Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We can tell that heat released by human energy consumption
> does not have a significant effect for two reasons:
> First, any heat release escapes from the atmosphere in about 40 min.
This is untrue, because most of the heat caused by (cold fusion) power
plants is not released into athmosphere but it is dumped into sea. And sea
can store heat for a long long time. In a very extent that it has
significant effect on global scale. However, this is not the severe issue
and all extra heat can be mitigated by reforestation. So I would think that
there is potential to increase power consumption at least by one order of
magnitude, perhaps several, if large scale reforestation is accompanied.
However, I do not think that even severe warming by urban heat lake effect
(I modified the expression to be more accurate) is not dangerous, because
there are geological times when tropical forests were extended far north
and even arctic circles without obvious positive feedback loops. That is,
world was back then more moist and nicer place to live. (according to IPCC
climate models, equatorial zone would have been burning in blazing 80°C
heat, but this was not correct, but also equatorial zones were covered with
forests, because forests moderate their own climate by circulating water
and releasing aerosols that create artificial clouds and rains.
I would say that most of the observed global warming is not due to CO2 but
because of deforestation. Global warming does not correlate with
atmospheric carbon dioxide but it is correlating with deforestation.
Though, deforestation has been major contributor for increasing levels of
atmospheric carbon dioxide.
> As I explain in this chapter, cold fusion will eliminate CO2
> emissions caused by energy production. There may be some
> emissions from other human activity, especially cutting down forests.
With cheap cold fusion, we can transfer into vertical agriculture, because
it is cheaper than horizontal agriculture. That is because land use is up
to 200 times more efficient and there is no need to worry about,
insufficient irrigation and nutrients, because all nutrients can be
recycled. Recycling however takes energy, so expensive electricity has so
far been the bottle neck. But due to evolving LED technology and ever
cheaper electricity, I would say that vertical agriculture could be reality
soon even without cold fusion.
Therefore as horizontal agriculture is expensive and obsolete, we can
return 2 gigahectares of deforested fertile land into natural
reforestation. This much forest can absorb up to one teraton of carbon
stored in living and dead biomass from atmosphere. Currently atmosphere
however contains only 700 gigatons of carbon, so there must must be
released plenty of carbon that is stored in the oceans to account forest
regrowth.
So there is absolutely no need to remove carbon-dioxide from atmosphere,
because living biomass that is destroyed by humans can absorb and store far
more carbon than what are global fossil fuel reserves. I am utterly amazed,
why people have ignored how much forests can store carbon. If I would ask
from any climate change scientist how much forests can store carbon, I
would receive a null result, because they have no idea. IPCC did not even
mention this in the report, and it's crude guesses were of at best factor
of two and at worst one order of magnitude under evaluated.
—Jouni
