Dear Mr. Levitt,
The problem of global warming is so big that solving it will require creative thinking from many disciplines. Economists have much to contribute to this effort, particularly with regard to the question of how various means of putting a price on carbon emissions may alter human behavior. Some of the lines of thinking in your first book, Freakonomics, could well have had a bearing on this issue, if brought to bear on the carbon emissions problem. I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.
I am addressing this to you rather than your journalist-coauthor because one has become all too accustomed to tendentious screeds from media personalities (think Glenn Beck) with a reckless disregard for the truth. However, if it has come to pass that we can’t expect the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor (and Clark Medalist to boot) at a top-rated department of a respected university to think clearly and honestly with numbers, we are indeed in a sad way.
By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics , but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing. I will take Nathan Myhrvold’s claim about solar cells, which you quoted prominently in your book, as an example.
As quoted by you, Mr. Myhrvold claimed, in effect, that it was pointless to try to solve global warming by building solar cells, because they are black and absorb all the solar energy that hits them, but convert only some 12% to electricity while radiating the rest as heat, warming the planet. Now, maybe you were dazzled by Mr Myhrvold’s brilliance, but don’t we try to teach our students to think for themselves? Let’s go through the arithmetic step by step and see how it comes out. It’s not hard.
Let’s do the thought experiment of building a solar array to generate the entire world’s present electricity consumption, and see what the extra absorption of sunlight by the array does to climate. First we need to find the electricity consumption. Just do a Google search on “World electricity consumption” and here you are:
Now, that’s the total electric energy consumed during the year, and you can turn that into the rate of energy consumption (measured in Watts, just like the world was one big light bulb) by dividing kilowatt hours by the number of hours in a year, and multiplying by 1000 to convert kilowatts into watts. The answer is two trillion Watts, in round numbers. How much area of solar cells do you need to generate this? On average, about 200 Watts falls on each square meter of Earth’s surface, but you might preferentially put your cells in sunnier, clearer places, so let’s call it 250 Watts per square meter. With a 15% efficiency, which is middling for present technology the area you need is
or 53,333 square kilometers. That’s a square 231 kilometers on a side, or about the size of a single cell of a typical general circulation model grid box. If we put it on the globe, it looks like this:
So already you should be beginning to suspect that this is a pretty trivial part of the Earth’s surface, and maybe unlikely to have much of an effect on the overall absorbed sunlight. In fact, it’s only 0.01% of the Earth’s surface. The numbers I used to do this calculation can all be found in Wikipedia, or even in a good paperbound World Almanac.
But we should go further, and look at the actual amount of extra solar energy absorbed. As many reviewers of Superfreakonomics have noted, solar cells aren’t actually black, but that’s not the main issue. For the sake of argument, let’s just assume they absorb all the sunlight that falls on them. In my business, we call that “zero albedo” (i.e. zero reflectivity). As many commentators also noted, the albedo of real solar cells is no lower than materials like roofs that they are often placed on, so that solar cells don’t necessarily increase absorbed solar energy at all. Let’s ignore that, though. After all, you might want to put your solar cells in the desert, and you might try to cool the planet by painting your roof white. The albedo of desert sand can also be found easily by doing a Google search on “Albedo Sahara Desert,” for example. Here’s what you get:
So, let’s say that sand has a 50% albedo. That means that each square meter of black solar cell absorbs an extra 125 Watts that otherwise would have been reflected by the sand (i.e. 50% of the 250 Watts per square meter of sunlight). Multiplying by the area of solar cell, we get 6.66 trillion Watts.
That 6.66 trillion Watts is the “waste heat” that is a byproduct of generating electricity by using solar cells. All means of generating electricity involve waste heat, and fossil fuels are not an exception. A typical coal-fired power plant only is around 33% efficient, so you would need to release 6 trillion Watts of heat to burn the coal to make our 2 trillion Watts of electricity. That makes the waste heat of solar cells vs. coal basically a wash, and we could stop right there, but let’s continue our exercise in thinking with numbers anyway.
Wherever it comes from, waste heat is not usually taken into account in global climate calculations for the simple reason that it is utterly trivial in comparison to the heat trapped by the carbon dioxide that is released when you burn fossil fuels to supply energy. For example, that 6 trillion Watts of waste heat from coal burning would amount to only 0.012 Watts per square meter of the Earth’s surface. Without even thinking very hard, you can realize that this is a tiny number compared to the heat-trapping effect of CO2. As a general point of reference, the extra heat trapped by CO2 at the point where you’ve burned enough coal to double the atmospheric CO2 concentration is about 4 Watts per square meter of the Earth’s surface — over 300 times the effect of the waste heat.
The “4 Watts per square meter” statistic gives us an easy point of reference because it is available from any number of easily accessible sources, such as the IPCC Technical Summary or David Archer’s basic textbook that came out of our “Global Warming for Poets” core course. Another simple way to grasp the insignificance of the waste heat effect is to turn it into a temperature change using the standard climate sensitivity of 1 degree C of warming for each 2 Watts per square meter of heat added to the energy budget of the planet (this sensitivity factor also being readily available from sources like the ones I just pointed out). That gives us a warming of 0.006 degrees C for the waste heat from coal burning, and much less for the incremental heat from switching to solar cells. It doesn’t take a lot of thinking to realize that this is a trivial number compared to the magnitude of warming expected from a doubling of CO2.
With just a little more calculation, it’s possible to do a more precise and informative comparison. For coal-fired generation,each kilowatt-hour produced results in emissions of about a quarter kilogram of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. For our 16.83 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity produced each year, we then would emit 4.2 trillion kilograms of carbon, i.e. 4.2 gigatonnes each year. Unlike energy, carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, and builds up year after year. It is only slowly removed by absorption into the ocean, over hundreds to thousands of years. After a hundred years, 420 gigatonnes will have been emitted, and if half that remains in the atmosphere (remember, rough estimates suffice to make the point here) the atmospheric stock of CO2 carbon will increase by 210 gigatonnes, or 30% of the pre-industrial atmospheric stock of about 700 gigatonnes of carbon. To get the heat trapped by CO2 from that amount of increase, we need to reach all the way back into middle-school math and use the awesome tool of logarithms; the number is
or 1.5 Watts per square meter. In other words, by the time a hundred years have passed, the heat trapped each year from the CO2 emitted by using coal instead of solar energy to produce electricity is 125 times the effect of the fossil fuel waste heat. And remember that the incremental waste heat from switching to solar cells is even smaller than the fossil fuel waste heat. What’s more, because each passing year sees more CO2 accumulate in the atmosphere, the heat trapping by CO2 continues to go up, while the effect of the waste heat from the fossil fuels or solar cells needed to produce a given amount of electricity stays fixed. Another way of putting it is that the climate effect from the waste heat produced by any kind of power plant is a one-off thing that you incur when you build the plant, whereas the warming effect of the CO2 produced by fossil fuel plants continues to accumulate year after year. The warming effect of the CO2 is a legacy that will continue for many centuries after the coal has run out and the ruins of the power plant are moldering away.
Note that you don’t actually have to wait a hundred years to see the benefit of switching to solar cells. The same arithmetic shows that even at the end of the very first year of operation, the CO2 emissions prevented by the solar array would have trapped 0.017 Watts per square meter if released into the atmosphere. So, at the end of the first year you already come out ahead even if you neglect the waste heat that would have been emitted by burning fossil fuels instead.
So, the bottom line here is that the heat-trapping effect of CO2 is the 800-pound gorilla in climate change. In comparison, waste heat is a trivial contribution to global warming whether the waste heat comes from solar cells or from fossil fuels. Moreover, the incremental waste heat from switching from coal to solar is an even more trivial number, even if you allow for some improvement in the efficiency of coal-fired power plants and ignore any possible improvements in the efficiency of solar cells. So: trivial,trivial trivial. Simple, isn’t it?
By the way, the issue of whether waste heat is an important factor in global warming is one of the questions most commonly asked by students who are first learning about energy budgets and climate change. So, there are no shortage of places where you can learn about this sort of thing. For example, a simple Google search on the words “Global Warming Waste Heat” turns up several pages of accurate references explaining the issue in elementary terms for beginners. Including this article from Wikipedia:
A more substantive (though in the end almost equally trivial) issue is the carbon emitted in the course of manufacturing solar cells, but that is not the matter at hand here. The point here is that really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you that the claim that the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think you would have accepted such laziness and sloppiness in a term paper from one of your students, so why do you accept it from yourself? What does the failure to do such basic thinking with numbers say about the extent to which anything you write can be trusted? How do you think it reflects on the profession of economics when a member of that profession — somebody who that profession seems to esteem highly — publicly and noisily shows that he cannot be bothered to do simple arithmetic and elementary background reading? Not even for a subject of such paramount importance as global warming.
And it’s not as if the “black solar cell” gaffe was the only bit of academic malpractice in your book: among other things, the presentation of aerosol geoengineering as a harmless and cheap quick fix for global warming ignored a great deal of accessible and readily available material on the severe risks involved, as Gavin noted in his recent post. The fault here is not that you dared to advocate geoengineering as a solution. There is a broad spectrum of opinion among scientists about the amount of aerosol geoengineering research that is justified, but very few scientists think of it as anything but a desperate last-ditch attempt, or at best a strategy to be used in extreme moderation as part of a basket of strategies dominated by emissions reductions. You owed it to your readers to present a fair picture of the consequences of geoengineering, but chose not to do so.
May I suggest that if you should happen to need some friendly help next time you take on the topic of climate change, or would like to have a chat about why aerosol geoengineering might not be a cure-all, or just need a critical but informed opponent to bounce ideas off of, you don’t have to go very far. For example…
But given the way Superfreakonomics mangled Ken Caldeira’s rather nuanced views on geoengineering, let’s keep it off the record, eh?
Your colleague,
Raymond T. Pierrehumbert
Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences
The University of Chicago
“what’s a person called who has no scientific knowledge of climatology but whose opinion is solidly supportive of AGW? A “denier,” I suppose”
No, a believer.
Why do you suppose it would be denier?
“Mark, the part you are missing from the story is subsidies. Germany subsidises solar at a remarkable rate, and US wind investment follows something of a boom-and-bust cycle as subsidies lapse and then are renewed”
And you’re missing the enormous subsidies for coal, oil and nuclear.
How can you say with a straight face “you are missing the subsidies” when I’ve talked about that all along?
Andrew: “Charcoal is almost pure inorganic carbon. There is no biological process which can metabolize inorganic carbon.”
Please check the links I gave. They don’t say exactly and precisely how CO2 is produced but it does say it is.
Maybe that’s why David later on goes to say about half goes back into the cycle within a few decades.
Professor,
You are obviously a talented and intelligent person. You also appear to not be questioning the AGW proponents (I prefer language that doesn’t imply religious or Holocaust references), only those who are intent on questioning the agenda of the AGW crowd.
Your references cited are Google and Wikipedia. Here’s the great thing about Wiki-land: I can make up something and put in on Wikipedia and people will think it is fact.
The earth is the greatest organism ever created. For sure, pollution is wrong. For sure, we should reduce carbon output. For sure, Al Gore should downsize his house and stop jetting around on his private jet. However, I think it is obvious that the arrogance of the human species knows no bounds. I’m glad to see that you all think we can destroy a planet based on a few years of data (I say “a few” because the earth is pretty old, isn’t it? Even if we had thousands of years of data, would it be enough? As someone who enjoys numbers, the statistics are pretty ridiculous). But, that’s not even what the chapter is about.
The case made in the book is for cooling solutions that IGNORE, yes that’s right IGNORES the carbon-reduction solutions. This was done purposefully to focus on a narrow idea. It may even have been purposeful to sell more books (if so, bravo to Levitt and Dubner). The simple fact is that both of these guys believe in AGW, and are attempting to think outside of the box.
[edit]
Ray, any response from Levitt you can share?
(Did you send him a paper copy by campus mail?)
I realize any conversation may be off the record.
Here’s an interesting tidbit:
A client of mine actually owns a company that installs solar panels. Now, it is in this guy’s BEST INTEREST that solar energy is efficient. But here’s the kicker – he must disclose to all of his clients that it is incredibly inefficient and won’t do 1/3 of the job that it is supposed to. You won’t be selling any energy back to the grid, you won’t be powering your home. The best you will get is a heated pool. This is REQUIRED by the Department of Energy. Nice, huh?
This man lives and works in central Florida. That is about as micro as you can get. So all of the theorists out there – here’s practical applications and why they are not working.
David #539
I take your point. There could be several reasons.
Many of the studies I could find are carried out on the pre-existing charcoal present in the soil. Natural charcoal accumulates in many soils as a result of fire in the covering vegetation. Such fires will decompose organic matter to varying degrees; from barely singed through to pure carbon as charcoal, in many cases all in the same branch or lump of wood. In fact one of the problems of such studies is actually defining what you mean by soil charcoal and how do you measure it. Most natural charcoal fragments in soil contains high levels of organic carbon as measured by physico-chemical means, presumably because of incomplete pyrolysis. In that case I would not be surprised if there is significant loss as CO2.
In terms of carbon sequestration as ‘biochar’ the question of greater importance is, is the result the same with industrial charcoal produced at rather higher temperatures specifically for sequestration.
However all the evidence is that it would be possible to store large amounts of carbon as charcoal in soils for very long periods of time, plus it makes good agricultural sense.
Cheers
#556.
“But here’s the kicker – he must disclose to all of his clients that it is incredibly inefficient and won’t do 1/3 of the job that it is supposed to. You won’t be selling any energy back to the grid, you won’t be powering your home. The best you will get is a heated pool. This is REQUIRED by the Department of Energy. Nice, huh?”
Out of interest, what job is it supposed to do that it can only do less than 1/3.
I can see that if you try to tell the customer that they can power their home and sell power back to the grid with a few cheap little panels that would be a problem. However, you only need to look at your electricity bill to see how much energy you use, and there is a pretty simple formula that tells fairly closely how much energy you are likely to produce per panel. Where is the problem.
And why on earth would anyone want to heat their pool with electricity generated from solar panels. That really would be stupid.
Cheers
Tim Lambert essentially chased you out of Deltoid by threatening you with being put into his moderation queue, the first step towards being outright banned.
> all the evidence
See my note above on looking things up.
558 Andrew asks, ” why on earth would anyone want to heat their pool with electricity generated from solar panels. ”
Water heating is done with thermal panels, not PV. Heating a swimming pool in Florida is one of the absolute best ways to utilize solar energy. It can be done with seriously cheap rubber panels since it is low pressure and fairly low temperature.
Mike – From your comments about praise for selling more books by focusing on a narrow idea (even though it is misrepresented) and your apparent disgust over the DOE requiring honest disclosure, it would appear that you hold honesty in low regard.
Your comments about Wikipedia are not new to any of us; it’s interesting that you seem to confuse Google with the CIA factbook though. There are many other professional scientists here that would be quick to correct the Dr. Pierrehumbert if his data were in error. If you have data you consider superior please present it.
It is also in your client’s best interests to size systems appropriately for the situation. When done so they power homes. To imply otherwise is misrepresentation.
“I’m glad to see that you all think we can destroy a planet based on a few years of data…”
This is wrong on so many levels it’s almost breathtaking.
No, we don’t all think that. In fact, most of the regular posters here are aware that matter can’t be created or destroyed(a teeny bit, under special circumstances, can be converted to energy – I’ll let someone else find what proportion of a nuclear weapon’s initial mass gets converted to energy, or how much less the fuel rods in a reactor weigh at the end of their life.)
Some of us might say “destroy” as a short form of “alter the bio/geochemical conditions necessary to support the complex ecological interactions which resulted in a stable population of passenger pigeons and allowed some early men to enjoy grilled mammoth.” That doesn’t mean we don’t know and appreciate the difference between precise, accurate, or succinct, either mathematically or verbally.
Few of us would use “planet” to lump together elements with disparate physical qualities, especially when the physical qualities are important parameters in determining how they interact. For example, the density of ice, water, the atmosphere, or the Limbaugh wing of the Republican Party is an essential parameter for predicting future climate scenarios.
Our current understanding of climatology isn’t based on statistical models of “a few years of data”; although the data gets sparser as we look back earlier than such events as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the physics & math that underpin all of science apply to the entire 4+billion year history of earth (except for a brief period when the Indiana House of Representatives set the value of pi to 3.2, “that the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fourths to four” and the square root of 2 to approximately 1.429, “the ratio of the diagonal and one side of a square which is as ten to seven” – perhaps it might be interesting if Gavin Schmidt were to run the climate models with these, er, “fundamental” values).
@Andrew.
In central Florida, people heat their pools in the winter. Not really that stupid.
The problem is that you cannot put enough solar panels on a roof to heat the entire house. Not efficient. Two story? Forget it.
Every house could try to have solar panels on their lot, but there are trees in the way. Maybe we could cut those down? How’s that for conservation?
I left, dog.
And I notice that you’ve been blocked before too.
But it’s nice to know you worship me so much you follow me around like this.
It’s cute.
“And why on earth would anyone want to heat their pool with electricity generated from solar panels. That really would be stupid.”
It would be much smarter to use solar heat to warm the water and then if/when needed, solar electricity to heat the water to a higher temperature.
“(I prefer language that doesn’t imply religious or Holocaust references), ”
But denier is the correct term from BEFORE the holocaust.
Why do you think it got used there?
Ergo, there’s no implication of holocaust in the use of denier.
The world emits about 21 billion metric tons of CO2/yr from fossil fuels. A medium sized Eucalyptus tree contains the amount of carbon to produce 1.85 metric tons of CO2. So in order to offset fossil carbon emissions it would require the harvesting of 11 billion trees, cook them to carbon, bury the carbon, do something (hopefully useful) with the nasty volatiles, and plant another 11 billion trees every year.
How much arable land would this take? How much water? How much would the machinery and labor cost? And, I think most troublesome, how would the soil be maintained as nutrients are being removed? This is just a rough example, but it looks to be an enterprise that should not be entered into lightly.
On the other hand, I am in the process of making biochar to mix with my 40 cubic yard (starting volume) sheep poop and straw compost pile in order to improve my clay soil for a garden and some fruit trees.
Steve
Andrew Hobbs (557) — Fast pyrolysis produces mostly pyrolysis oils and very little biochar.
For long term sequestration, I suggest compressing the biochar (like coal) and burying it deep (like coal). Then, I opine, it will last a very long time (liike coal).
This review (pdf link in the link)
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/node/578
may be of interest.
Brian, some outstanding snark there.
I’d add that we have more than 150 years now of data on the IR spectrography & radiative physics of CO2 and gaseous H20:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Global-Warming-Science-In-The-Age-Of-Queen-Victoria
(“backgrounder”, profusely illustrated)
http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/PALE:ClassicArticles/GlobalWarming/Article3
(reprint of original paper)
And about the same for the Hadley reconstruction fo the instrumental record, IIRC.
Mark (551), “Why do you suppose it would be denier?”
’cause that’s pretty much the way you defined “denier.”
Steve Fish (568) — Here is a proposal to grow enough trees:
Irrigated afforestation of the Sahara and Australian Outback to end global warming
http://www.springerlink.com/content/55436u2122u77525/
#568 & #569 are putting their fingers on the problem. It is one of the more bizarre suggestions that we continue to dig up real coal while burying artificial coal. While it seems to me rational to produce some biochar from material such as straw or waste from plantation timber that would otherwise just be burnt, the idea of setting out to produce such material on a large scale, by, for example, cutting down mature trees and then planting more, is bizarre. What effects do proponents imagine this would have on biodiversity? In addition, while biochar at some concentrations in some soils may be beneficial, extending this to other soils in high concentrations is certainly questionable. What effect would it have on many of the thin silty soils of Australia for example? Not only on the structure, but on soil organisms, and on the plants adapted to the original soils. This isn’t some benign environmentally costless proposition (in contrast to the obviously loopy idea of pumping chemicals into air and sea) as some people here have suggested. It isn’t just a case of adding some gentle organic matter to soils. All of these “solutions” are just whistling in the wind – there are NO alternatives to reducing energy use and switching to low greenhouse gas energy producers.
Established coal plant efficiency in Germany stands at 38% with modern plants with reduced CO2 at 46%.
http://interestingenergyfacts.blogspot.com/2009/04/germany-to-have-coal-power-plants-with.html
> Irrigated afforestation
This has the same basic problem as many other technofixes — you have to keep doing it, and it costs money and uses energy, and if for any reason either the money, the power, or the will fails, the technofix stops. And the problem explodes, metaphorically if not literally.
PASSIVE COOLING — set it up and forget about it and it still works.
ACTIVE COOLING — activity costs money, time, and will; they will fail.
David Horton (573) — It has to do with the ecnomies of transportation, so it is actually not so bizarre at it first seems. First off, there are three distinct uses of biochar: (1) burn it in place of fossil coal; (2) use as a soil amendment (down to root depth); (3) bury compressed and deep as a milf form of geo-engineering. For purpose (2), read the review in the link provided in comment #569. You will find that biochar improves soils and yields in Australia as well as other locations. For purposes (1) and (3), but possibly some of (2) as well, do read the proposal linked in comment #572.
While energy efficiency makes sense (especially in the USA and Australia) one form of “low greeenhouse gas” energy producers is, of course, biochar. But the fact remains that for a long time to come fossil coal will be burnt, and in prodigeous quantities. Ways to offset this are offered in the papers linked as described in the previous paragraph.
Those who have bothered to actually study the matter conclude that for most temperate and tropical soils the application of biochar is not just beneign, but actually beneficial. As for amounts, don’t add too much. But then, calculate just how much carbon would be removed from the active carbon cycle by the application of a biochar layer a mere 8 cm deep and only on the world’s arable lands. As the main trust of this thread states “do the numbers”.
Mike (#554), Raypierre uses Wikipedia for the same reason as I do on blogs: it’s accessible to the public. If he (or I for that matter) used papers in Science or Nature or other high-impact journals that can only be read by subscription, you’d have to take his word for it. You do of course have to take his word for it that Wikipedia is not far off what’s in the academic literature (give or take some that is free to read), but plenty of people reading this site know this and do check.
If you have a high electric heating bill in Florida (#556), you need to buy better insulation, followed by more efficient heating, before you contemplate buying solar. I live in Brisbane (Qld, Australia), which has a similar climate to the milder parts of Florida, and I spend very little on heating.
The average year-round consumption of my home (a compact townhouse) is 8kWh per day. This is after I cut consumption about 20% by switching to energy efficient lighting and a heat pump for hot water. If I had a bigger roof, I would have gone for solar hot water. I have space on the roof for 1.5kW of PVs; with an average of 4 hours of full sun per day, I can produce 75% of what I currently consume. Even with a net feed-in tariff as we have in Queensland (instantaneously calculated, based on excess over use, at about 3 times the retail price) I will not only cut my electricity bill but make some extra money.
Tell your client in Florida to do energy audits as part of the process of selling PV systems. Just reading this page of comments would provide a few good hints.
#576 David I appreciate your enthusiasm, but the idea of “a biochar layer a mere 8 cm deep” fills me with thoughts of massive unintended consequences on the kind of soils I am most familiar with on the southern tablelands of NSW. On deeper alluvial soils, perhaps, but even then I would be concerned about long term implications for soil organisms (as well as burrowing animals).
576 David B. Benson
I tend to agree with David Horton that burning biochar in place of coal is off the mark as a way of reducing CO2. Basically, the biostuff gets completely burned so CO2 is fully released. It really takes combination of carbon and oxygen to make heat. I would guess you could make coalchar out of coal just about the same as biochar. Hm, lets call it “coke.” And though there might be some quibbling about the texture, biochar is really just charcoal.
But you seem well supported as to the usefulness of burying charcoal, and I see no fault in the basic process. However, the economics of biochar are highly doubtful, in my estimation. That opinion is based on some understanding of the collection process in agriculture (also called harvesting).
A real analysis has to fully account for labor costs. That seems to be missing.
An example from the past might illuminate: Iowa farmers have long been successful in farming corn. Those that survived the consolidation only did so because they were effective in mechanizing to reduce labor on ever larger fields. 50 years ago farms were not so big but even then the corn was planted with planting machines, weeds were scraped out with cultivating machines, and harvesting was done with corn picking machines. The manual labor was left to the hogs which were released on the field to gather, by eating, the corn that was left on the field. Nobody had to get down off the tractor except to open and close the gate. And it was desirable then that hogs got really fat.
How is it now? Looking at the ethanol farms I imagine that the hogs are not even willing to bother with such large fields, and the lean diets now in fashion for hogs probably would make the style conscious hogs cringe at all that corn starch. So a fair amount of good corn probably is left to rot. This is just to give perspective on what people are willing to do with their time. Pigs as well.
I can report directly that farmers 50 years ago were not very interested in gathering up corn stalks or corn cobs for purposes of heating or anything else known then. Modern culture being what it is, it is hard to imagine that farmers now are more willing to hop out of their air conditioned tractor cabs and gather up the corn stalks. Note that they would be pulling a couple extra wagons behind their corn pickers. Neither is there a large labor pool of willing workers to walk and gather.
re 577 Philip Machanick
Why would they pay you three times the retail rate for your electricity? Are they having difficulty with their cyphers in Australia? (I am kidding.)
Do they also pay part the cost of installing the PV array like they do for us in California and USA in general? We have difficulty with arithmetic here as well. Our planning is a little off also. We see it as more important that we have solar and wind systems than to have health care or decent education. But we firmly believe in free money that comes from issuing bonds for later folks to pay for in the future, ah that’s the ticket.
Is there reserve capacity for producing electricity standing ready in Australia from coal powered systems? You folks need to get some electric plug-in cars so that reserve capacity can be tapped! That’s what we are setting up to do here. Don’t worry about the coal. You have plenty as well. Just divert a fraction of that loading for China, Japan, wherever and put it on a train for Melbourne area. As he is doing here, Warren Buffet is probably buying up railroad and coal mining stocks in Australia as we speak. (He calls me every day to talk about how we can get ahold of BHP Billiton’s coal resources.) And then there will be no limit on how fat folks can get since there is no limit on the size of cars to haul them.
That is the plan here. Whoopee, lets go to Burger King!
I know someone in Virginia who uses solar to heat their pool, and the thing is uncomfortably warm. And why the big concern over heating a house in Fla.?
Hank Roberts (575) — Absolutely. And if one stops maintaining wind turbines or solar reflectors, those will stop working as well. Indeed, if one stops planting and havesting crops, then …
To reverse global warming will require some means of actually removing carbon from the active carbon cycle; irrigated forests in deserts are one rather inexpensive means of doing so.
David Horton (578) — Obviously the biiochar is worked into the soil up to root depth when used for the purpose of improving yields. My limited understanding of various trials indicates up to 20% biochar is beneficial. You can read about some of the wheat field trials CSIRO did in the linked report. There may well be more recent information from CSIRO. For small plot applications, look though
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/
for soemthing which might be rather similar to your soils.
Jim Bullis, Miastrada Co. (580) — Burning any biomass is carbon neutral; no carbon is added or subtracted from the active carbon cycle. Indeed, more and more US utilities are meeting their “renewables commitment” by converting coal burners to biomass burners; peanut shells, paper mill wastes, other forestry wastes.
Yes, biomass collection for this purpose is one of the cost limiting factors. One way to cut down on the cost is to take otherwise unused wood to a nearby torifaction reactor (a form of pyrolysis). The densified material is even called “biocoal” in The Netherlands. In any case, transportation thereafter is very similar to transporting fossil coal. This scheme appears to pay woodlot owners in South Carolina enough to make it worth their while to pick up limbs otherwise too small for other purposes.
#561 Richard C and others.
I know water heating is done with solar water panels. We have a solar water heater and we have year round hot water at virtually no cost for heating. Only on the occasional day in Winter when it has been cloudy for more than a day do we have to use the booster heater.
However that is not what was implied in Mike’s (#556) original post. He was complaining about “…. solar panels. ….. incredibly inefficient and …… won’t be selling any energy back to the grid, you won’t be powering your home. The best you will get is a heated pool.”
That seems to me to imply that having installed solar panels to produce electricity all the person will get is a heated pool *from the panels*. Either someone is trying to sell solar water heaters as electricity producers or they are using the electricity to heat water.
#573 David Horton wrote
“It is one of the more bizarre suggestions that we continue to dig up real coal while burying artificial coal. While it seems to me rational to produce some biochar from material such as straw or waste from plantation timber that would otherwise just be burnt, the idea of setting out to produce such material on a large scale, by, for example, cutting down mature trees and then planting more, is bizarre.”
I couldn’t agree more. I was originally responding to suggestions that the elemental carbon in charcoal was being metabolized and hence the person couldn’t/wouldn’t believe that it was relatively inert and could last in soil for 1000s of years, yet still play an active part in soil processes.
However the situation with regard to soil charcoal in Australia is not particularly simple. The regular fire regimes that have existed in most of Australia for at least the last several tens of thousands of years had built up quite high levels of soil charcoal. Conversion to agriculture seems to result in gradual loss of this charcoal from soil. Presumably this is because of the gradual loss due to soil turnover and wind erosion etc with no replacement due to fire suppression or lack of combustable material to form charcoal. As a result the levels in many Australian agricultural soils tends to be very low. I have seen published results of around 0.2%.
With about 450 Million hectares of agricultural land, one would only need to increase soil charcoal content to 1% to a depth of 10cm, a fairly modest increase, to sequester one year of global carbon release from fossil fuels. Finding the biomass is another matter.
However surely such schemes only make sense once the world has actually stopped using fossil fuels. With the denial industry in full swing, and the general populace unwilling to rely on experts or even to understand the simplest of arguments (see Monbiot http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/11/02/death-denial/) it seems that trying to get curbs on fossil fuel use are almost doomed to failure. Hopefully at some point before the situation becomes too unpleasant or irredeemable, the climate system will start delivering results that even the most ignorant denier will be unwilling to ignore. At that point you might get some action, and biochar etc makes sense as a means of drawing down carbon dioxide on a rather faster time scale than the thousands of years expected by natural processes.
Cheers
582 David Benson
I get the carbon neutral part but it is not impressive because of the attached labor non-neutral of it all.
I wonder if the pay to the woodlot owners is not coming from the government. If you really mean sawmills where there are great piles of sawdust, that might work at the collection end.
But transportation involves both collection and distribution. Once the biostuff is converted to charcoal it has to be spread on fields, and plowed under I guess. This also costs real money and takes real labor to do it.
Coal wins because it is scooped up by giant machines and dumped into waiting rail cars, all at one location. Then it goes to a single power plant where it is mechanically conveyed to the burners. This is incredibly efficient.
Unlike most freight, trains work very well for this. However, in general the reasons why trucks haul far more freight than trains is that a cargo only has to be loaded once and unloaded once and the truck can go point to point.
This is similar to the reason why mass transit will not really work except in dense urban situations.
582 David Benson,
Where did we get the idea that carbon neutral was a big deal? It seems that this is a pathetic apology for actually failing to accomplish something. And as I was getting at before, carbon neutral with labor negative and money negative is not worth much at all. Maybe it is worth forgetting about. Improving the soil seems like a stretch to rationalize the process, in the real scheme of things.
On the other hand we have possibilities of very large carbon negative, labor negative, and money negative. (You know how to sort out the negatives and positives.) Why not throw some thinking into that kind of thing. Cars and trucks do not need to waste so much energy to just go down the road. And power plants do not need to be out in the country where the inevitable discharged heat energy has no use of any kind.
Just in passing, if trucks rolled with the low rolling resistance of trains, the trains would be lost altogether as a means of transportation. Well, maybe not for coal.
Mark says:
“Oh, and Jim B, any evidence or explanation of how you make this assertion “assinine things like this ” in #510 or do you just prefer being rude to people?”
Let’s get a few things straight right here Mark, because I’m tired of this crap.
First of all, when it comes to being rude to people, you have absolutely no room whatsoever to speak, as most people here recognize, notwithstanding the fact their various oblique and direct comments to you on the matter go unrecognized. You are in fact, the king of rude on this site.
As to your specific comment above, yes I most certainly do have an explanation. I have watched as John Burgeson has asked many legitimate and straight-forward questions about climate change, and how he has not only tried to learn here, but also to educate his less-than-convinced friends. By his statements, he has also spent time with the IPCC reports, which is a lot of work, and is a clear sign of interest in the science. In spite of all of this, you, in one fell swoop of opinionated dismissal, write him off as someone who is trying simply to foment doubt by his questions. You know this for sure do you? You know about John Burgeson’s intentions do you? What are you, related to him, or work with him, that you know this with such conviction, you who constantly ask for proof of others’ statements?
It’s clear from your many responses that you see this forum as a means to shout down those who in any way, express questions or doubts about the science, for whatever reason. In doing so, you are apparently oblivious to the fact that there are many like John, with legitimate questions. Your mistake is that you take all such questions as the concerted effort of the deniers to plant doubt or undermine confidence in the science. Well, believe it or not Mark, many people have legitimate questions without such satanic motives, including scientists themselves. And it is only when we can provide strong, grounded answers, or references to the literature or websites that do, that these people can gain confidence that we do, in fact, have a strong and legitimate basis for our positions.
As John B correctly pointed out, you operate primarily by sarcasm and put downs, usually expressed in one-liner bullet form. Do you ever stop to consider for one second, what that does to those who have legitimate questions they want answered and that they are completely turned off by such responses? You appear to have no realization of this whatsoever. It doesn’t matter how correct the science is if you insult people and put them down. They’ll oppose you on those reasons alone. And not without some justification.
So let’s get something very straight right now. If you think this site is your license to insult people because they have questions, and express them, then I am here to tell you that you are doing more harm than good with the way that you treat people here, and are more concerned with your own ego than the good of the broader cause–that being educating people on the truth and importance of this issue. And I will oppose you because of it. The vast majority of people are curious and just want explanations or good references, and if they don’t get them here they will either go elsewhere, or in many cases, forget it all together, or maybe listen to someone who is wrong but at least doesn’t insult them.
David B. Benson (~#572, 8 November 2009 @ 4:00 PM):
I have seen the Sahara/Australia outback tree farm proposal, thus my Eucalyptus example. This is a BIG project with a lot of admitted unknowns, not the least of which are geopolitical and ecological in nature. Most disappointing is their treatment of my (~#568) concern regarding soil quality. Ornstein et al only say– “Desert sands and soils are depleted of soluble nitrogen. As a result, it will probably be necessary to preplant, or interplant with nitrogen-fixing legumes…” So, get your kid’s sand box, plant some beans, and then you will be able to grow a large tree. Pardon the satire, but I am currently struggling with trying to grow some vegetables in the nitrogen depleted forest soil of the northern California coastal range, and if you scaled up what I am having to do for the Sahara, it would not be economically feasible.
The whole tree farm idea is much more acceptable to me than SO2 pollution, that doesn’t address ocean acidification, or carbon capture sequestration, which just seems… outlandish, so I put it in the same category as generation IV nuclear reactors. We should develop these power plants for the future when we wish to get rid of all the nuclear waste already produced by generation II reactors. The tree farm plan will be useful for bringing down CO2 ppm as, or after, we deal with switching over to renewables to minimize the post peak oil/coal crash, global cooking, and a dead ocean. We don’t need patches, we need to make this whole enterprise sustainable for my descendants.
Steve
Mark:
I really, really enjoy your perception and intelligence regarding the topics discussed here. I also really, really support Jim Bouldin’s comments (~#587) regarding how you treat others.
Please, I really don’t care about your opinions about other posters. I do care about your ideas concerning the science. Use your intellect to decide what is important.
Steve
That link to Monbiot should be
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/11/02/death-denial/
Cheers
Andrew
Re 563 Brian Dodge – nice. But I had been under the impression that the legislation of numerical values to be other than what they are (pi, specifically) hadn’t actually occured, but was a scenario put forth in parody of the political/cultural aversion to the science of biological evolution. Am I wrong? (PS somewhat related, I have read that once upon a time some people resisted recognizing some cetaceans to be mammals because if they were fish, they could be eaten at various times by various people.)
—————
biochar – well, maybe the focus should be on the potential agricultural advantages, which could reduce energy use and reduce emissions indirectly (?)
PS I have also read that putting lint into soil can increase its ability to hold water.
—————–
Biofuels as symbiotic with food production:
From “The Rise of Vertical Farms” by Dickson Despommier, Scientific American, November 2009, p. 86: “studies show that 30 percent of what is harvested is lost to spoilage and infestation during storage and transport”
Of course, the point of that, in the context of the article, is that there is something significant to be gained by local production of food in vertical farming. And in general, waste is to be mitigated. But add that 30 % to what cannot be harvested, what must be recalled, the inedible peels and shells, what is thrown away, what can’t be scraped off the muffin wrapper, used coffee grounds and frying oil, etc, and there could be a significant biofuel source. It competes with food to the extent that the incentive to make food production less wasteful is reduced, but it could make food production itself less expensive if that waste can be converted economically to a valuable byproduct (and maybe reduce the incentive to pretend that food is safe when it likely is not); there will always be some waste in food production for the forseeable palatable future.
(If for ever (*kilo)calorie consumed by humans (not counted the part that goes into the sewer?) were matched by a (*kilo)calorie (~ 4000 J, rounded) of biofuel (possibly including sewage), and people got 2000 (*kilo)calories per day, that would be about 8,000,000/86,400 W ~= 92.6 W (~ 1 % of U.S. primary (fuel equivalent) power per capita), per person, or about 741 W/person during the winter for the half of all people (tropical countries selling biofuel to temperate regions), or about 1481 W/person for half the population for 12 hours (majority of the night) of each winter day.
Oh, what about the feed for livestock that gets spoiled, etc… (Of course, in order to continue (as if it were being done already – although much hunger now could be avoided if only wars were ended, as I understand it, but I’m not an expert on this) feed everybody, some proportions may need to change…)
—————–
Afforestation of the Sahara – I’m concerned about the albedo effect. Aside from global average changes, what would such a concentration of effect (or was this for illustrative purposes, as was the black rectangle representing the area of solar panels) do to atmospheric circulation patterns?
(I don’t remember what area was given for this. Back-of-the-envelope: A 1 million km2 area with an albedo reduction from 0.3 to 0.15, recieving 250 W/m2, would have a heating effect of 37.5 W/m2, which divided by 500 would approximate the global average effect, about 0.075 W/m2. Okay, that’s small enough. But if you used the entire Sahara, you’d be over half a W/m2, which is small compared to the total anthropogenic forcings, but is significant. *IF* 1 kg of C were fixed (net) per m2 per year, 1 million km2 would sequester 1 Gt of C. So over sufficient time, the benifit could outweigh the cost in terms of global average radiative forcing, provided sufficient time until C storage is steady state, although biochar could be produced at such time.)
And what about water vapor? If land that was dry, in contact with dry air, is irrigated, this will have a cooling effect at the surface that is balanced by heating elsewhere (increased latent heating in the air or reduced evaporation downwind caused by increased humidity), but this will also tend to increase the water vapor in the atmosphere (while not changing water vapor equilibrium concentration, adding water vapor to air upwind of where it would otherwise have been added from a wet surface should tend to increase the residence time of the water vapor, or if greater spatial extent of humid air results in greater average precipitation, the residence time might not rise so much but the total amount will still tend to have increased. Of course, vertical distribution matters – if the circulation patterns did not change, then – assuming very little dry deep convection from the surface (which makes sense given the tropospheric tendency toward a moist adiabatic lapse rate) the residence time will have increased but mainly just in the boundary layer, since the air still has to move to wherever it would have otherwise picked up water vapor and then to where it would rise higher into the troposphere… But moist convective processes may tend to be pulled back toward the moisture source particularly given the albedo effect of afforestation (vegetation feedback on rainfall) – in that case, would the changing circulation patterns result in drying trends elsewhere (since all upward motion requires downward motion somewhere, which tends to be dry given precipitation of water associated with ascent) to counteract the trend in humidity where vegetation and evapotranspiration were increased (??). I haven’t read of any significant global effect of irrigation before (??), but has irrigation ever occured to cause such a large change over such a large area?)
(Ballpark figure for desalination (assuming we’re not growing Mangroves): 3 MPa (rounded up from osmotic pressure of sea water)* 1 m^2 * 1 m = 3 MJ/m3. If 1 m evaporated per year, then this is an energy requirement of ~ 0.1 W/m2 (plus some additional energy for inefficiency of desalination, and pumping, etc.); that’s 100 GW of power for a million km2.)
While some reforestation and maybe afforestation could be advisable, might it be more economical overall to pursue clean energy, efficiency, and for sequestration, carbonate mineral production from accelerated weathering of silicate minerals (in situ or dispersed over the ocean, land, or air, etc.)?
Re 580 Jim Bullis, Miastrada Co
But we don’t have to pursue
electrification
…. of transportation
………. in isolation.
Depending on the economics of electric vehicles, it may be more economical to replace the entire fossil fuel mix with renewables than to only replace non-transportation energy with renewables. Okay, you can get economic savings again by just making transportation very efficient, but if you do that, why would there be a significant problem with plug-ins at that point (efficiency would reduce the need for batteries).
Thanks Steve. The issue I have is that people seem to think I *prefer* being rude.
I don’t.
It would be GREAT not to feel that the only way to drive a point home is with a metaphorical sledgehammer.
But isn’t complaining about the way I treat others you giving your opinion about other posters (I.e. me) and rather the obverse of what you ask me to do?
That missing of the obvious is why I am going on about this: it’s another example of a bad argument.
And as Hank posted here before with a comic link, education which when you’re a grown up is about working out a good argument is the aim and ignorance the enemy. Not pro AGW or anti AGW, but the good arguments for and against.
And the one-sidedness of the complaints of me are an example of ignorance. Look at what you ask of me and see if you’re doing it too.
[Response: This conversation, and the style of postings that provoked it, are a monumental distraction. We require a certain degree of civility on this site, and as I indicated above, I’m tired of editing and moderating comments that should have been thought about for more than 1 micro-second before being posted. Here are the rules (for everyone): be nice, be substantive, or don’t bother. – gavin]
“I tend to agree with David Horton that burning biochar in place of coal is off the mark as a way of reducing CO2. Basically, the biostuff gets completely burned so CO2 is fully released. It really takes combination of carbon and oxygen to make heat.”
I think your mistake is thinking this burning is done to produce heat.
It isn’t. Just char.
Charcoal is burned in a hut with minimal O2 allowed in and that banked down. But that’s not where charcoal is burned. That’s just where it’s made/prepared.
Charcoal is burned in a furnace or oven where there’s plenty of O2 and THERE the heat is extracted, this time without any of the water that reduces the temperature you can get.
So biochar doesn’t WANT heat produced. Lack of O2 isn’t a problem.
David B: “For long term sequestration, I suggest compressing the biochar (like coal) and burying it deep (like coal). Then, I opine, it will last a very long time (liike coal).”
And that was my thought: that biochar buried well outside the active soil area would last the 2000 years attributed to it, even with water leeching but that this doesn’t say it would last 2000 years buried at root depth.
Apologies if this is a little off to one side but is their any ready reckoner for differing emissions trajectories and concentrations?
Bearing in mind the “average” hundred year periodicity of CO2 if, purely for argument’s sake, all anthropogenic emissions of CO2, CH4 were to cease tomorrow, how long would it be before concentrations returned to the 280 level that is probably non-forcing?
I ask because it seems clear that oceans will continue to heat even if we stabilise at 450 and it won’t be until we get below about 280 that we can expect that accumulated insolation to start dissipating.
Is this right?
Oh, and Jim, please go back and reread the post made on Burgy’s posts:
“I am skeptical…I doubt that…”
Which came up just after Rene started yibbering on about how denier was all wrong and Burgy “bought in” to the idea.
1) Oddly enough, “skeptical” wasn’t acceptable to John in that case. It HAD to be “because Mark likes being rude”. But surely that is what opens up the difference between “skeptic” and “denier”. The denier is more concentrated on how it couldn’t be. Just as “I am skeptical” from me there was pointing out how John could be fronting for deniers. And just as you and several others are pointing out how I’m just mean
2) Everyone, and that includes me, missed it. I chose my words with purpose and then got dragged into side arguments off it.
Oh, and your explanation (to head off that line) is about what YOU see in John’s posts. It’s explaining we have a different opinion but doesn’t explain why yours is right and mine definitely wrong.
595
Mark says:
9 November 2009 at 4:04 AM
“And that was my thought: that biochar buried well outside the active soil area would last the 2000 years attributed to it, even with water leeching but that this doesn’t say it would last 2000 years buried at root depth.”
Firstly, I think you mean leaching.
But to the issue of carbon sequestration in soils: there is no need for carbon whether as biochar or as sequestered carbon as a soil improvement to be kept out of the biotic zone. CSS receives a lot of research effort in Australia and the research indicates that improving the soil carbon (whether it is reactive or not) by as little as 15% can account for a greater proportion of Australia’s carbon emissions.
Just google Carbon+sequestration+soil
“Firstly, I think you mean leaching.”
Yeah.
“Just google Carbon+sequestration+soil”
I did.
All I got was a mix of half statements.
Others have posted on here (578, 582 etc) that this isn’t as cut and dried as some on here like to make it and all the references talk about how char can last a long time when buried and that if it’s at root level it can increase fecundity of the soil.
But nothing really about the long lasting char at root level.
Hence my point.
The other thing about biochar–or, speaking more correctly, terra preta, which includes the biochar, but also microbial cultures and perhaps other soil amendments–is that it apparently regenerates in situ. Seems incredible, but apparently the bacteria sequester carbon, too.
Here’s a report–it’s actually footnote 7 from the Wikipedia article on terra preta–based on a symposium at the University of Georgia:
http://www.eprida.com/hydro/yahoo2004.htm
For those who’d rather not go haring off, here’s the short version from the Wiki article “Terra Preta”:
“Terra preta soils are of pre-Columbian nature and were created by humans between 450 BC and AD 950. The soil’s depth can reach 2 metres (6 feet). Thousands of years after its creation it has been reported to regenerate itself at the rate of 1 centimetre per year by the local farmers and caboclos in Brazil’s Amazonian basin, and they seek it out for use and for sale as valuable compost.”
Rather nice to think that humans can also make long-lasting ecological changes for the better once in a while. (Even if the “thousands of years” characterization is a bit hyperbolic–clearly it’s only “hundreds of years.”)