Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

Tom Kalbfus · 2007-12-01 09:28:36

Basically most of 1 degree centigrade in the last 50 years, it will perhaps rise another degree centigrade in the next 50 years and another by the end of this century. We'd better work on our space travel technology instead of duncing around like we did for the last 50 years. The rise in CO2 levels roughly parallels the rise in living standards world wide. So it appears we're heading for the tropics.

I just don't see how 6 billion+ people can live in harmony with nature, that is why we should learn to live in space, yet we've been acting like we've got all the time in the world.

Terraformer · 2007-12-01 09:37:01

jumpboy, you've made the same mistake (deliberate?) that Al Gore did. The temperature and the CO2 lines don't overlay each over in the undoctored graph. They're actually a hundred years out.

And I would like to see a graph that starts from, ooh, say, 10,000 years ago? Remember, the further you go back, the shakier the foundations man made climate change is built on. Is that why they only start at 1880?

JoshNH4H · 2007-12-01 12:55:46

and

I hope that satisfies your majesties need, King Terraforrmer :shock:

RickSmith · 2007-12-01 13:22:18

Read my posts a little more carefully. What I am basically saying is that I don't like hasty approaches, ...

Mr Kalbfus,
I have read your posts, and you said:

... I just think we shouldn't kill ourselves trying to rescue the Earth from global warming, ...

A number of other times you have made blanket statements that trying to slow carbon dioxide build up / slow global warming would require excessive efforts and may well fail anyway.

I am asking you a specific question. (For perhaps the fifth time.) Would implementing the flex fuels plan that Robert Zubrin suggests, kill the USA economy? If you can't answer this question, please don't bother to answer at all as I won't bother to reply to your posts again.

Rick

Terraformer · 2007-12-01 14:34:45

Well, actually I asked for the past 10,00 years.

As even you should be able to see, the temperature 'increase' from trees, corals, historical records, and ice cores, fits into a general pattern with little or no net increase in temperature, and the temperature starts to go up as they start to use thermometers. All it is is we are getting better at measuring temperature. You've kind of shot yourself in the foot.

And there's no need to call me King, Supreme Overlord of the Pegasus galaxy will do.

Terraformer · 2007-12-01 15:02:30

And another thing jumpboy. The CO2 in the samples only goes up as the types of samples change. Could it ever possibly be that different samples hold different amounts of CO2 anyway? Or am I mental and seeing info that isn't there?

You're a very civilized spammer, jumpboy.

Tom Kalbfus · 2007-12-01 15:36:05

Read my posts a little more carefully. What I am basically saying is that I don't like hasty approaches, ...
Mr Kalbfus,
I have read your posts, and you said:
... I just think we shouldn't kill ourselves trying to rescue the Earth from global warming, ...
A number of other times you have made blanket statements that trying to slow carbon dioxide build up / slow global warming would require excessive efforts and may well fail anyway.
I am asking you a specific question. (For perhaps the fifth time.) Would implementing the flex fuels plan that Robert Zubrin suggests, kill the USA economy? If you can't answer this question, please don't bother to answer at all as I won't bother to reply to your posts again.
Rick

No, developing flexible fuels wouldn't, but I said we shouldn't kill ourselves to rescue the Earth from global warming, and I mean draconian measures such as high gasoline taxes and carbon credit trading, in other words the government starts counting the carbon percentage in out fuel and starts taxing them accordingly, and people have to buy offsets so the rich can still travel in their corporate jets if they plant X number of trees on Y amount of land, that's the part I don't like. The best way to handle this is to build systems that move cars around without resort to having the internal combustion engine on. This is kind of like deploying fiber optics. The first bit of copper cable to get replaced by fiber optics are the main lines, and the last bit connects directly to the homes. In a similar fashion the first highways we replace are the main arteries, the interstates, then we electrify the main state highways, then the county routes working our way to every street and throughfare, but we don't do them all at once. Alot of the driving we do is on the main highways, we do a little bit to get from those highways to specific destinations on the local roads, but most of the distance traveled is on those highway.

The problem with electric cars are limited battery storage of expensive fuel cells, so you avoid the problem with electrified highways, relying on hybrid battery/internal combustion engines to get the rest of the way. The effective range on an electrified highway is the length of the highway. So long as you stay on it, you don't need to stop to refuel.

Figuring out alternative fuels is relatively hard, you have to develop new engines sometimes, and new manufacturing processes on large scale to manufacture the fuel. There are alot of flex fuel vehicles on the road today, but I have not seen alot of fuel pumps that offered Ethenol 85. Hybrids have elctric motors to run the cars, Deisels and ethenol powered cars do not, their motors run all the time. I like electrics the best, they're quite, and they don't smell.

Commodore · 2007-12-01 21:51:03

Considering the strain that ethonal production is already putting on things, I would say it it would.

noosfractal · 2007-12-02 00:08:57

The CO2 in the samples only goes up as the types of samples change. Could it ever possibly be that different samples hold different amounts of CO2 anyway?

No, this is silly. They take all this into account.

If you want to argue against AGW, do it properly. The facts of climate change are well established: the global temperature is rising, CO2 concentration is increasing. The scientific points in dispute are: what is causing the warming, and how much warming will we get (in particular, what is the sensitivity of global temperature to CO2 increase). The economic points in dispute are legion (in particular, is it cheaper to deal with any problems now or in the future).

Now CO2 is a greenhouse gas (i.e., having more does in fact warm the Earth), so it is at least a positive feedback. The only other real candidate for warming is solar, so you'd have to present a convincing case as to why the IPCC is wrong went it says the warming isn't caused by solar. Lots of people are trying to do this, so pick your favorite. A tricky problem for skeptics here is that the isotope ratio of carbon in the new CO2 is the same as that in fossil fuels, making it hard to argue that the new CO2 is an effect rather than a cause of the warming.

Predicting how much warming we'll get is much less certain. The IPCC says we'll get something like 1.5-4.5 degrees Celsius for each doubling of CO2, with the most likely being around 2.5 degrees. This is a big issue. If the sensitivity is closer to 1.5 degrees then economic impacts are likely very low. If the sensitivity is closer to 4.5 degrees then we should probably take some action (although timing is a separate question).

Here however, skeptics have a good case for a sensitivity of something like 0.5 a degree, because that is what we actually measure (note that sensitivity is logarithmic, not linear, so we should already have experienced most of the warming from the current CO2 increase). The forecast models ("GCMs") used by the IPCC say that the missing heat is currently stored in the ocean, but will come out any day now and cause a dramatic temperature increase. The problem here is that global temperature hasn't changed at all in the last 5 years (actually, it went down a little), so maybe the models are *gasp* wrong. It is very possible that they are wrong because they (still!) don't include clouds. There is also lots of uncertainty related to various aerosols.

There are people saying that the sensitivity is actually 11.0 degrees and that we'll all have to move to Antarctica, but they are activists not scientists, and should be mocked mercilessly at every possible opportunity.

Terraformer · 2007-12-02 04:11:44

My point was that the temperature increase from thermometers (ed) was, what, a whole 1/2 a degree nearly from the other sources (blue) and that we shouldn't use one source for nearly a millenia and then switch to another source, there is bound to be some *recorded* increase, that may not acurately reflect the actual warming at all. There probably were some people in 1450 talking about humanity was cousing an ice age. Shortly after was the little ice age. Does this mean those people are right? No it doesn't, as inn 1350 there was a smaller dip in temperature. The Earth is on a cycle. Maybe it isn't greenhouse gasses or the sun. Maybe Earth has some slight variations in orbit that Astronomers havn't been looking for or found yet.

And you've also got to take into account natural disasters. The Boxing Day earthquake in the Indian Ocean shifted the Earth by a whole 2 degrees on its axis, causing hotter summers and colder winters in some places that has been blamed on Global Warming.

And are these temperature sources from all around the orld or just a few places? Regional Warming would be a problem if the latter.

Tom Kalbfus · 2007-12-02 09:00:49

Considering the strain that ethonal production is already putting on things, I would say it it would.

Assuming the ethenol comes from corn, but there is research to find ways to produce ethenol from grass, that is why I'm suggesting we do things such as build electric highways to power electric cars and hybrids that can also drive off of those electric highways. I mean the big selling point of these highways is that you don't have to drive your car while you are on it, couple that with a highway that actually powers your car and the fact that there are now cars on the road that are powered by electricity at least part of the time, then I think we can go somewhere with this concept.

Instead people have been concentrating on giving electric cars the same range as gasoline powered cars, and they're assuming traditional "dumb highways", they just focus on the car and not what its driving on. Same with alternate fuels, they want a substitute for gasoline, end of story, but why should I get into an ethenol powered car, if I still have to drive the thing the whole distance to my destination, also those cars either have less range or their fuel tanks take up greater space within the vehicle leaving less space for passengers and cargo. If its going to require big government to tax gasoline so that its unaffordable so I have no choice but to drive an ethenol powered vehicle, I think that's the wrong approach. I feel this is the 21st century, so we should act like it. I drive cars for a living, so I should know.

Terraformer · 2007-12-02 09:18:23

There's one teeny little problem with electric highways: for them to be efficient, you'd need a high temp. superconductor.

Tom Kalbfus · 2007-12-02 12:44:39

Not really, they are basically the same thing as an electric train, the "wheels on rails" kind except instead of a track under the wheels you have an asphault highway instead. Electric trains are of two varieties, ine kind draws its power from wires above, while the other draws its power fron a "third rail" underneath. An electric car would be like an electric train only smaller, and it would have only that "Third rail" underneath and no steel tracks to guide it. Instead each car would be guided by radio signals from transmitters placed along the highway, these radio signals would guide the car so that it stays over the electric rail such that it can draw current from it. The cars would have touch screens on the dashboard so you can indicate which exit you want to get out of and the automated highway would maneuver other cars out of the way and manuever your car onto the exit ramp at which point an alarm would signal indicating to the driver to take over the controls of the car. If the driver is still asleep or unable to do that, then the highway will park it to the side, and give a 5 minute warning before emergency vehicles or a tow truck is alerted.

noosfractal · 2007-12-02 13:32:32

My point was that the temperature increase from thermometers (ed) was, what, a whole 1/2 a degree nearly from the other sources (blue) and that we shouldn't use one source for nearly a millenia and then switch to another source, there is bound to be some *recorded* increase, that may not acurately reflect the actual warming at all.

It is misleading to glue the thermometer record, hockey-stick style, onto the proxy record, but switching to thermometers doesn't necessarily give you a temperature jump - although the urban heat island effect may still be underestimated.

And are these temperature sources from all around the orld or just a few places?

The historical proxies aren't well-distributed, and there are problems with the thermometer record in developing countries, but these days we have these nifty things called satellites, which don't miss much. Actually, until 2005, the satellite record conflicted with the surface record, but they found a subtle error in the way the satellite data was being processed (minor orbit changes meant the processing assumptions were out of synch with the true diurnal cycle). It's possible they'll find more errors with the satellite measurements, but right now they are roughly in synch with the surface measurements.

The Earth is on a cycle. Maybe it isn't greenhouse gasses or the sun. Maybe Earth has some slight variations in orbit that Astronomers havn't been looking for or found yet.

This is possible.

And you've also got to take into account natural disasters. The Boxing Day earthquake in the Indian Ocean shifted the Earth by a whole 2 degrees on its axis, causing hotter summers and colder winters in some places that has been blamed on Global Warming.

This is nonsense. Don't make statements like this. They reduce your credibility to zero.

Terraformer · 2007-12-03 01:08:21

How? It is a known scientific fact that the boxing day earthquake shifted the Earth on its axis. At least tell me how I've 'reduced my crediblity to zero'.

noosfractal · 2007-12-03 23:21:02

How? It is a known scientific fact that the boxing day earthquake shifted the Earth on its axis. At least tell me how I've 'reduced my crediblity to zero'.

You're presumably interested in terraforming. So this should be a fun exercise for you: calculate the rotational energy of the Earth, lookup the energy of the Boxing Day earthquake, guess which is more likely:

- the earthquake induced an axial wobble with a magnitude at the Earth's surface of up to 1 inch that was, as usual, quickly damped by the moon

- the earthquake "shifted the Earth by a whole 2 degrees on its axis, causing hotter summers and colder winters"

?

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#51 2007-12-01 09:28:36

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#52 2007-12-01 09:37:01

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#53 2007-12-01 12:55:46

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#54 2007-12-01 13:22:18

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#55 2007-12-01 14:34:45

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#56 2007-12-01 15:02:30

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#57 2007-12-01 15:36:05

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#58 2007-12-01 21:51:03

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#59 2007-12-02 00:08:57

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#60 2007-12-02 04:11:44

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#61 2007-12-02 09:00:49

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#62 2007-12-02 09:18:23

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#63 2007-12-02 12:44:39

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#64 2007-12-02 13:32:32

Re: Terraforming techniques to combat global warming

#65 2007-12-03 01:08:21

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#66 2007-12-03 23:21:02

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