Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

cricketo said:
Well, by the level of industrialization and use of machinery the third world may be quite a bit behind, but they're pretty efficient at chopping down and burning down forests to do agriculture. How much of an impact is that ?
Click to expand...

I don't think it's very much. Forests are carbon sinks, but I believe the ocean dwarfs the land by a considerable amount. (I should probably Google that)

The problem isn't really humans fiddling with the carbon cycle, it's the release of the sequestered carbon. It took millions of years for plants to gather the carbon and we're releasing it over a couple hundred.
 
sendler2112 said:
Some interesting charts...
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..and now you can find exactly where all the manufacturing and production went..
So sad that we lost the title of #1 polluter..

2f08f6ec31171f50edf86f2dab6918f5--god-bless-america-sodas.jpg
 
furcifer said:
........ Forests are carbon sinks, but I believe the ocean dwarfs the land by a considerable amount.
...........
The problem isn't really humans fiddling with the carbon cycle, it's the release of the sequestered carbon. It took millions of years for plants to gather the carbon and we're releasing it over a couple hundred.
Click to expand...
Since we know that the Oceans are the major repository for “available “ CO2,...
...what do you think would be the most likely source of CO2 variation in the atmosphere ?
 
Hillhater said:
Since we know that the Oceans are the major repository for “available “ CO2,...
...what do you think would be the most likely source of CO2 variation in the atmosphere ?
Click to expand...

Us.

After 4 billion years the oceans pretty much runs like a Swiss watch. The changes to algae blooms, red tides, La Nina etc. are one of the ways to measure the effects of additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

The ocean may be one of the better ways to reverse the effects of climate change. Artificially stimulating the ocean to absorb CO2 is a possibility. There's also a layer of soil a few feet down that holds a lot of CO2. From what I remember it's not as massive as the oceans but it's much more robust.
 
furcifer said:
After 4 billion years the oceans pretty much runs like a Swiss watch. ......
Click to expand...
..and how was the atmospheric CO2 over that 4 bn year period...befor any influence from US. ?

furcifer said:
The changes to algae blooms, red tides, La Nina etc. are one of the ways to measure the effects of additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
Click to expand...
So, you are saying La nina is a result of Mans activities ? :shock:
 
furcifer said:
Do you know what the Paris Accord is?
"The climate agreement adopted at the 21st United Nations Climate Conference (COP21) in Paris in December 2015 has officially abandoned the idea of an international equitable burden-sharing arrangement to control and reduce carbon emissions based on multilaterally negotiated binding emissions targets and time tables for each country, the foundation of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. By that it has effectively sidelined equity and environmental justice considerations as a guiding principle for multilateral cooperation. It has let the developed world largely off the hook for its massive historic contribution of CO2 that has already accumulated in the earth’s atmosphere. "
Click to expand...

Interesting quote. It appears to originate from here: https://openev.debatecoaches.org/rest/wikis/openev/spaces/2016/pages/Michigan7/attachments/Warming%20K%20-%20Michigan7%202016.docx

It's a strange, rambling document peppered with the phrase "neo-liberalism" and quotes Karl Marx.

Interesting choice of source.
 
Punx0r said:
Interesting quote. It appears to originate from here: https://openev.debatecoaches.org/rest/wikis/openev/spaces/2016/pages/Michigan7/attachments/Warming%20K%20-%20Michigan7%202016.docx

It's a strange, rambling document peppered with the phrase "neo-liberalism" and quotes Karl Marx.

Interesting choice of source.
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It's from the Journal of Environment and Development :roll:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1070496516631362
 
Hillhater said:
..and how was the atmospheric CO2 over that 4 bn year period...befor any influence from US. ?
Click to expand...

If memory serves, early on it was almost entirely CO2, giving rise to plant life, single cell life, animals, fish, whales, and Jacque Cousteau.


Hillhater said:
furcifer said:
The changes to algae blooms, red tides, La Nina etc. are one of the ways to measure the effects of additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
Click to expand...
So, you are saying La nina is a result of Mans activities ? :shock:
Click to expand...
No, read for comprehension. I said "changes to".

:bigthumb:
 
furcifer said:
Hillhater said:
..and how was the atmospheric CO2 over that 4 bn year period...befor any influence from US. ?
Click to expand...

If memory serves, early on it was almost entirely CO2,
Click to expand...
No , never near entirely co2, but much higher levels , and much more variation than now, without any help from Man
Point being...other factors way beyond human presence , drive CO2 levels ..then and now.
 
We are doing it this time. And although there were periods of atmospheric CO2 that were much higher than now, from 1,000's of years long protracted Basalt Lava flows, and are linked to previous mass extinction events, we are emitting it much, much faster. Which gives life forms way too short a time to adapt through generations of natural selection and plant migration.
 
Hillhater said:
We cannot know if the rate is greater now , than previous changes,..the data is not precise.
But even so, a rapit rate of change does not automatically mean its due to human influence,
Click to expand...

You do understand that there are millions of people, driving millions of cars, pumping millions of gallons of gas into those vehicles and burning it? Thousands of power plants, with million of tons of coal, being burnt every day?

Sometimes people get confused and don't understand the difference between the carbon cycle; the carbon in the environment that is active in numerous processes like photosynthesis, and sequestered carbon, carbon that has been locked in and is no longer a part of that cycle?

You can think of it like money. Some money is in circulation, you use a $20 to buy bread, the guy behind you buying a card gets your $20 and puts it in the card, gives the card to his nephew, who uses the $20 to buy baseball cards and so on. Some money gets put in a mattress, or stored in a house by some drug dealers. It may have been in circulation before but once it gets stored and not used it's basically "sequestered".

Fossil fuels store carbon. It found it's way into the ground and was removed from the carbon cycle. By burning it in ICE's it is released, and after not being in circulation for millions of years it's back. And it's measurable. We know how many gallons of gas have been burned, how many tons of coal.

It's definitely due to human influence, it was in the ground for millions of years, then we dug it up. It would still be in the ground, for millions of more years if we didn't.
 
sendler2112 said:
We are doing it this time. And although there were periods of atmospheric CO2 that were much higher than now, from 1,000's of years long protracted Basalt Lava flows, and are linked to previous mass extinction events, we are emitting it much, much faster. Which gives life forms way too short a time to adapt through generations of natural selection and plant migration.
Click to expand...

Correct.

It's the effects of releasing this sequestered carbon that are questionable. I've heard for many, many years very bad things were just around the corner. So far they don't seem to pan out. The media likes to use every bad weather incident as a sign it's happening and for the most part, meh.

What we know for sure is we are releasing CO2 at an unprecedented rate since the industrial revolution. We also know changes like this tend to upset the balances established over many, many years, and aren't always a good thing. But compared to most of nature humans are very adaptable, we already live in greater extremes. And like the virus we are, we will undoubtedly survive while everything around us is destroyed.

That's just being human. People like to think we can destroy the earth but it's been around for a very long time, and will be for many more. Even if we kill off ourselves and every living thing on this planet, it will keep spinning. And chances are pretty good it will all happen again. Maybe the next batch of life on this planet will be better.
 
Hillhater said:
No , never near entirely co2, but much higher levels , and much more variation than now, without any help from Man
Point being...other factors way beyond human presence , drive CO2 levels ..then and now.
Click to expand...
Yep. But this time it's us.
 
billvon said:
Hillhater said:
No , never near entirely co2, but much higher levels , and much more variation than now, without any help from Man
Point being...other factors way beyond human presence , drive CO2 levels ..then and now.
Click to expand...
Yep. But this time it's us.
Click to expand...

Yah, its not much of a question. Its actually surprising its not already worse than it is. We have dumped a lot of carbon. To change the acidity of the entire ocean with the added CO2, its crazy.
 
cricketo said:
furcifer said:
I don't think it's very much.
Click to expand...

It is estimated that 25% of the world’s total greenhouse gas production comes from deforestation alone.
Click to expand...

http://climate.org/deforestation-and-climate-change/
Click to expand...

That's net production. In terms of climate change, cut a tree down and burn it you produce CO2, plant a tree and grow it you reduce CO2.
Pull a ton of coal out of the ground and burn it, its not going back anytime soon. You have to find new sinks.
Cows contribute a lot to GHG but its still carbon neutral. The grass absorbs CO2, cows release it in the form of methane.
Its not good but its not so much the problem.
 
sendler2112 said:
It doesn't say anywhere in there how much carbon is emitted or net changed from the deforestation
Click to expand...

Yah. It's at least reversible. Although good luck getting it back once its gone and people are building concrete structures on it.
But again this tends to be the western world telling the third world what to do, so we can continue to burn fossil fuels.
 
furcifer said:
That's net production. In terms of climate change, cut a tree down and burn it you produce CO2, plant a tree and grow it you reduce CO2.
Click to expand...

That's what we call "sustainable logging", which is the only way to do it in Oregon by law. That's not the same thing as deforestation though - in case of deforestation trees are removed to give way to agriculture, and never replaced.

Cows contribute a lot to GHG but its still carbon neutral. The grass absorbs CO2, cows release it in the form of methane.
Its not good but its not so much the problem.
Click to expand...

I think you're making a mistake with this one. Cows may be carbon neutral, but methane is a lot more potent than CO2, and stays in the atmosphere a lot longer. Swapping CO2 for CH4 is to make the problem progressively worse.
 
cricketo said:
furcifer said:
That's net production. In terms of climate change, cut a tree down and burn it you produce CO2, plant a tree and grow it you reduce CO2.
Click to expand...

That's what we call "sustainable logging", which is the only way to do it in Oregon by law. That's not the same thing as deforestation though - in case of deforestation trees are removed to give way to agriculture, and never replaced.

Cows contribute a lot to GHG but its still carbon neutral. The grass absorbs CO2, cows release it in the form of methane.
Its not good but its not so much the problem.
Click to expand...

I think you're making a mistake with this one. Cows may be carbon neutral, but methane is a lot more potent than CO2, and stays in the atmosphere a lot longer. Swapping CO2 for CH4 is to make the problem progressively worse.
Click to expand...

No, the cows just take in more C02. Carbon in = carbon out. I think it takes 6 CO2 to make a methane molecule. Its been a while since i did organic chem...
 
furcifer said:
No, the cows just take in more C02. Carbon in = carbon out. I think it takes 6 CO2 to make a methane molecule.
Click to expand...
The carbon from one CO2 molecule will make one CH4 molecule. Cows emit both. The carbon comes from the grass they eat, and is liberated in the form of CO2 and CH4 by gut bacteria, and in the form of CO2 by the cow's cellular respiration. Some carbon ends up in the meat and the milk (and is thus released by downstream users) but most of it is released by the cow.

If a cow is pasture-fed its whole life, and poops, pees and dies in the field, it's close to net zero - because the huge amount of grass a cow eats (~200,000 lbs over its lifetime) has absorbed all that CO2 - and the grass that will regrow will absorb a huge amount of CO2. That's true for dairy and meat cattle as well; the CO2 is just released somewhere else and reabsorbed by the pasture.

Needless to say, most cows aren't pasture-fed any more. They are fed high energy diets of soy, corn and industrial slops (like candy factory waste.)
 
billvon said:
furcifer said:
No, the cows just take in more C02. Carbon in = carbon out. I think it takes 6 CO2 to make a methane molecule.
Click to expand...
The carbon from one CO2 molecule will make one CH4 molecule. Cows emit both. The carbon comes from the grass they eat, and is liberated in the form of CO2 and CH4 by gut bacteria, and in the form of CO2 by the cow's cellular respiration. Some carbon ends up in the meat and the milk (and is thus released by downstream users) but most of it is released by the cow.

If a cow is pasture-fed its whole life, and poops, pees and dies in the field, it's close to net zero - because the huge amount of grass a cow eats (~200,000 lbs over its lifetime) has absorbed all that CO2 - and the grass that will regrow will absorb a huge amount of CO2. That's true for dairy and meat cattle as well; the CO2 is just released somewhere else and reabsorbed by the pasture.

Needless to say, most cows aren't pasture-fed any more. They are fed high energy diets of soy, corn and industrial slops (like candy factory waste.)
Click to expand...

I was think C6H something for methane, so yah then its one to one.

Methane is a more powerful GHG, but it rises and gets hit by UV and breaks down pretty quick.

eta: the other thing with livestock is the methane can be captured and reused. it's not the most efficient process but making something useful from waste usually turns out for the better when incentivized. feeding cows grains farmed and transported with fossil fuels is the bigger problem really. with peak population looming the inefficiency of feeding animals to feed US animals also needs to be addressed. In the US and Canada the beef industry is subsidized. I think this may be one of those areas where countries could do better. As much as I like my beef and don't want people messing with the prices, those prices do not reflect the carbon input. And we probably shouldn't forget the water. While I don't want to be taxed on essentials, "luxuries" definitely should be.

Anyways, these are all lateral moves in the carbon cycle. If this was all we were dealing with it would be a problem. But we're also going to have to deal with 100 years of burning fossil fuels. That's massive.
 
furcifer said:
It's from the Journal of Environment and Development :roll:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1070496516631362
Click to expand...

You didn't cite a source so I Googled it and the JoED article isn't indexed by Google.
 
Sometimes YouTube creeps me out. I just saw this in my Recommended:

[youtube]Qaf6baEu0_w[/youtube]


I'm not too big on conspiracy theories but Big oil, the Big 3 and politicians seem to be holding back the inevitable. It's downright shameful we don't have a world class railway in NA.

Anything to not be like the French I guess :mrgreen:
 
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