Best,

D

But you often have to have some “creative economics” to go along with your “creative thermodynamics,” in the cases you bring up! And I don’t believe that government subsidies will benefit man or the planet, in the long run.

Then grow up. Is your concrete basement insulated? Are you heating your home with your electric appliances? Other’s call it ‘cogeneration’.

All heat is usable, all you have to do is start with the optical and then cascade down through the infrared. What you do in the multiple steps through that cascade is up to your ‘creativity’, and even then you’ll need to radiate that energy away lest you overheat. You really fundamentally misunderstand thermodynamics if you aren’t applying creativity to its real world applications.

It is a tough call, since the media still views him as credible and cites him. My general rule has been to ignore him unless Big Media gives him a megaphone as they have here.

Also, one of Pielke’s goals is to stifle climate science advocates from discussing about the link between global warming and extreme weather. I am trying to demonstrate to all that there is more than enough justification in science journals to warrant this discussion.

“If we can radiate away that extra energy, and reduce emissions to zero via creative thermodynamics, we’ll be set. This isn’t a problem that is going to solve itself, it has to be solved. It won’t be policy wonks that solve it.”

It is EXACTLY this kind of non-informed, non-educated, non-physical wishful thinking that is going to either cause a revolution or put humanity back into the Dark Ages. Just don’t tell me you actually graduated from an accredited high school, please!

Actually we want to rid the surface of the Earth of excess energy, remember? We’ve just started thinking with this project and already we’ve made some startling discoveries, many of them counter intuitive.

But you’ll need quite a bit of energy. I’ve been recently looking into growing algae (should have a daily doubling with natural levels of CO2) and then either (i) burning it directly [problem: have to dry it] or (ii) putting it thorough an anaerobic digester to produce biogas. The latter has the advantages of for-sure closed cycle for solids and liquids (mostly H2O) so don’t have to keep adding water or nutrients.

Then burn the biogas. All this looks to be about as capital intensive as a standard coal-fired power statiion, but otherwise carbon-neutral.

The other choice is to separate the methane from the acid gas (amine process). The acid gas will have a little sulfur in it, but that cn be cleaned out as well, providing you with a quite pure CO2 stream. The methane can be burnt or, with some further cleaning, introduced into the “natural” gas pipelines.

My estimates are that in this latter CO2-capture process, about 10–24% of the carbon is captured for whatever form of sequestration is to be applied. The remaining carbon is in the methane, so there is lots of that.

I agree, its up to engineers to solve this horrid problem.