Who in their right mind situates an atmospheric sampling site in the middle of a chain of active volcanoes ?
People who understand CO2 better than you. Kilauea volcano emits a fair amount of it, but much less than the seasonal uptake and release of an entire continent's worth of trees growing in the summer and dying off in the winter. To minimize the effect of plant seasonal cycles, you want to be as far away from deciduous forests as you can get. In the middle of a giant lava field in the middle of the biggest ocean on the planet is a pretty good choice. South Pole would be a better choice, but Hawaii is cheaper to get to. Plus they serve mai tais.
They're not confused, they just understand that the media and public get excited about big round numbers, and if "CO2 at 400 ppm!" gets as much attention as "Dow Jones at 18,000!", it's a win.
Long term historical ocean temperature readings not needed. Measurements made just in the past decade show energy gain in the ocean of about 10^22 joules per year. If the atmosphere received even half of that, it would be heating up at 1 degree per year and we'd all be dead by now.
The people you call "alarmists" are a diverse group, and many of them do not support the in-your-face "you must do XYZ" prescriptive solution to CO2 regulation. Take me for instance. I don't want to force you buy new light bulbs: I don't trust government to pick and choose the right way to lower CO2 emissions. I just want to put a big hefty tax on every ton of fossil fuel carbon as it comes out of the ground. That cost will be passed on through the economy, raising the price of things in proportion to their CO2 consumption; the tax money raised would be returned to the people however you'd like: lower income taxes, free health care, whatever.
I don't want to force you buy new light bulbs. I want to make you *want* to buy new light bulbs to save money. But if you like your light bulbs and would rather save money (and CO2) some other way, that's totally OK with me.
Your post has some basis in scientific facts, but misrepresents their implications.
The CO2 peak is a fairly narrow range of infrared, but it's right at the wavelength that the Earth emits most strongly. To say that it's unimportant is like a traffic reporter saying that 99% of the roads in a city are wide open, only the main freeway is gridlocked, so no big deal. What matters is the fraction of total outgoing energy that CO2 prevents from escaping, which is roughly 20%. Keeping in mind that zero blockage would correspond to a global temperature of -18 C / 0 F, and 50% restriction would give a temperature of +30 C / 86 F -- 20% is a big deal. Just going from 20% to 25%, which is what we're looking at, is also a pretty big temperature shift.
Water vapor is a major greenhouse gas, but human emissions of it do not change the amount of it in the atmosphere for three reasons. First, the tight feedback you mentioned (the Clausius-Claperyon relation) means that any extra water added immediately falls out as extra rainfall. Second, human emissions of water vapor via combustion amount to 2 gigatons per year, or a global layer or liquid water 4 microns thick -- utterly insignificant next to the natural evaporation and rainfall of about 1 meter per year. Third, you mentioned increase in paved surfaces that would "catch rainwater", but precisely the opposite happens: water drains quickly off pavement and into rivers and sewers, while natural soils remain moist for longer.
That's not to say that water vapor's role as a greenhouse gas is unimportant: if temperature rises for any reason (including from CO2 greenhouse effect), the Clausius-Claperyon relation allows more water vapor to enter the atmosphere, amplifying the warming.
The upshot: water vapor is a major greenhouse gas, but that doesn't call the role of CO2 into question: instead it amplifies the importance of CO2.
But more to the point, defining "city" as "the central part with the skyscrapers" is not useful, because an insignificant number of people live there -- much less than 10%, in the case of New York.
When we're talking about densely populated cities, it's not the condo towers that are important: it's square miles of four-story walk-ups. That's true in London, New York, Tokyo, everywhere.
When TFA is talking about megacities, it's discussing conurbations and greater metro areas, not just the city proper. Tokyo+Yokohama+Chiba+etc, New York+White Plains+Newark+Bridgeport, and London out to at least the M25.
The locally-defined boundaries of the city proper have very little to do with how people live in it. The fact that South Chicago is inside city limits and Elizabeth, NJ is in a different state doesn't change the fact that they're both lower- and working-class heavy industry neighborhoods on the edge of their metropolitan area.
Actually I live in the country, in a house pretty much like yours. The problems of cities are obvious and well known: my point is that environmental damage and waste are not among them. And as we move toward a world with scarcer resources, you and I may have little choice but to move into town.
I replied to another post in this thread with stats on solid waste and water usage. New York does very well on those measures, too. IMO cities have a fundamental economy of scale which gives environmental benefits across the board.
I just wish I could find environmental stats that were broken by urbanization level rather than by state...
Point taken: Texas is a special case. Maybe a fairer comparison is New Jersey or Connecticut: both have similar climates and similar amounts of industrial activity, but New York emits significantly less per capita than either, both overall and specifically for transportation.
I think you're trying to bait me on the "should EPA regulate CO2 as a pollutant" news item, but the relevant point is that fuel usage (and CO2 emissions) was one of the submitter's complaints, about New York, along with solid waste, which New York state produces the least of of any state, and domestic water use, in which it's merely below average.
New York is only the most wasteful global megacity because it's full of Americans. The more important point is that New York City is the most environmentally friendly place in the United States, when measured by pollution emitted per capita. (See this list of CO2 emissions by state: New York State, whose population is tightly focused in NYC, has twice the CO2 emissions per capita as the more sprawling development in Florida, and one New Yorker is worth *four* Texans.
To improve its environmental standing, America needs *more* dense urbanized areas like NYC, not less.
You're missing the point. I'm not trying to defend what the US has done here, nor am I trying to equate German political scandals with American ones -- and the fact that I can't find an equivalent German scandal says a lot of good things about Germany. But celebrating the failures of somebody else's country is pretty close to what the Germans call schaedenfreude, and what Americans call "a dick move". Let Americans put up their own Snowden statues.
Dear Germany: you get no points for putting up statues to controversial dissidents from other peoples' countries. You're clearly trying to make a bold political statement here, but to do that you need to take a stand against members of your own nation. Put up a statue to the folks who prosecuted the Christian Democratic Union's campaign donations scandal in 1999, or Kathrin Oertel, the leader of an anti-islamic nationalist group who recently resigned and recanted, and *then* you can pat yourselves on the back.
Dear Armenian folks: while I sympathize with the history of your people, picking a fight with an algorithm is probably not a good use of your time. Everyone knows that Google's search content reflects the views of the wider Internet, and their sponsored links reflect the views of the people who pay them. You might be better off buying your own sponsored link on Google to combat the offensive one.
The liberal arts college I teach at is a little further along in this process. What matters most is community. You need to focus less on physical hardware, and more on finding faculty (and don't forget staff!) with hands-on skills, getting them committed to the space, and sucking in a critical mass of students to make it self-sustaining.
The fact that you were asked to do this by the administration is not a good sign.
And re putting it in your library: talk to your HVAC guys. Ventilation and noise are serious issues.
No, but it's incredibly expensive to remove it, so mostly nobody bothers. Also diesel fuel plus pure oxygen burns hot enough to turn your engine into a puddle of molten steel.
Almost everyone on the planet would be driving an EV at today's energy densities if one factor was significantly improved, but that factor isn't energy density. It's cost per kilowatt hour.
Fair point, but now do the energy density math for an electric powered passenger jet. Because I want to live in a renewable-powered world where I can fly to Europe if I have to. (I don't expect it to be cheap...)
Audi's statement is correct in every way that matters. Hydrocarbon synthesis is also going to create a complicated blend of molecules of various lengths, which would be distilled and cracked to create a substance with properties as similar to ordinary diesel as possible, to ensure compatibility with existing engines.
It might not be exactly the same mix of dodecane to naphthalene to whatever, but it'd be close enough.
You're right that we don't have enough renewable energy yet to make this a useful technology. But hopefully that day is coming.
Re synthetic diesel, it's like I've always said: screw the "hydrogen economy", hydrogen is cryogenic, low-density, and difficult to work with. You'd be better off joining those hydrogens to some nice stable carbon atoms to create a storable, pumpable, relatively safe room-temperature liquid fuel.
Is it more efficient than just using the electricity to charge up batteries in an electric car for example?
Maybe, maybe not, but I guarantee you it has a higher energy density than batteries, which is super important for vehicle applications.
Just for future reference, if you find yourself in a position of authority and someone comes to you with a solution to your pressing problem, and he doesn't know exactly what the solution is or how to make it happen, but he knows exactly how much it costs? You throw that guy out on the street, because that guy is at best a con artist, at worst utterly clueless. (Yes, in that order.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, please do! Just be aware that if you live in a place with winter and trees, you will see a much bigger seasonal cycle than they see at Mauna Loa.
People who understand CO2 better than you. Kilauea volcano emits a fair amount of it, but much less than the seasonal uptake and release of an entire continent's worth of trees growing in the summer and dying off in the winter. To minimize the effect of plant seasonal cycles, you want to be as far away from deciduous forests as you can get. In the middle of a giant lava field in the middle of the biggest ocean on the planet is a pretty good choice. South Pole would be a better choice, but Hawaii is cheaper to get to. Plus they serve mai tais.
http://www.geology.iastate.edu...
They're not confused, they just understand that the media and public get excited about big round numbers, and if "CO2 at 400 ppm!" gets as much attention as "Dow Jones at 18,000!", it's a win.
Long term historical ocean temperature readings not needed. Measurements made just in the past decade show energy gain in the ocean of about 10^22 joules per year. If the atmosphere received even half of that, it would be heating up at 1 degree per year and we'd all be dead by now.
The people you call "alarmists" are a diverse group, and many of them do not support the in-your-face "you must do XYZ" prescriptive solution to CO2 regulation. Take me for instance. I don't want to force you buy new light bulbs: I don't trust government to pick and choose the right way to lower CO2 emissions. I just want to put a big hefty tax on every ton of fossil fuel carbon as it comes out of the ground. That cost will be passed on through the economy, raising the price of things in proportion to their CO2 consumption; the tax money raised would be returned to the people however you'd like: lower income taxes, free health care, whatever.
I don't want to force you buy new light bulbs. I want to make you *want* to buy new light bulbs to save money. But if you like your light bulbs and would rather save money (and CO2) some other way, that's totally OK with me.
You've got your maunas mixed up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Your post has some basis in scientific facts, but misrepresents their implications.
The CO2 peak is a fairly narrow range of infrared, but it's right at the wavelength that the Earth emits most strongly. To say that it's unimportant is like a traffic reporter saying that 99% of the roads in a city are wide open, only the main freeway is gridlocked, so no big deal. What matters is the fraction of total outgoing energy that CO2 prevents from escaping, which is roughly 20%. Keeping in mind that zero blockage would correspond to a global temperature of -18 C / 0 F, and 50% restriction would give a temperature of +30 C / 86 F -- 20% is a big deal. Just going from 20% to 25%, which is what we're looking at, is also a pretty big temperature shift.
Water vapor is a major greenhouse gas, but human emissions of it do not change the amount of it in the atmosphere for three reasons. First, the tight feedback you mentioned (the Clausius-Claperyon relation) means that any extra water added immediately falls out as extra rainfall. Second, human emissions of water vapor via combustion amount to 2 gigatons per year, or a global layer or liquid water 4 microns thick -- utterly insignificant next to the natural evaporation and rainfall of about 1 meter per year. Third, you mentioned increase in paved surfaces that would "catch rainwater", but precisely the opposite happens: water drains quickly off pavement and into rivers and sewers, while natural soils remain moist for longer.
That's not to say that water vapor's role as a greenhouse gas is unimportant: if temperature rises for any reason (including from CO2 greenhouse effect), the Clausius-Claperyon relation allows more water vapor to enter the atmosphere, amplifying the warming.
The upshot: water vapor is a major greenhouse gas, but that doesn't call the role of CO2 into question: instead it amplifies the importance of CO2.
http://climatemodels.uchicago....
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
But more to the point, defining "city" as "the central part with the skyscrapers" is not useful, because an insignificant number of people live there -- much less than 10%, in the case of New York.
When we're talking about densely populated cities, it's not the condo towers that are important: it's square miles of four-story walk-ups. That's true in London, New York, Tokyo, everywhere.
When TFA is talking about megacities, it's discussing conurbations and greater metro areas, not just the city proper. Tokyo+Yokohama+Chiba+etc, New York+White Plains+Newark+Bridgeport, and London out to at least the M25.
The locally-defined boundaries of the city proper have very little to do with how people live in it. The fact that South Chicago is inside city limits and Elizabeth, NJ is in a different state doesn't change the fact that they're both lower- and working-class heavy industry neighborhoods on the edge of their metropolitan area.
Actually New York has half the population density of London. Next question.
http://www.citymayors.com/stat...
Actually I live in the country, in a house pretty much like yours. The problems of cities are obvious and well known: my point is that environmental damage and waste are not among them. And as we move toward a world with scarcer resources, you and I may have little choice but to move into town.
I replied to another post in this thread with stats on solid waste and water usage. New York does very well on those measures, too. IMO cities have a fundamental economy of scale which gives environmental benefits across the board.
I just wish I could find environmental stats that were broken by urbanization level rather than by state...
Point taken: Texas is a special case. Maybe a fairer comparison is New Jersey or Connecticut: both have similar climates and similar amounts of industrial activity, but New York emits significantly less per capita than either, both overall and specifically for transportation.
I think you're trying to bait me on the "should EPA regulate CO2 as a pollutant" news item, but the relevant point is that fuel usage (and CO2 emissions) was one of the submitter's complaints, about New York, along with solid waste, which New York state produces the least of of any state, and domestic water use, in which it's merely below average.
New York is only the most wasteful global megacity because it's full of Americans. The more important point is that New York City is the most environmentally friendly place in the United States, when measured by pollution emitted per capita. (See this list of CO2 emissions by state: New York State, whose population is tightly focused in NYC, has twice the CO2 emissions per capita as the more sprawling development in Florida, and one New Yorker is worth *four* Texans.
To improve its environmental standing, America needs *more* dense urbanized areas like NYC, not less.
You're missing the point. I'm not trying to defend what the US has done here, nor am I trying to equate German political scandals with American ones -- and the fact that I can't find an equivalent German scandal says a lot of good things about Germany. But celebrating the failures of somebody else's country is pretty close to what the Germans call schaedenfreude, and what Americans call "a dick move". Let Americans put up their own Snowden statues.
Dear Germany: you get no points for putting up statues to controversial dissidents from other peoples' countries. You're clearly trying to make a bold political statement here, but to do that you need to take a stand against members of your own nation. Put up a statue to the folks who prosecuted the Christian Democratic Union's campaign donations scandal in 1999, or Kathrin Oertel, the leader of an anti-islamic nationalist group who recently resigned and recanted, and *then* you can pat yourselves on the back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Dear Armenian folks: while I sympathize with the history of your people, picking a fight with an algorithm is probably not a good use of your time. Everyone knows that Google's search content reflects the views of the wider Internet, and their sponsored links reflect the views of the people who pay them. You might be better off buying your own sponsored link on Google to combat the offensive one.
The liberal arts college I teach at is a little further along in this process. What matters most is community. You need to focus less on physical hardware, and more on finding faculty (and don't forget staff!) with hands-on skills, getting them committed to the space, and sucking in a critical mass of students to make it self-sustaining.
The fact that you were asked to do this by the administration is not a good sign.
And re putting it in your library: talk to your HVAC guys. Ventilation and noise are serious issues.
No, but it's incredibly expensive to remove it, so mostly nobody bothers. Also diesel fuel plus pure oxygen burns hot enough to turn your engine into a puddle of molten steel.
Oh, and despite our differences on the viability of synthetic hydrocarbons versus batteries, we can at least agree that hydrogen is bullshit, right?
Fair point, but now do the energy density math for an electric powered passenger jet. Because I want to live in a renewable-powered world where I can fly to Europe if I have to. (I don't expect it to be cheap...)
Audi's statement is correct in every way that matters. Hydrocarbon synthesis is also going to create a complicated blend of molecules of various lengths, which would be distilled and cracked to create a substance with properties as similar to ordinary diesel as possible, to ensure compatibility with existing engines.
It might not be exactly the same mix of dodecane to naphthalene to whatever, but it'd be close enough.
You're right that we don't have enough renewable energy yet to make this a useful technology. But hopefully that day is coming.
Re synthetic diesel, it's like I've always said: screw the "hydrogen economy", hydrogen is cryogenic, low-density, and difficult to work with. You'd be better off joining those hydrogens to some nice stable carbon atoms to create a storable, pumpable, relatively safe room-temperature liquid fuel.
Maybe, maybe not, but I guarantee you it has a higher energy density than batteries, which is super important for vehicle applications.
Just for future reference, if you find yourself in a position of authority and someone comes to you with a solution to your pressing problem, and he doesn't know exactly what the solution is or how to make it happen, but he knows exactly how much it costs? You throw that guy out on the street, because that guy is at best a con artist, at worst utterly clueless. (Yes, in that order.)