Totally OT but…

“This really has nothing to do with Lovelock’s predictions but what the hell did he mean by the statement “We were alone without an effective ally”. This is the type of crap I’ve heard too often put forth by Brits. No the UK didn’t stand alone. If it wasn’t for the Commonwealth and the convoys, Britain would have fallen for sure. Ungrateful twits.”

Lovelock is referring to the period in 1940 when France had been overrun / given up without much of a fight and the US was still neutral. We would have been wiped off the face of the Risk board there and then if anyone else but Churchill had been prime minister and if the Battle of Britain had gone badly. It was much later, after Pearl Harbour, that the US joined in.

For a brief period after France fell many politicians wanted to give in and make some sort of pact with Germany. Come to think of it it might not have been a bad idea. It took us 50 years to get the same there via the EU…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II

But maybe yes, a few people, mostly on dirt-poor farms (literally dirt poor, consider the Candaian Shield), a few in towns can probably manage to obtain almost all P by careful recycling.

Notice this implies a rather small world population. Maybe 100 million total?

[JR: I try to stay current, plus I actually do watch the show. For others, there is always Google.]

We know that the CO2 concentrations are rising at an unprecedented rate. Its quite simple logic to deduce that we are in deep doo doo. Some thing I heard before here..
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

Here’s what Hansen said on SLR.

Under BAU forcing in the 21st century, the sea level rise surely will be dominated by a third term: (3) ice sheet disintegration. This third term was small until the past few years, but it is has at least doubled in the past decade and is now close to 1 mm/year, based on the gravity satellite measurements discussed above. As a quantitative example, let us say that the ice sheet contribution is 1 cm for the decade 2005–15 and that it doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. That time constant yields a sea level rise of the order of 5 m this century. Of course I cannot prove that my choice of a ten-year doubling time for nonlinear response is accurate, but I am confident that it provides a far better estimate than a linear response for the ice sheet component of sea level rise under BAU forcing.

[JR: I haven't changed things in months.]

http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/ docs/ cnbe/ climate_geoengineering_web221208_section3.pdf

These ideas may have some minor implementation problems, but if the choice is solving these problems, or runaway climate change, we need to solve the implementation problems.

Many of the difficulties mentioned in this report are exaggerated, IMO. Many power plants in the East reside directly over deep saline aquifers (which lie under wide areas of the earth’s surface) suitable for CO2 deep injection, for example, so no multi-trillion dollar network of pipelines is necessary, for many power plants.

Sufficient biomass does exist, according to ORNL.

Many coal fired power plants are located on navigable rivers, especially in the entire Mississippi river basin including the Ohio river. All of the area upstream of each power plant becomes potential collection area for biomass or biochar.

Biochar can be burned as a 100% replacement for coal.

Biomass could be transformed into biochar locally, by mobile pyrolysis units. Some energy in the form of hydrogen or electricity could be generated at this stage.

The resulting biochar could be returned to the soil, and used as a soil amendment and fertility enhancer. Or it could be burned in coal fired power plants. If river transport is used, farmers would only have to truck the biochar to collection points along the rivers or their entire tributary systems.

Transformation of biomass into biochar, and then pelletizing the biochar, produces a fuel as dense, storable, and transportable as coal.

We need to seize the coal fired power plants worldwide, and transform them by fiat into carbon negative power plants, and start putting billions of tons of carbon per year back underground. This seems like the highest probability solution for turning the corner on abrupt climate change.

As long as ice dynamics and all of its implications are a taboo topic, talking about the rest climate change is silly. We might as well be talking about our favorite sports teams because we are not getting to the heart of climate change risks for society. Ice dynamice suggests rapid sea level change. It is consistent with geology. It is just that forcings we see in geology are a couple of orders of magnitude lower than current forcings, so our sea level change can be a couple of orders of magnitude faster.

Society has built its infrastructure at sea level. Any sudden change of change of sea level is disastrous. The only two numbers in climate science that matter are how much ice is warming toward 0C and how much potential energy is in that warming ice.

Actually, the answer is simple: start with the worst case and work backwards. This is simple risk management. To avoid the worst case, what must we do? Power down. Now.

How do we do that without destabilizing global society? (I’m going to ahead and assume we are not in full Survival of the Fittest mode and that we’d like to keep safe as great a number as is practicable.) As someone alluded, we go Amish, essentially. I don’t mean we follow their mores, etc., but the low-carbon lifestyle of self-reliance and near-self-sufficiency. Funny thing is, that sounds like an impossible change, but it’s not. It’s as simple as re-allocating land and building with natural/reclaimed materials. People are doing it, or at least trying like hell: http://www.dancingrabbit.org/

As an intermediate step in advanced countries, why not take half a trillion (in the U.S.) and apply it to DIY individual/community energy efficiency/production? Instant work, instant community-building, instant economic help and instant paradigm shift jump start. http://aperfectstormcometh.blogspot.com/ 2008/ 03/ build-out-grid-vs-household-towards.html

Of course, growth as a paradigm is done for the foreseeable future. Even if one thought it possible to continue growth via innovation and efficiency (you can’t, at least not forever since systems have all have limits), one must keep in mind **all** aspects of The Perfect Storm, and the Great Limiter – what I like to call deal breakers – is Climate Change. For the next 50 years, growth = GHG emissions, and that equals collapse/chaotic/non-linear response of the natural system we exist in. For most, that’s an unacceptable outcome. Thus, growth is dead. Or, as I have said once before, “Green or gone. Deal with it.”

If we accept all of the above, then it gets much easier to deal with the transition that must come because we simply have no choice. Cutting GHGs means changing lifestyles drastically in advanced and advancing economies to essentially zero, and even below that if the CO2 350ppm or less threshold is accepted. (This is an obvious choice given the extreme response of the climate system already.) And that means Hobbiton-on-the-Internet, i.e., relocalized, reduced, recycled, renewable and self-reliance/-sufficiency. Again, Amish-ish.

Some parameters to keep in mind might be EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) which for crude oil is as low as 11:1 where it used to be 100:1. Energy per capita peaked long ago. According to thermodynamics, less energy equals less life, less work, less production. Most notably for this discussion, it can mean a lot less stuff. There is so much waste in the American system that we could, quite literally, likely cut our energy consumption in half and suffer no privation. Change, yes. Privation, not necessarily. Europe, for example, has a higher standard of living on half the oil consumption.

Another might be Dunbar’s number. That’s his theoretical limit of 150, give or take, people that can exist together in community and maintain significant relationships with all. Does this mean each town or city can be only 150 people? Not necessarily, I’d think. Rather, it means your walkable area, a semi-self-sufficient (perhaps in food, energy, housing, ??) neighborhood might stay in that range of 150+/- 50 or so to have the kinds of connections that build real community and allow for proper debate and discussion, conflict resolution, social welfare, etc.

And growth. I love Dr. Albert Bartlett’s presentation on exponents. It makes the limits of efficiency and innovation so clear. Population truly can only grow so large in a given environment before committing unintentional mass suicide. The work of Tainter and Diamond illustrate this well. A simple example is oil. If the entire world lived as the US does, all @1.2 trillion barrels of crude left to extract would be gone in around 6 or 7 years. (This is an unrealistic, actually impossible scenario used for illustrative purposes only.) Obviously, the American Dream is, and always has been, a myth for all but, well, America and/or the OECD. It’s as much an illusion as the idea that every American family can own their own home and live a nice, comfortable middle class life.

Getting back to population and efficiency, despite efficiency gains that are actually quite large, the US used more oil in mid-2008 than it ever had in previous decades. Why? Population. Population is the other deal-breaker, alongside Climate Change. The two are actually two sides of the same problem. Three if you include energy and other resource limits that are coming up.

It should be clear that this is a time like no other in human history. At no other time have we faced global resource depletion, massive climate change and population limits **at the same time.**

We can fix it by simply reducing consumption and living in a carbon neutral or carbon reducing way. It will probably require an end to fractional banking, reduced central government at all levels, increased cooperation at the neighborhood/town level, a steady-state economy and most people producing their own energy and food. (I do believe technology can be kept alive if used to enhance our relationships with nature and each other.)

Time is running out and the challenge is beyond enormous. BUT, the solution is utterly and completely simple: live simply, live closely with others and live to live, not to profit.

Cheers