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!
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
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?
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!"
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!
On top of that, Farmer's Almanac, long a very trusted and reliable predictor of future events, has predicted a cooling ...
It's good to see the Slashdot audience moving back to reliance on such scholarly peer-reviewed journals. That's science, that is, science by the quart.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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.
When i first read the title i thought the concrete was actually green.
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?
Scientific != peer reviewed
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
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
I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is a matter of serious concern. For example, several of your claims are answered here and here.
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."
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.
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.
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
The Farmer's Almanac? Balderdash! My trick knee can predict the climate more accurately than anyone.
Seriously, though. Look at NASA's data. The "cooling" you've seen since 1998 has happened several times before. 1900, 1915, 1940, 1960, etc. At every such point you could claim we're cooling, but years later it would be apparent that we're not. Besides, by your standard, every momentary upturn of the temperature would mean we're warming, and you can see there has been times like that in the last century.
Take a good, long look at the overall trend and put your Almanac in the outhouse, where it belongs.
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...
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
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
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!
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.
no one said it's unscientific or inaccurate or made up. It just isn't peer reviewed.
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
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
The Farmers' Almanac publishers are highly secretive about the method used to make its predictions, only stating publicly that it is a "top secret mathematical and astronomical formula, that relies on sunspot activity, tidal action, planetary position and many other factors."
From their own site they say "We derive our weather forecasts from a secret formula that was devised by the founder of this Almanac, Robert B. Thomas, in 1792."
I'm not trying to denigrate science done from the agricultural perspective, and they do have a nice and informative web site, but the above "formula" sounds very like paddock pastry to me and does not fill me with trust with regard to predicting weather trends in a manner useful to scholarship, especially of the form that dictates broad scale eco policy. Call me a skeptic, but if they aren't open about their methods I can't trust them.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
'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!
http://www.almanac.com/weathercenter/howwepredict.php
More on Global Cooling:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10783
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25348657-401,00.html
I love this quote by Jay Lehr of The Heartland Institute: "And, if we were to try to reduce greenhouse gases with China and India controlling way more than we do and they have boldly said they are not going to cripple their economy by following suit, our impact would have no change in temperature at all."
Point blank, people: You can't trust your local, highly trained meteorologist to predict tomorrow's weather, so how can you trust a bunch of politicians and climate scientists looking for funding to predict the weather 50 to 100 years out? Most of you will be dead before you realize it was a scam all along.
Remember the hole in the ozone scare? Turns out it's a natural phenomena after all... Now, we're stuck with R134a instead of the far more efficient R12, not to mention all these other products that supposedly did such irreparable harm...
http://www.gwb.com.au/gwb/news/beck/230899.htm
Patrick Moore (founder of Greenpeace) said, "much of the environmental movement has been hijacked by extremist activists who use the language of the environment for a movement that has more to do with class struggle and anti-corporatism."
Don't believe the hype!