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If we are forced to go into yet another Covid-Lock-Down, do you think they will still go ahead with COP26 in Glasgow?
Clark, as you say, often threads intertwine.
Apparently Scotland now is using Covid-Passports to let people into venues.
I suppose this will be used at COP26Archaea
“Last year’s rise was the biggest increase since global methane levels started rising again in 2007.
The majority of it was from natural sources.
“If you increase the amount of precipitation in the areas of the wetlands, and if you increase the temperature, then these methane producing bacteria, produce more methane,” said Dr Oksana Tarasova from the WMO.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59016075
If the BBC would like to check the facts, they might find that Methane comes about as a waste product of methanogenic Archaea. Not from Bacteria.
It is now thought that the weight of Archaea outweighs all other living things, not really something that humans have much control over.Michael, on October 24, 11:22 (#80302), you wrote:
– “You are not allowed to mention population growth.”
Hans Rosling talks extensively about population growth; it is what he studies. Here are two of his lectures.
Why the world population won’t exceed 11 billion – YouTube, an excerpt with simple illustrations, under 17 minutes.
Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen – YouTube, with more detailed graphical illustrations, under 21 minutes.
Hans Rosling seems very knowledgeable, but above all, very respectful of people, and compassionate.
I try to always remember to write “climate and ecological emergency”, because climate has massive effects upon ecology, and ecology has massive effects upon climate; the two are inextricably interlinked. Most “news” media seem to refer merely to “climate change” or “the climate crisis”.
Michael, I’m rather disappointed at your selective quotation and interpretation of the source you linked. Your suggestion that the measured increases in methane are unrelated to human activities is directly contradicted several times in the article you cited, which repeatedly attributes it to global warming. I suppose that the tenor of your comment reflects your doubt that global average temperature is in fact increasing, but earlier I cited two widely confirmed observations which put that beyond doubt – the melting of polar ice, and the rising of sea level.
Additionally, the article says that 60% of methane emissions are caused by human activities, and only 40% from natural sources, so even if human activity was having no effect upon the natural sources, we’d still have even more powerful ways of decreasing overall methane emissions.
But the worst sin goes to the article itself, its last three lines are a counsel of despair. They seem to say “there is nothing we can do; we may as well give up”. No. I refuse to abandon civilisation to avoidable collapse.
Michael, this commercialist, materialist, exploitative system that cultivates greed, selfishness and alienation from nature, in order to maximise monetary profit clearly disgusts you as much as it does me; why not rebel against it? I think you’re a natural for Extinction Rebellion.
– “If we are forced to go into yet another Covid-Lock-Down, do you think they will still go ahead with COP26 in Glasgow?”
Yes, I think they would go ahead with COP26. But I think it is more likely that they will delay any social restrictions until afterwards.
Clark, I doubt if Boris Johnson believes any of the Global Warming stuff, he is a charlatan who cannot speak the truth. I doubt he reads or tries to grasp, anything much but I bet he knows a good red from a middling red.
Yes, I agree, he will not call “Plan B” till after it is too late, so Christmas is buggered, for the second year or is it the third? I am not sure, who he is trying to influence other than his new partner who is woker than Meghan Markle.
I doubt he has any true convictions but then I doubt Sir Keir has any either.
So I agree, he will not call a medical emergency, till COP26 is over by then covid will be rife, in Glasgow.Michael
Irony is that China (country you dislike and blame for everything) is the only one that implemented
ONE-CHILD Policy in human history to consternation of the Free World!
People lifted out of absolute poverty are mostly in China but the credit is always attributed to globalisation and free trade without mentioning China and the % in the total number of people lifted out ofp overty!
Without knowing you are not only XR but you are hard left with love for Royals and millioners representing workingc lass Brits like BJ Mogg Raab IDS etc. in a fight against elite. One of my favourite english expression is
” You could’t make it up”
BREXIT IS GLOBALISATION ON STEROIDS Michael
Michael – “Boris Johnson […] a charlatan who cannot speak the truth. […] I doubt he has any true convictions but then I doubt Sir Keir has any either.”
Yep, and yep. And it’s the same in most of the world.
I have my own theory about this. Old fashioned parliamentary democracy mixes very badly with telly, because the political parties all hire PR companies to cultivate an image that will be popular. It works because telly is very emotive, but of course the PR companies choose utter bullshitters because they make the best figureheads, so politics ends up all image and no substance. Look at Trump; literally a game-show host! Politics is supposedly about policy – a load of written statements that a government can be held to – not about whoever can charm or bluff their way into people’s favour with three minute slots in front of a camera.
We the people have to take back the power before all is lost. Letting these jokers fuck it up any further just does not bear thinking about.
Myself, yesterday, 21:18 on the covid thread:
– “All governments need to conserve resources for that vital task, or we’ll run out of fuel and overload the atmosphere before making our new energy system self sustaining.”
Oil System Collapsing so Fast It May Derail Renewables Warn French Government Scientists
Nafeez Ahmed, 20 October 2021:I am sure there are several hundred years left of Methane under the Earth.
I guess, it partly depends on how badly you want the stuff and how much you are willing to pay.
Perhaps if Natural Gas was reserved for house holds, Quarry Vehicles, construction vehicles, large HGVs, heavy trains and ships were made to run on Methane, then most smaller vehicles could run on battery power. What is currently being priced out of the market is Methane for electricity production. As less use is made of Methane, the price should come down.
One thing which almost certainly, should happen, is they should imprison the Methane speculators.Similar peak will occur with off shore wind energy after we fill shallow windy waters with wind turbines.
We will have to move further away.Following article by Positive Money deals with everything (apart from science) mentioned in the title of this thread
Nearly Everything is intertwined and political! Whatever we do is political decision. In old days it was called Political Economy which become Economics to pretend that it’s a scientific discipline by itself?
MN, do you acknowledge that there are issues with methane and that it is itself a much more potent green house gas than CO2 and lingers in the atmosphere for up to 20 years, that it leaks from getting it out of the ground, from storage facilities and pipe work, that when burned methane also produces CO2? Or are you just going to ignore those issues that have been pointed out numerous times? Do you believe in the greenhouse effect itself?
ET
yes, the Green House Effect is what keeps us alive, with out it we would be freezing our balls off.Methane is as natural as you could get. Nobody is quite sure how much Methane on Earth was Abiotic and how much is renewably Biotic.
As far as is currently known some types of Archaea expel Methane, it is not known if any other types of life make Methane.
Methane is expelled from termites but that is because they have Methanogens to aid their digestion.ET, yes I do understand that there are worries with Methane but there are worries also with Nuclear Reactors, just look at Fukushima. Most coal miners did not enjoy a long retirement as they often died of lung conditions.
|In the U.K. we have been getting rid of coal fired power stations but some places are building more coal fired power stations, so they could be thought of as problematic.
I guess all forms of power have downsides?
Today I hurt my back digging a tree root out.
That was manual work, other people would use a diesel powered digger to rip it out.
Every system has worries and problems.ET I have lived in my home for twenty three years, I have a gas boiler for the heating and hot water, I have a gas fire for warmth, I have a gas cooker. None of these apliacces have been changed, other than I bought a gas cooker when I moved in.
My brother also had a gas refrigerator and gas lights.After waching this video I start to believe that we are beyond breaking point.
It is about methane release in Siberia Arctic region and according to the Russian scientist data was not incorporated in global warming model.M N
yes, the Green House Effect is what keeps us alive, without it we would be freezing our balls off.It is the other way around!
Green House Effect will make us boil like the proverbial Frog.
The atmosphere consists of 78% nitrogen and 21% Oxygen etc and you are mixing it with Green house gases.
The amount of heat/energy from Sun is colossal but most of it gets reflected back into the space. but CO2 and Methane trap part of that energy.
Michael, you are frugal, and this is always commendable. The personal should be distinguished from the systemic, but the message developed by the fossil fuel companies, and disseminated through government and media, is that emissions are purely our personal ethical responsibilities.
This is gross psychological abuse of the public – including you personally, michael – on a massive scale. It is victim-blaming. It is gaslighting, forcing global scale responsibilities onto individuals unequipped to cope with them. While the government and media publish advertising campaigns exhorting us all to turn down our thermostats, put a woolly on, put less water in our kettles, cycle to work instead of drive, they vastly subsidise the fossil fuel companies, neglect to legislate against planned obsolescence and the financial sector’s massive investment in fossil fuel extraction. It is utterly hypocritical.
Even worse for our individual psychology, the government actually promotes massive obsolescence through greenwashing, inducing ecological guilt into the population to make them replace, for instance, working and reliable gas boilers with marginally more efficient but far more complicated condensing gas boilers, all at great individual expense. Replace perfectly good washing machines with “low energy” washing machines with flashy, unreliable electronic controllers that cost the manufacturer about a fiver but are extortionately expensive when they go wrong. Replace working vehicles with “lower emissions” vehicles which are too complicated and computerised to service ourselves.
Doing all this permits the government to inflate GDP to increase its borrowing power, and to raise more tax on all those individuals’ additional purchases. People who can afford all this new stuff can then develop a pious, self-satisfied smugness and look down on poorer people who are supposedly “doing all the harm”. Then, at massive taxpayer expense, the government devastates Iraq and Libya to secure supplies of diesel. I can’t tell you how unspeakably angry such rampant hypocrisy from the government makes me.
Michael? YOU. ARE. NOT. TO. BLAME!
Fuck this government shit! Our government is meant to exist to serve us, not to facilitate commercial exploitation of us. It’s meant to protect us and our environment, not make us feel guilty about being individually unable to afford to protect it. Looking after things at the systemic scale is what we pay our damn taxes for.
The government is over fifty million times more powerful than you or me. This is psychological bullying on an unimaginable scale, and it causes psychological injury. Us individuals cannot possibly take on the massive burden of guilt of the destruction of our own biosphere and the consequent plight of our own descendants, so our minds start to malfunction. We start to believe contradictory and impossible things – psychosis. We subconsciously go into denial, or we try to displace the guilt. Then we blame each other for our varying symptoms. Some of us choose yet more retail therapy, some resort to comfort eating, others get pills from the doctor, indulge in internet porn, or get a pet for comfort – and all these things make yet more profit for the system, raise yet more tax, AND… Protect the damn government from the responsibility that was rightfully its own in the first place.
Extinction Rebellion Principle 8:
– We avoid blaming and shaming.
– We live in a toxic system, but no one individual is to blame.
Michael, please forgive yourself. We need you, to help fix this damn toxic system.
Pigeon English, no michael was right; without the greenhouse effect Earth’s surface temperature would be much colder on average. Water vapour is a major greenhouse gas, and it helps keep us warm. But the additional greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide and methane are increasing the greenhouse effect too much. Earth can regulate its atmosphere’s water vapour content, but plant growth is too slow to keep up with human combustion of fossil fuels, because we are burning countless millions of years of organic deposits in just a couple of centuries. Apart from which our toxic system keeps cutting down forests because they don’t make a damn profit.
Michael, I hope your back feels better soon.
Pigeon English, thanks for the video. Shakhova is right; potential methane release was not included in the 2015 IPCC assessment. It has been included in the latest 2021 assessment; they have rated massive methane release as unlikely, but put new, much higher lines on the graphs for what they think would result if it did occur. But the IPCC have consistently underestimated things.
Let’s not count our vultures before they’ve hatched, eh? We try our best, get the emissions down, hopefully before the methyl hydrates blow.
Michael, now, back to the physical problem, and thus your Oct 26, 13:45 comment. I always write “natural gas” because I think there are some other gases in with the methane.
– “I guess, it partly depends on how badly you want the stuff and how much you are willing to pay”. And from your next paragraph: “As less use is made of Methane, the price should come down.”
The first line is exactly right. Sudden reduction in demand can cause a short term drop, but over time the price will always go up and up because the easiest reserves are always tapped and thus depleted first. For the same reason, the amount of energy used in extracting the gas forever goes up and up too – this is what the French scientists called “energy cannibalism”. So the emissions also go up and up, even though it’s the same type of gas.
– “Perhaps if Natural Gas was reserved for house holds, Quarry Vehicles, construction vehicles, large HGVs, heavy trains and ships were made to run on Methane, then most smaller vehicles could run on battery power. What is currently being priced out of the market is Methane for electricity production.”
This is roughly what’s going on, except it’s diesel for heavy vehicles (industry and agriculture) because liquid fuel is more convenient than gas; there’s not a huge amount of difference in energy content or emissions, but pressurised tanks are unnecessary. Yes, the vast fleet of private cars can run on batteries, conserving hydrocarbons considerably.
In the UK, households actually burn about twice as much gas as goes to electricity generation. Households too can go over to electricity because houses are stationary and thus can be connected to the grid. This conserves even more, buying us some more time.
– “One thing which almost certainly, should happen, is they should imprison the Methane speculators.”
I resent speculation too – in the UK the speculators include the “energy companies” that customers buy gas and electricity from. They neither extract nor distribute gas; they just bid for it from the extraction companies and arrange contracts (fixed or variable “tariffs”) with customers, be they personal or industrial.
But what governments should really do is nationalise the gas reserves, or rather re-nationalise them like they used to be. These reserves rightly belong to humanity, to the whole population, to be shared as needed, and burned frugally to make them last until we have enough solar and to keep emissions down.
But actually, the US and its crony states attack or subvert any sufficiently vulnerable country that nationalises its hydrocarbons. It subverted Iran in 1953:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_ajax
– The 1953 Iranian coup d’état, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup d’état (Persian: کودتای ۲۸ مرداد), was the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953. It was orchestrated by the United States (under the name TPAJAX Project or “Operation Ajax”) and the United Kingdom (under the name “Operation Boot”). The clergy also played a considerable role.
– Mosaddegh had sought to audit the documents of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), a British corporation (now part of BP) and to limit the company’s control over Iranian oil reserves. Upon the AIOC’s refusal to co-operate with the Iranian government, the parliament (Majlis) voted to nationalize Iran’s oil industry and to expel foreign corporate representatives from the country.
Iraq was about to set up a nationalised oil market when Bush and Blair overthrew it in 2003. Libya was next. Syria has been under attack from Gulf Monarchy jihadists with NATO support for over a decade, with a view to weakening Iran, again. The US is also currently covertly undermining Venezuela’s elected government, and the Guardian is propagandising for the US-backed “opposition”.
So far from imprisoning the speculators, the “free world” actually overthrows governments to enforce speculation. It’s called the “free market”, or capitalism.
Scotland is in the very slow process of manufacturing new ferries that will run on Methane.
LNG is a good fuel for ships. It would be a good fuel for heavy trains and heavy agriculture and quarry plant.
It is transportable, less strain on the engine, so the engine should last longer. Most useful for electricity back up production. Less polluting than petrol or diesel.But the three main things are to stop the increase in human numbers.
Allow people to choose less stuff, this could be done with campaigns on the T.V. by our government by many governments.
The next is to stop the felling of the forests, especially complex rainforests, which suck down a lot of greenhouse gases but also retain huge biodiversity, once you clear fell a tropical rain forest you kill their biodiversity and it will take much time, if ever, to recover.
Most forests are clear felled for short term nonsense, like meat for dogs.
