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“It trivialises the problem.”
No it doesn’t. Rust is a potentially serious problem for a ship. The point being, as I’ve said, compared to all the other stuff climate change is not the most pressing issue.
Focussing soley on (actually, obssessing over) climate trivialises everything else (listed in post #99131).Fat John, So if it is not COAL, what is causing Global Warming?
I don’t know what is causing Global Warming, does anybody?
If I was to have a shot at it, I would guess it is the population of the World going from two billion about 1880 – 1900 to eight point one billion now, so in 125 years the population of the World has quadrupled.
I expect that’s the main factor.
If that is the main factor, then you must ask how did so many people eat?
“Green Revolution” the widespread use of chemical fertilizers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution#:~:text=The%20Green%20Revolution%2C%20or%20the,globally%20until%20the%20late%201980s.There is about three times as much Carbon in the top soil as Carbon in the Atmosphere.
Agriculture has always involved removing forests to plant crops, mainly cereals.
Many plants that humans cultivate use the C4 method of photosynthesis, like Maize, the most widely grown crop.
They do not need as much Carbon dioxide as plants using other pathways, like C3.
Only a few trees use C4, the overwhelming number of trees use C3, so they take in a lot of Carbon, some/most of which is passed into the soil. So cutting C4 trees down to clear for agricultural land to mostly grow C4 crops, means that Carbon is quickly being returned to the Atmosphere, it is not being retained in the top soil.
Top soil is almost all made by trees.
Clear the trees and the top soil is not being remade, it is eroded/blown away.
Hence why growing crops, soon requires fertilizer. Using fertilizer, allows you to grow crops but it destroys the living top soil, you have taken a slippery path to enslavement but you have quadrupled the amount of humans.
I don’t think stop burning coal or oil is going to solve this problem, at all.Cutting down C3 trees to plant C4 crops will stop the land absorbing as much Carbon as it used to.
“Fat John, So if it is not COAL, what is causing Global Warming?”
The exhaust gases from 1.5 billion road vehicles, 40,000 aircraft and a similar number of diesel powered trains (I can’t find the exact figure) will be a very large contributor.
BTW, I assumed only trolls added words in capitals to a sentence, but I have been told I might be too judgemental, so will ignore that for now.
“the population of the World going from two billion about 1880 – 1900 to eight point one billion now” and “exhaust gases from 1.5 billion road vehicles, 40,000 aircraft and a similar number of diesel powered trains” are both contributing factors to CO2 emissions (and so much else)… both underlie the same predicament, i.e., too many people and too much dependence on technology.
8 billion+ people can only be fed by using FF and diesel machine-aided agriculture.Fat Jon, could you imagine that your view is too simplistic?
Many factors are at play.
I suggest the biggest factor is the human population quadrupling in 125 years.
Basic needs of humanity are to breathe to drink to eat to rest to exercise to excrete and to breed.
In a city many humans live, one of their basic requirements is to breathe, they breathe in air and give out Carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is a heavy gas, that means it pools. The level of Carbon dioxide at street level in a city is greater than in the countryside, actually many times greater than in a forest. If most measurements are taken from areas of high human density, they will show high levels of Carbon dioxide.Energy crisis fuels coal comeback in Germany
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-crisis-fuels-coal-comeback-germany-2022-12-16/#:~:text=Global%20coal%20consumption%20reached%20a,versus%202021%2C%20the%20IEA%20said.
Long demonised by Germany’s Green party, which leads some of the government’s top ministries, coal was set to be phased out by 2030, but Russia’s war with Ukraine and gas export curbs, brought coal back into favour. Global coal consumption reached a record high of over 8 billion tonnes this year, with Germany one of the highest with a 19% rise, or 26 million tonnes, versus 2021, the IEA said.
Instead of shutting down 1.6 GW of lignite-fired power plants by the end of 2022 as planned, the German government has issued a waiver to allow production until March 2024.
Germany has created a “gas replacement reserve” with a total capacity of 11.6 GW. This includes 1.9 GW of lignite and 4.3 GW of hard coal power plants which are allowed to return to the market until 2024, the IEA report said.So even though the Greens are in government in Germany, they allow brown coal to be burnt in German power stations.
In the U.K. only one or two percent of our electricity is produced by coal.
We are also shutting down our steel plants to save the World.
We are wearing the hair shirt for all of Europe?
Drive an EV and virtue signal you are saving the WorldYou need to put some numbers to these arguments, and see the numbers plotted as graphs. Yes, coal was a major energy source in the industrial revolution, but there wasn’t that much industry. It wasn’t until about 1950 that fossil fuel burning really took off – see the graphs just down the following page, which is about population, and how much energy each of those people were/are using. You can see that most of the carbon dioxide was released recently:
And here’s atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration against time, the Keeling curve:
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/bluemoon/co2_400/co2_800k_zoom.png
That line is as directly measured from 1958; pre-1958 reconstructed by various means. You can play with different timescales and find out about pre-1958 estimates here:
https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/
Remember that the carbon dioxide problem is cumulative, and that the consequent temperature increase will take years or decades to catch up. So it’ll keep getting hotter even if we could stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow, and it’ll take centuries for the carbon dioxide level to fall. It’s like a debt; it starts small but rises rapidly due to compound interest (exponential growth), and doesn’t really make any problems until the bailiffs come knocking, after which you just can’t get rid of them.
None of this is to detract from the damage being done to nature. Another page at that blog makes that point very clearly:
And Michael, no, it hasn’t been thought out. “Leave it to the market”.
MICHAEL/CLARK
perhaps of interest (perhaps not, since I am no expert here):This is a German book review of an Oxford University Press study:
“Energy and Power. Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change”
by Gross, Stephen G., 2023“(…)
With his highly readable and strong thesis study on “Energy and Power”, the US historian Stephen Gross makes an important contribution both to the history of the Federal Republic of Germany and to the recently rapidly growing field of energy historiography. Starting with the threat of climate change, he examines “how the consumption of massive amounts of energy has become naturalized, and with it the accompanying volumes of carbon emissions that are changing our environments”
(…)
The crisis in the coal mining industry at the end of the 1950s was also crucial for Gross because it led to the large-scale “Investigation into the development of the current and future structure of supply and demand in the energy industry in the Federal Republic” by the Energy Economics Institute of the University of Cologne and the German Institute for Economic Research, among others, and thus strengthened energy economics expertise. Since then, energy economists in the Federal Republic have acted as “handmaidens of the state” by defining the energy industry as a special sector and energy as a public good that required special political attention (p. 69). In contrast to their US colleagues, German energy economists did not understand the energy industry in a dematerialized way and attached greater importance to natural resources overall.
(…)
Gross therefore sees the 1980s as the real decade of the environment, in which the environmental wing of the CDU became stronger and climate change was taken seriously as a problem. However, the Greens tried unsuccessfully to break up the regional electricity supplier monopolies, which dated back to the Energy Industry Act of 1935, in order to improve the chances of renewable energies. In the 1990s, the old paradigm became dominant again, with more and more gas being imported from the former Soviet Union. At the turn of the millennium, however, the red-green government implemented the ideas of ecological modernization. With the nuclear phase-out, the promotion of solar energy and the Renewable Energy Sources Act, “green energies” were unleashed: “In an age of neoliberalism, Germany launched this energy transition through state-guided market creation, pure and simple” (p. 294). Despite this narrative of success, Gross’ subsequent assessment of German energy policy is ambivalent: the ecological tax reform was slowed down, renewable energies were criticized as being too expensive, and the decarbonization of the energy sector progressed more slowly than in France or Great Britain because coal and gas continued to be used for electricity generation.
(…)”I had the impression on first reading of the review, that Gross falls short of understanding some serious gepolitical issues and forces. There is no scientifically rational explanation for phasing out NNPPs the way it happened or to not invest into alternative sources for real.
As CLARK says “Leave it to the market”.
This is true for the German situation for reasons I don´t know, may be you do.
But it appears to apply to all of Europe. One after the other alternatives fold. Be it Germany, France, or Norway.
But what is being invested into are still NNPPs in Britain e.g. or France, and often together with the Chinese, or be it in little Hungary.The Greens must not be telling the truth to the public about some major decisions taken instead of other measures. Forces of capital that stay in the dark. Odd…
You environmentalists have told us how the world was going to end so many times, yet it never happens; you have been correct zero times out of hundreds of forecasts. Now you come back and complain because nobody with more than vegetables between the ears is taking you seriously. You cried wolf too many times sonny, so no, why should we “prove” your jumped up theory is wrong when we have the proof from your previous theories that what you forecast is garbage or worse, is manipulative lies.
aspnaz – “You environmentalists…”
Please engage with the arguments rather than making personal accusations; this is one of this site’s rules for commenters. Your comment is a troll’s comment, accusing others of dishonesty and malicious intent. It contributes no data or reasoning relevant to the discussion; there is far more to natural law than how you personally feel about other humans.
I regard myself as an engineer rather than an ‘environmentalist’. Do you dispute that humans are dependent upon nature?
Site team, please feel free to delete this comment if comment #99228 is worthy of deletion.
I am curious as to what were the “hundreds of forcasts” made that all turned out to be incorrect. Are we talking chief vitalstatistix here? 🙂
Idle trolling is the best that the denialists can offer. They never have the courage to stick around and actually argue their case.
aspnaz
There most certainly has been unprecedented pressure from most governments, the E.U., the U.N., some scientists and most of the press, only people who are true believers are allowed to speak.
I disagree, Democracy means we should all have a voice – even if we are not true believers. If you don’t allow people with other views to express themselves, you are slipping down into totalitarianism. Locked up for being a non believer, killed for not being a true believer.
I do not think we should go down this route. I strongly think everybody should have their voice heard, in fact, everybody should be encouraged to think through all these problems, irrespective of being a believer or a non believer, we all have to live on the same world. Perhaps the future can be for all.
Not just for the rich?Attributing post #99228 to ‘denialists’ is not helpful. The word ‘denialist’ is divisive, in itself.
Anyone who criticizes the over-emphasis on climate change is labelled a ‘denialist’ or ‘denier’, in the same way anyone who criticizes the actions of the Israeli government is labelled ‘anitisemitic’ or an ‘antisemite’ (to draw a correct analogy).
Play the ball…AG, sorry; what are NNPPs?
– “This is true for the German situation for reasons I don´t know, may be you do.”
In the 1990s an activist group called the Corporate Europe Observatory infiltrated the headquarters of the European Round Table, a lobby group of industrialists. They were discovered but, remarkably, permitted to continue copying the documents they had found rather than being thrown out. Eventually they simply walked out through the front doors.
They collated what they had gathered into an extensive report – but then found no organisation willing to publish it :-$ EU infrastructure policy was being drawn up and prepared by this board of the CEOs of the major European multinational industries, and then essentially rubber-stamped by the EU Parliament:
The Brussels Business – Who Runs the EU?
“EU infrastructure policy was being drawn up and prepared by this board of the CEOs of the major European multinational industries, and then essentially rubber-stamped by the EU Parliament”
You sound surprised?
“Drive an EV and virtue signal you are saving the World”
I wonder who this backhanded insult was aimed at?
How many contributors to this forum have mentioned they own an EV? If I have any virtue signal about an electric car, it is that my exhaust is not poisoning those in the street as I pass them by. We all saw the massive improvement in urban air quality during lockdown.
If the graph I posted the link to:- https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data//temperature/HadCRUT4.png simply shows the effects of a rise in world population, then I don’t understand the relative stability in the half century between 1930 and 1980.
According to this website – https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population
The world population was ~2 billion in 1930, and ~4 billion in 1980. The population doubled in that period but the graph remains persistent around the horizontal axis. The world population had doubled again since then but the temperature anomaly in the northern hemisphere has shot up by a whole degree.
Something else must have triggered that and, given these changes are not instantaneous, that change must have been affected by events which happened 10-15 years earlier. Thinking about the post war era, the most obvious lifestyle changes were the rapid increase in privately owned cars, the transfer of long distance freight from rail to road, and the increase in air travel especially for overseas holidays.
However, there was also the change from steam to diesel power throughout much of shipping and railways. Not only that, but the majority of people who had used goal gas for cooking and heating, were switched to burning natural gas.
Most of these have one thing in common and that is the wholesale change from coal (as the primary fuel source), to oil & gas.
Wouldn’t it be somewhat ironic if rapid global warming was actually caused by the move from a global coal economy to one of oil/gas products?
Michael, I think you have gained a very inaccurate impression somehow:
– “There most certainly has been unprecedented pressure from most governments, the E.U., the U.N. [1], some scientists [2] and most of the press [3], only people who are true believers are allowed to speak [4].”
[1] Governments subsidise fossil fuels orders of magnitude more than they fund wind and solar. They may talk the climate change talk, but they’re walking the walk backwards.
[2] The vast majority of scientists accept the theory of greenhouse heating – not just Earth scientists; the same science is used to understand temperatures on Mars, Venus etc. Every scientific institution in the world agrees that the IPCC has AGW science broadly right, even the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which was the last one to grudgingly admit it.
[3] The press has been appalling; they have platformed the tiny minority of contrarian scientists, putting them in one-against-one ‘debates’, as if there was anything to be debated; a more representative panel would have forty scientists supporting AGW for every one disputing it. UK TV company Channel 4 screened The Great Global Warming Swindle in 2007, nineteen years after greenhouse heating was proven. There are plenty of similar examples. Would you start thinking that gravity was debatable if a handful of contrarian scientists were repeatedly platformed by the press disputing it?
[4] You yourself keep linking to Peter Ridd; no one seems to be preventing him from speaking.
Democracy means we should be free to hold whatever political opinions we choose, not that we can just choose misleading claims about reality and call them ‘facts’. The Catholic church tried that one on Galileo; thank God (irony intended) that they didn’t manage to ban telescopes, to prevent people seeing Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto happily orbiting around Jupiter rather than Earth, as the church was attempting to enforce.
James, no I’m not surprised. I just like evidence 🙂
Fat Jon – “Wouldn’t it be somewhat ironic if rapid global warming was actually caused by the move from a global coal economy to one of oil/gas products?”
Jevons’s paradox.
– “In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced. Governments typically assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising.” – Wikipedia.
This doesn’t answer the flat portion of the temperature graph. IPCC Working Group 1 covers that. As best I remember, there are three main inputs to global temperature; when you combine all three, you get a remarkably accurate fit with observation. If I could remember where to find that graph I’d post a link.
As most here will recognise, IC is predicated on FF. Therefore FF subsidies are actually subsidising IC.
Also, as ‘renewables’ are completely dependent on FF (for their construction and maintenance), they are indirectly subsidised by FF subsidies, quite apart from any other subsidy they may receive.Came across this the other day – it may be of interest:
https://open.substack.com/pub/edconway/p/does-it-really-matter-if-we-cant
It talks about making steel from recycled metal. The article is worth fully reading – the usual arguments about ‘precision’ steel and so on is addressed. This would be made in arc, rather than blast furnaces. It changes the requirements for steel production, and its environmental cost, considerably.
There is talk about wind turbines as if the entire lot has to be thrown away upon end-of-life. This simply isn’t true – the towers themselves and the concrete bases can be reused, if not recycled. Even the fibre-glass of the blades can be recycled.
This study: https://www.freeingenergy.com/math/wind-turbine-weight-pound-mwh-gwh-m148/
says : “about 5 pounds of steel, fiberglass, and other materials are needed to generate 1 megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity. If you include the concrete foundation, the weight jumps up to 25 pounds per MWh.”Most of that weight can be reused and recycled.
