Dear Keith,
You are right of course. I should study the whole treaty rather
than rely on what I read about it. Also, my thanks to you for
untangling my sentence about Republicans.
Um, sorry, wearing my editor's hat in the wrong place, but I was
tempted by the idea of using spontaneously combusting Republicans as
an energy source.
I may be being a pessimist here but I don't see the world doing much
about global warming in time to stop it's effects.
But do you the propose that therefore we shouldn't even try?
Even if the US got on board the agreements don't seem to me to go far enough.
As I said, all concerned freely acknowledge that. "Nobody closely
involved with the Kyoto Protocol sees it as a final document, nor as
perfect, just as a first step - it enables further steps."
I know, "go read them" OK I will. By your own figures, a 60 - 80
% cut in CO2, there would have to be a massive change in the way we
generate our energy.
Yup.
Look at China just since the treaty was negotiated.
Living in a dream.
Look at South East Asia. I think little can be done until an
alternative system for producing energy that doesn't pollute and
provides the same amount of energy is in place.
We've discussed this so much here, and other people have discussed it
so much elsewhere. Have a look at Lovins's "Negawatts", for instance,
or at the many studies that show how appropriate energy offers jobs
and prosperity along with everything else, not least to local
economies.
"... provides the same amount of energy"? Another dream...
What bothers me more than the US failure to sign the treaty is that
lack of serious commitment to replacing fossil fuels. The hydrogen
economy proposed by Bush is a joke.
Lack of serious commitment on the part of whom? Corporations with a
vested interest in fossil fuels and the status quo and the
governments they own, mainly, along with those spun or sent to sleep
by the PR they pay for. What's said here very often is that merely
replacing fossil fuel use is no answer, nor even an option: in the
OECD countries at any rate, a rational energy future requires great
reductions in energy use (currently mostly waste), great improvements
in energy use efficiency, and, most important, decentralisation of
supply to the small-scale or farm-scale local-economy level, along
with the use of all ready-to-use renewable energy technologies in
combination as the local circumstances require. The powers-that-be
will just love that, eh? Nonetheless, that's the context within which
biofuels make sense, not in any cloud-cuckooland scenario of
"providing the same amount of energy", or as the US DoE and many
others see it, not the same amount but more according to projections
of current growth figures. Dream on!
Look at these energy use figures:
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_404.html#energyuse
"On a per capita basis, the US uses 5.4 times more than its fair
share of the world's energy, the EU 2.6 times its share, Germany 2.6
times its share, France 2.8 times its share, Japan 2.7 times its
share, Australia 3.8 times its share... The average American uses
twice as much energy as the average European or Japanese and 155
times as much as the average Nepalese. In terms of production,
Americans produce more per head than Europeans and about the same as
Japanese, but they use twice as much energy as the Japanese to do it."
The Japanese tend to think their use of energy is efficient, and I
suppose it is by comparison, but all I see here in Japan is waste,
waste, waste.
Have a look at these previous messages for a different view:
http://archive.nnytech.net/sgroup/BIOFUELS-BIZ/1395/
How much fuel can we grow?
http://archive.nnytech.net/sgroup/BIOFUELS-BIZ/1801/
Re: Biofuels hold key to future of British farming
As to the effect of global; warming I think your comparison with
Venus is a bit over the top.
We're discussing what's called the Greenhouse Effect, triggered by
high carbon levels in the atmosphere. Venus is a greenhouse planet.
If we all sit here twiddling our thumbs much longer Earth could well
also be a greenhouse planet - that's what could come of doing
nothing, business-as-usual. It's not over the top, it's a rational
projection.
For the last few million years the major trends in climate have been
controlled by the orbit of the earth around the sun and the
precession or "wobble" in the earth's rotation. These cycles
control the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun which
varies by about 10% (Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery by John Imbrie
and Katherine Palmer Imbrie 1979).
Hamaker, for one, has a different theory, more to do with biomass
cycles, which is more in keeping with the Gaia theory. Some of
Hamaker's conclusions might be another matter, but his work on soil
mineralisation and ice ages makes sense and he supports it well. This
opens the possibility of forestalling the onset of another ice age by
controlling soil mineralisation, which is not an impossibility
(easier than controlling termites!). See:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010146tsoc.pdf
The Survival of Civilization, John D. Hamaker
See also:
http://wwia.org/pipermail/biofuel/Week-of-Mon-20050124/005224.html
[Biofuel] Global Warming Approaching Point of No Return, Warns
Leading Climate Expert
I don't necessarily subscribe to this, nor to anything much, other
than that our human-caused carbon emissions are pushing the global
climate towards an uncontrollable disaster. I don't think carbon is
the only problem - eg, in the interconnected way of things, nasty
links are emerging between global warming and damage to the ozone
layer. But carbon is the main and most immediate problem.
For the last two million years or so, the period of time that can
be tracked by core borings of ice, the climate has been
distinguished by long periods of cold, ice ages, with short periods
of warming. With respect to the cycles we should be sliding into a
new ice age with the global temperature about two degrees colder
than it has been over the last ten thousand years since the end of
the last ice age. Apparently, human activity has forestalled this.
As noted by another contributor to this group, at some point we will
run out of fossil fuel to pollute with
We won't ever run out of fossil fuels, not even of oil. It will just
get more and more expensive. I also suspect that, without some such
mechanism as the Kyoto Protocol, the current increasing levels of
supply would last much longer and stay much cheaper than many people
believe. To me the issue isn't that the heroin, sorry, the oil will
run out as predicted and we'll all have to give it up, it's that
using it like we do is not sustainable anyway no matter how much or
how little there might be, and that is a much more pressing issue
than that of supply.
and at that point it is possible that the global temperature will
crash precipitously to the point in the climate cycle we would have
been at had human activity not have occurred.
:-) Greg just said removing the carbon we've added will lead to
temperature increases. Are you saying we should keep emitting fossil
carbon as long as possible to prevent an ice age? Other scenarios see
rising atmospheric carbon as the trigger that causes the onset of an
ice age. You're prepared to risk turning the planet into a Venus
lookalike or perhaps actually causing an ice age on the strength of
your convictions about this?
Global warming is expensive no doubt. So is having New York and
Chicago buried under a mile thick layer of ice. I suppose the ideal
would be to understand the chemistry of the atmosphere to the point
where we could avoid both extremes although you can imagine the
fights that would go on between nations as to where to set the
thermostat.
The ideal is to stop merely jawing about it and get on with doing
something about it. The scientific consensus that carbon emissions
must be reduced with all speed is massive, the few kept scientists
who demur don't even make a percentage and have been thoroughly
exposed as frauds (Singer, Soon, Baliunas et al). With the Kyoto
Protocol's coming into force, the scope and scale of action possible
has taken a huge leap. Good.
Best wishes
Keith
Rick
Keith Addison wrote:
Hello Rick
Dear DB,
I liked your response. Partly, I suppose, because it accords with
my own thoughts. There is no doubt at this point that global
warming is occurring even among some republicans.
There's no doubt even among some republicans or it's occurring even
among some republicans? The first, cause to rejoice (though that's
been the case for awhile I think), if the second, depending who
they are, if they're becoming prone to spontaneous combustion
should we shed tears or consider them as an alternative energy
source? (Sorry!)
What drives it it the question. There are no shortage of non man
made effects that could raise the global temperature. Methane
produced by termite colonies world wide is more abundant than any
man made green house gas.
And it plays an important and complex role in the climate andd the
upper atmosphere.
The main problem with this sort of argument though, apart from the
now-massive body of science that debunks it, is that the termites
have not been working more and more overtime for the last 200 years
to account for the rising temperatures. The lead contender for
that, by a whole bunch of lengths, is CO2 produced by us.
It seems apparent to me that what ever the cause the effect is not
stoppable at this point. There is just no time left to turn the
battleship before it hits the pier.
How do you know that? A very premature conclusion, with little to
support it that I know of. Again, at the Kyoto Protocol
celebrations in Kyoto on Wednesday the speakers were talking of the
need for 60-80% CO2 cuts, and these people were mostly being
placatory, not provocative. Such figures have been making it into
print more and more in the last couple of years. It was common
parlance at the Climate Change conference in Nairobi in 1992, among
those people I'd guess that 60-80% would now be seen as very
conservative.
So we (or some of us at least) blew it on precaution in favour of
sheer greed, so now let's just accept that and give up trying to
curb the damage we've done when we've hardly even begun? Is that
what you're saying? Sod that. (Pardon me.) We're able to expend
much greater efforts, resources and expertise on mitigation than
anything that's been done so far. Mitigation is a major plank of
the Kyoto Protocol which now comes into force. I really don't mean
to be insulting, but I have to say that you sound a bit like former
Commissioner of the US Patent Office Charles H. Duell, who said in
1899 that "Everything that can be invented has been invented." This
is perhaps the greatest challenge humanity has faced, we're
ingenious little monkeys, I don't think you should gong us out
before we're even in the ring.
Would we not be better off at this point figuring out how to live
in a warmer world than trying to stop a flood with a tea cup?
Say you were already there so there wasn't a transport problem, how
would you go about living on Venus? You and six billion others,
plus the whole biosphere? Do you think that would less of a
technological challenge than mitigating global warming at this
stage on Earth?
The Kyoto protocol has considerable economic consequences.
Global warming has even more considerable economic consequences.
The insurance industry calculated that global warming cost US$60
billion in 2003, going up fast.
Is this the best use of the worlds resources to solve the problem?
Do you know of a better one? Nobody closely involved with the Kyoto
Protocol sees it as a final document, nor as perfect, just as a
first step - it enables further steps. That's absolutely true -
things are possible this week that were not possible last week.
You'd need to assess all this very closely, and for some time to
come, before you could safely draw conclusions as to whether or not
it's the best use of the world's resources to solve the problem.
The point is that it's the ONLY such use of the world's resources,
it has international acceptance and force and it is happening now.
What would you prefer? Another 13 years of talking about it? As it
is, if better uses of resources emerge than are now envisaged, as
no doubt they will, it's within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol
that they'll be implemented.
Would it not be better to determine the likely consequences of
warming and figure out how best to deal with them?
That's included in the Kyoto Protocol. Maybe you should go and study it.
http://i-newswire.com/pr6144.html
i-Newswire.com - Press Release And News Distribution - WORLDWIDE
CELEBRATIONS TO MARK KYOTO PROTOCOL'S ENTRY INTO FORCE 16 FEBRUARY
"The Kyoto Protocol's entry into force means that from 16 February
2005... the Protocol's Adaptation Fund, established in 2001, can
become operational to assist developing countries to cope with the
negative effects of climate change."
[more]
The industrialised nations are expected to "take the lead" in these
efforts (rather than leaving the 3rd World countries to it). No
country will be immune, but it's already apparent that the 3rd
World countries, who've contributed to it the least, will be the
hardest hit and the least equipped to cope with it.
http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/kpeng.html
Kyoto Protocol
KYOTO PROTOCOL TO THE UNITED NATIONS FRAMEWORK CONVENTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE
Best wishes
Keith
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