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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (31846)	6/7/2002 6:03:58 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Nadine, facts are not determined by electoral success or popularity. Paul Krugman is simply saying that because lots of support seems to favour worrying about greenhouse gases, that makes it a problem. Voting for the earth to be flat doesn't make it so, even if the flat-earthers kill those opposed. If the oil industry opposes action on limiting CO2 emissions [which they all don't because BP for example is not opposed to controls - BP has a big photovoltaic and other alternative energy programme] then they are acting against their own interests. Oil and coal and gas will remain the cheapest big energy sources for decades other than for special applications such as remote sunny locations where photovoltaics are cheaper. Nuclear power would be cheaper if allowed. If CO2 emissions are controlled, that will increase oil, gas and coal consumption, which is good for those industries. There are ways of reducing hydrocarbon consumption, such as insulation, building design and management, vehicle design, taxation of carbon, cyberspace developments to replace 3D transport, terrorism [which cuts air travel and jet fuel consumption - though on the other hand it causes a lot of military fuel consumption, probably terrorism increases overall hydrocarbon consumption now that I think of it - new building needed too]. But the best way of cutting CO2 emissions is to burn hydrocarbons in big, efficient power stations, send electricity to cities and bury the CO2 400 metres under the ocean. That process requires more oil, gas or coal to be burned to provide the energy for the process. In my 1980s oil days, I calculated that a power station would need about 20% more energy to process the exhaust into liquid CO2 form which could be piped down 400 metres under the ocean, which gives sufficient pressure at ambient temperatures to keep it in liquid form - this should remind you of what happens in volcanoes as the pressure comes off liquid CO2, water, etc. Being denser than seawater, the CO2 liquid would sit on the bottom in a big puddle, gradually dissolving and providing nutrients for marine life. Manatees love the hot water from power stations and plants will love the CO2 from power stations. So, if we want to, we can at relatively low cost, dump the CO2 back in the marine recycling chain where it will end up once again on the ocean floor, heading for subduction and recycling through volcanoes millions of years later - which is too long to wait which is why I think it should be put in the atmosphere, to feed the land-based food chain before heading for the oceanic food chain. About three years after I came up with that scheme, I saw that Mitsubishi patented it! Cheeky buggers! I didn't know that such a simple and obvious thing was patentable. Paul Krugman thinks oil companies [or energy industries] benefit from doing nothing about CO2 emissions. He's wrong. Ask John Browne at BP about it. Energy companies like energy consumption. Unfortunately, governments usually do stupid things, so they'll mismanage the CO2 business too. <On an order of magnitude scale, which affects C02 more, man's activities or a medium size volcano?> People beat a single volcano very easily. We have big pipelines running 7.24. Even all the world's volcanoes combined aren't much compared with what we are doing. We are much more successful than volcanoes which have to wait for their fuel supplies over centuries as subduction slowly inches along at about 10 cm per year [to mix some units]. CO2 in the air is a good thing. More is better. Mqurice PS: Paul is wrong about the ozone hole too. It isn't getting bigger. It expands and contracts with summer and winter. I wear sunscreen and sunglasses and a hat because with our without an ozone hole, the sun causes eye damage and melanoma in melanin-deficient people. Which is not to say that CFCs don't cause a problem with ozone depletion.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (31846)	6/7/2002 6:58:55 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Nadine, as you say, water is the biggie controlling the temperatures. Water in the form of oceans, which are dark and absorb sunlight like crazy, snow, which is white and reflects sunlight like crazy, clouds, which are white and reflect sunlight like crazy, deserts, which are dry and light and reflect sunlight quite well as well as getting hot and re-radiating it, leaves, which are dark and wet and absorb sunlight efficiently. Clouds are water below the dew point. What happens to clouds is what controls the climate. Water evaporates from plants, ground, oceans etc. It goes up, floats around to a cooler place, reaches the dew point and falls out as rain or snow. As earth cools, the balances of snow cover, cloud cover, evaporation rate and other water cycles change and rebalance in a way too complex for me to figure out. We can see though, that cooler means more snow cover, more cloud cover, more rain and snow, more sun reflection because that's what happens each winter. An ice-age is just an extension of winter. A warming period is the equivalent of a permanent summer. The doomsters worry about non-linear runaway heating. But that can't happen as shown because it has never happened, despite the most extreme atmospheric changes over a billion years. Huge changes have taken place including huge amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere in the early eons and there was never a runaway heating to make a cooked planet. Doomsters love non-linear and trigger effects because they can imagine all kinds of dramatic stuff such as human populations reaching plague proportions. In fact, contrary to the Malthusian Club of Rome doomsters, [reincarnated as CO2 doomsters] human populations are going to drop dramatically and due to contraception, the whole character of being human is going to change. No longer does sex-drive cause people. Women have to choose to have babies. That's a non-linear effect of major proportions. They are universally choosing to have none, one or very few. People are dying out. Mqurice