The climate change debate continues.

[old man emu]

11 hours ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

belief or intuition has been trumped by the facts

Sorry, but I couldn't resist ....

Isn't that a logical non-sequitur?

[Bruce Tuncks]

The calculation of temperature rise associated with a reduction in albedo is not difficult for a dry planet. You could expect high-school students to get it right.

It is the effects of humidity , including cloudiness, which put the calculations beyond most of us and so leave room for intuitive beliefs.

There is a list of intuitive beliefs that many still uphold despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The flat earth being one.

[old man emu]

I wonder if the belief in a flat earth was the product of the observations of people who lived in hilly, or mountainous areas where there is not a view of an unobstructed horizon. Stand on a beach and the curvature becomes obvious. The same on a plain.

[onetrack]

In the following article on mega-droughts and the security of (potable) water supplies, the writer complains that it's difficult to get a handle on previous drought records and conditions, because BOM records only go back 120 years, at best!

 

Yet, scientists have produced a vast new world of Climate Change Industry, based on only 30 years of accurate weather observations? There's little logic or scientific sustainability in that approach.

 

https://watersource.awa.asn.au/environment/natural-environment/what-can-historical-mega-droughts-tell-us-about-future-water-supply/

[old man emu]

Some inferences can be drawn from tree ring analysis, ice core analysis and sediment core analysis. 

[octave]

4 hours ago, onetrack said:

Yet, scientists have produced a vast new world of Climate Change Industry, based on only 30 years of accurate weather observations? There's little logic or scientific sustainability in that approach.

 

 

The theory of human induced climate change was not derived merely from weather records but primarily from physics.  The Greenhouse Effect Explained - Sixty Symbols

 

I am not really concerned with people who dont accept the evidence, they are a minority.  Even fossil fuel companies now accept the evidence and pretty much are only arguing about what is to be done about it and how quickly we tackle it.  The mechanisms were first understood a couple of hundredd years ago.    

 

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

On 26/09/2020 at 11:23 PM, nomadpete said:

Jerry, thanks for a great post. I'd love to have you drop in for dinner and debate, any time. But I warn you, it might be a long debate. Don't worry, in spite of us sharing many views, I'm pretty sure we'd keep it lively but harmless.

 

Thanks, NP.. When this blasted COVID debacle blows over and Aus opens up her borders, you may live to regret the offer.. But I will take it up (I will bring the wine - Aussie of couse, but for some reason, Wolfie never accompanies me when I am in Aus!).

It may have been sooner that you thought, too - I pulled out of advanced stages of a job application in Sydney on account that while I could have got back to Aus, I couldn't conscionably have taken the seat and hotel room/s of an Aussie family stranded and wanting to get home..

 

Probably woudl have got the job, too.. it was about 6 weeks ago I pulled out and my job feed still sends it to me.

 

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

There are kids who compare our efforts at combating climate change with the effort about Corona virus.

I agree with the kids. Corona is nothing compared with climate change.

[Bruce Tuncks]

I would like somebody to do the sums on this:

If farmers were paid to produce charcoal for burial, ( the exact opposite of coal mining and burning ) how much would we have to pay them to do this?

Personally, my guess is that this would indeed be a viable way to extract co2 from the atmosphere, and possibly the cheapest way.  Alas it will not happen even if it is the cheapest way  because farmers do not constitute the big end of town.

But the sums are a bit beyond me.

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

farmers were paid to produce charcoal for burial,

This argument falls down for a quite simple reason. Australian farming tends to be broad-acre. This means that the land has either been cleared of trees, or never had large forests on it in the first place. Even grazing land naturally only has scattered tree stands. The landscape type is savanna, also spelled savannah,  a vegetation type that grows under hot, seasonally dry climatic conditions and is characterized by an open tree canopy (i.e., scattered trees) above a continuous tall grass understory (the vegetation layer between the forest canopy and the ground).

 

So there are no trees to turn into charcoal in the volumes that would appreciably affect CO2 levels.

[pmccarthy]

Take a step back. How could burning trees be good for the environment under any circumstances? It is loopy science.

[Old Koreelah]

46 minutes ago, pmccarthy said:

Take a step back. How could burning trees be good for the environment under any circumstances? It is loopy science.

I totally agree, PM. We have destroyed so much of our continent’s forests that we should regard the remnants as sacred. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

(My grandfather was a respected forest manager and my family has many links with the timber industry.)

 

 I do, however, agree that much of Australia’s soil could be improved by adding charcoal, as was done by the ancient people of the Amazon. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

[willedoo]

A few years back, scientists found that grass type plants locked carbon in the soil. Broad acre grain crops do it, as well as bamboo but one of the best was sugar cane. They estimated that for every ton of carbon a cane farmer causes, three are locked in the soil for up to seventy years.

 

From what I remember, they form root nodules about the size of a grain of sand and store carbon from the atmosphere. They are so hard that cultivation of the soil will not break them open and release carbon, plus they last about seventy years. When they were talking about carbon credits a few years ago, this science came out proving some types of farmers were responsible for locking up a lot of carbon. In typical fashion, there was no talk of farmers being paid credits for it, whereas other industries were paid for their forms of effort.

Edited December 14, 2020 by willedoo

[Bruce Tuncks]

There are lots of trees down here OME. But I think you could charcoal stubble too. I didn't know of your stuff wille, i"ll look into it.

And Pmc, while some burning is needed to char the stuff, the charred burial really represents carbon which was in the atmosphere to be permanently removed.

[Bruce Tuncks]

The very fact of you guys doubts is more evidence to me that it will never happen

[Bruce Tuncks]

Yep, straw can be charcoalified. So can sugar cane after the sweet sap has been crushed out.  I reckon $100 a tonne would make it happen and this would be a cheap way to save the planet. 

I also liked the ocean seeding with iron idea and note with horror that trials have been stopped by greenies.... gosh they don't understand the idea of least worst.

[octave]

36 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

Yep, straw can be charcoalified. So can sugar cane after the sweet sap has been crushed out.  I reckon $100 a tonne would make it happen and this would be a cheap way to save the planet. 

I also liked the ocean seeding with iron idea and note with horror that trials have been stopped by greenies.... gosh they don't understand the idea of least worst.

 

There are many justified questions about the effectiveness of this idea and the unintended consequences.   These concerns are being expressed not just by the greens but also scientists.

 

 

Researchers worldwide have conducted 13 major iron-fertilization experiments in the open ocean since 1990. All have sought to test whether stimulating phytoplankton growth can increase the amount of carbon dioxide that the organisms pull out of the atmosphere and deposit in the deep ocean when they die. Determining how much carbon is sequestered during such experiments has proved difficult, however, and scientists have raised concerns about potential adverse effects, such as toxic algal blooms. In 2008, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity put in place a moratorium on all ocean-fertilization projects apart from small ones in coastal waters. Five years later, the London Convention on ocean pollution adopted rules for evaluating such studies.

 

Full article https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocean-experiment-sparks-controversy/

 

 

As you might suspect, adding iron to the oceans could do more than just reduce carbon dioxide levels. Changing the structure of the food web by infusing the ocean with iron and promoting phytoplankton growth could drastically change the concentrations of other gases in both the air and the sea, potentially negating any positive effects of reduced carbon dioxide levels [source: Liss]. For example, some computer models predict that adding iron could increase levels of nitrous oxide and methane, two greenhouse gases [source: Haiken]. Scientist Mark Lawrence also points out that blooms of phytoplankton produce chemicals called methyl halides, which erode the ozone layer [source: Wright].

Scientists also don't know how long any carbon dioxide that is captured by the phytoplankton would be stored. While the ocean has the ability to stockpile millions of tons of the gas for a century or more, there's a catch: It must sink below the surface if it stays in solid form. But it doesn't necessarily do that.

 

The carbon dioxide is just as likely to be carried right back up to the surface by ocean currents and released back into the atmosphere. Most of the carbon dioxide never even reaches the ocean floor. As much as 95 percent of it stays in circulation because it is continuously recycled through the food chain [Wright]. Plankton process it and are then eaten by other organisms, which simply exhale the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, so it never drops out of circulation [source: Haiken].

Many environmental organizations are also against ocean seeding. When the company Planktos announced plans to sprinkle 100 tons of iron sulfate off the coast of the Galapagos Islands, t­he Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and others fought back. One group even threatened to intercept the company's ship. Planktos ended up canceling its plans due to limited funding and inadequate gear, but the environmental groups remain­ on guard. On its Web site, the World Wildlife Fund warns of the following potential ill effects the method could incite:

• Phytoplankton blooms will release large amounts of gases, as will the bacteria they leave behind when they die.
• The bacterial decay that results when the plankton die will reduce oxygen levels in the water, possibly leading to the increase of gases like nitrous oxide.
• Unless the iron is very pure, it is likely to be accompanied by other potentially toxic trace metals.

Iron fertilization raises a lot of interesting questions. The relationship between the carbon dioxide cycle and marine processes is complex, and so far science isn't clear on the long-term effects of altering it. Is iron fertilization a global warming panacea or a Pandora's box? Only time will tell, but scientists are sure to keep searching for answers. To learn more about global warming and possible carbon sequestration strategies, be sure to explore the links on the following page.

 

Full article https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/iron-sulfate-slow-global-warming.htm#:~:text=The idea of dumping iron,ocean seeding or iron fertilization.&text=Adding iron to the water,up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis.

 

 

[pmccarthy]

If iron is to be added as an oxide, it first has to be mined and ground to a fine powder, both operations can be energy intensive, particulalry grinding. If it is to be added as iron metal, then it also needs a lot of energy to reduce the oxide. 

[onetrack]

The number of rust-bucket large iron ore carriers that have gone to the bottom of the sea in adverse weather conditions, should have already provided all the evidence for iron seeding the oceans.

 

15 of these huge carriers went down just in 1994 alone. There have been multiple dozens since that time.

 

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619752-200-clampdown-on-the-rust-buckets/

[Old Koreelah]

The end of fossil fuels is coming faster than expected:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-17/bluewaters-coal-fired-power-station-written-off-books/12990532 

 

Why can’t Australians grow up and adopt the German approach?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2020-12-06/changing-climate-of-coal-mining-australia-environment/12918334

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-13/national-party-rebels-fighting-for-more-coal-power-stations/11959568

[pmccarthy]

The Office of the President of the USA commissioned a series of explanatory papers on climate change but has yet to post them, now it may never happen. The following links give those papers, written by well-qualified scientists. If you believe what they say, as I do, then you will find them interesting and informative. If you believe in human-induced global warming then they will help you to understand the enemy of your faith. Note that I use the words "believe"  and "faith" here for good reason.

 

Introduction (Dr. David Legates)

The Sun Climate Connection (Drs. Michael Connolly, Ronan Connolly, Willie Soon)

Systematic Problems in the Four National Assessments of Climate Change Impacts on the US (Dr. Patrick Michaels)

Record Temperatures in the United States (Dr. John Christy)

Radiation Transfer (Dr. William Happer)

Is There a Climate Emergency (Dr. Ross McKitrick)

Hurricanes and Climate Change (Dr. Ryan Maue)

Climate, Climate Change, and the General Circulation (Dr. Anthony Lupo)

Can Computer Models Predict Climate (Dr. Christopher Essex)

The Faith-Based Nature of Human-Caused Global Warming (Dr. Roy Spencer)

 

[nomadpete]

Try this for starters.......

https://debunkingdenial.com/john-christy-climate-change-denier-part-i/

[spacesailor]

NIAGRA falls, 

IS the runoff from the melting snow & ice !.

It,s been running longer than man remembers !.

WAY LONGER

Than the industrial history that the crazies want to blame for the,

MELTDOWN

Of Snowball earth.

Our coal comes from the forna that was HUGE, when growing, so what was the climate in those day,s.

AND when will that climate come back again, with it,s GIANT forna. 

spacesailor

[Marty_d]

11 hours ago, pmccarthy said:

The Office of the President of the USA commissioned a series of explanatory papers on climate change but has yet to post them, now it may never happen. The following links give those papers, written by well-qualified scientists. If you believe what they say, as I do, then you will find them interesting and informative. If you believe in human-induced global warming then they will help you to understand the enemy of your faith. Note that I use the words "believe"  and "faith" here for good reason.

 

Introduction (Dr. David Legates)

The Sun Climate Connection (Drs. Michael Connolly, Ronan Connolly, Willie Soon)

Systematic Problems in the Four National Assessments of Climate Change Impacts on the US (Dr. Patrick Michaels)

Record Temperatures in the United States (Dr. John Christy)

Radiation Transfer (Dr. William Happer)

Is There a Climate Emergency (Dr. Ross McKitrick)

Hurricanes and Climate Change (Dr. Ryan Maue)

Climate, Climate Change, and the General Circulation (Dr. Anthony Lupo)

Can Computer Models Predict Climate (Dr. Christopher Essex)

The Faith-Based Nature of Human-Caused Global Warming (Dr. Roy Spencer)

 

 

The office of the... oh, you don't mean the lying, conspiracy-theory peddling, QANON-believing, Proud Boys-supporting, friend of the KKK & the NRA, piece of sh*t who will be the only President in history to be impeached twice... is it the office of THAT president who brought together every debunked contrarian to do a piece on something he doesn't believe exists?

 

Yep, surely that will be an unbiased and totally factual, not influenced in the slightest, piece of work.

[Bruce Tuncks]

Spacey, you and I will not be around when the Mekong runs dry. But it will, what with the glaciers retreating and the Chinese dams.