Thanks for the references and your viewpoint. Both are really helpful.
Rick
Keith Addison wrote:
Hello Rick
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
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