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To: Slagle who wrote (68193)	8/28/2005 9:58:13 AM
From: Moominoid	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Moominoid Re: "oil fields" Yeah, injecting the gas into oil fields is probably the best way. But YIKES, in the USA with I suppose thousands of utility boilers scattered all over the country, how would you get all that gas to the oil fields? Pipe lines? What would THAT cost in energy terms? And would that be enough to matter without the rest of the world doing the same thing? That is what I was suggesting that it would need a huge pipeline network to be constructed to be applied to existing power plants. New gas fired plants could be constructed to reinject CO2 in an integrated way, but then long transmission lines would need to be built... There's not much of a free lunch here :) And what explains the several "warm periods" that have occurred in the last several thousand years, long before the industrial revolution? You need to read Ruddiman - see Scientific American - March 2005 based on his article in Climatic Change. The warmest preindustrial period was probably several thousand years ago. Ruddiman's thesis is that basically, the trend would be to cooling if people hadn't started interfering with the system several thousand years ago. Up till this century by luck we have about balanced the increased greenhouse effect we have created with this cooling trend to maintain a fairly stable climate. Within that period there have been cooler episodes due to reduced solar activity, increased vulcanism, or the die off of the human population. This is very radical as essentially it means that there is no such thing as "nature" today's world is already entirely antrhopogenic before the industrial revolution arrived. My own time series modeling of the last 150 years shows that volcanic activity has a big impact on cooling the climate that lasts decades. The system responds very slowly due to the huge mass of water in the ocean. You need a complicated dynamic time series model to build in all the lags. I have a paper up on the web that does this: econpapers.repec.org There is an improvement needed in that model which will be done in the next round (might reduce the sensitivity to CO2 a bit). Industrial activity only really accelerates post WW II. Several big eruptions (Agung, Mount Saint Helens, and Pinatubo) plus increased reflectivity of the atmosphere due to industrial emissions (sulfate aerosol) have helped reduce the warming effect until the last decade. This is scary because taking all this into account leads to an extremely high sensitivity to increased CO2. But this isn't the only model coming to this conclusion as explained in the paper.