Glad you are excited Maurice :)
We can actually turn ice-ages on and off. That is so good. More importantly, we can stop them encroaching and prevent overheating.
Well that is like saying now we know the genome we can cure all diseases. First we don't know all thsoe proteins yet and then we'd need to deal with the social and economic aspects of disease and treatment. Environmental science/policy is at a similar stage IMHO.
We can seed the oceans with iron and other nutrients and have seething sea life instead of fairly dead seas.
Yeah when those oceans flood places like Bangladesh there will lots more fertile continental shelf :P
We can store huge lakes of liquid CO2 400 metres under the ocean in case we need a lot more in a hurry. Power stations could compress their exhaust and drop the liquid into nearby water [over 400 metres deep, which provides the necessary pressure to maintain a liquid phase for CO2 at ambient temperatures]. The energy cost is only about 20% extra.
That is one of the issues they want to investigate at Princeton, but not so we can get it out in a hurry, I imagine! In the proposed scheme hydrogen would be stripped off for use in fuel cells and other mobile applications and the carbon could be oxidised for grid power and then the CO2 buried.
Then, if the sun gets a bit lazy,
I guess it did in the middle of the last millenium but on the whole it is getting brighter.
I'm with you that the radiative forcing, heating, cooling and snow cover are much faster than people normally think. My guess is about 5 years for cooling as the snow cover races south in the northern hemisphere [and north in the southern], extremely rapidly increasing reflection of incident radiation.
I can't find any sign in the statistical evidence that the reaction of surface temperatures to changes in gas concentrations is as slow as climate scientists generally claim. Most of the reaction is over in 5 years. This despite the large heat reservoir in the oceans that is supposed to slow things down. However, carbon concentrations in the atmosphere do react slowly to changes in emissions. There is a fast initial reaction but then a long slow tail. 35% of the impact happens in one year, the next 15% in the next ten years and so forth. But my research shows that carbon concentrations in the atmosphere are much more stable than generally thought . If we held emissions constant at the current level, concentration would rise to about 430ppm (from 370ppm currently) and temperatures would rise by a few tenths of a degree. Maybe I'll eventually overturn that finding but that's what I get now.
who are freaked out by the greenhouse shroud-waving will raise taxes to reduce consumption
Yes I think that is probably the worst policy move (apart from doing nothing). Some approach which subsidizes research into sequestration and alternative technologies may be best at the moment, with credits for sequestration etc. Sticking taxes on the fuels won't encourage burying carbon for example.
Hooray for George W, canceling the Kyoto stuff.
This Carbon Mitigation Center I am applying to be at may well be in the front line of developing his alternative climate policy. My potential boss was on Bush Senior's Council of Economic Advisers and in the Ford Treasury Dept. That will be a lot more interesting than hanging out with greenies and moaning about Bush and Howard et al. Though I must say people here are often somewhat shocked when I tell them this info (or that I vote for the Liberal Party here) :)
David |
