It's all over but for the sweating?

[freebeard]

OK, yes.

Until that point is reached, it would be better to forget the biochar and completely burn the biomass it is made from in lieu of the coal.

Logically though, if we were to forget biochar. we would never reach that point.

I suspect you didn't look at the Cool Planet process. (they just announced the creation of three commercial facilities in LA, in addition to their pilot plant in CA)

Their output have three fractions. The first extracted is food/fuel. The second is 110-octane gas-o-line. The third (the remainder) is biochar which is used to increase the depth or area of the soil to grow in. It is really a virtuous cycle.

We need to be cranking the handle on that magic box as hard as we can. When you do look you will find their major investors are all the major energy corps, plus Google. Google is trying to steer them from large first-world facilities to something 1/10th the size that would create pockets of prosperity all across the third-world.

Originally Posted by P-hack

But I don't have a lot of faith in the "intellectual superiority" of the first world either, it is that grandiose notion that got us in this unsustainable mess. And I'm afraid that the solution is going to hurt. Not every sperm IS sacred.

Greed≠intellectual superiority ...and, worship daily, it's good for the prostate.

Originally Posted by P-hack

Just to muddy the waters further, CO2 actually escapes the atmosphere, like helium only slower. There will come a time, very far from now, when there will not be enough CO2 to support plant life, and you can figure out what happens then, and long before then.

Exfiltrate and spread our genes through the Cosmos?

[NeilBlanchard]

There is no "pause" in global warming. Sheesh. How many times is this canard going to tossed out?

And most of the added heat is ending up in the ocean. When the ocean gets too warm to hold all of the carbon dioxide it has been absorbing (making it more acidic) then we will see the Mother of All Feedback Loops...

I'm not not making any claims; exaggerated or otherwise. The fact that humans burning fossil fuels is what is largely causing climate change this time around is what the science shows. Period.

[Arragonis]

Nope, no pause at all. Not happening. Nowhere. Nope.

The recent pause in global warming (3): What are the implications for projections of future warming? (UKMO PDF)

But it seems they can't explain it correctly either.

Nic Lewis on the UK Met Office on the pause | Climate Etc.

But then again we have feedbacks - all hail the mighty feedbacks which will cook us all - they are all in the models which are wildly out.

Someone went back to basics recently and implemented a simple CO2 based model without them - guess what, it fits better than the multi £m official models.

[Arragonis]

Someone made an alternative escalator to the Skeptical Science one.

[Arragonis]

Welcome to the future where up is down, black is white and "we don't know" is "certainty".

EU policy on climate change is right even if science was wrong, says commissioner - Telegraph

BTW nobody voted for her.

[NeilBlanchard]

The long term trend is climate, and short term variations are just that: short term variations.

The ocean is absorbing a lot of the heat, and the ocean has been absorbing a lot of the carbon dioxide. Scientists are looking at all the data.

The long term trend is global warming:

[youtube]

[P-hack]

to many it looks like WMD, another boogie man, or a "crisis" as whoovians might say. And making absolute statements is never good science, just blind activism.

Last I recall that nasa imaging was skewed. %97 of scientists do NOT agree on the effects (they threw out any opinions that weren't coincident with their conclusion, hmm... sounds familiar). I lived through the CFC and global cooling threats in the 80s.

Indeed, recently nasa reported the effect of CO2 and NO in reflecting tons of heat energy from the sun, having a cooling effect:
Solar Storm Dumps Gigawatts into Earth's Upper Atmosphere - NASA Science

So, please, stop pulling the fire alarm. The same properties that allow it to reflect heat back to the earth are what allow it to reject %95 of the suns heat in the first place. The climate is not as simple as one variable.

[euromodder]

I see colouring that's purposely cherrypicked to be alarmist ...

[NeilBlanchard]

Here's what a friend of mine has written - I'm using it with his permission:

This is a response to someone talking about sea ice “recovery”, and then throwing out a number of baseless assertions in the ensuing discussion. I’ll let you, dear reader, guess what I’m answering to. It’s nothing new or original:

[youtube]

Unprecedented Warming in Lake Tanganyika and its impact on humanity

As to vague assertions of corruption on the part of climate scientists, that is, and has always been unfounded.

To begin with, it means you would have to dismiss around 150 years of research that was in no way connected to “profit”. The “Greenhouse Effect” hypothesis was first developed in the 1820′s, along with the “Cosmic Ray” hypothesis, when Fourier calculated that the amount of energy reaching the earth from the sun could not explain the temperature of the earth unless some of it was being trapped here, or unless there was extra energy coming in from space. The cosmic ray hypothesis has gotten no supporting evidence. The greenhouse hypothesis got confirmation in the 1860′s when Tyndall measured the thermal properties of a number of greenhouse gasses including CO2.

In the 1890′s, Arrhenius first published the hypothesis that an increase in CO2 levels due to human use of coal would cause the earth’s temperature to rise. His calculations, based on the rate of coal use at the time, indicated a temperature increase over a period of 3,000 years that would result in Sweden being capable of supporting palm trees. He was rather excited about that.

Then, in the 1950′s, scientists began to measure CO2 levels, and realized that the rate of accumulation was far greater than they had thought. They recalculated, and showed a much faster warming that Arrhenius had predicted, due to the increased buildup. Their math, and Arrhenius’ math, has held true when tested against reality in the intervening years.

The warming we are now experiencing was predicted DECADES before any of it showed up, because while we don’t know everything about how the climate works, we do know a few things pretty solidly, and one of them is that when CO2 levels increase, so does the climate. Even the eruption of Mt Pinatubo only knocked temperature back to what it had been a couple years before, and then the warming continued as soon as it aerosols disappeared.

When you look at scientists’ motivation, and claim corruption, you’re missing a crucial factor. The prevailing motivation, in science, is to discover something revolutionary. THAT is where the money is. THAT is where the prestige is. THAT is how you get your name in this history books. Copernicus, Gallileo, Darwin, Einstein, Krauss – these are people who we remember (or will) because their work was revolutionary – it challenged common understanding and won (or appears to be winning in the case of Krauss). Any scientist that could provide a well-supported alternative hypothesis that turned out to better explain the workings of our climate than the theory of man-made global warming would get a nobel, and all the research money they could ever want. Nobody has been able to do that

If you look at the research of “skeptics” in the last couple decades, it has mostly involved complicated statistical analyses that disagree with small pieces of the evidence around the theory of man-made global warming, without actually touching the evidence surrounding the theory. One paper often cited by deniers/skeptics is by Soon and Baliunas in 2003. That paper did NOT provide any original research, it looked at other people’s climate proxy data, left out large chunks of it, and made the assertion that current temperatures are not unusual for the past few hundred years.

That paper has been roundly debunked since then, and interestingly enough, the funding issues YOU brought up, Rich, came back into the picture. Soon and Baliunas claimed that their research was funded by NASA, NOAA, the Navy, and the American Petroleum institute. After they made that claim, it turned out that NASA, NOAA, and the American Navy had given the money for DIFFERENT RESEARCH. The 2003 paper was funded entirely by oil interests. Since 2000, Soon has received over one million dollars from fossil fuel interests.

It always astonishes me to see people making assertions of corruption on the part of climate scientists, and complaining about them not doing proper research, while they ignore the millions spent by fossil fuel interests on a tiny number of contrarians, whose research consists of poking at other people’s work, rather than developing any alternative hypotheses and finding evidence to support or disprove them.

What we get, instead, is vague assertions, unsupported by any data, that it’s due to “natural cycles”, even though every single natural cycle we know of has been checked, and not a single one can explain the current rise in temperature OR mitigate the rise in temperature that is dictated, but the laws of physics, in response to the increase in greenhouse gasses.

Oh, and just to add: The fact that the climate has been different in the past is about as useful as the fact that some fires start naturally. You might as well be arguing that arson doesn't exist based on forest fires.

The fact that it's been different in the past is ALSO irrelevant in terms of what this warming event means for us. As a species, we've been through a couple ice ages. As a species we have NEVER been through a warming event of the kind that is currently occurring.

And even if this WAS due to a natural cycle (though again - nobody's found any evidence supporting that assertion), it doesn't change the fact that we should be working to deal with the effects of what's going on, rather than electing idiots who deny that the planet's even warming. Regardless of why it's happening, sea levels are rising, drought/flood cycles are intensifying, heat waves are increasing (which means worse air pollution), the ocean is becoming more acidic, and every ecosystem on the planet is being disrupted.

Even if the premise that "it's natural" was true, the NATURAL warming events in the past have caused massive upheaval, and mass extinctions, and simply ignoring this one because you don't think humans are responsible would be idiotic at best.

Reducing air pollution will save human lives, and even if we can't replace ALL of our power plants with renewable, Germany alone has proven that we can do more than we have so far.

Changing the federal flood insurance program to remove incentive to build at sea level will also save human lives, and save billions of dollars.

Investing in power plants that are not vulnerable to floods or droughts (i.e. that don't need water for cooling) will increase the resiliency of our energy network, and mean fewer blackouts and brownouts due to unexpected shutdowns.

At the same time, we KNOW that when food prices rise, it causes turmoil. When people who are already at the edge suddenly can't get enough to eat, revolutions happen. Crop production has already taken major hits in the last four years due to a series of record-breaking droughts in major agricultural areas all over the planet. Reducing our dependance on the international oil market will make us less vulnerable to the reverberations of conflicts overseas.

We should be planning for all of this, but instead we have a bunch of businessmen and lawyers insisting that they know better than every major scientific body in the world, and (and even the Pentagon), and telling us that nothing is happening, REGARDLESS OF THE CAUSE. There is no justification for this.

[P-hack]

LOL, I'm part Swedish and I LIKE palm trees!