The Greenhouse Emissions Trading Farce
Threads -
The Greenhouse
Emissions Trading Farce, Iron in the Sea
On
12/1/2004, Peter Macinnis posted:
I feel like the person who has been suggesting gently that the emperor
is somewhat clothes-deficient. Today on the news, we hear that
the government is quietly dropping all those nice schemes, so beloved
of economists.
The claptrap about planting trees to make up for burning yet more
fossil fuel missed these points:
Land given over to planting forests was probably producing each year
just as much locked-up carbon in the form of crops before it was
reallocated to trees, though Blind Freddy would realise that this is
not an issue, since most of that is consumed by us or by other animals
and converted to carbon dioxide, but that is where Blind Freddy falters.
A forest is not just trees, it is a complete and balanced ecosystem.
Within a remarkably short time, the average forest approaches
equilibrium, with rotting and animal-eaten vegetation (leaves on the
trees, heartwood, leaf litter) returning to (what a surprise!) carbon
dioxide.
That said, in Australia, few forests ever reach equilibrium, because of
an unusual and unexpected phenomenon, called bushfires. These consume
almost all of the stored carbon, and return it to, umm, ahh, let me
think, ah yes, carbon dioxide. And in a best-case scenario, they
tend to come through once every fifty years, but more typically, around
ten to twenty years.
Given the climate changes we are seeing, this may well change, with
unusual weather becoming more usual. More lightning, longer
droughts, and maybe more of those bushfire thingies that the economic
rationalists appear not to have heard of.
In short, planting forests to soak up the extra CO2 we are generating
in our fools' paradise was ever a pipe dream.
Kevin
Phyland responded:
I
am in a perpetual state of confusion with your posts (as in they lately
seem to be harder and harder to discern fact from the
usually well-deserved irony or sarcasm...)
Having
said that, the comment that Australian forests "can't reach a state of *balance*"(my
*s) is confusing IF you mean prior
to human influence. I fail to see how balance is even a meaningful term
for a naturally occurring periodic phenomenon?
Do
you mean that the *balance*is
different for Australian forests or have I totally (as is most likely)
misinterpreted your original post?
Peter Macinnis
replied:
>
I am in a perpetual state of confusion with your posts (as in
> they lately seem to be harder and harder to discern fact from
> the usually well-deserved irony or sarcasm...)
Put it down to
the fact that some of us aren't on what are laughingly called school
"holidays" -- which are still working time, but allow some time also
for reflection -- I have had a few other calls on my time, so I rushed
it. Why not? After all, I knew what it meant :-).
I made the
following points, repeated here with clarification in parentheses: you
will note that MOSTof what follows is in parentheses -- and
probably draw justifiable conclusions from that.
1. A
forest is a balanced ecosystem (in terms of being both animals and
plants, balanced in terms of overall energy flows -- the simplistic notion
that forests are just docile carbon sponges is stupid, because every
forest includes animals on the leaves and in the litter, termites in
the heartwood and fungi all over the place, all breaking down organic
matter -- not to mention that trees also respire, though there is a net
photosynthetic gain). This is the first mistake -- the economists and
politicians seem to think a forest just keeps on taking in CO2 and
locking it away. Maybe that is why they think they can woodchip it all.
2. Left
alone and unburned, a forest eventually reaches the (carbon)
equilibrium of a mature forest (where carbon in = carbon out, with
chewing, munching and decay generating as much CO2 as is trapped by
photosynthesis, but few ever reach this carbon equilibrium: the reason
they DON'T reach equilibrium is that they burn, thus tearing up all the
gains of the previous 10, 20 or 50 years).
(Either way, the
end result is that planting more trees is like sticking chewing gum in
the crack in the wall of the dam -- you may care to hum the
Dambusters March while reading this para, if it helps. I
apologise for confusing issues by using balance and equilibrium in
entirely different senses, without qualification, and close together.)
>
Having said that, the comment that Australian forests "can't
> reach a state of *balance*" (my *s) is confusing IF you mean
> prior to human influence. I fail to see how balance is even a
> meaningful term for a naturally occurring periodic phenomenon?
Prior to human
influence, there were still wildfires that ran through the bush when
fuel levels built up and there was a dry spell. Of course, at a certain
point, fuel levels held, because decay equalled new growth, and so you
had the carbon equilibrium I refer to above. Then there would be a
wildfire, triggered by lightning or some such, and the ground would be
cleared, ready to start again. ALL of the CO2 locked up in the
previous phase would now be back in the atmosphere, except for small
amounts of charcoal on the ground.
>
Do you mean that the *balance* is different for Australian
> forests or have I totally (as is most likely) misinterpreted
> your original post?
No, you couldn't
understand wild and unstructured drivel, churned out while the mind was
elsewhere. I hope this will be clearer.
A corollary of
this: we are often told it is ecologically more sound to compost than
to burn, as it somehow produces less CO2. Composting produces fewer
unpleasant pollutants, but the end result is that all that organic
matter turns into animals, and is converted either to CO2, or to other
animals that in turn convert either to CO2 or to new animals.
I hope that
clarifies a few bits of it.
Kevin
Phyland answered:
Yeah,
the following was a point I was going to address if I'd understood the
missive properly...fires are naturally occurring (prior to humanity's
strange propensity to lord its *invention* over all other living
creatures)...
<Prior
to human influence, there were still wildfires that ran
through the bush when fuel levels built up and there was a dry
spell. Of course, at a certain point, fuel levels held,
because decay equalled new growth, and so you had the carbon
equilibrium I refer to above.
Then there would be a wildfire, triggered by lightning or some
such, and the ground would be cleared, ready to start again.>
Cheers,
Kevin
from Wycheproof.
P.S.
My *holidays* have indeed given me time for introspection and are
disappearing faster than the average politician's credibility...
Angus commented:
While the "quick
fix" solution of carbon sinks is arguably not a solution to ongoing
increases in CO2 emissions from fossil
fuels, would the restoration of forest not correct some of the
imbalance if only to a new lower CO2 equilibrium? As I see
it, significant philosophical change (with respect to personal
convenience for example) is needed and the only way governments can
"drive" such change is to link philosophy somehow with money. More
trees wouldn't be a bad thing in any case?
Peter
Macinnis replied:
>More
trees wouldn't be a bad thing in any case?
Yes
to all of that, trees are nice, and they will help in the short term,
but the problem is that even if we planted trees everywhere, we are
only putting off the inevitable -- unless we bury all the timber in a
deep hole :-)
Seriously,
any real approach has to look at the energy levels we live at in the
First World -- around 7.5 kilowatts is needed to maintain us and our
lifestyles. That is an all-in estimate, based on the costs of housing,
infrastructure, transport of grapes from Baluchistan, the electric
grape peeler, all the other wasteful stuff we use, as well as power and
light, while in the third world, it is around 1.1 kilowatts per person.
Note:
kilowatts, not kilowatt-hours. Multiply that figure by 24 to get
the number of joules we use each day, or that our society uses on our
behalf.
A
better answer: smaller cars not bigger, swingeing taxes on cars based
on cost and mass and energy use, solar power wherever possible and BIG
money in further research, better public transport, subsidies for using
smart/efficient appliances flike fluorescent "bulbs", taxes on all
those TVs with remotes that sit around on standby, an end to stupid
power tools like leaf blowers. Trees are nice, but they won't
make that much difference. The whole "grow-a-tree" thing is a stunt to
help greedy people make lots of money by getting other selfish people
to pay them to plant trees, so those selfish people can keep running
gas guzzlers, and then when the trees burn down, somebody else can pay
them to plant a new lot of trees.
Does
it sound a bit like a certain over-insured print shop? It has the
same ethics, and the same social usefulness.
Maybe ITER, the planned new fusion
experiment will offer some answers -- I have some stories from "Le
Monde" on it to read tonight. More later -- my French is going to
have to get better . . .
Podargus
commented:
snip
>
taxes on all those
> TVs with remotes that sit around on standby, an end to stupid
power tools
> like leaf blowers. Trees are nice, but they won't make that
much
> difference. The whole "grow-a-tree" thing is a stunt to help
greedy people
> make lots of money by getting other selfish people to pay them to
plant
> trees, so those selfish people can keep running gas guzzlers, and
then when
> the trees burn down, somebody else can pay them to plant a new lot
of trees.
Whilst I agree
with your main thrust, it is rare, rare enough for me to have never
seen it, at least in eucalypt forest, for a forest to burn down.
I have this very day driven through what was called by persons of the
press twelve months ago 'destroyed bush/forest' near Tenterfield.
The trees have put out their epicormic shoots from the still intact
trunks and look quite well.
So when we plant
a eucalypt forest on clear land there will be a locking up of carbon
whilst the forest stands. It will as you say reach an
equilibrium, where carbon in shed/eaten/burnt material is endlessly
recycled.
Again as you
have said the amounts of carbon locked away compared to the amount we
continue to produce is miniscule.
A retired mate,
one of the bods who worked on the effect of a warming ocean on CO2 and who is now a
Macadamia grower (all scientists, dentists, doctors, pharmacists and
lawyers become macca growers before they die), calculated that
the CO2
locked up in his macca trees did not equal the amount of CO2 he produced in
driving to town for normal living purposes. Then there was the
tractor and implements to run the farm and the odd overseas flight to
talk about ocean warming.
And for all
those natterers who believe in train travel. Timber sleepers are
in themselves CO2 neutral, as long as
you cut them by hand and square them off with a broad axe, and haul
them around with bullocks or horses. However the modern you beaut
concrete sleepers have released all that CO2 in the limestone, not
to mention the coal burnt to heat the limestone.
Hanrahan was
correct!
Kevin
Phyland noted:
<Note: kilowatts,
not kilowatt-hours. Multiply that figure by 24 to get the number
of joules we use each day, or that our society uses on our
behalf.>
Watts
= Joules per second
kW
= 1000 Joules per second
so...multiply
by 60 and multiply by 60 and 24 and divide by 1000...so....86.4?
Toby Fiander
wrote:
>
A better answer: smaller cars not bigger, swingeing taxes on cars based
on
> cost and mass and energy use, solar power wherever possible and
BIG money
> in further research, better public transport, subsidies for using
> smart/efficient appliances flike fluorescent "bulbs", taxes on all
those
> TVs with remotes that sit around on standby, an end to stupid
power tools
> like leaf blowers.
I am for all of
that, but the really big advantages are to be found in better design of
houses (so there is less heating and cooling), better planning so that
there is less travel and when it is required, it is on efficient
trains, not in cars or even in buses.
The supposedly
green Bob Carr is on the wrong track (!) at the moment. There
aren't going to be any railways if you live around here. Instead,
they are going to give us nice new buses in busways... like the ones
that no one is using around Liverpool. They will be run of diesel
power which will belch a lot of particulates and colour the snow and
contribute disproportionately to
global warming by mechanisms that are only now becoming apparent.
And where are
the group housing schemes so that there is not wall to wall houses like
there are around here - each with their own air-conditioning? On
hot days the electricity zone substations have fire hoses playing on
the oil cooling radiators to keep the over-temperature protection from
tripping the transformers offline - such is the love of cool air (says
he enjoying his a/c in the poorly positioned subdivision, designed I
happen to know in three hectic days by an able junior engineer trying
to make the well-known developer the maximum amount of money).
BTW, the water
from the fire hoses is wasted into the drainage system, to add further
insult....
Electricity
prices are to rise but not enough to fund the asset replacement
program, and there is limited investment in conservation or programs of
encouragement.
It is specious
to say we should turn off the light, when the decisions that matter
most are made with no thought about the consequences for the
environment.
Steve
wrote:
Yes,
trees are nice, I love trees and forests, wouldn't mind to live in one.
I'll never forget the overwhelming feeling I had when I was standing in
a redwood forest in California. Awed, humble, feeling one with
the silence.
One
can get the same feeling in the Australian bush, but the ever presence
of the bush fly diminishes the experience.
But,
as Jaques Cousteau has said long ago: "Without population control every
effort to save the planet will be in vain".
Harsh
words, but true. The much revered idea of "Nature" as a
benevolent - to humans that is - force is absolutely erroneous
Stephen Berry
replied to Toby:
I have been
catching the T-Way buses since they started because of the poor
service of private buses to the Smithfield industrial area.The bus I
catch in the morning has 15-20 regular passengers and in
the afternoons 25-30.All T-way buses are compressed natural
gas/electric hybrid vehicles they have no diesel buses.In fact the
entire government bus fleet is almost 60% converted.
Toby
responded:
Ah
that's good!! Now it only produces about two or three as
much CO2
per passenger as the average train.
Peter Macinnis
answered Kevin:
>
Watts = Joules per second
> kW = 1000 Joules per second
> so...multiply by 60 and multiply by 60 and 24 and divide by
> 1000...so....86.4?
Whoops -- use
the free hand to pass me a drink, will you. (1) I knew that and
(2) it looked odd at the time, but no bells rang.
But why divide
by 1000?
7.7 kilowatts =
7.7 kilojoules per second = 7.7 x 1000 x 24 x 60 x 60 joules in 24
hours= 6.65 x108 joules, on
my reckoning or
have I blown it again?
Gotta go, the
competing demands are bubbling over.
Gary-Peter
Dalrymple wrote:
I
am prepared to defer to those with greater understanding, but one thing
has always puzzled me about the CO2
sequestration business.
It
is easy to objectively agree that 'less' CO2
production is better, but subjectively it is difficult to enforce the
voluntary discipline to see how this will be achieved globally with out
some sort of regime of (market?) incentives.
That
said, Forests can be grown on land, but not much of the Earth's surface
is spare (excluding wilderness and nonarable areas)on the otherhand sea
surface is plentiful.
I
have seen a documentry on giant clam farming on the reef/lagoon of a
land scarce pacific island where these filter feeding moluscs were able
to grow from microscopic to chicken sized in 3 to 5 years were able to
deliver kilo sized lumps of highly marketable protein AND several
kilograms of Calcium Carbonate rich shell as a by product.
Anyone
for Solar calcined clamshell concrete for Pacific Island breakwaters
for islands threatened by rising ocean levels and increased intensity
storms?
My
point is that looking beyond the trees in the greenhouse forests, there
may be sea based ways of getting CO2
out of the atmosphere that could be explored without tying up otherwise
scarce agricultural land.
Does
anyone have facts and figures about the above?
I
have this vision of herds of tethered hectare sized 'floaty rafts' of
suspended shellfish and marine vegetation providing employment, food
and financial security for Pacific Islanders through a Carbon trading
economy.
Zero Sum replied:
Foster
the use of plantation timber in building, and manufacture. Let
the plantations harvest the CO2 then us it in things
that sequestrate it.
Peter
Macinnis responded:
My
point is that looking beyond the trees in the greenhouse forests, there
may be sea based ways of getting CO2 out of the atmosphere
that could be explored without tying up otherwise scarce agricultural
land.
Does
anyone have facts and figures about the above?
I
have this vision of herds of tethered hectare sized 'floaty rafts' of
suspended shellfish and marine vegetation providing employment, food
and financial security for Pacific Islanders through a Carbon trading
economy.
**********
I
am still on a frantic treadmill, but there was talk a while back of
seeding the oceans with iron compounds (iron is the limiting factor in
most oceans) to produce an algal bloom that would sink, taking carbon
to the bottom and so effectively out of the atmosphere. I know
Michael Borowitzka in WA was up in arms about it, but I can't see any
of my notes, nor can I find the article that I am sure I wrote on it.
and:
>
Foster the use of plantation timber in building, and manufacture.
> Let the plantations harvest the CO2 then us it in things
that sequestrate it.
This
is where I have to question a few assumptions.
What
is the average life of timber in a house? My guess is that it is probably
less than 50 years if you include all of the timber in a house
and include the houses pulled down for development -- the house
over
the road from me has just been gutted to a timber-free shell, and is
now being rebuilt. The original is 40 years old, some parts were less
than 10 years. That is common around where I live, a social-climbing
area of 4WDs and leaf-blowers, where people like us can
no longer afford to buy in.
Timbers
rot (which means CO2 is produced), they burn, they are replaced
and the timber is disposed of where it will probably rot or be
burned. Some house timber lasts longer, some less, but with a static
Australian population, we will soon see a situation where the new
timbers are largely replacing old timber, which converts in the next
few years to CO2, so there is NO net gain.
Zero Sum
answered:
This is the same
point you were making about forests. It misses the observation
that the more that is sequestrated, even in areas that will reach
an equilibrium, the less there is in the atmosphere. The point
that none of these particular sequestration methodologies achieve a
huge gain is true but if they are all followed much would be
gained. Essentially we have (and are) releasing CO2 into the
atmosphere from coal, oil and levelled forrests. It will have to
be (and will be by natural processes) sequestrated
somewhere. Any 'small' thing may be that which tips the balance.
Toby
Fiander posted:
Structural
timber from older house frames is often reused. The oregon from
the houses in the next street built in about 1960 was recycled
because it had a high value. This area is to become ugly slums...
err, sorry, I meant units and hovel houses... no, ummm, sorry again, I
meant townhouses.
The
current fashion of framing in pine timber will probably mean that it
will be thrown away when the house is demolished. Timber cladding
is usually discarded to landfill, which might be OK, if it was
deep enough to form peat and then coal....
I
thought that the fate of timber was the subject of study by the
CSIRO. I have not read any outcome - perhaps it was found to be
unfavourable or more likely the results were not published because the
Building Division has been decimated. Thanks again to
Captain Smirk and his willing servant, Geoff Garrett.
Anthony Morton
commented:
>
Essentially we
> have (and are) releasing CO2 into the atmosphere from
coal, oil and
> levelled forrests. It will have to be (and will be by natural
> processes)
> sequestrated somewhere. Any 'small' thing may be that which
tips the
> balance.
And of course
the real problem is the enormous release of CO2 from buried
fossil fuel. Does anyone know offhand how many hectares of
Carboniferous forest goes into each litre of refined petroleum?
Peter Macinnis
responded to Zero Sum:
No, it doesn't
miss that point at all. Every little will help, but forests won't
get you all that far. They won't even keep up with CO2 generated to make
electricity, as the back-of-the-envelope figures that follow will show.
Of course, I could shortcut the whole issue by pointing out that
virtually all the suitable land for planting already has old-growth
forest on it, which will be clear-felled and trashed or wood-chipped,
but I won't argue that one -- I want to look at the reasons why carbon
credits are a scam.
First, a few
facts: it is worth looking at how we each generate carbon dioxide.
Boiling the water in an electric jug for a cup of coffee produces half
a litre of carbon dioxide, about a gram of the gas. If we take other
activities in cups of coffee, we find that cooking a full breakfast
equals 230 cups of coffee, running a fully loaded dishwasher is 330
cups, running a modern refrigerator freezer for a day is 700 cups,
leaving a computer on standby for 24 hours is 360 cups, driving a
petrol car 30 km to work generates carbon dioxide equal to 4200 cups of
coffee (if you ride a bus the same distance, your share of the cost is
equal to 1770 cups of coffee), while if we buy a takeaway lunch, that
will typically generate the equivalent of 1000 cups of coffee.
One cup of
coffee releases a gram of CO2, about a quarter of
a gram of carbon (the element) into the atmosphere -- when we
factor in growing, transport, processing, packing etc., it gets much
worse than that, but driving a car 30 km puts a bit more than one
kilogram of carbon into the air.
Now when this
kilo of carbon (in the form of CO2) is converted to
wood (which we can assume to be CH2O) that will be about
2.5 kg of dry weight wood (probably 3 kg of live wood, but we will go
with the low figure) that needs to be grown and stored EVERY DAY to
cover the carbon cost of DRIVING the car only -- the costs of
manufacture, maintenance, fuel transport, road upkeep and much more
will add to that. You need to grow and sequestrate about 250
grams of wood to cover the computer you left on standby, and my coffee
consumption demands about 400 grams of wood each day.
Keep going down
that line, and you will see that we each need to grow several hundred
kg of wood every day, just to cover the extra atmospheric CO2 our life style
generated today -- and don't lose sight of the catch that there are
termites in your floorboards, converting timber back to CO2, dry rot in your
sills is doing the same to the sills. The timber in your home is
NOT sequestrated, it is sitting idle for a bit, some of it.
Podargus pointed
out this morning that forests are not completely burned out, that they
grow back: this is true, but in pine forests, for example, all the
trees die, and in dry sclerophyll, much of the standing fuel is burned,
while large amounts of other vegetation dies: leaves fall and go into
the rot cycle that takes them back to CO2. Pine forests
are favoured by the get-rich-quick schemes.
Walk through the
bush and see how many gum trees are hollow up the centre, where fire
has got in, and converted the heartwood to CO2. THIS is why the
emperor has no clothes -- fire consumes most of the "sequestrated" wood
in the forest, leaving a shell of live wood.
It is a classic
three-card trick. The Libs fell for it, Labor has fallen for it,
the Greens have fallen for it, but it simply does not work. The Libs
may have realised that it doesn't work, but more likely, they found a
lack of suckers willing to put money into what is, to all intents and
purposes, a scam.
Let us assume
that you only need 100 kg of wood a day to cover all your energy use --
a vast underestimate, I suspect, but we will go with that round
figure. You need to store, in a rot-free environment, 36.5 tonnes
of timber each year. That is, assuming a VERY dense timber, about
40 cubic metres of timber, which will overfill a large room in your
house. If there are three of you, that is three large rooms,
stacked to the ceiling, each year -- or you can cover your entire
suburban block with 6 cm of timber each year, but you need to keep it
dry and free of rot . . . or if there are three of you, you will need
about 18 cm of timber each year.
And just what IS
40 metres of timber per year? If I am right in reading http://www.teagasc.ie/publications/forestry/thinning.htm, it is the average
annual yield from a one-hectare stand of Sitka spruce, over 40
years. 200,000 square kilometres of forest, about ten Kakadu
National parks-worth of land. Plus the forest needed to cover the
storage costs, and the on-costs of managing, cutting and moving all
that timber to storage.
Reading http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hts/tsr1/sopi/41/41Pi0004.htm, I am not sure that
this figure is entirely reliable. The problem is that many industry
sources show what can be harvested rather than annual productivity, but http://www.teriin.org/climate/forestry.htm says "The current
productivity of the forests is very poor and ranges between 0.7 and 1.5 cubic
metres per hectare per year as against the world average of 2.1 cubic
metres per hectare per year."
Oh dear -- looks
like we need 20 hectares of forest each, just to sustain our
fuel-hungry lifestyles. Well, that's OK, then -- we have about 40
hectares per person in Australia. No, YOU can have YOUR forest in
the Lake Eyre basin, I'm having MINE in FNQ, right on the coast . . .
Now let's hope
the USA doesn't want us to shoulder 10% of their carbon burden as
well! If that happens, we'll be all up a gum tree, without a
paddle, on my figures. E&OE, but I think the maths are right this
time. Near enough for government work, anyhow.
If you don't
agree with me, that's fine. By all means, get in a lather about
it, get cranky, foam away, so that in five or ten years when people realise
the truth, you will still recall that I was right all along, way back
in 2004 -- well, in 2000, actually, but who's counting a few
years? Trust me -- I used to be a fraud investigator until it got
too risky, but I still have the nose for a con.
The emperor not
only has no clothes, he appears to have been flayed alive . . . now all
you have to do is sniff a bit harder.
Podargus
replied to Peter:
>
is now being rebuilt. The original is 40 years old, some parts were
> less than 10 years. That is common around where I live, a
> social-climbing area of 4WDs and leaf-blowers, where people like us
> can no longer afford to buy in.
Forty
years ago or thereabout when I was in the construction industry forty
years was considered the life of a building. This means the State
Office Block (don't know what it is now) known then as the 'Black
Stump', Australia Square, Pearl Assurance, Caltex House, Reserve Bank,
IBM building and a few I can't remember are reaching the end of their
useful life, and will need
refurbishment???.
>
Timbers rot (which means CO2 is produced), they burn, they are
> replaced and the timber is disposed of where it will probably rot
or
> be burned. Some house timber lasts longer, some less, but with a
> static Australian population, we will soon see a situation where
the
> new timbers are largely replacing old timber, which converts in the
> next few years to CO2, so there is NO net gain.
It
is interesting to note that the Opera House is either in the process or
has just had a needed refurbishment.
One
of the benefits of timber is that it can be recycled reasonably easily,
and some is. If say, a house is demolished the structural timber
is quite easily reused. However a trip to any tip on any day will
show a large amount of timber dumped to become as Peter says part of
the revolving CO2
door.
I
might smugly point out that the extensions to my banana growers cottage
were done with timber which came from an eighty year old house.
This timber is now 110 years old.
and
to Toby:
>
Structural timber from older house frames is often reused. The
> oregon from the houses in the next street built in about 1960 was
> recycled because it had a high value. This area is to become
> ugly slums... err, sorry, I meant units and hovel houses... no,
> ummm, sorry again, I meant townhouses.
Workmens
houses-->slums-->yuppies!?
>
The current fashion of framing in pine timber will probably mean
> that it will be thrown away when the house is demolished.
In
pedantic mode. Oregon of course is a particular pine.
Zero Sum posted:
On Tue, 13 Jan
2004 15:48, Peter Macinnis wrote:
>
The emperor not only has no clothes, he appears to have been flayed
> alive . . . now all you have to do is sniff a bit harder.
No, Peter, it is
yours that are missing. I haven;t disagreed with anything that
you said except the implied conclusion that it is useless to do
anything.
This problem
will not be solved with one path of action. It requires lots of
"tiny bits".
In fact the
emporer is not naked, he has this tiny almost useless scap of cloth
from forrest sequestration, but now if he has enough scraps from
multitudinous methods then he will be fully clothrd (but probably
somewhat tatty).
A disparaging
attitude acerbates the problem. You are quite correct but not
constructive.
Toby
Fiander commented:
>
In pedantic mode. Oregon of course is a particular pine.
green
Pinus radiata
(F5
as used in most house frames) => crap
Podargus noted:
>
<snip>
> > And of course the real problem is the enormous release of CO2
from
> > buried fossil fuel. Does anyone know offhand how many
hectares of
> > Carboniferous forest goes into each litre of refined
petroleum?
Not much.
Perhaps the question should be rephrased for coal/electricity.
>
As far as I know (which is not too much ) no one has a clue.
> My understanding - such as it is - indicates that natural
petroleum may
> well originate from non biological sources:
This idea is
intriging but has still to find much acceptance.
Peter
Macinnis responded to Zero Sum:
>
On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 15:48, Peter Macinnis wrote:
> > The emperor not only has no
clothes, he appears to have been flayed
> > alive . . . now all you have to do is sniff a bit harder.
>
> No, Peter, it is yours that are missing. I haven;t disagreed
with anything
> that you said except the implied conclusion that it is useless to
do anything.
I
didn't imply that, or if I did, I did not intend to do so, and withdraw
any such implication retrospectively.
>
This problem will not be solved with one path of action. It
requires lots
> of "tiny bits".
I
think you have missed my targeting -- I have no problem with growing
trees, but I am furious at the idiots who say we don't need to sign
Kyoto, we will just grow trees and do bugger-all.
>
In fact the emporer is not naked, he has this tiny almost useless scap
of
> cloth from forrest sequestration, but now if he has enough scraps
from
> multitudinous methods then he will be fully clothrd (but probably
somewhat
> tatty).
>
A disparaging attitude acerbates the problem. You are quite
correct but
> not constructive.
So
far as the "grow trees and all will be sweet" brigade, it is true that
I am happy to be destructive. It is, as we both agree, AN answer,
but they want us to believe it is THE answer. I have no qualms at
disparaging head-in-the-sand Pollyannaism. In time, they may
realise that when your head is in the sand, you make an easy target :-)
The
whole notion of greenhouse credits and Oz growing trees to save the
world is spurious. Their problem is that real solutions will be
unpopular, so the sooner we all start realising that, and explaining it
to Joe Public, the better.
We
need to learn to live on 2 kilowatts. THEN we may be able to do
some real good with alternative energy and tree planting. Right
now, it is an impossible dream.
and
to Podargus:
>
I might smugly point out that the extensions to my banana growers
cottage
> were done with timber which came from an eighty year old house.
This timber
> is now 110 years old.
And
I have a garden table and benches for ten made from the surviving
untermited timbers of a 1920s garage that I demolished in the 1970s,
but they are almost at the end of their life, and will be stripped of
the planks, with the older timber going out in the next year or so.
Average
life of timber in that garage was decidedly less than 40 years, given
the amount that had gone to the termites by the time we moved in.
Sadly,
I suspect recyclers are a tiny minority . . .
Podargus
answered Gary-Peter Dalrymple:
>
I have seen a documentry on giant clam farming on the reef/lagoon of a
land scarce pacific island where these filter feeding moluscs were able
to
grow from microscopic to chicken sized in 3 to 5 years were able to
deliver
kilo sized lumps of highly marketable protein AND several kilograms of
Calcium Carbonate rich shell as a by product.
Some(?) clams
also have symbiotic dinoflagelates IIRC.
>
Anyone for Solar calcined clamshell concrete for Pacific Island
breakwaters for islands threatened by rising ocean levels and increased
intensity storms?
However you get
your cement for the concrete you will release the CO2.
>
> My point is that looking beyond the trees in the greenhouse
forests, there
may be sea based ways of getting CO2 out of the atmosphere
that could be
explored without tying up otherwise scarce agricultural land.
>
> Does anyone have facts and figures about the above?
My understanding
is that the rising temperature and acidity will release more CO2 from dissolving
Calcium carbonate which will lead to...........
>
I have this vision of herds of tethered hectare sized 'floaty rafts' of
suspended shellfish and marine vegetation providing employment, food and
financial security for Pacific Islanders through a Carbon trading
economy.
If these
islanders are to do their thing on a reef system it could prove
interesting. Coral reefs by definition do not have any spare
nutrients. This is why the water is so clear. If one starts
shipping nutrients away then the reef will become depauperate.
Adding nutrients is also fraught with danger. The ocean in
general is very low in nutrients. The rich fisheries are mainly
on upwellings, which Australia does not have, for this reason we have
no real fishing industry. Failing that, nutrient export from the
land, as say on the east coast of USA helps. Iron rich dust
blowing off the land is not bad either.
Aquaculture has
made great strides in recent years. I think I am correct in
saying that most of the prawns eaten are now from prawn farms.
But like all forms of farming there are problems.
and:
> > In pedantic mode.
Oregon of course is a particular pine.
>
> green Pinus radiata
> (F5 as used in most house frames) => crap
Our friends from
the Land of the Long White Cloud have to send us something
besides excess
people.
and:
>
Sadly, I suspect recyclers are a tiny minority . . .
>
> peter
Sadly I
agree.....
Paul
Williams answered:
From:
"Peter Macinnis"
Sent:
Tuesday, January 13, 2004 3:32 PM
<snip>
>
The whole notion of greenhouse credits and Oz growing trees to save
> the world is spurious. Their problem is that real solutions
will be
> unpopular, so the sooner we all start realising that, and
explaining
> it to Joe Public, the better.
>
I
agree that planting trees for the stated purpose is spurious.
Another
spurious idea formerly shouted out (by well meaning belief driven
people) was that forests are "the lungs of the world".
Elementary
understanding of ecosystems called the lie here.
The
"real solutions" are unknown by anyone.
"Real
solutions" would need deep knowledge of both astrophysics (solar cycles
are merely one of the parameters we need to understand) and
geophysics - which we may perhaps (in the future) have a better handle
on.
What
we continue to have is rhetoric.
This
is generally culturally based.
There
is some consensus on certain issues.
This
consensus (involving scientists much cleverer than me) proves
nothing.
The
reason is that consensus regarding such an almost infinitely complex
combination of diciplines cannot be trusted.
Complexity
breeds erroneous ideas.
>
We need to learn to live on 2 kilowatts. THEN we may be able to do
> some real good with alternative energy and tree planting.
Right now,
> it is an impossible dream.
This
is your understanding.
I
think that we can be fooled easily into belief systems.
One
of the reasons why I follow science (with some passion) is that through
science, beliefs can (hopefully) be slowly extinguished.
Gerald Cairnes
wrote:
I believe
Earthbeat a couple of weeks or so back did a segment on just this and the personage
being interviewed quote figures for hectares = coal. My memory is vague on
the detail but I meant to chase up the transcript and forgot. Check it out.
and:
The main
building we built ourselves at Wyee NSW in the early 70's was
substantially recycled Jarrah from 2 of the old Bradfield Park Migrant
Centre buildings. We built that building of 39' x 121' with a six car
drive through garage and three self contained flats completely services
for about $22,000 including floor coverings!!
We got the 2
buildings from the demolishing contractor for $800 which included brick
foundation piers, all roofing, framing and flooring. We will never see
a deal as good as that again. This included delivery to Wyee on three
overloaded trucks which took the Wisemans Ferry road to avoid the weigh
bridge at Berowra. We got that deal because the contractor was fast
running out of time to clear the site before penalties applied.
Added to this we
felled and milled 8 large Blackbutt trees on a property near the
Entrance NSW, where the road was to be widened - pity but that made
some very tough framing, great tensile strength, and the flitches which
would normally be burned were planed down for beautiful ship-lap wall
paneling. By the way they were going to cut those trees up and burn
them!
All up I
estimated that there was about 35 tonnes of timber in the building. If
it gets pulled down I am sure that much of the timber will be used
again. I still have two 8" x 2.5" x 26'+ planks left which we brought
with us and they are still in excellent condition after 20 years in
storage. Of 4 other such planks pressed into roofing duty here in Qld
they too are in excellent condition. The original roof trusses were of
8" x 5" hardwood beams with a king pin and sandwiched 8" x 2" cross
members, took 5 men to lift one. I think they should be around for a
while yet.
I think if the
timber is quality hardwood well protected from the weather and
miniature creatures it should last a lot longer than 50 years. One word
of warning though, that timber was so hard that EVERY nail hole had to
be pre drilled and oiled before it could be nailed - PHEW, broken
drills etc. etc! Some of the initial attempts at nailing ceiling joists
left them looking like an octopus with a the bent nails. :-)) All the
wall panels were bolted together with 1/2" bolts much easier and
stronger than nailing, not surprising that
the building inspector at the end looked thoughtfully and remarked
"..if ever a cyclone blows this building away you won't be lonely, the
rest of the Shire will be there too!".
There was an
article years ago in NS entitled "Grow a tree for chemicals", I think
that is the use to which softwood ought to be put, I would never build
with softwood, most of it is crap.
All of that is
history and sadly they ran the Freeway/Gas and Petrol Pipelines through
the place and destroyed a dream.
Chris
Forbes-Ewan posted:
It's
pretty straightforward--if rate of energy consumption by people in
developed nations is 7.5 kW, this is 7.5 kJ/sec
=
7.5 x 3,600 kJ/hour
=
27,000 x 24 kJ/day
=
648,000 kJ/day
=
648 MJ/day
The
mean physiological energy expenditure of an adult human is about 10
MJ/day. This was the energy requirement of Paleolithic people (several
tens of thousands of years ago), give or take a few MJ for cooking food
after fire was harnessed.
Apparently,
people in developed nations now use about 648/10 =~65 times their
physiological energy expenditure in non-physiological ways.
Kinda
makes you sit up and take notice, dunnit!
Peter Macinnis
responded:
At 21:16
13/01/04 +1100, Forbzy wrote:
>You
know, I'm glad you asked that question :-)
>
>See the article from Nature below my signature block.
I had forgotten
that (I think I said I was frazzled this week) -- here is my take on
the same issue fir a reliable Australian encyclopaedia, with a bit more
detail than the 'Nature' report -- I had the advantage of extra info
from my mates at the American Geophysical Union, and my account is
closely based on their release, which is why it had slipped my mind --
I had
the paper from the AGU, but you can download it from
http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/downloadok.html
Doing 98 tons to
the gallon, 1003
(October 2003)
How much
vegetation was needed to generate the fuel in your tank? According to a
report to be published next month, making one US gallon (3.785 liters)
of gasoline or petrol requires a staggering 98 tons of prehistoric,
buried plant material. The study, conducted at the University of Utah,
will be published in the November issue of the journal Climatic Change,
and we got advance information
from ecologist Jeff Dukes, who says that this figure is equivalent to
loading 40 acres worth of wheat, stalks, roots and all, into the tank
of your car or SUV every 20 miles''. For metric readers, that is 16
hectares every 30 kilometers, near enough.
That is how much
ancient plant matter had to be buried millions of years ago and
converted by pressure, heat and time into oil to produce one gallon of
gas, Dukes concluded. He also calculated that the amount of fossil fuel
burned in a single year, 1997, that was used in the study, totals 97
million billion pounds of carbon, which is equivalent to more than 400
times ''all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year,''
including vast amounts of microscopic plant life in the oceans. That is
about 44 x 1012 tons, 44 teratons of
vegetation.
Every day,
people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plant matter
that grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole year,
he says. In another calculation, Dukes determined that the amount of
plants that went into the fossil fuels we burned since the Industrial
Revolution began [which he sets at 1751], is equal to all the plants
grown on Earth over 13,300 years.
Explaining why
he conducted the study, Dukes writes: ''Fossil fuel consumption is
widely recognized as unsustainable. However, there has been no attempt
to calculate the amount of energy that was required to generate fossil
fuels (one way to quantify the 'unsustainability' of societal energy
use).''
The study is
titled ''Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of Ancient Solar
Energy.'' In it, Dukes conducted numerous calculations to determine how
much plant matter buried millions of years ago was required to produce
the oil, natural gas and coal consumed by modern society, which obtains
83% of its energy needs from fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels
developed from ancient deposits of organic material, and thus can be
thought of as a vast store of solar energy that was converted into
plant matter by photosynthesis, he explains. Using published
biological, geochemical and industrial data, he estimates the amount of
carbon photosynthetically fixed and stored by ancient plants that was
required to form the coal, oil and gas that we are burning today.
How the
calculations were done
To determine how
much ancient plant matter it took to eventually produce modern fossil
fuels, Dukes calculated how much of the carbon in the original
vegetation was lost during each stage of the multiple-step processes
that create oil, gas and coal. He looked at the proportion of fossil
fuel reserves derived from different ancient environments: coal that
formed when ancient plants rotted in peat swamps; oil from tiny
floating plants called phytoplankton that were deposited on ancient
seafloors, river deltas and lakebeds; and natural gas from those and
other prehistoric environments. Then he examined the efficiency at
which prehistoric plants were converted by heat, pressure and time into
peat or other carbon-rich sediments.
Next, Dukes
analyzed the efficiency with which carbon-rich sediments were converted
to coal, oil and natural gas. Then he studied the efficiency of
extracting such deposits. During each of the above steps, he based his
calculations on previously published studies. The calculations showed
that roughly one-eleventh of the carbon in the plants deposited in peat
bogs
ends up as coal,
and that only about one eleven-thousandth (he actually quotes
one-10,750th, but figures like this can never be exact) of the carbon
in plants deposited on ancient seafloors, deltas and lakebeds ends up
as oil and natural gas.
Dukes then used
these recovery factors to estimate how much ancient plant matter was
needed to produce a given amount of fossil fuel. Dukes considers his
calculations good estimates based on available data, but says that
because fossil fuels were formed under a wide range of environmental
conditions, each estimate is subject to a wide range of uncertainty.
What about
modern plant biomass?
Unlike the
inefficiency of converting ancient plants to oil, natural gas and coal,
modern plant biomass can provide energy more efficiently, either by
burning it or converting into fuels like ethanol. So Dukes analyzed how
much modern plant matter it would take to replace society's current
consumption of fossil fuels.
He began with a
United Nations estimate that the total energy content of all coal, oil
and natural gas used worldwide in 1997 equalled 315,271 million billion
joules (the joule is the standard metric unit of energy).
He divided that
by the typical value of heat produced when wood is burned: 20,000
joules per gram of dry wood. The result is that fossil fuel consumption
in 1997 equalled the energy in 15.8 trillion kilograms of wood.
Dukes multiplied
that by 45%, the proportion of carbon in plant material, to calculate
that fossil fuel consumption in 1997 was equivalent to the energy in
7.1 trillion kilograms of carbon in plant matter.
Studies have
estimated that all land plants today contain 56.4 trillion kilograms of
carbon, but only 56% of that is above ground and could be harvested. So
excluding roots, land plants thus contain 56% times 56.4, or 31.6
trillion kilograms of carbon.
Dukes then
divided the 1997 fossil fuel use equivalent of 7.1 trillion kilograms
of carbon in plant matter by 31.6 trillion kilograms now available in
plants. He found we would need to harvest 22% of all land plants just
to equal the fossil fuel energy used in 1997, about a 50% increase over
the amount of plants now removed or paved over each year.
Paul
Williams wrote:
>
Does anyone know offhand how many hectares of
> Carboniferous forest goes into each litre of refined petroleum?
>
> Tony M.
Chris
wrote:
You
know, I'm glad you asked that question :-)
See
the article from Nature below my signature block.
-
Chris Forbes-Ewan
>From
the artilcle cited:
"When
you start multiplying uncertainties the numbers start to become
meaningless."
-
Sandra Neuzil of the US Geological Survey..
Are
we really talking science here - or are we emeshed in philosophy?
Peter Macinnis
responded:
>From
the artilcle cited:
>"When you start multiplying uncertainties the numbers start to
become
>meaningless."
>- Sandra Neuzil of the US Geological Survey..
>
>Are we really talking science here - or are we emeshed in
philosophy?
No, we are
playing an old journalistic game -- ring somebody likely to be
antagonistic, and get a quote. and so foster an apperance of
controversy. Jeff Dukes is fairly good at promoting himself -- with
reason, IMHO, as I have written about him before -- and that means
there will always be a few who will knee-jerk a snappy response, or
snap a knee-jerk response.
It isn't a ploy
that I use, because I am not writing "news" in quite the same way.
Paul
Williams replied:
>
At 21:16 13/01/04 +1100, Forbzy wrote:
>
> >You know, I'm glad you asked that question :-)
> >
> >See the article from Nature below my signature block.
>
> I had forgotten that (I think I said I was frazzled this week) --
here is
> my take on the same issue fir a reliable Australian encyclopaedia,
with a
> bit more detail than the 'Nature' report -- I had the advantage of
extra
> info from my mates at the American Geophysical Union, and my
account is
> closely based on their release, which is why it had slipped my
mind -- I
> had the paper from the AGU, but you can download it from
> http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/downloadok.html
>
Bollocks!
There
are people who want to change the world for the good.
This
is a fine ambition to have.
Many
of these people are driven by philosophy - not evidence based reality.
One
can easily see this article for the empty rhetoric it is - unless one
is driven by similar laudable but misguided philosophies.
Steve wrote:
When we came to
Australia some 30 plus years ago we fell in love and bought a timber
weather board house built in about 1900. Everyone asked us: "When ae
you going to pull it down?"!!
Coming from
Europe and loving old houses we had it checked out - termites , dry rot
etc - and given the all clear. So we renovated and lived in it. All we
paid was......$ 4.800!!, incl. the land So all the timbers are
now more than 100 years old and still going strong. But, as the house
was built by a builder for himself, he used no shortcuts! Even all the original
weather boards are still there, except on a later added extension. (and
the floor boards of the balconies) The house is still
there and lived in. BTW we sold it 15 years later for $ 48.000.!
Ray
commented:
Of
sequestered CO2, houses and scarce arable land: -a lot of prime
agricultural land is buried under concrete and bitumen.
and
Isn't
the source of petroleum oceanic floor slime, and coal derived from
forests?
Peter Macinnis
wrote:
>
Of sequestered CO2, houses and scarce arable land:
> -a lot of prime agricultural land is buried under concrete and
bitumen.
Well, you
wouldn't want us building in a desert, would you, Ray? This is a
problem everywhere: cities and towns are founded near a water supply
and where there is trade -- and that means agriculture.
(A side issue:
Bam in Iran has extensive groves of citrus and dates, watered by
qanats, ancient tunnels that slide into nearby hills, under the water
table, and draw water to the city. I regard Bam as a breaker of
the above "rule", but I wondered what happened to the qanats in the
earthquakes. If the qanats have gone, the whole town has had it. http://www.fao.org/reliefoperations/appeals2004/irn_en.htmlsays the qanats are
stuffed. Now back to the main issue.)
I have been
trying to work out how much carbon would be tied up in a mature forest.
The source I cited yesterday
(http://www.teagasc.ie/publications/forestry/thinning.htm) sees a managed and
thinned Sitka spruce forest having 550 cubic metres per hectare after
40 years. That would be around 40 tonnes/hectare, call it 60 to allow
for soil organic matter, trash etc. In reality, the rest of the
thinnings cannot be counted, as much of it will have rotted or burned
by then, so that net productivity is around 1.5 tonnes/hectare/year.
A few scribbles
on an envelope suggest that rainforests may do better than that by an
order of magnitude, so why aren't we doing more about the
rainforests? Let us not forget the little-known fact that
rainforest is quite good at invading and reclaiming its margins --
imagine what they could do with help!
Useful reference
on sequestration:
http://www.cla.org.uk/climatechange/annex.htm -- depending on the
species, productivity lies between 7.3 and 2.4 tonnes/hectare per
annum, counting all organic products. That equates to 5-15 hectares per
Australian to retrieve ALL carbon dioxide generated on our behalf -- IF
AND ONLY IF my estimate of 100 kg of wood per day stands up as either
accurate or conservative as a counter to our societal and personal
energy use. Sitka spruce would need 24 hectares per Australian,
out of our personal share of 38 hectares.
If we DID plant
spruce on that scale, what happens when a wildfire gets away?
Anybody from Canberra care to comment?
As I said to
somebody off-list, trees are a good thing, because they are a start,
and they help counter salinity, but they have a snowball's chance in
hell of solving the WHOLE problem, as our government would have us
believe. On the other hand, given enough snowballs, the fires of
hell may be damped, and a few non-wet Tory "economic rationalists"
(i.e., willing and venal tools of fat greedy bastards) may be dampened
as well.
Planting trees
helps, but it is no solution. Emissions trading based on tree
plantations is a giant con.
Sooner or later,
people will realise this -- get in now and avoid the rush.
Paul Williams posted:
>
Isn't the source of petroleum oceanic floor slime, and coal derived from
> forests?
Fellow,
Royal Society (London)
Member, National Academy of Sciences (US)
Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Member, American Philosophical Society
Fellow, American Geophysical Union
Honorary Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge
Gold Medal, Royal Astronomical Society (UK)
Doctor of Science, Cambridge University
Honorary M.A. Harvard University
Sandie Stockwell
responded:
I've been
reading your emails with interest, especially the one that gave the
gasresources.net url
I read the
article and my memory was prompted - I knew I'd read about some
scientist who'd worked in many fields coming up with a theory of life
below the surface of the earth ... so I read the other urls and there
was his name 'Thomas Gold' so I googled (a new verb, extremely useful
that i've learned from this list) it and this is what came up....
http://www.gasresources.net/Gold_plagiarism(complaints).htm
http://www.gasresources.net/Plagiarism(Overview).htm
hmm
I'll leave his
book on my amazon wishlist for the moment
Chris
Forbes-Ewan wrote:
>
Bollocks!
> There are people who want to change the world for the good.
> This is a fine ambition to have.
> Many of these people are driven by philosophy - not evidence
> based reality.
>
> One can easily see this article for the empty rhetoric it is -
> unless one is driven by similar laudable but misguided
> philosophies.
>
> Paul
Um
... is this a considered opinion, or an ill-considered knee-jerk
reaction?
I
don't know a lot about Jeff Dukes, but from what Peter Macinnis says,
it might be unwise to dismiss him unless you have good reasons (such as
references from reputable journals) to do so.
Dukes'
paper was in Nature. How often have you been quoted in Nature, Paul?
I
suspect that an appropriate answer to that question is 'about as often
as I have' (i.e. never).
What
makes you so you so sure that Dukes' opinion is "bollocks"?
Paul Williams
answered:
>
Um ... is this a considered opinion, or an ill-considered knee-jerk
> reaction?
If you read the
literature, you may discern some semblance of logical structure backing
my opinion.
>
I don't know a lot about Jeff Dukes, but from what Peter Macinnis says,
it
> might be unwise to dismiss him unless you have good reasons (such
as
> references from reputable journals) to do so.
All the links I
have posted on this are relevant to Dukes' paper.
Basically - if
one starts with a false (not evidence based) premise, cascades of
nonsense will logically follow.
>
Dukes' paper was in Nature. How often have you been quoted in Nature,
Paul?
Ad hominen
attacks I usually ignore (I realise that you didn't really mean this)
My academic
standing has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Dukes' paper is
accurate or not.
It has nothing
to do with my considered opinion which is backed by evidence.
>
I suspect that an appropriate answer to that question is 'about as
often as
> I have' (i.e. never).
Of course.
This gets us
nowhere in the search for truth though.
>
What makes you so you so sure that Dukes' opinion is "bollocks"?
Bollocks is (I
believe) a very ancient term for a surfeit of priests.
I use "priests"
in a broad sense of people shouting from the heavens that if we don't
get our act together (according to their beliefs) all will be doom and
gloom - death for the planet.
People may
believe whatever they want.
My posts to this
list are (as much as I'm capable of) as accurate as a mere fragile
human can make possible.
I do not rely on
consensus.
I do rely on
others actually reading the literature and finding their own
understanding before they comment.
The difficulty
we all face is an overload of information.
My way through
this overload is to force myself to think - no matter what.
Steve
posted:
I
found in Environmental News Network this very interesting URL.
Dubya
c.s. don't give a damn. Lucky that there are courts that try to stand
up against this madness
Steve
"May
your life be a very interesting one"
Court
overturns Bush air conditioner standards - A federal appeals court
overturned a Bush administration decision to weaken energy-efficiency
standards for new air conditioners, a move which could save American
consumers $20 billion and avoid the need for up to 200 new electricity
plants by 2030.
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-01-14/s_12022.asp
PS
I found another one!! (lost the URL, but this seems sufficient to me)
To
Avoid Fuel Limits, Subaru Is Turning a Sedan Into a Truck
By
DANNY HAKIM
Subaru
is tweaking the Outback sedan and wagon to meet the specifications of a
light truck in order to avoid tougher fuel
economy and air pollution standards.
Paul Williams
wrote:
From: "Peter
Macinnis"
Sent: Thursday,
January 15, 2004 7:22 AM
Subject: Re: The
greenhouse emissions trading farce unravels
>
From: "Paul Williams"
>
> > All the links I have posted on this are relevant to Dukes'
paper.
> > Basically - if one starts with a false (not evidence based)
premise,
> > cascades of nonsense will logically follow.
>
> What is the false premise, and can you offer a couple of examples
of
> the nonsense it generated?
>
> In point form will do . . .
>
The false
premise that all natural petroleum reserves have a biological origin.
Part of an
interview with Thomas Gold:
[Were there
precedents for your idea that deep hydrocarbons are a normal fact of
planetary geology?]
"In the '60s,
Sir Robert Robinson [a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and president of
Britain's Royal Society] said that petroleum looks like a primordial
hydrocarbon to which biological products have been added."
[And what was
the response?]
"The response
was that I quoted his remark in many of my papers. But the profession
of petroleum geology did not pick it up. Mendeleyev [the Russian
chemist who developed the periodic table] in the 1870s had said much
the same thing, but Robinson had done a more modern analysis of oil and
had come to the same conclusion. And, in fact, the Russians have in the
last 20 years done an even more precise analysis that completely proves
the point. The fact that Mendeleyev was in favor of a primordial origin
of petroleum had a great effect - you see, to most Russians, Mendeleyev
was the greatest scientist that Russia ever had."
- Thomas Gold
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold_pr.html
Gold had also
read much literature from the former Soviet Union (he reads Russian).
He is a little
reticent in giving credit to others (as Sandy pointed out)
I won't quote
Gold again for this reason. One other reason too - it has been reported
that Gold now thinks that coal is also formed from abiogenic origins -
this is patently ridiculous.
The modern
Russian-Ukrainian theory of abiotic hydrocarbon origins:
"In 1951, the
Russian geologist Nikolai Kudryavtsev enunciated what has become the
modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins, a
fundamental tenet of which is that natural petroleum is a primordial,
abiotic material, erupted from great depth. Kudryavtsev was soon joined
by many prominent Russian geologists, geochemists, geophysicists, and
petroleum engineers who together developed the extensive body of
knowledge which now forms modern petroleum science."
"Modern
petroleum science has heretofore been a geologists' theory, supported
by many observations, drawn into a comprehensive pattern, and argued by
persuasion. By contrast, a physicist's theory uses only a minimum of
data, applies fundamental physical laws, using the formalism of
mathematics, and argues by compulsion. The theoretical results here reported, use only
the fundamental laws of physics and thermodynamics, and establish the
provenance of modern petroleum science in the rigorous mainstream of
modern physics and chemistry. The experimental results here reported,
confirm unequivocally those theoretical conclusions, which may now be
taken as foundations of the modern theory of deep, abiotic petroleum
origins."
http://www.gasresources.net/AlkaneGenesis.htm
There appears to
be no argument against the physics used in this paper.
There is much
western agument about how much natural petroleum reserves result from
this mechanism. The western viewpoint is - basically, very little.
Many oilfields
around the world are being replenished. Many fields which should, by
the most optimistic predictions of geologists, have run out by now,
continue to produce.
This is not
evidence for abiogenic hydrocarbons upwelling from depth but one has
the suspicion that this may be the case.
The North Sea
oilfields were supposed to peak in the early 1980s - they haven't
peaked yet.
We were supposed
to run out of oil by the year 2000 at the latest.
There are more
reserves of oil now than there ever have been.
This is not to
say that hydrocarbon resources are infinite - of course they are not.
It is to say
that many scream from the rooftops - doom and gloom - self righteous
attitudes are encouraged and everyone gets a (sickening to me) warm and
cosy feeling inside when they point out the shortcomings of others.
Regarding Dukes'
paper:
I like his style.
He has done a
good job of showing how much energy we use unsustainably in the long
term.
The reason why
it is nonsense is that there is much evidence to show that natural
petroleum reserves are not biologically based.
He asserts that
they are.
If one's premise
is false, there is no doubt that cascades of nonsense will follow.
If my premise is
false, all I've written is mere hot air and should be deleted.
Time will show -
but not in my lifetime. :-)
Peter
Macinnis replied:
>
The false premise that all natural petroleum reserves have a biological
> origin.
>
> Part of an interview with Thomas Gold:
Ah,
yes, now that's a different matter -- you are espousing a new paradigm
which has something going for it. I have met and interviewed him,
had dinner with him and watched his reaction as a Fat-o-gram being
delivered to the next table, and co-chaired a lecture by him.
Here
is something from a reliable Australian encyclopedia that often seems
to have chapter and verse on stuff like this -- I agree with the
author, and would not commit myself to the new paradigm just yet, while
conceding that the old one has some gaping rips in its fabric.
****************
According
to standard wisdom, all of the oil and coal that we find in the earth
is organic, and so must have originated with organisms. This is
testable in some cases: we can certainly find plenty of fossils in
coal, confirming that coal was formed when dead plant and occasional
animal matter was buried in a swamp under the right conditions. We can
see peat, brown coal, black coal and anthracite, and we can show that
these are always found in sedimentary rock. We call these energy
sources fossil fuels because we regard them as a form of buried solar
energy, fossilised sunshine.
Scientists
usually work with a particular paradigm, a set of assumptions and
beliefs, and they stay with the accepted paradigm
until
evidence arises to make the old paradigm unacceptable. When Charles
Darwin proposed evolution by natural selection, that introduced a new
paradigm. So did the discovery of nuclear fission. The sea floor
spreading that was discovered in the 1960s boosted the 'continental
drift' idea into the paradigm that we call plate tectonics, and there
have been many other successful paradigm shifts in science.
There
have also been many failed paradigm shifts, because scientists are only
swayed by the evidence. When the scientists proposing a change are as
astute and capable as Thomas Gold, people need to ask themselves what
evidence they should look for, either to support or refute the paradigm
shift that Gold is demanding.
Every
so often, a scientist comes up with what sounds like a totally crackpot
idea. That is, in terms of what other scientists believe, it is a
crackpot idea. Alfred Wegener wanted people to accept the idea of
continental drift, and people dismissed him as an eccentric or a fool.
Louis de Broglie made the crazy suggestion that electrons might
really be waves, and almost failed to get his doctor's degree because
of it.
Wegener
died without recognition, though his theory of continental drift (which
we now know in an amended form as plate tectonics) is standard stuff in
your textbooks. Louis de Broglie was luckier, because Albert Einstein
heard about his strange idea, and suggested gently that de Broglie
might be correct, and de Broglie lived to see the electron microscope
(which treats electrons as waves) become a standard laboratory tool.
Wegener's
case is a bit more typical, for most 'crackpots' do not have such an
easy time of it. More than that, most of the crackpot ideas turn
out to be wrong. Yet without those strange ideas, science would never
grow. Thomas Gold must comfort himself with that thought, each time a
geologist sneers at his ideas about where oil comes from. That, and the
knowledge that scientists can change their minds.
Gold
is a famous physicist, one of three astronomers who worked out the
steady-state theory of the universe, which has now been replaced by the
big bang theory of the origin of the universe. He has lived to see his
own theory overthrown, and now he is attacking an older, and more
deeply accepted theory, that our oil comes from dead animals and
plants. He cannot accept that our world supplies of hydrocarbons are
biogenic, made by living things.
When
we first discovered petroleum, says Gold, it was close to the surface,
and chemists then thought that the only place you found carbon
chemicals was in living things. They even named carbon chemistry
organic chemistry, because it was the chemistry of organisms. Oil was
made of organic chemicals, so obviously it had to come from organisms.
Now
we know that comets contain 'organic' chemicals, and so does Jupiter.
Nobody argues that the methane on Jupiter came from giant Jovians
breaking wind, and nobody assumes there are little green people all
over the comets, producing the organic stuff there. If we were to
discover oil today, says Gold, we would never be so silly as to claim
that it came from plants and animals, not with the knowledge we have of
the other planets in the solar system.
The
geologists sneer at this. How much oil has been found in igneous rock?
they ask. Gold accepts this question cheerfully. Not a lot, he says,
because geologists are set in their ways, and they only drill for oil
in sedimentary rock, where the oil sometimes gets trapped as it rises
to the surface. He has, he claims, extracted 12 tonnes of hydrocarbons
from granite in Sweden, most of it coming from veins of mineral that
have intruded into the granite from below. These dolerite veins either
weakened the granite, or carried the hydrocarbon with them, says Gold.
The
Arabian Gulf oil fields, according to Gold, have no common features at
any depth, except that they are over an area of great seismic activity.
This area contains 60% of the world's recoverable hydrocarbons. From
the mountains of south-eastern Turkey down to the Persian Gulf, the
plains of Saudi Arabia and the mountains of Iran, there is a continuous
band of oil-fields. But nobody can find an adequate supply of source
rocks to account for the oil that is there.
There
is simply no 'coherent geology' beneath the surface to explain why the
oil is found there. The rocks are of all types and all ages, with
nothing in common. But they are all rich in oils, and the oils are
chemically identifiable, right through the area. They must have a
common origin, says Gold, but some of the rocks are fifty million years
younger, and were formed when the climate, the biology, everything in
the area had changed. According to Gold, there is just no way the oil
could have come from the rocks that have been formed since life evolved.
In
other places as well, we find oil provinces that stretch much further
than any surface geological features. The only thing that is
common
is the deep volcano and earthquake activity.
Then
we come to Gold's other problem: where did the living things that
supposedly formed the oil get their carbon? If they got it from carbon
dioxide in the air, through photosynthesis, there could not have been
enough for life to keep going. So, says Gold, there must have been a
continuous supply of carbon compounds for life to keep going. On his
calculations, the earth's atmospheric CO2 must have been replaced 2,000
times in the past 500 million years.
The
source of our hydrocarbons, he suggests, is about 150 km (93 miles)
below the surface, seeping upwards when it can. Look at Indonesia, says
Gold, where the movement of the Australian plate is causing activity
below the surface, and where there are huge oilfields. Look at
California, he says, where two plates are separating. Look at the
match-up between seismic activity and oilfields in the rest of the
world, says Gold.
To
put it simply, Thomas Gold does not believe that the oil we burn is
fossil fuel, derived from the remains of dead and buried plants and
animals. It is true, he says that we often find petroleum in
sedimentary rocks, but that, he says, is merely because we have a
paradigm that says that we should look in sedimentary rocks, and so we
only drill oil wells in sedimentary structures.
We
are trapped in a 19th century paradigm, he says, one that held, until
well after Friedrich Wöhler synthesised urea and Sir William
Perkin synthesised the first organic dyes in 1856, a paradigm that is
reflected in the very name of the science that Perkin initiated,
organic chemistry.
Back
in the 19th century, as people began to drill for oil and use it, they
naturally assumed that carbon compounds were organic, formed from
living things. Even Pluto has hydrocarbons, but where did Pluto's
methane come from? There are no swamps on Pluto, yet there is methane
there. These organic chemicals come from a distinctly non-organic
background.
Just
for now, the oil companies are not rushing to take up exploration
leases on the world's granite belts. In the future, we might just see a
paradigm shift that leads them to do so, but even then, the oil would
still be fossilised sunshine in a sense, for all of the solar system's
other hydrocarbons must have had their origin inside the sun, or some
other earlier star, and the stored energy in them is derived from a
star's nuclear furnaces.
Paul Williams
wrote:
<snip>
> A few scribbles on an envelope suggest that rainforests may do
better
> than that by an order of magnitude, so why aren't we doing more
about
> the rainforests? Let us not forget the little-known fact that
> rainforest is quite good at invading and reclaiming its margins --
> imagine what they could do with help!
>
<snip>
The figures I've
seen for mature rainforests show a virtually complete recycling of all
materials within that system (isolated systems do not, of course, exist
in reality).
One thing I
haven't looked into is the swampland (peat) sequestering of carbon.
All our coal
reserves are basically buried carbon - these may be worth looking into.
On second
thought, these systems may be a little slow for your purposes...
Rainforests as
'the lungs of the world' being bunkum, it may be interesting to look
into the phytoplankton of the oceans - perhapsmore accurately 'the
lungs of the world'.
A wild thought
perhaps - it came into what I loosely call my mind - and needs egress..
Vast rafts of
genetically engineered nitrogen fixing plants - floating on the ocean.
Vast schools of
GM fish, and GM invertebrates feeding, dying, sinking...
Forget it - I
had to throw it out. :-)
Peter
Macinnis wrote:
>>I
have this vision of herds of tethered hectare sized 'floaty rafts'
>>of suspended shellfish and marine vegetation providing
employment,
>>food and financial security for Pacific Islanders through a
Carbon
>>trading economy.
>I am still on a frantic treadmill, but there was talk a while back
of
>seeding the oceans with iron compounds (iron is the limiting factor
in
>most oceans) to produce an algal bloom that would sink, taking
carbon
>to the bottom and so effectively out of the atmosphere. I know
>Michael Borowitzka in WA was up in arms about it, but I can't see
any
>of my notes, nor can I find the article that I am sure I wrote on
it.
Here
is what I wrote -- found it! The interesting stuff is about 45%
of the way down Chisholm's site. Note the date, note that i was
saying even then (a little more politely) that emissions trading was
baloney. I am consistent in my prejudices :-)
Putting
the oceans at risk
(October
2001)
Three
academics have warned of a serious danger attaching to the notion of
carbon trading, a feature of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. A
country that exceeds its limit could fulfil its commitment by
purchasing 'carbon credits' from a country that emits less than its
quota. Seen by many conservationists as a simplistic dream-child of the
bean-counters, one aspect of carbon trading is for less developed
countries to undertake actions that will reduce the amount of
atmospheric carbon by moving the
carbon
into carbon sinks. Corporations may also be expected to invest in
carbon sinks if they are engaged in heavy industry.
Among
these notions, policymakers see planting forests as a good idea, since
it leaves timber standing that ties up carbon, or it produces timber
that may be converted to lumber that remains in people's houses for
long periods of time. Problems like the waste from lumber-making,
lopped boughs and leaves which rot back to carbon dioxide again, forest
fires and so on, seem to feature more in the scenarios of
conservationists than they do in the thoughts of accountants.
Some
policymakers have clearly recognized the need for longer-term carbon
sinks, and they have proposed a system of using the oceans to absorb
more of the greenhouse-inducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The oceans,
they point out, have productivity that is limited by the availability
of minerals, so that a small addition of a limiting chemical could
produce large algal blooms that would produce animal detritus that
would descend to the ocean floor, where much of it would be buried in
the sediments of the abyss.
Ocean
fertilization involves, as the name implies, fertilizing the oceans.
Small scientific experiments over the last ten years have shown
that fertilizing parts of the ocean increases the number of tiny
organisms, or phytoplankton, that remove carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere as part of their normal growth. Entrepreneurs watching these
developments have concluded that fertilizing large patches of ocean
might therefore be profitable if carbon trading is instituted, and this
is where the three authors, contributing to a 'Policy Forum' in
\IScience\i on October 12, see a problem.
"Proponents
claim that ocean fertilization is an easily controlled, verifiable
process that mimics nature; and that it is an environmentally benign,
long-term solution to atmospheric CO2 accumulation," they write.
They also note that some of the proponents are extremely
enthusiastic, quoting one of them as saying "only partly in jest" to
the effect that "Give me half a tanker of iron and I will give you the
next ice age".
"These
claims are, quite simply, not true," they say, refuting each argument
in turn within the 'Science' article. For example, ocean fertilization
is not easily controlled. "A fertilized patch in turbulent ocean
currents is not like a plot of land."
A
particular objection is that the changes are seen as environmentally
benign, an assumption that ignores the results of years of research on
aquatic ecosystems, including the negative effects of nutrient
enrichment in lakes and coastal waters.
They
say they are not against individual experiments in which ocean
fertilization is used as a tool for studying the ocean's response to
enrichment. Such experiments have already yielded "very exciting
results that have contributed to our understanding of the role of the
oceans in the global carbon cycle and in regulating climate." But "we
are against the large-scale implementation of ocean fertilization as a
carbon sequestration option," they add.
Commercial
implementation of ocean fertilization techniques is not imminent, but
interest is growing. About seven patents have been filed on different
techniques, and at least three small companies have been established.
Chisholm says she recently talked to a representative from Mitsubishi
Heavy Industries about ocean fertilization. "So many large companies
are watching with interest," she said.
Although
Chisholm notes that a given company fertilizing a relatively small
patch of water would not by itself change the ecology of the oceans,
she is afraid of the "slippery slope" that would lead us down. "If it's
profitable for one, it would be profitable for many, leading to
exploitation and a classic tragedy of the commons."
The
trio write that "one simple way to avert this potential tragedy is to
remove the profit incentive for manipulation of the ocean common. We
suggest that ocean fertilization in the open seas, or territorial
waters, should never become eligible for carbon credits."
The
text of the forum can be downloaded from Chisholm's Web site at http://web.mit.edu/chisholm/www/pub.html
- the 67-page White paper written by Chisholm and Jaghat Adiya is one of
the documents available in PDF format, and provides excellent
background. The Policy Forum is at http://web.mit.edu/chisholm/www/whitesci.pdf
Key
names for searching: Sallie W. Chisholm, Paul G. Falkowski and John J.
Cullen.
David Maddern
replied:
Here is one
circular effect in greenhouse warming
Currently algal
blooms are associated iron in dustorms, and with more duststorms there
will be more iron going oceanwise and more diatom blooms to sequestrate
carbon.
Let's hope that
is a big effect cos little Johnny isnt going to do enough
A rerun of the
Cambian Extinctions is on the cards
And then
duststorms will be a daily occurence
Gary-Peter
Dalrymple posted:
The
tide of conversation on this topic may have ebbed, but I can confirm
that rainwater is blue.
second
day runoff half a metre deep, left standing two days in a white plastic
bucket is blueish tinged.
Not
as blue as South Island NZ bath water (due to glacial melt 'rock flour'
in water).
I
noticed a thin layer of mud at the bottom of each bucket (rain drop
nucleating dust?), is there anyone studying the volume/composition of
this mud to get some sense of ultimate rain source?
Wishing
you well in all things.
Margaret Ruwoldt
replied:
>I
noticed a thin layer of mud at the bottom of each bucket (rain drop
>nucleating dust?), is there anyone studying the volume/composition
of this
>mud to get some sense of ultimate rain source?
Dunno, Gary, but
someone should be monitoring my white car--it regularly turns brown
after a short shower of rain, and yesterday I'll swear there was a
potato starting to grow in one of the grooves on the bodywork... ;-)
Gerald
Cairnes wrote:
Hi
Gary,
For
some weeks now I have begun recording the pH and wind direction with
the rain and been surprised by the variation of the pH, from about 6.8
- 9.2 roughly, mostly basic. This is not what I expected so I will have
to check the calibration of my pH meter but when I have enough readings
to be sensibly analysed I will post them for all.
Angus also
responded:
Hi Garry,
having lived in NZ for some time, I have seen the blue water you refer
to. Somewhat like Mt Gambier's but for different reasons (Mt
Gambier water is specifically due to precipitated CaCO3)? I
had read somewhere that the NZ river water was coloured that particular
blue hue because of the water's structure at low temperature (0-4C) in
a similar way to some ice formations - a while since I first read it
though...
Paul
commented:
I
thought that the pH of rainwater was generally on the acid side - about
5.6 or thereabouts?
