Climate Change

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Was Kyoto anything more than a giant international feel-good photo op?

It was another step in a long journey. Travelers often take pictures of scenes along their way. A few travelers may be travelling only for the purpose of taking those photos. More do so to produce incidental keepsakes of the journey made for other reasons.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by 10metreh

For how long has the title of this thread been 'Global warring: Hoax or real threat to mankind?'

Thread titles change. Just get used to it.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by 10metreh

For how long has the title of this thread been 'Global warring: Hoax or real threat to mankind?'

Warming, warning, warring. I challenge you to find another example like that where all three are (loosely) related!

Oh do keep up --- it's been like that for ages.

Knitting, kitting, netting


Paul

[ewmayer]

Up in Smoke: Europe's $14 Billion Clean-Coal Venture Fails to Win Backers: A European proposal to spend 11 billion euros ($14 billion) testing how to pump greenhouse gases underground is itself getting buried.

Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- A European proposal to spend 11 billion euros ($14 billion) testing how to pump greenhouse gases underground is itself getting buried.

The plan to subsidize 12 pilot plants that capture and store carbon dioxide blamed for global warming won initial approval by a European Parliament committee on Oct. 7. Germany, Spain, Poland and at least three more countries have since decided to oppose the project, officials said in interviews. Chris Davies of the U.K., who sponsored the proposal in parliament, said it needs to be changed to win a final vote that's not yet scheduled.

At stake is the world's most ambitious research project to demonstrate that coal-burning, CO2-spewing power generators can run without releasing gases that warm the planet. Experimental ``carbon-capture'' technology is vital to the United Nation's goal to halve global emissions by 2050, said Kamel Bennaceur of the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

``It's critical that the world commits to 20 demonstration plants by 2010,'' Bennaceur, a senior energy analyst at the policy adviser to the largest oil-importing nations, said in an interview yesterday. ``Of those, 10 to 12 would be from Europe.''

The unproven technology typically aims to compress exhaust from a coal-fired power plant and pump it into an underground cavern where it would be trapped for eons. More tests are needed to determine if it's cost-effective and safe, scientists say.

Beneath the Sea

Several projects have been started outside the EU. The Norwegian oil company StatoilHydro ASA is injecting 1 million tons of carbon annually beneath the North Sea. A U.S. venture called FutureGen was canceled in January by the Energy Department after costs climbed to $1.8 billion from $1 billion.

The EU wants to test capturing and transporting technologies beyond those being used in Norway, and it needs a number of plants running to help make the system commercially viable as quickly as possible, according to the European Commission, the bloc's executive arm.

Spain and Denmark oppose the plan, saying it would invest too much in carbon capture and that proven technologies such as solar power and hybrid cars deserve more incentives.

``We must take care that we are not giving such a high priority to just one technology,'' Danish Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard said in an interview. Alternatives for funding include renewable energy, ``state of the art'' incinerators and hybrid cars, she said.

My Comment: Nice as the idea sounds in theory, my concern about carbon sequestration technologies is that their aim in effect is to make carbon emissions "as penalty free as possible", which, given human nature, thus provides a perverse incentive for people to not take the needed steps to reduce their energy usage and their fraction of nonrenewable energy production. Moral hazard, global-emissions style.

[cheesehead]

Ernst,

It's important to reduce global warming on _many_ fronts. The global-warming special Scientific American issue (September 2006?) pointed out that a wide array of measures need to be taken because the problem is too big to leave any out.

Carbon sequestration technologies are NOT aimed at making carbon emissions "as penalty-free as possible". In fact, since they divert carbon from fuel-burning exhaust so that it doesn't escape to the atmosphere, they are aimed at _preventing_ carbon emissions, not reducing those emissions' penalty, so your statement is false on its face!

Also, it is an educational and psychological matter, not the fault of the existence of mediating technologies, that someone is not taking the needed steps to reduce their energy usage or not increasing their fraction of nonrenewable energy production. If the connection were as you attribute, then an even better way to reduce AGW would be to shut down all fossil-fueled power plants tomorrow. _That_ would be incentive, all right ... but its side effects are worse. Banning auto seat belts would provide incentive for drivers to drive more safely (since the belts reduce the penalties of unsafe driving), but the net effect would not be what we want. Not every way of removing a moral hazard is equally virtuous.

[cheesehead]

What carbon sequestration does, in effect, is to enable us to harvest the energy released by oxidation of carbon while leaving that carbon in the ground afterwards.

Coal, oil, and natural gas all start as carbon compounds beneath the earth's surface. We extract them and run them through processes that oxidize them and capture (some of) the energy released by that exothermic oxidation. If we then sequester the resulting carbon dioxide securely beneath the surface, the carbon winds up back where it was before we disturbed it.

(This leads to the thought that one way of harvesting the chemical energy of carbon oxidation would be to pump oxygen into underground carbon-compound deposits, somehow induce the oxidation, then capture the energy. However, this would probably be less efficient than harvesting existing geothermal energy more directly.

However, this could all-too-easily lead to more of the uncontrolled underground fires we already have -- see http://www.post-gazette.com/healthsc...lenviro4p4.asp. "One coal fire in northern China, for instance, is burning over an area more than 3,000 miles wide and almost 450 miles long.")

[10metreh]

Paul, yours changes two letters, mine only changes one!

Could this letters discussion be made into another thread?

A rhyming relationship: summit, plummet.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Coal, oil, and natural gas all start as carbon compounds beneath the earth's surface. We extract them and run them through processes that oxidize them and capture (some of) the energy released by that exothermic oxidation. If we then sequester the resulting carbon dioxide securely beneath the surface, the carbon winds up back where it was before we disturbed it.

But not in the same form. Also, your claim that sequestration means "no emissions" of CO2 is specious - the fuel-burners still emit the CO2, just instead of venting it into the atmosphere, they pump it deep underground. In the short term, that seems a neat have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too solution: "Let`s put it somewhere where it can do no harm while we work on the *real* solution." Suuuure ... I stand by my claim that humans have shown over and over again throughout our history that out of sight truly is out of mind and that effective sequestration technologies would likely lead to us burning more fossil fuels, not less.

So then the question is, "If we can safely sequester the CO2, what's the harm of burning more fossil fuels?" The harm is multifold, and many of the potential side effects are not yet known. Obvious ones I can think of:

- Burning fossil fuels releases many other more-noxious compounds [NOx, SO2, Mercury, i.e. the oxidation products of whatever non-carbon compounds were in the coal or oil]. Separating these from the CO2 is known to be quite expensive, and sequestration will provide a disincentive to do so.

- The effects of pumping huge quantities of compressed/liquefied/clathrated CO2 into underground reservoirs over decades and centuries are unknown, and computer models will be of limited use here because they by their very nature only model "the knowns" [and the admittedly complex interactions of same].

So answer me this: Assuming that human nature will not change radically [which seems a safe bet to me], what will be the result of pumping ever more CO2 underground, instead of allowing it to be processed by photosynthetic means, as happens to atmospheric CO2? How much do you want to bet that, just as poorer nations of the world often end up as dumping grounds for the solid refuse of the big consumer nations, poor nations will end up "competing" for the right to be paid money to have the CO2 of the industrialized nations dumped under their doorsteps, as it were, because pro-environmental groups in the CO2-producing countries will fight [and rightly so] against sequestration there? How many Lake Nyos-style events are you willing to live with per annum?

The *only* true long-term solution is to drastically curb our burning of fossil fuels.

Originally Posted by 10metreh

A rhyming relationship: summit, plummet.

Boron, moron
Nit, wit
Rather, blather
Distraction, redaction

[petrw1]

Originally Posted by 10metreh

For how long has the title of this thread been 'Global warring: Hoax or real threat to mankind?'

Warming, warning, warring. I challenge you to find another example like that where all three are (loosely) related!

You forgot warding, warping, warting.

[10metreh]

What relationship do they have other than the letters?

[petrw1]

Originally Posted by 10metreh

What relationship do they have other than the letters?

1. Kyoto etc are warding off greenhouse levels.
2. Warping is what what happens when things get too hot so maybe global warming will warp the earth ... to some microscopic level.
3. Warting (a stretch) ... the warts are the corporations or countries ignoring the long term impacts of Global warming and continuing to endanger the climate.