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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (40287)	5/30/2013 4:14:13 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Respond to of 86356

Wharfie, we agree that the temperature of Earth has increased about 0.7 degrees [near enough for government work] since the Little Ice Age or maybe it was just since 1900. The end of the Little Ice Age wasn't like an alarm clock going off at a certain time. Since Fox, Franz Josef, Tasman glaciers are still retreating, we could say it hasn't ended yet. What's the reason for the warming? Solar activity did increase as shown by the sun spot record going back hundreds of years. As predicted by me in October 2008 it was entering a down cycle and winters would get colder, which they did - to bleak proportions but still mild compared with reglaciation coldness or even Little Ice Age conditions. 2020 should see the realization that the sun means business and cold is the new norm. Apart from the sun's output, there are lots of other variables affecting how much sunlight is absorbed and the extra CO2 helps keep the atmospheric blanket thick enough to keep us warm, including by the mechanism of the CO2 light absorption process. When glaciers melt, the sunlight arriving lands on rock instead of ice. That rock absorbs the light and gets warm. When sunlight lands on snow, most of the light is reflected as white light. When plants grow over the newly exposed rocks, they are even darker and designed for absorbing light, which they turn into heat and methane and biosphere [when they rot or are eaten]. When clouds form in cooler conditions, they reflect light in bright white, which previously landed on dark rocks or darker leaves. That causes a feedback loop of cooling. When air is warmer, clouds don't form. So the majority of clouds are squeezed to higher latitudes, covering less ground. Clouds are not so simple because they also form as hot humid air rises, reaching the dew point at some altitude, resulting in vast tropical storms when conditions are just right, deluging the ground and carrying CO2 to the oceans. For the most part, Australia doesn't get clouds and rain, but New Zealand does. It's about the dew point. Back in 1983, I thought CO2 could be a problem. I suggested to my BP Oil boss [Nelson Cull] a carbon tax as the solution if it turned out to be a problem. He told me "Shhhhh, we don't want that in the oil industry". Over the next couple of decades, I didn't think CO2 would amount to much. But it has amounted to quite a lot. Ashley Mullen pointed out to me that I had not been keeping a close enough eye on CO2 levels because they were in fact soaring more than I had thought. Sure enough, absorption by the ocean and biosphere was not keeping pace and accumulation was significant. But still not problematic other than for marginal things such as breaking world records in athletics, climbing Mount Everest without oxygen and the like. Meanwhile, bonus CO2 for plants is a good thing. I came up with a method [1986] to take CO2 from power stations, liquefy it and pipe it under the ocean to store it where it could dissolve in stupendously vast quantities. Some Mitsubishi visitors to BP Oil International who I told about it must have liked the idea because Mitsubishi patented it about 1989 or 1990. I did not know that such a simple and obvious [to me anyway] idea could be patented. But that patent has now expired. So the main reason the world has warmed is due to the end of the little ice age, melting of snow, growing of plants and increased absorption of sun. But extra CO2 will have helped. Unfortunately, about half the CO2 people produced has already been absorbed and dumped at the bottom of the ocean [by the Gulf Stream and by dead things falling down there]. CO2 does also absorb straight into the water and just as heat can migrate deeper, so can CO2. When Peak People arrives in 2037 and technology advances continue apace, with resistance to buying carbon to burn continuing [it's expensive to fill my car with petrol], combustion of carbon will reduce. Perhaps dramatically if fusion reactors get on a roll, or if photovoltaics finally get cheap enough. I'm not expecting to use much carbon in 2037, even if I am still alive, so somebody else will have to make the effort in my place. They might be too lazy to do it. They might just sit around cerfing in Cyberspace, on a tropical island. It's not a sure bet that CO2 output will continue. Let's see what the thermometers are doing in 2020. You might find it's quite cold and CO2 heating is not much of a problem. Mqurice