AJ, thanks for your rational response, as usual. In none of the research that I read through have I seen anything which says CO2 reduces plant growth. There's a lot of hemming and hawing about just how much and under what circumstances there is plant growth.
But cutting to the chase. As you sensibly point out, it's somewhat academic anyway, since we have got a 30% CO2 increase and while absorption into the ocean is proceeding apace, we have not yet reached CO2 equilibrium.
Even if plants are going flat out, growing much faster, which they obviously are doing, [those limited by CO2 rather than other nutrients or lack of light] and even if the ocean is gobbling lots more CO2, which it is obviously doing, it's still not enough given our continuing increase in CO2 emissions to cause equilibrium in the CO2 level in the atmosphere.
At some stage, just as with human population, if we don't reach equilibrium, there will be carnage and we will reach equilibrium, perhaps at a MUCH lower level of human population and CO2 level.
The Malthusians of a couple of centuries ago: ucmp.berkeley.edu sensibly pointed out that women couldn't all have 10 children without 8 out of 10 of the offspring dying or otherwise not reproducing. With the invention of contraception, the whole need for genocidal wars and other horses of the apocalypse has become passe [in many countries though Moslem and African countries are still Malthusian].
It looks as though humans are going to go through a population bust over the next century which might be quite spectacular. Unfortunately, we'll be part of that process so won't be around to say I told you so [and if we are, then we won't be saying I told you so].
I think that the way CO2 will reach equilibrium at reasonable levels is that the human population will bust and our technological need for carbon-based energy will dwindle. Especially if environmental costs are loaded onto carbon as a tax, while reducing tax on things like cyberspace which use no [or negligible] carbon fuel, and actually save on the use of carbon fuel [Melissa for example, told me last night she'd call into a yoga class in Newmarket to get a timetable - I said, hang on; three clicks later, I was printing it out and she saved a trip].
Fuel isn't like food in that we WANT to eat it. It's not like movies which we WANT to see. Fuel [as we in the oil industry knew all too well] is a distress purchase which nobody wants to buy. Very few people get their kicks by swinging by the local gas station for another top up. They buy it because they have to make their SUV and Cessna Mustang zoom along.
There are LOTS of ways to cut fuel usage and people are adopting them. To move 70kg of human 100 km doesn't really take a couple of tons of SUV and a huge highway and vast wind resistance and danger of crashing. People could move the 100 km at 300 km/hour, [or 1000 km/hour I really think], and use not even a litre of petrol equivalent if transport systems were better designed.
The source of the atmospheric carbon increase is fuel [from isotope studies]. So they say [I haven't checked that, but it seems about right from my boe calculation a few years ago of tons of oil/coal/gas burned and the mass of the atmosphere]. I hadn't realized we'd achieved so much. I thought it was much less.
But there hasn't been much warming [0.7 degrees Celsius allegedly] over a century, despite the enormous effort going into producing and burning carbon. So I'm doubtful that we are going to succeed in cooking Earth or even raising the sea level significantly or doing much other than hopefully preventing descent into the next glaciation, even if we do go on producing all the carbon we want to buy. Even without carbon taxes instead of cyberspace taxes.
But we might as well at least get taxes right. Stop taxing the good stuff, cyberspace, and start taxing the possibly bad stuff, carbon.
When the population bust gets underway seriously, as it is now doing in Japan, Italy, soon to be China and lots of other countries, the demand for oil will drop too. With increasing technological shifts to non-carbon activities, there will be a further drop. Plus, people will move to nicer climates, so that will cut demand further. That move to nicer climates will be accelerated by the start of the next glaciation, which will happen at the same time as the population drops.
Back to Africa! Mesopotamia and Egypt will bloom again.
Sea levels will drop, creating new beach front properties. But don't move there, because the tsunami will get you. Oh, you are already there!! At least you are on the top floor.
BTW, I advocated carbon taxes over 20 years ago, but Nelson Cull, my boss at BP Oil, didn't think that was a good idea because that would cut fuel demand. But I thought BP was in the business of business, not just oil and indeed we were, from BP Solar, to fish farming, tree growing, alternative fuels research, all of which would be enhanced by carbon taxes [as demand for such things would grow]. Competitors, who were less sophisticated, wealthy and up with the play, would be stuck in oil and lose market share to BP and also lose business in other ways to BP [photovoltaics which is a successful business].
That's the line I pushed when I was moved to London too and indeed in recent years has become, to some extent, BP's official policy from the top down. Hans den Ouden, my boss in Antwerp [my last job with them] reckoned that things were moving in my direction. I laughed because I like things to move a LOT faster than they were. But he was serious.
I thought CDMA would replace GSM by Y2K. I did NOT think it would take another decade.
Anyway, it's amusing that having pushed for such things nearly quarter of a century ago, I'm now lectured to by wet behind the ears children who think I'm some kind of recalcitrant dinosaur. What were they doing 20 years ago when the problem was looming? I don't mean you [you are far too geriatric]. I mean slogan-touting Greenie cultists, with no idea what's really going on.
As you know, I really don't think we are anywhere near CO2 panic stations. But media and politicians love panic stations as it gives the media fear to feed on, and therefore cash flow, and it gives politicians an open cheque-book and power and that's what they love. So far, we've got to a happy level of CO2. If the USA was to whack on a carbon tariff, and cut company dividend tax, that would mean loads of investment into carbon replacement and technological development.
China could gobble up the oil instead. Beijing is filthy! It might as well be filthier. Then, in 10 years, when they aren't so poor, they'll buy USA-developed low-carbon transport technologies and other low-carbon systems. Cyberspace for example.
See, I'm not just an evil-doing oil polluter. I was cleaning things up before most Greenies had stopped sucking their thumbs. 35 years ago, our family recycled everything. I mean the whole lot! Maybe there was something that went to landfill, but not much. Unfortunately, the government forced my parents to stop using their perfectly adequate septic tanks and start sending sewage to the Mangere "Purification" Plant, which then fouled our Manukau Harbour and helped kill it stone dead where I used to go fishing and easily catch eels, snapper, trevally, kawhai galore, and even a blue maomao once, with cockles, pipis and other shellfish filling the harbour and mullet leaping in the cold winter mornings.
Mqurice |
