As there is patently no defendable scientific evidence to support the hypothesis of manmade global warming and the IPCC’s mission is to show the effects of global warming whether it is happening or not, their reports are a forgone conclusion. They have to propound and push global warming – that is their mission. They have no interest in disproving or even looking closely at verifying warming or cooling. With cooling, they would cease to exist.

Their basics assumptions for global warming are false and their temperature data from poorly maintained and urban heat island warmed sites are gleefully accepted and only tokenly “adjusted.” Their reports are jokes.

Global climate models are critically flawed, not scientific, and represent programmers’ imaginations and, again, there are invalid assumptions included which render them incapable of predicting the past, present, or future.

Add to this mix of false assumptions and conclusions ridiculously biased and misinterpreted anecdotal reports from the field and you have a perfect storm of junk science which is again gleefully accepted by the politicians as it supports their agenda to cripple the world economy while consolidating power and creating a one-world government.

Anybody supporting or approving of a political body, like the IPCC, which pretends to be scientific IS GUILTY OF FRAUD as it affects major and important decisions and policies everywhere.

I did reply to your post but it appears my post has been censored. So it seems that is the end of our discussion.

OK, we’ll discuss CCS another time, no problem.

About the urgency of the problem, and whether this is a crisis or not, though, I really think this is a crisis.

In California last year we had 1.2 million acres burn, and I recall a study published in Science in 2005 that found a sixfold increase in wildfires with only a one degree C rise in temperature. The more wildfires, the more CO2, the more fires – a positive feedback loop. As an engineer, you are undoubtedly familiar with positive feedback. What concerns me are the number of positive feedback loops that are appearing.

You might check out Chris Field on Democracy Now, February 26, 2009. Here’s a link and a few quotes from the transcript:

http://www.democracynow.org/ 2009/ 2/ 26/ member_of_un_environment_panel_warns

CHRISTOPHER FIELD: Well, the important thing to remember is that we’re not committed to any particular trajectory and that there are a range of different possibilities. The possibility that is increasingly stark and that we really want to be increasingly certain to avoid is one where we end up with climate forcing at the high end of the possible scenarios. The IPCC projected that with the scenarios it explored, we could see 2100 temperatures that were anywhere from as little as two Fahrenheit to as much as eleven to twelve Fahrenheit warmer than possible.

And what we increasingly see is that with temperatures at the upper end of this warming range, we begin to get a large series of very dangerous feedbacks from the earth’s system. In particular, we see tropical forest transitioning from taking up large amounts of carbon to taking up very little or even releasing carbon. And it looks like there’s an increasing risk that high latitude ecosystems that are characterized by these frozen soils called permafrost may release some of the organic matter that’s stored in this permafrost to the atmosphere. So you end up in a situation where, instead of having ecosystems storing large amounts of carbon, their storing very little or releasing large amounts.

The calculations to date are that tropical forests—and this is something that is explored in the IPCC—could, at the higher ranges of temperature forcing, release anywhere from a hundred billion to 500 billion extra tons of carbon to the atmosphere by 2100. And that should be put in the context of understanding that during the entire period from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until now, all of the world societies have only released a little over 300 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere.

What we’re worried about, parallel, as you know but apparently disagree with, is that we will pass a tipping point, and then it will become harder and harder to stop the sort of runaway global warming we saw in the Permain/Triassic mass extinction.

The issue has been framed by those that favor going slow on climate change such that without proof that climate change is undoubtedly occurring and without proof that this possibility of runaway climate change will occur, we can take no substantive action.

But as an engineer, I’m sure you know about risk, and that risks are commonly assessed by multiplying the probability of an event by the consequences of the event. In this case, the consequences are so extreme (possible extinction) that even a low probability of being correct should trigger drastic, emergency action, in my opinion.

The subject is too far off topic for discussion in this thread.

What’s wrong? Have you also run out of pseudo-science arguments against the topic of this thread, too?

I’m an engineer with many years experience in the design, build, operation & economics of furnaces. Oxygen addition has its own set of problems and is not the panacea some suggest. Most power stations are not sited close to suitable ground storage for CO2.

I’m not advocating nuclear power for any possible personal gain, but because they make by far the best economic sense.

The subject is too far off topic for discussion in this thread.

I read that method of converting coal powered power stations would >double the cost of electricity. A much cheaper method (that has also been proposed) is to convert them with Pebble Bed Reactors.

Well, we swim in a sea of commercially motivated information and misinformation. Industry supported “astroturf” propaganda groups are actually quite common.

What the coal industry does not tell us is that most coal plants are hugely inefficient technological fossils, which with a little tweaking using technologies like oxyfuel combustion and a topping cycle, could pay for their own CCS.

Carbon negative strategies could be really hugely effective, because they actually put carbon back into the ground at the same time that they generate electricity, which itself displaces fossil fuel generated electricity. So, you get huge synergies with carbon negative energy ideas:

http://www.etsap.org/worksh_6_2003/2003P_read.pdf

Abrupt Climate Change (ACC – NAS, 2001) is an issue that ‘haunts the climate change problem’
(IPCC, 2001) but has been neglected by policy makers up to now, maybe for want of practicable
measures for effective response, save for risky geo-engineering. A portfolio of Bio-Energy with
Carbon Storage (BECS) technologies, yielding negative emissions energy, may be seen as benign, low
risk, geo-engineering that is the key to being prepared for ACC. The nature of sequential decisions,
taken in response to the evolution of currently unknown events, is discussed. The impact of such
decisions on land use change is related to a specific bio-energy conversion technology. The effects
of a precautionary strategy, possibly leading to eventual land use change on a large scale, is modeled,
using FLAMES. Under strong assumptions appropriate to imminent ACC, pre-industrial CO2
levels can be restored by mid-century using BECS.

Industry advocacy of nuclear energy is also commercially motivated, IMO. Pebble bed reactors might make some sense in some cases, I think, for coal plants located far from biomass sources, in areas of low solar energy, not on natural biomass river transport networks, not sited above areas of hot dry rock for engineered geothermal, and so on.

We swim in a sea of disinformation. One of the things I like about Energy Secretary Chu is that he seems to be able to cut through some of this.

I read that method of converting coal powered power stations would >double the cost of electricity. A much cheaper method (that has also been proposed) is to convert them with Pebble Bed Reactors.

I know about the potential hydrate problem. There are quite a few disaster possibilities out there, the most likely being wars and mega inflation.

I don’t find the evidence of rapid warming due to CO2 is strong enough yet to justify panic measures. Just as well, as we have little control over India & China who will greatly add to the amount of CO2

The sun/climate connection, if it exists, may in fact just mask CO2 forcing during years of low solar magnetic activity, and so “set us up for the big one” when solar magnetic activity increases, most likely reaching its peak about 5 years from now, unless we’re really, really lucky.

A generalization which has been pointed out elsewhere before – this argues for CO2 sensitivity at the higher end of the 1.5C-4C range, not lower. It’s not clear why deniers embrace this so enthusiastically since it doesn’t actually bolster the lower-sensitivity argument.

In terms of effectiveness, I advocate nationalization of the coal fired power plants, and converting them to operation on compressed charcoal pellets, while simultaneously capturing their CO2 and deep injecting it. This “carbon negative” strategy is the most radical strategy and the most effective strategy proposed so far, IMO, and is what I think we have to do to avoid a methane catastrophe.

As the CERN video points out, though, the sun/climate connection, if it exists, seems to be breaking down or decoupling due to rising greenhouse gas levels. We are increasing CO2 levels on the order of 10000 times the rate of natural processes, and this is truly unprecedented.

What really worries me is the possibility of a methane catastrophe:

http://www.killerinourmidst.com

These methane catastrophes have happened just a few times, in Earth’s history, and have resulted in widespread extinctions apparently due to runaway positive feedback driven global warming. One such catastrophe appears to be the Permain/Triassic mass extinction, and it killed something like 95 percent of all the species then living.

Even if the sun/climate connection hypothesis is correct, it could still be overpowered by a methane catastrophe, as apparently happened during the Permian/Triassic extinction event. This event was so huge, it caused a huge runaway spike in temperature, anoxic oceans, large amounts of hydrogen sulfide produced by the anoxic oceans, and the extinction of 95 percent of species on the Earth – and it happened apparently slowly compared to our current increases of one percent per year of CO2.

If the Earth’s climate is a self regulating system, similar to an economy in its feedback effects, complete with bubbles and crashes, we do need to be afraid of the crashes, IMO.

What would happen to our economy if we changed one of the basic inputs to our economy 10000 times as fast as it was adapted to dealing with?

I think the poor quality temperature record is a larger problem right now, with people looking for just a fraction of a degree change with measurement errors of several degrees in some cases. Same is true with temperature proxies like bristlecones for longer time periods.

It is hard to imagine that the government will do much to change the equation, except to use it as an excuse to raise taxes that will be spent on something else. I think the most useful thing to do would be to build a lot of nuclear power stations (Modular Pebble Bed or Liquid Thorium Salt reactors) and convert heating and transport to electric power.

Keep in mind that history shows the earth to be much colder most of the time and that would be even worse than +2C. Also, that the GCM projections are so far off they are close to being falsified, so the problem is a long way from being understood.