George, you have gone off the rails a bit with this one:
"Gore really isn't interested in technology except as an excuse for new forms of government industrial policy to extenuate his Luddite opposition to the automobile, his paranoia about useful chemicals such as PCBs and DDT, his phobia toward all extant forms of energy access (wait 'till he discovers his Pentium emits microwaves!), and most of all his ridiculous desire to shut down the economy in response to fantasies of global warming."
I don't know what Al has said about cars, but a bit of fear of useful chemicals is in order. Thalidomide was a conspicuous failure, though belatedly found to be useful in cancer treatment. Tetraethyl Lead was a crazy addition to gasoline supplies though it seemed a good idea at the time. It was one of the 20th century Big Blunders. Benzene was great for washing down lab benches, but leukemia turned out to be a product of its use. Diesel fuels are used in cities without the environmental cost being assigned to the people producing the exhaust for a net economic loss. Lead sprays were used on apples to prevent codlin moth. A circumspect view of 'chemicals' is a good idea.
I doubt Al is too worried about photosynthesis as an energy access medium. Nor photovoltaics. He probably thinks fuel-cell cars would be hot stuff. I guess you mainly mean his concern about CO2 from fossil fuels when you write 'phobia toward all extant forms of energy access'. I also doubt he wants to shut down the economy in response to 'fantasies of global warming'. He probably is just worried about CO2 causing things to heat up faster than they do in the Oval Office when interns get interested. Rightly so!
You and he are both wrong; assuming you think global warming won't happen and he thinks it is terrible and must stop.
CO2 levels are increasing and we'd have to be a bit naive to think that metre diameter pipelines delivering carbon by the billions of tonnes into the atmosphere won't make a difference. There are also some very busy coal producers.
But this is GOOD!
Over a very long time, longer even than the Republicans have been rabid and paranoid [getting in the swing of using such words - I need to make a thumb in bum comment too somewhere], carbon has been sucked out of the atmosphere by naughty chlorophyll and buried in swamps and under the ocean by trees whose purpose in life was to make coal and skeletal sea critters whose job was to make chalk [limestone = carbonates with lots of carbon in them] and volcanoes.
I'd better explain the volcanoes. The whales, fish, squid and whatever doesn't get eaten lands on the sea floor. Hagfish make a valiant effort to recycle these, but they do a worse job of that than Ericy did of CDMA in the 1890s. So they get buried and carried along on the ocean floor conveyor belt into continental subduction zones where some end up in flysch wedges [scraped off the conveyor belt by the continental shelf]. The rest dives down a long, long way. It gets really hot down there. So a lot of the minerals melt, and the organic/water/etc does some chemistry to pass the time and floats up towards the surface in a column of magma.
When the pressure builds up enough, it lifts the lid off the pressure cooker. The column of liquid forms gas which acts like a very very large geyser, shooting hot stuff by the 10s of cubic kilometres
10 km upward. The carbon in the column tends to react with oxygen, water and sulphur and the rest all gets into the act too. Now THAT's recycling.
Anyway, a lot of the carbon stays underground as oil, coal, shale oil, tar sands, gas, limestone and peat.
This is bad. The trees and diatoms get hungry and have to have big leaves [the diatoms can't do that] to try to get their share of CO2 from the thin atmosphere. The sky is full of ozone due to the oxygen which plants dumped out so they have trouble getting enough ultraviolet light - having to climb all over each other, grow 100 metres tall and generally fight for light. We and other animals have done our bit by inhaling the oxygen and giving the plants CO2 in an excellent recycling effort. Unfortunately, we tend to end up underground though not usually subducted so the carbon gets buried with us.
Basically, the planet is dying and has been for a billion years or two.
Luckily I came along and I just love flying in 747s and driving around in my car. I burn a lot of carbon. The plants are grateful. Some farmers are so kind that they give their plants a glasshouse to live in and burn natural gas to make it warm inside and full of CO2. So we are in the process of creating life. Digging up dead old C and freeing it to form a petatrillion living beasties and plants. We just need a way to stop mosquitoes, sharks, AIDS and the like from getting their share.
This is good! The price of fish will reduce and so will timber costs.
BUT, there is 5 or so kilometres of water, not to mention an Antarctic ice cap, so if things get warmer, which they will, there will be a substantial expansion of water as well as the runoff from Greenland, Russia, Canada and Antarctica. Okay, so we just move inland and uphill. There is lots of room. If London and New Orleans get wet, it won't matter that much. London has few motorways and Johny Cash can move house.
Some places are probably warm enough already, but some places like here need another 10 degrees.
If things get way too hot, we can always just liquify the CO2 from power stations and pour it 400 metres under the ocean where it will stay as a liquid or dissolve and skip the atmospheric recycling step. We could turn ice ages on and off! Have skiing for a while, then ocean swimming.
I dislike ice ages though, so I'm burning fuel flat out to try to heat things up enough to stave it off. With the gradual decline of life, ice ages have become all too common.
Well, there you have it! That's the short version. I'll do ice ages and how bad gasoline lead is another time.
Now you'll see that you and Al have a lot in common; the need to move to higher levels of discussion. People seem to think sea levels immutable. They are not. The tide is rising!
Maurice |
