Slashdot Mirror
Green Cement Absorbs Carbon
Peace Corps Online writes "Concrete accounts for more than 5 percent of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions annually, mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Now Scientific American reports that British start-up company Novacem has developed a 'carbon-negative' cement that absorbs more carbon dioxide than it emits over its life cycle. The trick is to make cement from magnesium silicates rather than calcium carbonate, or limestone, since this material does not emit CO2 in manufacture and absorbs the greenhouse gas as it ages. 'The building and construction industry knows it has got to do radical things to reduce its carbon footprint and cement companies understand there is not a lot they can do without a technology breakthrough,' says Novacem Chairman Stuart Evans. Novacem estimates that for every ton of Portland cement replaced by its product, around three-quarters of a ton of CO2 is saved, turning the cement industry from a big emitter to a big absorber of carbon. Major cement makers have been working hard to reduce CO2 emissions by investing in modern kilns and using as little carbon-heavy fuel as possible, but reductions to date have been limited. Novacem has raised $1.7M to start a pilot plant that should be up and running in northern England in 2011."
No mention in the article of the strength of the new material. How would this compare to regular concrete?
This missed this story about earth's habitable period ending in a billion years.
I see one of the early tags is 'negligible.'
Maybe it is in terms of global CO2 levels, but under a cap and trade system, this will turn an industry that might have to buy CO2-emission rights into one that could make money selling them!
What is the purpose of going to all the trouble of actually creating a product that produces more or less carbon. Global warming may or may not be happening, but if so we don't exactly know what is causing it and we definitely can't stop it - but the companies that seek to profit from global warming hysteria don't care in the slightest that anything is actually being done about carbon - just that one pays the extra global warming carbon tax.
the composition of asbestos?
This sounds like a concrete nightmare:
If a material absorbs so much CO2 over it's lifespan, it significantly alters the chemical composition and therefore strength.
I doubt any builder will use this material unless it's been proven that the new material is sufficiently stable.
Example: as a geology student, I ran into an area in central spain with lots of Gypsum sediments (Ca|MG.SO4). Putting limestone and concrete buildings on this sediment wasn't done until the 20th century, but all the buildings built in that area are long gone, even though in nearby towns they still stand tall. Reason? The Gypsym in the soil chemically eats the mortar and limestone (CaCO3) out of the structure on top of it, making it crumble within a few decades. The Gypsum areas are largely a wasteland where only very few buildings remain.
Now, Mg.Ca-CO3 (dolomite limestone) is largely as stable or more stable than pure limestone, and certainly harder, but any new formula for the glue in concrete will have to pass the test of time before it will be widely adopted, especially in e.g. bridges and skyscrapers...
Perhaps we can start with the interstates, nobody would notice if they started to crumble early ;)
"The building and construction industry knows it has got to do radical things to reduce its carbon footprint and cement companies"
Seriously? At least here in the Midwest (USA), construction bids still go to the lowest bidder and there are huge piles of construction waste that go straight to the landfill. They won't change until someone makes them change.
:wq
Well, we better start cutting down some more rainforests and start pouring more swimming pools and parking lots if we are ever going to beat this global warming thing!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
What is the life span?
How much if a cost increase would it take to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by using this product?
Does it have the same strength? Is it completely interchangeable with today's concrete?
Is it possible to retrofit current concrete plants? Do we have to build all new concrete plants?
An mal-adjusted, racist asshole?
Fly ash, which is the ash waste from burning coal is also being used in concrete to lessen the amount of C02 concrete creates as well as improve strength. My question is since this fly ash has a high amount of toxins(heavy metals) in it, would the toxins be locked in the concrete or would they seep out if exposed to water or other stresses over time.
I am curious to know this because apparently fly ash can make concrete easier to work with in insulated concrete form construction and because other types of materials that compete with concrete seem to be using it. Gigacrete.com ( supposedly 10,000 psi strength) though not for structural use is an example. I can't tell if they are using weasel words though because they claim there binder is nontoxic, I can't tell if they are purposely talking about the binder being non toxic and not the fly ash.
I hope someday to build a house out of ICF's (insulated concrete forms), I guess I must have taken to heart that story of the three little pigs when I was young.
You mean turning the cement industry from a big emitter to a small emitter...
The summary jump to the conclusion that "is made with a process that traditionally uses fossil fuels" to "emits carbon dioxide" , albeit without saying the latter? Wouldn't the more effecient thing to do be to figure out a way to make cement without using traditional methods requiring fossil fuels? I guess nowadays anything you call green and make sound even close to like it helps the environment makes the hippies happy and business believe you..sigh...
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
One of my dorm friends, Jakob Husum, wrote his dissertation on ways of optimizing cement productions.
One of the rather impressive/scary things about that, is that it is responsible for about 2% of the world's energy consumption. That's an insane amount of energy for something that isn't even an end product.
The first paragraph of the paper actually grabs you by the balls and twists firmly:
Can't quite remember how much of the energy if spent on the last bit, but I think it was something like 25%. That's 0.5% of the world's energy usage spent on a 1% efficient process. Now imagine you could up the efficiency to 10% or even 5%. That'd be a reduction of the world's energy usage of 0.45 or 0.4% respectively, simply by improving a single process.
Now, there are a lot of arguments for saving energy. Saving the environment, less pollution etc., but it's hard to overlook the economic incentive of cutting back energy costs of a production, where a large part of the process is 1% efficient.
and by that phrase, I mean its popular bullshit. Most of the "green" things that have been devised over the past few years do NOTHING other than hold the carbon and make it the next generations problem instead. I thought the entire idea here was to NOT do that, but then again we live in an excessively hypocritical society that makes things up so they can make money, and this may just have been the latest and greatest. I'm not saying environmentalism is bad, but the majority of it so far isn't actually doing any good for the environment, its just helping the stock holders behind the products involved.
"They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal!"
Let's get something straight: The amount of carbon dioxide that's in the greenhouse gases is very fractional and the actual human contributed amount of CO2 is a small fraction of that. In fact, its dwarfed by rotting vegitation and animal releases of it. That, in turn, is even dwarfed by the amount of CO2 the oceans give off. So, what makes you green whackos think we have any impact on this? Well, unfortunately, we've entered a cooling off period. The Earth hasn't warmed since 1998 and actually slightly cooled off the last 2 years. On top of that, Farmer's Almanac, long a very trusted and reliable predictor of future events, has predicted a cooling of the Earth for the next 100 years. Which leads me to ask you environmentalists to PLEASE...STOP TRYING TO FIX THE EARTH! You're gonna screw it all up!!! Don't fool with Mother Nature!!!
Unintelligible.
I swear... by the time this whole "green" fad is over, it'll be illegal to breathe....
A similar product was presented on Australian TV) in 2005.
It's not a bug, it's a lepidopter!
concrete results!
Frankly, the mention of the term "carbon footprint" puts this squarely in the "hype" category.
Why did that get modded 5 insightful? Carbon Footprint is a valid and useful term.
The only reason I can see why some might like the above comment is if they are so conservative on climate change, they reject even the terms used in discussing it.
It would almost qualify as an example of the logical fallacy known as the "Appeal to Ridicule" but it wasn't quite intelligent enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
I would think that sidewalks and minor side roads would be the place to start. If EU is going to start this, then perhaps we should order some of this and put it into various places (none structural) to see how it lasts. In fact, just thinking about it, it MIGHT actually improve the roads. It would slowly gain weight which MIGHT also strengthen bonds in it, though I notice that they have said NOTHING about that. I would think that if it did get stronger, then they would say something. Regardless, if this is cheaper, it would be great on sidewalks.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
what are the other costs for this new material? It is possible that this will take a lot more energy.
One odd idea for cement is to start using solar to make it. I would think it should be possible for using a solar kiln to do the heating of this. Yes, it will not solve the breaking up, but, the true energy intense part is the heating.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The summary doesn't explain things very well. Just to set things straight, most of the CO2 emissions from portland cement production is not from the fuel burned in the kilns but from the gas released by the limestone itself during the calcination process. The only real incentive for the use of energy efficient kilns is to reduce fuel costs and not to reduce emissions. The upside is that cement will reabsorb much of the released CO2 as it cures over the course of time.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Take it for what it's worth, because obviously I can't prove this, but I asked friends a long time ago who work there, "how do you do this"? and this is what I got-> It is science, just published in their old ..almanac. And they nail it fairly well, too, over the years. It's bog standard normal how they do it, it's acceptable. They use accumulated data sets on the climate and weather and so on, all sorts of parameters, yes even including moon phases and so on, going way way back, and then model and do their yearly predictions from that. They don't just cast runes and use a Ouija board, it's not much different from what a lot of other teams do, except they don't use super computers, just normal old fashioned interpretation and analysis. They've taken observational data from a lot of sources over a very long period of time and specialized in future casting. Ya, it's posted "homespun", but that doesn't take away from all the work that went into it, and frankly, they seem just as good or even better than a lot of the overly bombastic climate and weather guessers out there now.
I always seem to be 5 years ahead of my time (Yeah, yeah, but just a feeling I get sometimes.). I was all into Google when it wasn't even on the map. (Darn it for being so young I couldn't invest or work at the time.) Anyway, I was also fully in belief of the whole green movement as well. Most of it is still important and very valid in improving the lives of humanity. However, the entire global warming argument, I think the best approach is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I have examined the data myself (as have many slashdotters at this point it seems.) I won't say it's a consensus, but it is certainly a movement away from the whole anti-carbon agenda. There are obviously a great many on both sides, but unless I'm completely wrong, the slight majority here is starting to think that indeed, the global warming is a farce. At least as far as humans are concerned.
The human produced carbon is not causing a warming, and even if it was, admittedly we're talking about a 1/20th of a degree in change/preventive change. This is with the ideal pro-green model. The cost of which, well I don't have a handy number here. In the US alone the costs, and hidden costs are going to be close to astronomical.
I mean we are really relying on measurements from so long ago. Who knows how truly accurate the devices were anyway? At least in today's digital age, we have a little more resolution on the temperature scale. [less errors from reading the mercury in the thermometer.] Since we really are talking about 1/20th of a degree in the model, those small errors do throw a large wrench into the model. The Nasa website has a place where you can compare climates. Comparing the 1920's to today makes it look like an agressive warming trend. Comparing... I think I tries both 70's and 80's to today it showed quite the cooling trend. Climates fluctuate anyway, and I won't believe for a second that someone can come up with an accurate model that will show what the temperature change will be if humans cut back on the extremely small volume of carbon that is released today. [Small when compared to all carbon sources, and infinitesimal when looked at as a greenhouse gas.] We would be much better off it seems if we cut back on water vapor... but then it might not rain as much... and don't clouds reflect light anyway?... Almost too many variables to account for, especially in a model that is inherently not stable.
Then there's the part of the argument that goes... global warming? GREAT NEWS!
Since we as humans benefit from a small warning. There is a net-gain in food production anyway. So I'm not really one to buy into the carbon neutral... whatever it is. Many people have likely had similar experiences here as well, and tend to agree. I know there are many detractors still here, but if there is a more valid argument against the global war... errrr climate change now right? I'd like to hear it.
Won't that make it more difficult to see green traffic lights?
And if I don't put an emoticon here, you won't know I'm joking, so here: :P
When i first read the title i thought the concrete was actually green.
thats the thing about AC, so dastardly one second, and then a thought provoking intellectual the next, thats why we all have a love hate relationship with AC.
Global warming may or may not be happening.
That's a tautology much like "water may or may not be wet," so by definition it's logically true. "Global warming is happening." That's a statement of scientific fact, it's empirically true.
We don't know exactly, however it has been established beyond any reasonable doubt that human activity is a major contributor.
Up to that point this was such a beautiful example of agnatology relying on nothing but formally True statements. Why did you have to ruin it? How very disappointing!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
"...mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels."
This sentence got me to wondering. . . one of the big problems of thermal electric power plants (coal, natural gas, nuclear), is that we throw away 50-60% of the heat as waste heat into the environment (nearby body of water or the air). Could the waste heat from a coal or nuclear power plant be used to 'bake' the cement? In the case of coal, sure, you're still burning fossil fuels, but those were being burned *anyhow* to generate electricity, so why not put the waste heat to use? You are, *at least*, not burning any *additional* fossil fuels just for the cement, right? In the case of Nuclear, you are using a very low-carbon heat source, and again, doing something useful with the waste heat?
It's not impossible but remember that (IIRC) theoretical optimum thermal efficiency is (THigh-Tlow)/THigh.
In practice that means that waste heat is generally too cold for this process. If it were hot enough to make cement it would be hot enough to extract power from.
Waste heat from Combustion Turbines (CTs) is already being used to generate steam in cogen plants.
'Pure' CTs are typically super-peaker plants. Lousy efficiency but they start and ramp fast. Which in practice means their heat is too unpredictable to run that kind of process in any case.
Typical applications of CoLo heating are greenhouses, malls and other large buildings. Market forces are making this (space heating) happen quite nicely where ever economically practical.
My university was/is entirely heated by the waste heat of the coal fired plant on campus (50+ year old setup). Good fun in the steam tunnels. Access to boiler rooms.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Why not just plant more trees around buildings made of concrete? That seems to me to be a more useful, long-term "incentive" program than some we've seen lately.
I wonder whether any reduced lifetime or design flaws of new materials like these will be factored-in by those who implement them. There is obviously a lot of room for snake-oil salesmen to set up shop and exploit the world's move towards carbon-neutrality by over-promising on products that would normally last for decades. It would be a very-bad-thing if the shortcomings of more environmentally-friendly products were not priced-in from the outset.
But it would be even more destructive if the move towards environmentally-friendly products and processes turned out to be an extension of the "designed obsolescence" movement of recent past. Cement has a fatal flaw as a product: it lasts a long time. Perhaps an entire lifetime, or more. Bridges and roads last a long time. Houses don't have to be re-built every generation. Mortgages expire. Producers, sellers and governments hate products like this. Producers want to keep producing forever, as long as they don't have too much competition. Sellers want to keep selling forever, earning a tidy profit. Governments don't handle inter-generational wealth transfer well. So-called "consumers" hate long-lasting products too. They constantly want new stuff to replace their old stuff. They want jobs making that new stuff. Sheeple appreciate the stability of going to work every day to get paid less and less, just as long as they are boiled slowly and can pass most of the buck to future generations.
Self-destructing concrete, if more environmentally friendly than the regular kind, could even be government-mandated. Construction jobs would go on forever! Recessions would be a thing of the past! Cyclical fluctuations in the economy would be replaced with one big perma-recession. We could all hold hands and join in one big suicide pact for humanity, that wouldn't come due until all the the easily available energy and mineral resources run out and we're already dead and buried.
People keep talking about the cost to future generations of carbon emissions, caps and taxes. But how does that occur, exactly? It's clear how carbon emissions might affect future inhabitants of Earth. The CO2 will be there in the atmosphere, heating the globe, affecting the Earth. There is debate as to what those effects may be, but it's clear how it occurs. But how do caps and taxes affect future inhabitants? Well there's the lost opportunity-cost of all the cool stuff we could have bought instead of investing in green technologies. We could have more stereos and TVs and bigger houses with copper roofs and stainless appliances. Or we can forego some of that and have renewable energy instead. We can make do with smaller TVs and fewer stereos and smaller houses with tin roofs and less-fancy appliances. And I think many people would choose to do that if given the choice. The choice is fairly straightforward.
But it's an even larger problem when the choice is not so clear. If people are told that they can have the same amenities and live the same lifestyle while also making gains in CO2 emissions, something doesn't add up. If green products come out that make grand promises of equivalence with existing, less green products, consumers will likely believe them. If, or when, those new products fail to live up to the expectations, there is potential for huge economic losses. It is one thing to make a decision to curtail consumption in exchange for a more green, renewable world. It is quite another to trade an existing lifestyle for some crapshoot on vague promises or outright fraud, brought to you by corporations that are only interested in next quarter's profits and governments that are only interested in paying off their cronies before their term expires.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Wrong. I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is a matter of serious concern.
Green cement is people! Green cement is people!
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
The house I live in is a mere 150 years old, but most of the street it is in was built between 1690 and 1695. In fact, our foundations go back to then. The composition and structure of Bath stone has been extensively studied, and I would imagine the results are just a small part of the data the technologists will take into account.
And your point was, again?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It's all very well and good making CO2 absorbing cement that will absorb more CO2 than it emits but I'm going to go right ahead and say that the amount emited byt cement is absolutely fuck all compared to the amount of CO2 generated in MAKING cement. The amount of energy required is terrifying, coupled with the fact that speciallist applications (such as oilfield cementing) tend to use even more since they have to use a particular grade of cement (I've not come accross them all, but I think it's something like 13 different oilfield cements and 8 or so different portland cements, if you include white).
Now for the technical bit.
CO2 absorbing cement implies that it has a rather porus structure, a feature that is generally VERY bad news for cement. CO2 is known to destroy normal cement not because it reacts, but because the cement is permiable. The CO2 dissolves in water that is left in the cement and this is absorbed through entrained air DEEP inside the cement. Since the CO2 forms an acid in water, the acid is then able to react with by products of the cement curing reaction which are also dissolved in the water to form further products which have the general effect of expanding. This causes the cement to crack and fail.
This is to say nothing of the reactions that can go on between the dissolved CO2 and the cement itself.
What I would love to know is how this stuff fairs against other forms of attack (chloride, sulphate, etc.) If this material does absorb CO2 in a way that does not cause failure of the structure, which frankly I doubt, how do the resistance to other forms of attack compare to other cements.
The chances are that this cement will have very narrow fields of use since you tend to use the right cement and/or blend of cement and additives in a particular field to get the desired effect, eg. Blending fumed silica reduces pores size and connections of pores, thus reducing the permiabbility of the cement to chemicals and increasing itâ(TM)s resistence to attack.
Also, adding extra silicate which can actually take part in the reaction (as opposed to say silica flour which though can react, is not soluble and does not contribute to the formation of crystal structures in the cement, will most likely have a large effect on the reactivity of the cement and will possibly show incopatiability with standard additives.
Cement Chemistry, despite being cement, is actually incredibly fascinating and it never ceases to amaze me what the researchers in the field are able to do and test and figure out. Personally Iâ(TM)d hate to have to try and do an NMR on a lump of concreteâ¦
Then there's the part of the argument that goes... global warming? GREAT NEWS! Since we as humans benefit from a small warning. There is a net-gain in food production anyway. So I'm not really one to buy into the carbon neutral... whatever it is. Many people have likely had similar experiences here as well, and tend to agree. I know there are many detractors still here, but if there is a more valid argument against the global war... errrr climate change now right? I'd like to hear it.
Of all the points tossed around by both sides, this is the most important point that's never talked about. Throughout the Earth's history, the periods substantially warmer than today correlate with the most prolific life. The extra energy seems to make the ecosystem flourish.
A while ago I read a doomsayer complaining that global warming would lead to a surge in the growth of poison ivy. How could a person write that without immediately feeling the intellectual dishonesty? Too close to the subject, I guess.
Does anyone know if it's possible to bake the calcium carbonate/limestone mix in a CSP collector? Just shove it in a box 50 metres in the air and point a few hundred mirrors at it...
Would that not result in the same mix, without the costly process of baking it?
Indeed, I think the consensus is shifting right now, and I guess that at one point it may become funny and some heads could start to roll...A few more years of flat or decreasing global temperatures, a few more theoretical and experimental blows to IPCC models, a few more scientists resigning from IPCC or publicly expressing doubts, and it's done.
It will not be so fast though, given the media and political huge investment in global warming: they will try to keep it silent, quietly put the last decade hysteria under the rug and will not easily do a mea culpa...I have noticed much less mention of global warming on TV since about 2 month though, while it was cruising at full sail propaganda before...Maybe some are feeling the wind turn already? ;-)
Yeah, and if we could resurrect those biospheres instead of living with our own, we'd probably be just fine. But we can't. In reality, scientists are concerned with the rapid rate of the changes in our climate. It's not that these changes have dangerous magnitudes, it's that the derivative is dangerously high.
Really? That's the impression you got from reading the legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journals? I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is well-supported by a mountain of credible evidence. If you've examined the IPCC models and found flaws that I haven't debunked in that article, by all means leave a comment describing these flaws and I'll look into them.
If only we had some sort of small organism that could thrive almost anywhere on Earth, ate CO2 and using some (in the foreseeable future) renewable energy source re-produced as fast as possible. That'd surely tie up carbon! We could even promote carbon sequestering ability by making plants and breeding the most prolific growers and breeders. Hell, perhaps these small carbon-munching critters could even be turned into something useful when they died! /sarcasm
Oh wait.. Algae thrive even in harsh, nutrition-deprived areas, reproduce and die fast (pushing quick adaptation to new environments), eat carbon, and can be turned into perfectly good bio-diesel by anyone who bothers reading a couple of online how-to's. Remind me.. why is this CO2 craze still raging as rampant as ever? Can't some rich entrepreneur just buy a huge patch of otherwise useless land and build algae farms and a bio-diesel refinery already? The stuff produces itself (given dirty water and some sun), is simple to refine, goes straight in the tank of pretty much any diesel vehicle ever built and the infrastructure for distribution is here.
A few flaws:
- no model takes clouds into account. Albedo variations seems not considered as important as greenhouse effect
- I do not have seen any attempt of applying models to past conditions where CO2 concentration was higher than today
- models predictions seems much better in the 1990-2000 region than in 2000-2010, but adjustable parameters were tuned to fit 1990-2000 data...not a good sign for a numerical model...
- cyclic variation of solar power is taken into account, but other effects on cloud formations are not (not surprising, as cloud are not taken into account anyway). But recent studies suggest that the main effect of solar cycles is linked to magnetic effects, not incoming solar radiation.
-much more emphasis (as in your article) to positive feedback effects than negative one. In fact, positive feedback is set at the stability limit: a little bit more and the system would be instable and the climate we had before industrialisation would simply not have been possible, you would have had a runaway warming or cooling. You need to have this quasi-unstable feddback factor to get sufficient impact of CO2 to fit the 1990-2000 data....but then how would you be able to fit paleoclimate data, where CO2 varied hugely and temperature not so much? Anyway, a natural process with quasi-unstable feedback is of course possible, but certainly not the norm, it seems suspect to me...
I have read your article, and it is not convincing. Especially, the way you insist that the model should be applyied to recent time only is not sound: a numerical model should be tested in as much conditions as possible, especially for other input that the ones that have been used to calibrate it!!! And man produced CO2 is just the same as natural CO2, any attempt to spearate the two (one have a greater effect that the other???) is highly suspect.
In fact, I think many reader objections in your article are valid, and you seem to agree as you do not really debunk the well formulated ones...
Really? Then I guess that my doubts are not reasonable
You guess correctly.
and I should not worry that IPCC numerical models predictions
You misunderstand. This has nothing to do with models or predictions. And what is this "IPCC numerical model" that you speak of? Surely the IPCC relies on models external to it, such a GISS?
It may have been beyond reasonable doubts until about 2005.
Unlike the OP you've got no class at all! No formal Truth, logical or empirical, just lies!
The Fourth Assessment Report, published in 2007 found:
"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.
My emphasis. "Very likely" is defined as >95% confidence. Perhaps you are arguing about the limits of "reasonability?"
What "advances"? Which "global data"? Do you just make this stuff up as you go along, or is there some kind of denialist RSS feed that you rely on? [The link is to forstall someone trying to tell that I should call people who uncritically swallow this stuff ... cough ... 'skeptics,' not 'denialists.']
In any case the Fifth Assessment is now under preparation. So perhaps we should wait until the people who actually know what they are talking about and follow all the peer-reviewed literature (both good and bad) closely have had their say before we jump to conclusions about what the "recent" science has to say.
In any case I prefer to see ignorance being fostered with much greater skill than you have managed here. Sorry, you fail!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Actually, all models take clouds into account. Which journal article led you to this conclusion? I've discussed this issue in the comments and linked to a new paper describing recent improvements to models of clouds.
Because, as I state in a popup on the words "very slightly" in the third paragraph of the article, there are so many changes to the Earth over such long periods of geological time (you have to go back tens of millions of years to see higher CO2 concentrations) that the dynamical models wouldn't be expected to apply. Plus, proxy data are unreliable at such timescales, so we're stuck with "recent" data like the last 650,000 years from EPICA.
Huh? You're not under the impression that climate models are empirical models, are you?
That's because those other effects have been shown to be very small. See 7 (b) in the index: "Cosmic rays are responsible for global warming." If you've found evidence contradicting these papers, please let us know.
I've explicitly addressed this point. The point is that feedback effects act on different time scales, and our forcing is geologically very rapid.
I didn't mean that man-made CO2 has a greater effect, just that feedback CO2 appears after the temperature rises, not before. Therefore the recent CO2 rise is anthropogenic, and we should expect the natural feedback CO2 (observed in Vostok) to add to it.
For instance? (I've got my own research distracting me, so I don't always have time to answer each and every question, but I've tried really hard to answer all the scientific questions that people have posed. I'd l
I've occasionally wondered if the real technological fix for nuclear waste would not be to wait till the short lived isotopes have fissioned (in dry cask storage) and then dilute the hell out of the stuff in concrete and brick plants. After all, we live in houses many of which emit small amounts of radon, and burn coal which contains uranium. So long as the level is background, it should be perfectly safe - and terrorist attack/geological damage proof. But sell that idea to the technological ignoramuses we have in charge of things nowadays.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Huh? You're not under the impression that climate models are empirical models, are you?
I am not, I am sufficiently well informed to know that those models are solving huge set of nonlinear PDE representing simplified thermal radiation equation, convection, gaz exchanges, ..., so they are based on basic laws of physics.
Problem is, i am more informed than that: I solve big sets linear PDE for a living, create the models and simplification under it, and had a go to nonlinear PDE during my Phd. Not a climatologist, i worked more in fluid dynamic and vibro-acoustic...
Now, you are not trying to tell me that the tuning of adjustable numerical parameters, grid size, time steps, simplifications, linearisation techniques, and choosing of unknown physical parameters in the simplified mathematical models are not of the utmost importance, are you? That, except if you are extremely careful and work in a field for which mathematical modeling is not under discussion, your numerical models are, when you are honest, sophisticated empirical models that may give insight to fine details, but always produce pretty color plots in 3D? The validations I have seen for those models (single curve fitting over small period) are not convincing enough, too much local errors for such a model to be reliable imho. I am aware that it is the best we can currently do, but I have enough experience in numerical models to consider it is far from being enough to trust...
I bet it could bake twinkies. That would be cool.
No, just that these parameterizations are only performed for the mean climate, and shouldn't change over a timespan measured in decades. Over geological time shifting continents and increasing solar brightness will matter, but not from the period 1900 to 2010.
I presume you're referring to the model validations via the Pinatubo eruption. There are other validations, chief among them being comparisons to proxy data which extends over hundreds of thousands of years. Initial conditions ensembles are taken to average out the weather, and models with completely different parameterizations are averaged in a bigger ensemble to produce the IPCC results (see chapter 8).
"Grön asfalt" = "Green cement" (Sven Melander, Nöjesmassakern 1985)
... what have they done here? Green cement - and with a yellow pattern!" ... uneven. It's so hard to walk on!"
Rough transcript in English:
00:10 - "But
00:20 - "It's all bubbly
I found it hilarious at the time, but maybe you had to be there (and be a Swedish pre-teen in 1985).
There's more than a small gremlin in this plan-- transport.
Cement and concrete are always made close to their destination, because, the stuff is, like, really, really heavy.
Now one suspects that the required chemicals for this new CO2 absorbing stuff are not equitably distributed.
So the places without the stuff would need to have the stuff trucked, barged, or railed in. That would send the
price of this concrete through the roof. Not to mention releasing more CO2 from all the diesel engines pushing the stuff
to its destination.
It might be more cost-effective to just mine the stuff, bake it, and just lay it out in the open to absorb CO2. Forget about
making concrete out of it.
There are three things about carbon footprint to remember. First, that the importance of the carbon footprint is in dispute. That is, we don't know how important the release of carbon into the atmosphere is. Second, as a result, there is little reason or incentive to reduce the carbon footprint of products. A similar problem occurs with energy. Because it is such a low value product, a lot of products use energy inefficiently in their manufacture process.
Third, the term is commonly abused to blame the end consumer. That is, a common ploy is to claim that the consumer is responsible for all the carbon released in the production of the product. But the consumer doesn't control the supply chain for the products they buy and due to the first problem with carbon footprint, it's not even clear that they should care.
Could the waste heat from a coal or nuclear power plant be used to 'bake' the cement?
Far, far too cold.
Typical Rankine cycle plant tops out around 500-600C at the hot end. Higher would be nicer, but the problem is you need a material with immense tensile strength to contain the pressure, pleasant failure modes (not brittle), and good heat conductivity. Sorry but 600C is about as good as our technology gets. The cold end is of course much colder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
On the other hand, cement kilns really need about 1500C. Kilns don't operate at much pressure, and insulating material is preferable. Seems our current technology is much better at weak insulators than strong conductors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement_kiln
The hot side of the plant is way too cold for a kiln. The cold side of the plant at around 50C or so at the power plant is waaaaaaaay too cold for a cement kiln, barely good enough to preheat the materials.
If you built a rankine cycle plant that had the same temperature at the hot and cold side, by definition it wouldn't make any power, so it would just be a waste. Or if you minimized the temperature at the cold end, the plant would be efficient, but the cold end would barely be useful for household heating in the winter, much less cement production...
If only the hot side of the plant could survive kiln operating temperatures... then during non-peak times, keep firing the furnace full blast, but make cement instead of electricity. But our technology is way to crude for that.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You know what else absorbs carbon dioxide? Trees. It's green, it's self replicating, and it spews out oxygen as a waste product. Plant more.
"Concrete accounts for more than 5 percent of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions annually, mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels."
baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat and burning of fossil fuels, hmmm
its ashame that natural earth processes have no part in this, its ALL due to human activity.
If you believe statement, you are a bigger idiot tool than before when you believed Al invented the internet.
Fossil records didn't show an increase in CO2 **after** the Earth's atmosphere getting hotter, being exuded from the oceans (3/4 of the Earth's surface) and COOLING THE PLANET.
This whole C02 thing is driving people to fight for such STUPID things.
It's another site where religion inhabits science: whether it gets ultra cold or ultra warm, BOTH SOMEHOW indicate ManMadeGlobalWarming(TM) that will surely kill us in a huge, heroic, 100ft tidal wave of death.
Guys- let's get back to science. And on the way there, let's stop off in a little town called Propogandaville where scientists are paid to make ANY oddball speculation with computer models attempting to come up with doomsday to cause people to send money to their governments.
THIS IS A HOAX, just like KillerBees(TM), AcidRain(TM), and TheOzoneHole(TM). It's been a long-standing parade of bullshit that lay people can't prove, to stimulate panic and give more power to the national, then world governments.
If you think you're intellectually honest enough, see "The Great Global Warming Swindle" at a torrent site near you. I promise you, you won't hate it.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
The peers in this case are the customers who purchase the almanac. They see if it works or not. Enough keep buying it, so it must be working well enough for that to happen. And anyone is free to take their public work and cross reference it against any other public work that addresses the same issues (climate and weather forecasting).
Everyone has lost their mind on this whole green anti-carbon thing. I am just shocked how quickly it rose to the incredible levels of hype it has.
Even back in the day when the concern for CFCs was high enough to ban it for nearly all purposes did not seem to have this level of hype around it. And cleaning our coal plants and car exhaust to reduce acid rain was great, but we never had Hollywood celebrities going around showing off their new cars with platinum and rhodium catalytic converters.
The media has made the global warming thing into a joke really, and our culture has jumped on the chance to embrace a new fad. But really, what we need is science is carefully planned regulation. Not the various PR stunts that play up to the green hype.
People worry so much about carbon, when methane is a stronger greenhouse gas. Although methane makes up a very tiny component of the gases in the atmosphere and therefor has a smaller overall effect than carbon. And there is water vapor, which is the primary greenhouse gas, beating out carbon dioxide by a large margin. Perhaps we'll have to ban hydrogen fuel cell cars in the future.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The goal to reduce carbon emissions is obvious, and this sounds like a good start (especially as one commenter noted -- on small scales to start, residential sidewalks, etc) but has anyone thought about the potential for impact of removing such a large portion of C02 from the environment on our fauna that requires CO2 for survival? I know we're putting off more than nature would due to processes like the creation of concrete, but could that mean that the plants of today are now depending on it? One argument could be that the amount of fauna in the world has decreased over the last 50-100 years (which is probably true), but could taking away all this extra "food" for the plants in a relatively short time span (5 years, 10 years, etc) have a serious negative impact on the greener places in the world?
I'm all for green, but we need to make sure we look at it from all sides, not just the obvious one.
And they said zombies weren't real!
Because I actually had some knowledge of the farmers almanac I thought I would share it. It's just not made up stuff, they do data collection and analysis. I have no reason to lie about it at all. You can choose to believe what you want, but I would wager a week's pay you know nothing about it, don't know anyone who works there or who has worked there, don't know their long term track record or anything, just spouting off trying to sound like a wiseguy. Typical jerk know it all.
Now, IF I had known about the almanac and knew from insiders that it was all made up stuff, or darts thrown at a graph,like the weekly world, etc., I would have said that. But I didn't because that isn't my recollection of the conversations. In fact, at the time I was skeptical myself until I heard how they went about things, then I went back, checked out past issues at the library and found that they have been pretty good. Not perfect, but damn respectable.
showing that abrupt climate change is a matter of serious concern
Anyone who wants to experience abrupt climate change only needs to move to Ohio. This past year we had a period where the temperature dropped 42 degrees (F) in just under 24 hours. Whoa boy.
And they said zombies weren't real!
Great debate! I hope someone can mod this part of the thread up.
I know you were joking, but some people genuinely do confuse local weather and global climate.
The unfortunate thing about Global Warming® is that the data is extrapolated backward then forward. It looks great in a research paper, but I'm sayin' we're going to need a good, solid 1,000 years (or more) of undiluted raw empirical data before every last skeptic is put to bed.
There's this branch of maths called 'statistics.' One of the thing stats can do for us is reveal, within limits of confidence, whether there are trends in noisy data. As of 2007 the warming trend was highly significant (at an alpha-level of 0.01). If we get a good 20 years of lower global temperatures, one after the other, that significance will vanish. We should all be happy if that occurs. Since it would fly in the face of what physics naively (ie. in the absence of specific knowledge about possible feedback mechanisms) tells us about the effect of gases of known greenhouse forcing potential in planetary atmospheres (and again we know we are augmenting these), this would be most unexpected. That should make our happiness all the greater. It would be like winning the lottery.
If you were planning for financial security in your retirement, would you think it wiser to begin investing now, even in the knowledge that there is a real risk that any investment will not pay off, or would it be wiser to hope that between now and your retirement you will win the lottery? Here you are making that choice, not only on your own behalf, but for all your neighbours.
Look, doubt and skepticism are healthy and of importance in the sciences. Indeed without all the skeptical analysis which scientists like Lindzen contributed to this debate during the 80s and 90s, our state of knowledge in regard to AGW would not be nearly as robust as it is now. But there is a point past which doubt ceases to be either healthy or skeptical and becomes something quite different. If we ignore the very serious concerns raised by our best science and maths for the next 1000 years, as a species, we deserved to "be put to bed."
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
It's usually a bad idea to quarrel with somebody's religion
Oh the delicious irony!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
'Troll' does not mean 'Wrong' or 'I disagree'.
Look I'm frustrated with these guys too. I can understand the temptation to want, simply to shut people up. However I can't stress enough how deeply inappropriate it is to moderate someone as a troll for honestly held personal opinions (unless perhaps they scattergun them all over discussions with robot repetativeness, in which case 'Redundant' or 'Offtopic' would be more appropriate.)
Gkay may be wrong. But he* has a right to express his opinion regardless. Beyond that this kind of moderation is totatlly unnecessary. Wrong opinions can be met with facts, data, links to reputable sources of information and yes even humour and sarcasm. I'm not above ridiculing my interlocutor, obviously, but this really crosses a line that should not be. It is outright censorship! As such it is also counterproductive, it merely fuels a sense of persecution and conspiracy.
We need to inform people, not to censor them!
*my apologies if he is a she
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Does it absorb *carbon* or *carbon dioxide*? It really grinds my gears when the two are used interchangeably. Let's begin.
Carbon is an element. Because of its sp3 hybridized orbitals, it can basically bond with whatever the fuck it wants. For that reason, it will either bond with itself, forming allotropes such as coal, graphite, or diamonds; alternatively, it can bond with other elements, forming molecules. (There are also cases where carbon forms carbanions and carbocations).
Once of these molecules that can form is carbon dioxide, CO2. In addition to having carbon, it also has two oxygen atoms. Yet here is the big difference: because there is a lack of polarity between the carbon atom and the oxygen atoms, there are very few van der Waals forces attracting carbon dioxide together, making it a colorless gas. Compare this to carbon, which is usually a black solid or a colorless crystalline solid.
In conclusion: CARBON is not CARBON DIOXIDE. And do NOT conflate the two EVER AGAIN!
Usually, the waste heat put out by a power plant is not going to be sufficiently hot to bake limestone into cement. And anyway, even if it could do that, it would release tons of carbon dioxide; carbon that was pulled out of the sea by ancient molluscs, which was (until then) sequestered in rocks and out of the atmosphere. The original article, by pointing to progress in developing non-Portland (limestone-based) concrete was showing us a way out of this problem; by all accounts, magnesium-based cement generates a whole lot less CO2 in the course of its production, and then actually absorbs it from the atmosphere as it ages. The magnesium carbonates formed in that process make it harder and more durable, according to what I've heard. This is not really a new technology; people were using it for floors in the 1920s, but it couldn't compete with Portland cement in terms of price. Of course, that was in an era of cheap energy and unconcern for the planet's carbon balance. In this new era, this is an alternative that merits serious consideration.
A low energy portland cement was developed 10 or so years ago called EMC Energy Modified Cement in Norway which the cement industry failed to take up.
It uses intergrinding of cement OPC and sand or a pouzzolane (fly ash, etc...) to an extremely fine powder. This effectively increases the surface area for the chemical reaction such that 50% lower cement content can be used in concrete for the same physical characteristics... (strength, setting time, etc). Of course there is extra energy used in the grinding process but 40% or so less energy is required overall.
http://www.emccement.com