accept climate change, wouldn’t you expect ecosystems to collapse, since they evolved in a different climate? Isn’t it inevitable that species that are selected to survive in a particular environment aren’t going to survive when that environment is altered faster than they can genetically adapt?
Just like weathermen/women, most predictive climatologists focus on temperature and give short shrift to dew points. I’d like to know the trends for DPs. It seems that would be more “telling” than temperature, for if evaporation is increased that offsets temperatures a bit. But the DP would show a more significant increase. It also would underline the risk from H2O potentiating the effect of CO2. CO2 increase alone (in the short term) is not enough to make the big temp. increases, true?
Also, would trying to mine methane hydrates be even more dangerous than burning more carbon later? I mean, disturbing the stuff.
Finally, the idiot rubbish like Glenn Beck implying we add net CO2 by exhaling continues apace. I wonder if he really doesn’t understand the surface carbon cycle v. bringing more from underground, or pretends not to.
GailZ — nope. Now don’t get hung up on “Darwinian” as opposed to the rest of evolutionary theory here. Darwin was a founder, but founders in science aren’t like founders of religions. They do early work that leads others to do better work later, even if they’re wrong. Darwin didn’t know much. But he knew more than anybody else, and got what he knew put together and published.
We know a lot more now. Darwin didn’t know about genes or DNA.
Nature doesn’t lose genes when conditions change and have to produce a whole new set for the new conditions.
What happens when conditions change is mostly that the plants, animals, or other organisms that happen to be better adapted to the new conditions have slightly more grandchildren — their heredity is somewhat more frequently reproduced.
But the rest of the genes are carried along in the background even if at low levels, and when conditions change again, whichever organisms happen to have the old inheritance — have slightly more grandchildren.
These changes — in which genes are most common — are the main thing that changes when conditions change. Selection is mostly just reshuffling the deck and copying more of whichever cards come to the top, each generation — but the other cards get copied too, just not as many copies in that generation because they weren’t as useful for survival.
Not to worry. Yes, we can wipe out species and are doing so at a great rate. That’s as much to do with overharvesting and cutting up environments into little bits and pieces, changing the background, as it is to just changing the environment beyond the ability to survive.
Chris (#344), James (#345),
I’m repeating myself a bit but I think one should be careful not to confuse oceans loss due to an H2O runaway greenhouse and oceans loss due to hydrogen loss.
In theory, the H2O greenhouse effect should be sufficient to evaporate the oceans given enough absorbed incoming radiation but I guess small seas might be left behind (there would large altitude differences for one thing). My understanding is that this could happen much faster than hydrogen loss. There’s still a significant amount of H2O on Venus apparently.
With regards to weathering of CO2, water is not strictly necessary and I don’t know if the science is settled on the speed of these processes but, as long as you have no more precipitation (and no more oceans of course), CO2 should accumulate beyond the equilibrium level. I gather that H2O in the atmosphere is not an obstacle so hydrogen loss would not be necessary.
And if it’s not clear that hydrogen loss would get rid of liquid water to begin with because, with an atmosphere primarily composed of H2O, hydrogen loss would diminish the greenhouse effect and lower temperatures. A self-sustaining super-feedback of doom (as opposed to the theoretical runaway greenhouse as I understand it) could allow H2O loss without a corresponding drop in temperatures though.
By my reckogning, there is not quite enough water on Earth for 300 atmospheres but it doesn’t matter. The implied temperatures are large enough, especially if you don’t assume a 100% relative humidity, that many of the assumptions we make would probably break down. You could have radiative heat transfer at different wavelenghts, CO2 outgassing rather than weathering, compounds which are currently stable which would melt or boil and so on. So I don’t know that it’s very useful to speculate about such a climate.
Of more immediate relevance is the mysterious process which would boil away the oceans. 10-20W from CO2 can’t do it (so far as I know anyway) and the CO2 concentration should fall at faster than geological speed because weathering should be faster at moderately higher temperatures (though this is purely speculation of course).
I can’t imagine what would enable the kind of hot equilibrium James (#339) is asking about except perhaps at very high temperatures. Pierrehumbert’s runaway greenhouse charts do not support such a “stepped runaway” with intermediate equilibriums but Hansen seems to believe that they wouldn’t apply or that an unknown process would be kicked into gear. And who can say what an unknown process would do?
Thank you for your response to my question(244), Dr. Schmidt. As is often the case, a good answer leads to more questions and I hope you will bear with me for a few more queries.
I can understand the system as a whole conserves energy, however, I had always assumed that this law is holographic in nature. In other words, every part of the system must satisfy the law of conservation and not just the system as a whole. Is this a poor assumption on my part?
The two questions I have for this response.
1. Exactly what is CO2 emitting? I mean without the absorption there is nothing to emit, CO2 could be a perfect emitter, but without incoming energy there will be nothing to emit.
2. Does not the sun produce IR in the bands that excite CO2? Would not this downwell IR in fact act to warm the stratosphere.
O.K here I will show my ignorance over the AGW theory. I thought that theory rested on the supposition that CO2 absorbs a photon of energy and then emits that energy in random directions that necessitates that half of those emission continue on their marry way to TOA, and the other half is emitted back to the earth which is what causes the warming. I guess my problem is when you say transferred to heat then emitted by water vapor, etc. at what point is that added energy to the system, and why would convection not serve to dissipate that heat?
Thanks again for taking the time to read my post.
Re Gail Z:
Yes.
Re bobberger – The V cycles – is that vanadium in an electrochemical battery or is this some new nuclear fuel cycle or…?
Ray Ladbury Says (13 June 2009 at 8:27 AM):
“A sustainable energy infrastructure MUST be based on renewable energy.”
The problem, though, is how to get there from here. Absent sufficiently-advanced-magic solutions such as orbiting solar collectors, renewables can’t supply power for the current world population to live near western levels of consumption (or possibly at any level), without the side-effects causing significant environmental destruction.
The seemingly inescapable conclusion is that the current world population is not sustainable. Reaching a sustainable level by reducing the birth rate (rather than calling on one or more of the Four Horsemen, which I for one would prefer to avoid) will take a century or more. So how do we provide for the existing population without spewing climate-altering amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere?
Neil B., you might find this of interest:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610185530.htm
James and Bob Berger, As I said, we may need less than palatable solutions to make it to sustainability. However, I see no reason to believe that either stroage of muclear waste or CCS are any more tractable than renewables + storage. This is a subject for research and it is a mistake to pre-judge the outcome. If we were to give the nod to one over the other, though, renewables offer the best hope for a long-term solution we don’t have to junk in a hundred years or so and which doesn’t leave us with longterm messes to clean up.
In the near term, though, the only solution is energy efficiency–even to the point of austerity. Every watt we don’t use is 3 watts saved.
Oh dear, I think this thread is starting to feel a bit like Groundhog Day itself. We all know where this discussion is going to go, so rather than repeating all 1400 comments from “Tragedy”, can we all just agree the following:
* CCS is a nice idea if it works, but the technology is not there yet, and may never be economical
* Nuclear will be useful in replacing coal/oil, but 100% nuclear will never happen, and waste is a problem
* Renewables look promising, but costs are not certain for the required scales, and storage is unanswered as yet
Realistically, some combination of all of these, plus efficiency, plus distributed/co-generation is going to be required. None of the options is going to be cheap, but all of the options are cheaper than BAU, so we just have to get on with doing something, rather than arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Please lets not have another thousand comments of name calling and posturing (from all sides).
> There’s still a significant amount of H2O on Venus apparently.
Apparent to whom? Citation needed.
Hank (#363),
I do not take kindly to this:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/antarctic-warming-is-robust/#comment-111836
But for the benefit of the other readers, a mission called Venus Express has been sending us data about the second rock from the Sun. Therefore I recommend searching for /venus express water/ rather than /venus water/.
I gather that the atmosphere on Venus is more vulnerable, not only due its proximity to the Sun and the lower gravity but also because of the Earth’s magnetic field. So I assume a lower rate of loss would be expected if Hansen’s scenario was to unfold.
In the earlier thread, I asked what your source was.
So you don’t take it kindly to be asked what your source is?
How about I give you a source and you say whether you like it?
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009JGRE..11400B39B
I am not sure if this fits, but I am in an argument with a skeptic about the declining Arctic ice extent. His argument is that we only know of the ice extent since 1979 and that is too short of time to be able to make predictions. Try as I can I have not been able to locate references to the Arctic conditions prior to 1979. Could I get help here.
[Response: Try the HADISST data – they pull together ship reports/ice charts etc going back to the 19th C – though obviously the coverage is not complete. Reasonable estimates of the extent – particularly in the North Atlantic. – gavin]
It takes you back to a time when climate science was a peaceful refuge from the turbulence of power politics. . .
You mean it’s not that now? :)
I often find it interesting to read about the development of a scientific topic in the days before it became popularized and/or contentious. A lot of the deniers appear to believe climate change science started with Jim Hansen, if not Al Gore. I’m sure they’ll figure out some way to discount Tyndall and Pouillet, once they learn who they were.
Gail Z – I also agree with Hank Roberts; but my yes was just that yes, if changes are too fast, you get more extinctions (adaptation has two parts – changes in genetics, and changes in behavior or phenotype in response to environmental changes for the given mix of genotypes. Either way, when some species start to change in response to change in different ways, this can actually add stress to ecological relationships – for example, if pollinators and their plants start missing each other’s seasonal timing).
(PS some potentially deleterious genetic variations are maintained in a population because either
1. they are recessive and thus, when selected against, become rarer, and thus less likely to be found in homozygotes, and thus harder for selective pressures to act on.
2. they may only be deleterious in homozygotes; they might be advantageous in heterozygotes.
Many other interesting aspects of how selective pressures can work on population genetics. Sexual selection, kin selection, frequency-dependent selection, epistasis,…)
It’s an interesting evolution … especially considering that Darwin sat on his notions regarding evolution for years, until Wallace pushed him, do in large part to his “anticipation” of the social reaction.
(“anticipation” as in … I’m putting it mildly)
Climate scientists can at least appreciate than even when their science is accepted by all, evolution will still be denied by 40% of the population of the US.
Re 357 Ellis –
Yes, energy is conserved at all points (define any given box, one can have an energy budget (inflow – outflow = storage), momentum budget, entropy budget (inflow + production – outflow = storage), etc.
The greenhouse effect would work in some way if it were based on fluorescence (photon absorption followed by photon emission without complete thermalization) or scattering or reflection. In most planetary atmospheres I wouldn’t expect fluorescence to be a big factor – For the Earth’s atmosphere, in the great majority of the mass of the atmosphere, molecular collisions are too frequent relative to photon absorptions and emissions; the energy of photons that are absorbed and converted to internal energy (‘heat’) of the atom or molecule(s) that absorb it is usually spread to other atoms/molecules (or other degrees of freedom in the same molecule) by molecular collisions before that energy would have been emitted. This process is called thermalization – it spreads the energy out over the substance so that all the different gaseous substances and other materials tend to remain near the same temperature; they share their energy.
So when a CO2 molecular emits a photon at some wavelength, that removes energy from the molecule, which likely came from molecular collisions with other molecules, which at some point in the chain could have come from the absorption of other photons, over various wavelengths, by various substances, and possibly in a different location (because of convection).
Convection is important but it does not ‘erase’ the greenhouse effect; ultimately, essentially all heat must leave the Earth-atmosphere system as radiation; convection only redistributes heat, and mainly below the tropopause. Convection can not make the atmosphere isothermal because air expands and cools as it rises (less so if water vapor is condensing, but this is all quite well understood). So the temperature tends to decrease with height in the troposphere. A majority of the radiation to space comes from the troposphere. Increasing the opacity of the atmosphere reduces the average distance over which radiation can propagate between emission and absorption – more of what you would see (at the wavelength being considered) would come from shorter distances. Substances emit photons according to their emissivity (a contributor to opacity, and for Earthly conditions, the dominant one for wavelengths where surface and atmospheric emission dominates over solar radiation) and their temperature – more photons per unit area per unit time per unit solid angle are emitted at higher temperatures. Temperature variation from the surface, throught the atmosphere, and to space (essentially zero Kelvins for climatological purposes) occur over optical distance; Except when temperature variations are over short distances relative to optical thickness, increasing the opacity decreases the net flux of radiant energy from thermal emission because it decreases the variation in temperature that is ‘visible’ from any one location, so that the radiant fluxes from opposite directions become more similar, reducing the net flux.
“more photons per unit area per unit time per unit solid angle”
… and per unit of the spectrum …
” are emitted at higher temperatures”
In the absence of scattering or reflection and assuming local thermodynamic equilibrium (effective thermalization of the energy involved), emissivity and absorptivity along any path length approach 1 as the optical thickness increases to infinity. This is because a fraction of the photons emitted along the path that make it to some point are absorbed over the next portion of the path, in proportion to the amount of photons that are added back by emission.
This is all true at one wavelength. For the greatest accuracy, the entirety of radiative energy transfer has to be evaluated over different wavelengths and directions.
Ellis – see also many comments here:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/03/olympian-efforts-to-control-pollution#comment-115348
(comments before and after that, going back to https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/03/olympian-efforts-to-control-pollution#comment-115180 )
and
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php?p=12&t=512&&a=18#2944
(and also on other pages, with great detail on pp 20 – 21; for your own sake, just ignore Gord).
Gail Z. (#353), yes, nature’s ability to cope with the pace of man-made climate change is a huge worry. The IPCC expects 20-30% of species assessed so far to be at higher risk of extinction with a warming of more than 2-3% over preindustrial levels.
But no, evolution is hardly the issue. Someone who rejected the theory of evolution, ruled out genetic adaptation, and believed e. g. that all species were created 6,000 years ago, would just have to worry all the more about climate change impacts. Some species have indeed specialized for a very narrow range of conditions. Others have evolved to be more versatile and able to cope more or less well with a range of climate conditions with the genes we are dealt, as one might expect from evolution on a varied and varying planet. After all, each of us is directly descended from a line of ancestors who proved resilient to every climate change on the planet since the beginning of life. Of course, that was true for the mammoths, too; the next change could always turn out to be the last for a species, and the real problem is that we have pushed so many to the brink of extinction already.
Also keep in mind that evolution or extinction are not the only options. Fast-dispersing species can also migrate polewards or up mountainsides with the moving temperature zones. But human destruction and fragmentation of the natural environment makes this migration a much more tricky proposition than in the past.
Ellis,
The sun doesn’t emit much infrared in the thermal bands where CO2 does most of its absorption. In the stratosphere, the energy balance is between absorption of ultraviolet by ozone and emission of infrared by carbon dioxide. The CO2 gets its heat from collision with the other molecules around it. The cycle is UV into ozone, ozone heating and splitting and hitting other molecules, which then speed up, heating up by the laws of statistical mechanics, those molecules hit CO2 molecules, which then radiate away the energy as infrared.
Thus the signature of global warming due to increasing CO2 is a warming troposphere coupled with a cooling stratosphere. Some stratospheric cooling is due to ozone depletion, but not enough to account for all of it.
James writes:
Garbage.
Think that’s argument by assertion? So is your more elaborate statement above. There’s no reason to think a world powered by renewables would cause more environmental damage than one powered by fossil fuel and nukes; very likely it would be very much the reverse.
[Response: To all, let’s not simply repeat all the points made in the last long thread… – gavin]
Hank Roberts writes:
Many sources give mean Cytherean atmospheric water vapor as 30 ppmv. The Venus atmosphere has a mass of about 4.8 x 10^20 kg. Given the respective molecular weights of water vapor and Venus air of 18 and 44, we can conclude that there are about 6 x 10^15 kg of water vapor in the Cytherean atmosphere. Compare this to 1.27 x 10^16 kg in Earth’s atmosphere on average, and you can see that Venus has almost half the water vapor in its atmosphere that Earth has. The big difference in Venus’s water vapor inventory is the lack of it in the lithosphere and Venus’s nonexistent oceans.
Barton — exactly; what’s ‘significant’? That we have numbers.
http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Venus_Express/SEM8MYSTGOF_0.html
“If you could condense all of the water vapour in Venus’s atmosphere, it would create a thin covering of water just 3-cm thick. For comparison, if Earth were a smooth ball, all of the water in the oceans and atmosphere would create a covering 3-km deep.”
http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Venus_Express/SEMGK373R8F_0.html
Details aplenty remain to be worked on:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2009.01.013
Patrick #358
Yes, I was talking about redox flow batteries.
And its true (and frustrating) that the discussion about how to solve the AGW problem suffers from much the same Groundhog Day syndome as the discussion about climate itself. As much as I wish people like Roy Spencer suddenly turn out to be right and almost everybody else being dead wrong, I wish that one day suddenly somebody comes up with a working alternative for nuclear, making all the discussions obsolete – but all we have is the same discussions over and over again. Maybe that in itself would be an interesting thing for realclimate to discuss: How do we break free of the loop? What would be the best strategy to quickly get beyond symbols like Kyoto and windturbines?
CTG (#362) wrote:
I agree that the technology is not there yet and may never be economical. I don’t necessarily agree that it “is a nice idea if it works” because there are other significant harms caused by burning fossil fuels besides their contribution to AGW and thus other good reasons to phase them out. Not to mention that supplies of fossil fuels are dwindling, so we will have to phase them out at some point anyway.
I think the focus of “carbon capture & sequestration” research should be on using agricultural and forestry practices to draw down the already dangerous anthropogenic excess of CO2 by capturing carbon in the soil & biosphere, rather than on capturing carbon from ongoing fossil fuel emissions.
I don’t agree that nuclear will be useful. I think nuclear is an extraordinarily costly and ineffective technology for reducing CO2 emissions from electricity generation. It is simply not possible to build enough nuclear power plants fast enough for nuclear power to make a “useful” contribution to reducing CO2 emissions in the time frame within which that needs to happen. Renewables can do the job faster, cheaper and better. Resources spent on expanding nuclear power would be far more effectively spend on rapid deployment of renewables and efficiency technology. Because of the “opportunity costs” of taking resources away from renewables to put them into nuclear, doing so hinders rather than helps the effort to reduce CO2 emissions.
As a practical matter, I doubt that very many nuclear power plants are actually going to be built in coming decades. At the rate that renewables, efficiency, energy storage and smart-grid technologies are advancing and growing (for wind and solar, it’s record-breaking double digit growth rates every year), there is just going to be less need for large, centralized power plants in the energy economy of the future. Nuclear power plants, as well as large centralized coal-fired power plants, are just not a good investment. And if you look at where private investment capital is going, it reflects that.
And of course nuclear waste is a serious problem. So is nuclear proliferation. So is the toxic waste from mining uranium. So is the vulnerability of nuclear power plants, and the whole nuclear fuel infrastructure, to accidents and terrorism.
Does it really make sense to build up a massive energy infrastructure — not only in the USA and other “enlightened” nations, but if it’s going to help with global warming, all over the world — that is fundamentally reliant on mining, refining, transporting, burning and burying vast amounts of some of the most toxic substances known, which incidentally can be used to make weapons of mass destruction?
Renewables are more than “promising”. Renewables are booming. Wind power accounted for 42 percent of all new electric generation capacity installed in the USA in 2008, and will soon account for a majority of all new capacity. Manufacturing of wind turbines and components is growing strongly in the USA and China. Concentrating solar thermal power — with integrated thermal storage, providing 24×7 baseload power — is poised for a major boom in the USA and elsewhere. Inexpensive, efficient mass-produced photovoltaics for municipal utility-scale applications, as well as traditional distributed rooftop applications, are on the market now and prices for PV are expected to drop dramatically in the next year or two as manufacturing expands.
Worldwide, in 2008 investments in “green” renewable energy exceeded investment in conventional energy for the first time. Venture capitalists as well as major utilities and corporations like Intel, Cisco, Google and GE are pouring many billions of dollars into wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, efficiency, storage and smart grid technology. The top recipient of venture capital investment in the USA in 2008 was Nanosolar, a manufacturer of inexpensive, high-efficiency, mass-produced thin-film solar panels.
These investments reflect market confidence that these technologies will be successful — and profitable — on a large scale.
As to storage, it is not really the challenging problem that some people make it out to be. First of all, studies have showed that a diversified regional portfolio of renewable energy sources — wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, hydro — managed through a smart grid can provide 24×7 power that is at least as reliable as coal or nuclear, even without storage. Second, numerous storage technologies are already available, for utility-scale applications as well as for distributed home & business applications, and even mobile applications: e.g. batteries, fuel cells, compressed air, flywheels, pumped hydro, thermal storage. And these technologies are advancing rapidly.
I find that very often people who are skeptical that renewables can “get the job done” are just not following the field closely, and are not aware of how far along renewables already are and how rapidly they are progressing, both in technological development and in market growth.
So, anyway — I’m not going to drag this on for another 1400 comments as in the “Tragedy” thread, but there’s my two cents as to the question of what we can all agree on. Or not.
Barton Paul Levenson Says (14 June 2009 at 4:10 AM):
“Think that’s argument by assertion? So is your more elaborate statement above.”
Assertation? No, merely an attempt (in advance) to comply with Gavin’s request to avoid repetition. Figures for land use can be found in for example, the “Solar Grand Plan” article you folks like to cite http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan Other numbers can easily be found for e.g. the North African scheme, or calculated.
The only assertation here is your opinion that those numbers & effects would not be significant. I admit that I don’t understand how it’s possible to reach that opinion through any process involving reason. If you can explain, I’d be interested. Otherwise, just re-read that other thread :-)
James wrote: “Reaching a sustainable level by reducing the birth rate (rather than calling on one or more of the Four Horsemen, which I for one would prefer to avoid) …”
Oh, you would prefer to avoid that now, would you?
I guess that’s an improvement over your previous position which you stated in the “Tragedy” thread, that a nuclear war that destroyed every city in the USA would be preferable to installing concentrating solar thermal power plants on one percent of the USA’s deserts to provide one hundred percent of the USA’s electricity.
“converted to internal energy (’heat’) of the atom or molecule(s) that absorb it is usually spread to other atoms/molecules (or other degrees of freedom in the same molecule) by molecular collisions”
As long as I went into that, I should point out that when the energy is spread by molecular collisions, it also spreads out of internal energy – it is a part of enthalpy. Change in Enthalpy = change in temperature * heat capacity at constant pressure; change in internal energy = change in temperature * heat capacity at constant volume; the difference is that at constant pressure, generally materials will expand with an increase in temperature, and the enthalpy includes the internal energy plus the work done by expansion at nonzero pressure.
James writes:
Barton replies:
It’s not garbage. Even non-renewables can’t supply power for the current world population to live at western levels of consumption!
For that to happen we would need more than three planets. Our generation of westerners has used up half of the global oil. There will soon be none left for our kids to share, far less the the remaining developing world. The only way the developing world will get to share in the benefits of the oil boom is to use as much as they can now before it is all gone!
I doubt that was said in the previous thread. People don’t want to face the truth.
Cheers, Alastair.
Re #300. “Could someone tell me what Groundhog Day is all about? Seems to be something American (?) and being a simple Irish peasant, I could do with some help.”
“Groundhog Day” is the title of a movie in which the same day is repeated over and over.It’s come to be used to symbolize or signify repetition, or non-changing conditions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)
But don’t be too discouraged. Not everything is staying the same.There’s even talk that the next batmobile may be a hybrid. :)
thanks for all the replies!
since I last checked, I found this wealth of information as copied here:
http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2009/06/climate-change-is-always-followed-by.html
Any more thoughts are deeply appreciated!
“Even non-renewables can’t supply power for the current world population to live at western levels of consumption!”
1)”western” levels ? are we speaking of the USA or Europe or ?
2)i do not believe that the governments of China and India are unaware of the elementary calculation indicating that USA levels of consumption are unsustainable.
3)Those governments face a rather more immediate problem. A large proportion of their constituents have rather less potable water than I flush down my toilet in a single use and no access to electricity at all. To suggest that those administrators are unaware of climate effects further reducing freshwater supply, or the potential for decentralized solar and wind power, would be naive. Both China and India have now committed to renewables by 2020 on a scale dwarfing the West.
4)Yes these are small steps. A journey of a thousand miles, etc…
The other problem with carbon emissions…
Front page, albeit local news:
Same paper:
Video: Washington’s Troubled Shellfish…
Monday, December 8, 2008 – Page updated at 12:41 PM
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/flatpages/video/seattletimesvideo.html?bcpid=1543292770
The Seattle Times is actually a bit conservative — on account of everyone in Washington to the north, south, east or west of Seattle. Just the same, they don’t seem to subscribe to the theory that the ocean is just too big for humans to affect its chemistry.
… but the editorial pages may be a different story:
Ike, is someone arguing that CCS ISNT going to increase the energy from coal significantly? We know that it will. The question is by how much? Could we bury all the coal-produced CO2 with CCS. Nope and I dont think anyone informed is claiming otherwise. Would capturing only 40% of coal CO2 help? You bet it would. Could it be a partial solution for some situations? Well maybe. Depends on economics, safety and getting the required technologies. I dont think you can write it off till the work has been done. Are you going to make steel without coal? This is another place for CO2 capture.
RE CCS – if we could plan for some relatively set amoung of fossil C emissions to be used before we are done with it, it would actually make the most sense to use up natural gas first, then oil, and then coal (except for security, etc.), so it might make some sense to pursue CCS with oil and gas as well as coal, and then adapt it to biofuels for net negative emissions at some point. And then there are biochar and carbonate mineral sequestration.
James – compare land use to land use for coal and nuclear (don’t forget mining). Compare it to urban land.
Compare it to agricultural land. Not that we can replace much if any of that now, but on some semiarid rangelands/pastures, runoff from solar power plants could – if managed well – boost productivity of neighboring land, so maybe there wouldn’t be much loss in agricultural value. Or maybe they could grow shade crops among the solar panels/collectors.
And there is roof space out there.
SecularAnimist Says (14 June 2009 at 12:52 PM):
“I guess that’s an improvement over your previous position which you stated in the “Tragedy” thread, that a nuclear war that destroyed every city in the USA would be preferable to installing concentrating solar thermal power plants on one percent of the USA’s deserts to provide one hundred percent of the USA’s electricity.”
(Sigh) I really wish you would work on your reading comprehension, followed by some exercise in elementary logic. You badly need it, because when I state that given two bad choices, I’d prefer one over the other, you come to the conclusion that choice is something I actually want. Just for the record, I want neither of them, nor any of the other alternatives that fall under the aegis of those horsemen. Reality, alas, has the unfortunate habit of ignoring what I’d prefer.
You also might go back to that Scientific American article you love to cite, and exercise your skills further, because your numbers are way off. The authors’ plan requires 30,000 square miles to generate 69% of electricity, 35% of total energy, but assumes significant improvements in efficiency to get those numbers.
Those square miles have to be subtracted, not from the total area of the US, but from what’s left after large areas have been converted to ever-expanding cities & suburbs, paved for highways, turned into monocultured factory farms… And so you cover an additional chunk with mirrors & PV panels, and get “green” power. But the population keeps expanding, all those people demand more power to run their toys, you have to cover over another chunk to meet their demands, and you keep on until you’ve got nothing left but solar panels filling every space that’s not a factory farm.
So what do you have to offer, for the long term, that’s worse?
sidd Says (14 June 2009 at 8:53 PM):
“Both China and India have now committed to renewables by 2020 on a scale dwarfing the West.”
Since when? Last I looked, they’re both committed to building large amounts of coal & nuclear, with a small fraction of “renewables”. (India does have a tentative plan for more solar http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6122 but it’s hardly committed yet.) I don’t think anyone has ever claimed that renewables can’t provide useful amounts of power, in the right circumstances. Certainly I haven’t, if for no other reason than that most of the electrons I’m using right now are courtesy of the geothermal plant a few miles down the road. But providing useful power is a far cry from providing all the power.
SecularAnimist #379
“I find that very often people who are skeptical that renewables can “get the job done” are just not following the field closely, and are not aware of how far along renewables already are and how rapidly they are progressing, both in technological development and in market growth.
So, anyway — I’m not going to drag this on for another 1400 comments…”
You could make that considerably shorter by taking out a calculator and checking the numbers. Pick whatever mix of renewables suits you, be optimistic and make it double as effective as it is today, pick your favourite storage technology, pick a really cheap grid structure and assume its going to work – and then add it all up to 2 GW 24×7 and compare the result with a nuclear plant. If you think this is unfair, do it on a national or continental scale.
Alastair writes:
Human power consumption right now: 1.3 x 10^13 watts.
Sunlight falling on Earth’s surface, on average, at any given time: 1.2 x 10^17 watts.
Still think it’s impossible? Now add geothermal.
US power consumption in 2005 3.5 TW (10^12)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petawatt
US population in 2009 307,000,000
http://www.census.gov/
World population 2009 6,787,000,000
http://www.census.gov/
Therefore for everyone to reach US 2005 standards we would need consume 22 * 3.5 TW of power = 7.7 x 10^13watts viz. 6 times the energy being consumed at present.
We can’t use all that solar energy because it is needed to radiate back to space to keep us cool. Moreover the solar energy is need to grow our crops for food.
It is probably impossible to replace all non-renewable energy supplies with renewable ones. There is no way we can supply six times that energy. We are already using the maximum we can get out of the Earth.
Either America will get richer and China poorer, or China richer and America poorer. You can see which already. So will they go to war?
Cheers, Alastair.
“We can’t use all that solar energy because it is needed to radiate back to space to keep us cool. Moreover the solar energy is need to grow our crops for food.”
Uh the work will produce its own radiation and since it is of even lower “quality” than the radiation from a warm earth, likely to be outside the 15um wavelength.
And we’re unlikely to put solar panels over the corn fields, are we.
So we still only need ~0.6% of the energy the sun gives us to get usage up to the US average.
But is that needed?
A USian over here for a year working in the UK found that they didn’t use a clothes dryer much here, whereas in the US it is done that way without a thought.
And was quite surprised (though after realising it happened, knew it happened, just didn’t think about it) how much lower the electricity bill was.
So is using the same power as the average USian a good or bad thing? It’s certainly not necessary.
Alastair, do you suppose there’s any chance both will become smarter, more efficient, and more careful of the world instead?
I wish I knew.
Barton, that comparison (394) is so elusive as to be delusionary, interesting though it is. Just to play: If you needed say 4×1013 watts to equalize the world’s requirement to the West’s as James proposed and used PV to use the insolation directly (using up about 0.04% of the insolation reaching the surface), I think it would take about 0.2% of the Earth’s surface (including oceans, mountains, polar caps, corn fields,pastures, cities, etc.). Looks like a small absolute number but seems like a tremendous amount of area – one square meter for every 20 x 25 meter patch (gross).
No, China really is outpacing the U.S. on renewable energy investment – but so is the rest of the world. That’s not really the image that any Washington politicians with close ties to various fossil fuel lobbyists (i.e. most of them) want to see presented, however. Instead, they’d like us to believe that we are “world leaders” in renewable energy, which is simply not the case.
For example, the U.S. has so far refused to join the International Renewable Energy Agency and is pursuing a resolutely fossil fuel-based foreign policy agenda in Africa, South America, the Arctic, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. This flies in the face of global efforts to shift to renewable energy-based economies – and what’s even more remarkable is that the U.S. press is refusing to cover the story.
If you think climate science reporting has been bad, you should look at energy science & industry reporting – it is far worse, almost as bad as reporting on pharmaceutical & health science-related issues. That’s really the reason that the U.S. public is so un-informed on global energy issues – you really see nothing on the regular media. You have to look at sites like:
http://www.solardaily.com/
http://cleantechnica.com/
http://www.greencarcongress.com/
For a nice picture of how China’s renewable energy growth will soon lead to global market domination, see:
http://www.solarbuzz.com/
Yes, that is an increase from 5% to 40% in four years. Hmmm…. project that trend, would you?
For global solar demand (dominated by Germany and Spain), see:
http://www.solarbuzz.com/Marketbuzz2009-intro.htm
[edit]
It sure isn’t a science-based political decision, whatever it is.
Barton #394
> “Human power consumption right now: 1.3 x 10^13 watts.
Sunlight falling on Earth’s surface, on average, at any given time: 1.2 x 10^17 watts.
Still think it’s impossible? Now add geothermal.”
Please put some real numbers behind that. How many PV cells, how many additional grid hubs and lines, how much storage, what’s it going to cost etc.
Mark #396
> “So is using the same power as the average USian a good or bad thing? It’s certainly not necessary.”
A dangerous path to go. Once we start talking about what’s really necessary and what isn’t, we quickly end up in the corner reserved for extremists nobody in their right mind would even listen to. (Having said that, probably everybody will agree to what you’ve said – however they’ll all have totally different ideas about what is necessary for themselves and especially what may or may not be necessary for others.)
captcha to this was “beloved dentist”. Now there is an oxymoron.