This study basically claimed that there was no such thing as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age.
No, it claimed that thr MWP and LIA were not periods of GLOBAL temperature change - i.e. changes in European temperatures were balanced elsewhere on the globe. This makes the rest of your post pretty misinformed.
I believe that it does lead to greater engine wear, in some older engines at least. There is no intrinsic problem, thougt, and IIRC, modern engines with automatic tuning and engine management computers can handle it fine.
Not sure what you have against electrolysis. Off peak nuclear electrolysis - essentially using such a process as a grid balancer - is cheaper then methane reforming, since you are only paying fuel costs.
With regard to the 'decreasing carbon content' idea, coal has a higher carbon content than wood, and we are currently using more of all the mentioned fuels than ever before. The statement just isn't true.
It's something of an urban myth that large amounts of natural gas going to waste; it's valuable stuff. Any significant quantities produced will have piplines or GTL plants built. The idea of using natural gas as a transportation fuel as well as all the current uses really is pie in the sky thinking.
Actually replacing oil should involve a hyydrogenation process of some sort; Methanol or DME are good targets that can be produced by hydrogenation of Coal, wood, generic carbon based waste.
Yes, it is. Luckily for life on this planet, though, water vapour exists in rapid (cf. 3 days) equlibrium and hence cannot drive a change in climate. Doubling the concentration of water vapour would simply lead to a few days of rain. Were this not true, any slight deviation from normal concentrations would quickly lead to the planet freezing or baking; as you will note, this has not happened.
However, the equlibrium concentration of water vapour is dependant on the temperature of the atmosphere (quite obviously). Hence any effect that changes the temperature of the atmosphere (Changes in solar irradiation, Volcanic aerosol albedo, persistant GHGs) will be amplified by the corresponding changes in water vapour.
IMO, massive agriculture began because cities became the way of life as opposed to tribes and small groups of people.
Well, the archeology suggests it was the other way around; farming begat larger populations, and things like surpluses that meant not everyone had to directly work for food; hence specialisation and eventually cities.
This was a long lime before fully industrialised pig farming .
You seem to be using a criteria for sustainability in which absolutely everyone has to be a smallholding farmer, since any deviation or division of labour would be unsustainable.
The reason for clear cutting is population. Cities are typically population sinks; a general principal is that birth rates are much higher in farming communities where labour is required, and lower in cities where children are a disadvantage. Putting everyone back on the land would lead to higher population increases and greater demand for land.
The reason for growing meat in vats would be that a great deal of land currently used for cattle feed crops would no longer be required.
We evolved in a niche where being eaten by lions, crocodiles and other animals was the norm.
Tell that to the Masai! Ever since the invention of the pointy stick, humans - or rather, groups of humans appropriately trained/experiences - have been top of the food chain.
Why agriculture started is still very much a subject for debate, although (no joking) it is suspicious that grain collection/cultivation and beer making crop up at the same time in the historical record. Of course, once you start agriculture, you cannot stop because the population grows.
Now in many poor countries, people are like bacteria cultures. Add food, they'll increase in numbers. Reduce food, they'll starve in big numbers= starvation.
Do you have the slightest bit of evidence to support what would otherwise look like a fairly nasty bit of xenophobia?
Ahhh, the sheer clulessness of the typical Slashdotter posting on climate..
Firstly - as a fairly minor point - oil and to some extent come from those algae that use oils for bouyancy, not sugar.
Secondly, you can assume that the aamount of oil, gas and coal in the earth's crust has been at equlibrium for at least 300 million years. Were the rest of your post not divorced from reality, then this alone would be a serious problem. Indeed, it would be interesting if you knew what main sequence stars do over such periods of time, but I won't hold my breath.
Thirdly, the amount of carbon locked up in organic matter is small compared to the amount in carbonates; over sufficiently long periods of time, it is the heat mediated reaction of CO2 with silicates that stops the earth cooking or freezing totally. You completely forgot to mention this; it means that the extremely rapid burning of coal, oil and gas is upsetting an equlibruim that works over much longer time scales.
Fourthly, if you would like to tell me about these mystical 'climate cycles', feel free, but I reserve the right to call 'completely stupid' people who go on about them without the slightest idea of existing knowledge.
And finally, look at a map of the US in the createceous.
That isn't actually true; coal-derived methanol was the original choice of fuel for the internal combustion engine. However, at that time, there was a lost of light-hydrocarbon waste (gasoline) coming out of heating-oil refineries, which was basically free, so this got the nod.
The point of a calculator is to take the drudgery out, yes. However, in order to use a calculator usefully, you have to have some understanding of what you are doing and what sort of answer you expect to get. If you don't kinow how to do it by hand (i.e. you have no idea how the conversion should look), then you'll never know if the answer the calculator gives you is correct.
I've seen this whan marking papers before, you can sometimes even work out which button the student accidentally pressed. This is a fast way to get on the wrong side of an examiner; after all, the thing you are always looking for is understanding and comprehension.
Yes, the fight scenes in the movies wouldn't be the same if both participants spend most of the time groping through their pockets for more AA batteries..
Look at it like this: Try dropping an ant down a mineshaft, then a rat, and then an elephant. The ant walks away, the rat breaks a few bones and the elephant becomes strawberry jam. It's similar with cars; the bigger a car gets, the worse off it becomes in collisions with things of equal or greater size.
So, the safest thing is for everyone to drive a small car. However, if this were the case, then any individual who bought a bigger car would be safest of all; so as long as no other factor is considered, individuals will try and 'out-size' one another to the detriment of overall safety.
The problem is, most SUV owners are not like you.. using one to drive a single child to school, for instance. And when it snows, why is it the SUV drivers that seem to have the most trouble?
Here's the thing, though: I have a Peugeot 406 HDi Estate. Now, it only seats 5 adults in comfort, and you probably wouldn't want to try camping in it, but apart from that it can do anything you mentioned - except at 50 odd miles per gallon. One thing you certainly want in the US is the introduction of CityDiesel together with the latest generation of common-rail diesel engines. They bear as much resembalance to a 1970s-80s diesel as an XBox to an Atari 2600, and you might find the low end torque a bit better for towing. Plus you double your fuel economy, more or less, for no sacrifice whatsoever - if you think modern diesels are sluggish, you've got another thing coming..
Kyoto would have had essentially no effect on getting oil for the US - I'm not sure where you get this from. Replacing petrol engines with CRD's as above, and replacing coal fired electric plants with Nuclear would dramatically cut US CO2 emissions (~30-50%), whilst making electricity cheaper, making people spend less on fuel and reducing most forms of pollution. No doubt the coal industry lobby would be upset, though.
How about something even simpler: Put a big duty on fuel, lowering sales taxes at the same time. You can drop all of these CAFE standards, and simply let consumers suddenly start choosing on the basis of fuel economy.
This is essentially the European approach, and it's why I drive a 50mpg diesel. No complicated rules/regulations, no complicated monitoring for compliance, just market forces (Expensive fuel->economical cars). This is probably the reason why there is so much opposition.. it might actually work.
Near as I can tell, the phenomenon (if it exists at all) is so buried within greater natural, well-understood cyclic climate variations
You know, here's the problem: As a trained geologist, I know a fair amount about normal climate variation; and the modern temperature trend does completely buck the expected natural trend at this time. But if I'm wrong on this, please explain how, because I'm getting sick of being told in vague terms about 'Natural cycles' by people who have no clue as to what those cycles are.
G-W is like religion; you'll never change anyone's mind by arguing the facts
See above; I desparately want to know what these facts *are*. I find that it's the global warming 'skeptics' who refuse to state facts and present models. And your post bears this out yet again - you are claiming a lot of things about climatology without even trying to back it up; bad data and models, inherant bias, political bias, etc - where's the data?
Well, for the average 2-car household, having an electric runaround for short, local journeys and a diesel for longer runs would probably work
out fine..
Well, if you are a mouse, we can cure your cancer easily..
There are problems of scaling; tumors in humans are typically much bigger than those in mice, and a mouse will die of old age before a tumor returns anyway.
But we can always hope.. Cancer survival rates are improving as new treatments come along.
Oil does not (by and large) come from dead animals - the most usual source rocks come from times when algal blooms (of much the same type as discussed in this article) happened over a stagnant bottom, so their dead remains accumulated. When the resultant source rock gets buried to a few km and hence heated to over 100C or more, the organic molecules react with water alto present in the rocks to produce hydrocarbon oils; this reaction leads to a volume change (more), which cracks the source rock and allows the oil out. If this migrating oil finds an enclosed, sealed geological structure (Such as an anticline with a layer of sandstone to hold the oil topped with a layer of salt to contain it), it will accumulate to form an oil field.
In essence, it IS biodiesel except that a large chunk of the processing is already done by nature.
The theories of inorganic petroleum formation (See Thomas Gold, Gasresources.net, 'Ukranian Theory', etc) are geologically and geochemically incorrect, and lack any supporting evidence. But some people have siezed on them for ideological reasons..
I suspect that the study is in fact one of (for instance) intensively farmed sunflower/soyabean/other plant oil. In which case the energy returns don't tend to be very good.
Algal biodiesel has a big advantage in that something like half the dry weight of the algae is fatty acids, making them far more energeticlly efficient. And you don't need pesticides, you don't spill fertilizer everywhere (Recycling is easy..), you can use salt water, and so on. The studies simply cannot be compared.
The other BIG thing to consider is that this process works well out in deserts, unlike crop based approaches which take up farmland we need for food.
That the existing oil company "dinosaurs" won't take too kindly to any upstart muscling in on their nice lucrative fiefdom... do not be surprised if they buy up the upstarts and sit on the technology.
So.. they could grow biodiesel-algae in the US (With tax breaks from the government, no doubt), process it locally and sell it to a large, nearby market with essentially no big risks, OR they could undergo the highly speculative and risky process of finding new oil fields, in corrupt and unstable 3rd world countries where 90% of the revenue vanishes to corruption and the local government, and they are always just a revolution away from hyaving their holdings nationalised.
Yeah, I can see why they would prefer the second option.
Seriously, if this proves economical, I would expect the oil companies to actually start using it - they currently have huge piles of cash sitting around and no where near enough conventional oil prospects to spend it on.
I would expect tritium would behave more or less like hydrogen once in the environment, form salts, etc.
Name three naturally occuring hydrides.. (no, there are none..) Actually, in the environment Tritium mixes fairly quickly with the ocean; even if we assume (on decadal timescales) that only the top 100m of the ocean is mixed, that is a LOT of dilution.
Well, I'd advise you also remove all of the potassium, carbon and hydrogen from your body, they all have extant radioactive isotopes. And no X-rays, of course. And no smoke detector in your house...
Well, mining may be a bit expensive, apart from concentrations of some iron-paritioning elements (i.e. Iridium). It will be mainly silicate rock, and we have plenty of that on earth.
However.. if we could steer this thing into a stable Earth orbit (Geosynchrinous would be ideal), then we have suddenly created a very big space station indeed; just tunnel in.. Given enough voltiles, there would be enough volume and mass to create a more or less self sustaining system. The real value is the fact that you now have a source of mass in space - you could harvest a million tonnes of iron, for instance, for building further craft or satellites, without having to pay to get the stuff into orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
This study basically claimed that there was no such thing as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age.
No, it claimed that thr MWP and LIA were not periods of GLOBAL temperature change - i.e. changes in European temperatures were balanced elsewhere on the globe. This makes the rest of your post pretty misinformed.
I believe that it does lead to greater engine wear, in some older engines at least. There is no intrinsic problem, thougt, and IIRC, modern engines with automatic tuning and engine management computers can handle it fine.
Not sure what you have against electrolysis. Off peak nuclear electrolysis - essentially using such a process as a grid balancer - is cheaper then methane reforming, since you are only paying fuel costs.
With regard to the 'decreasing carbon content' idea, coal has a higher carbon content than wood, and we are currently using more of all the mentioned fuels than ever before. The statement just isn't true.
It's something of an urban myth that large amounts of natural gas going to waste; it's valuable stuff. Any significant quantities produced will have piplines or GTL plants built. The idea of using natural gas as a transportation fuel as well as all the current uses really is pie in the sky thinking.
Actually replacing oil should involve a hyydrogenation process of some sort; Methanol or DME are good targets that can be produced by hydrogenation of Coal, wood, generic carbon based waste.
Yes, it is. Luckily for life on this planet, though, water vapour exists in rapid (cf. 3 days) equlibrium and hence cannot drive a change in climate. Doubling the concentration of water vapour would simply lead to a few days of rain. Were this not true, any slight deviation from normal concentrations would quickly lead to the planet freezing or baking; as you will note, this has not happened.
However, the equlibrium concentration of water vapour is dependant on the temperature of the atmosphere (quite obviously). Hence any effect that changes the temperature of the atmosphere (Changes in solar irradiation, Volcanic aerosol albedo, persistant GHGs) will be amplified by the corresponding changes in water vapour.
IMO, massive agriculture began because cities became the way of life as opposed to tribes and small groups of people.
Well, the archeology suggests it was the other way around; farming begat larger populations, and things like surpluses that meant not everyone had to directly work for food; hence specialisation and eventually cities. This was a long lime before fully industrialised pig farming .
You seem to be using a criteria for sustainability in which absolutely everyone has to be a smallholding farmer, since any deviation or division of labour would be unsustainable.
The reason for clear cutting is population. Cities are typically population sinks; a general principal is that birth rates are much higher in farming communities where labour is required, and lower in cities where children are a disadvantage. Putting everyone back on the land would lead to higher population increases and greater demand for land.
The reason for growing meat in vats would be that a great deal of land currently used for cattle feed crops would no longer be required.
We evolved in a niche where being eaten by lions, crocodiles and other animals was the norm.
Tell that to the Masai! Ever since the invention of the pointy stick, humans - or rather, groups of humans appropriately trained/experiences - have been top of the food chain.
Why agriculture started is still very much a subject for debate, although (no joking) it is suspicious that grain collection/cultivation and beer making crop up at the same time in the historical record. Of course, once you start agriculture, you cannot stop because the population grows.
Now in many poor countries, people are like bacteria cultures. Add food, they'll increase in numbers. Reduce food, they'll starve in big numbers= starvation.
Do you have the slightest bit of evidence to support what would otherwise look like a fairly nasty bit of xenophobia?
Tell me, did you ever work out what that grey stuff between your ears was for?
FUSION IS NOT FISSION. A FUSION REACTOR CANNOT GO BOOM EVEN IN THEORY.
Ahhh, the sheer clulessness of the typical Slashdotter posting on climate..
Firstly - as a fairly minor point - oil and to some extent come from those algae that use oils for bouyancy, not sugar.
Secondly, you can assume that the aamount of oil, gas and coal in the earth's crust has been at equlibrium for at least 300 million years. Were the rest of your post not divorced from reality, then this alone would be a serious problem. Indeed, it would be interesting if you knew what main sequence stars do over such periods of time, but I won't hold my breath.
Thirdly, the amount of carbon locked up in organic matter is small compared to the amount in carbonates; over sufficiently long periods of time, it is the heat mediated reaction of CO2 with silicates that stops the earth cooking or freezing totally. You completely forgot to mention this; it means that the extremely rapid burning of coal, oil and gas is upsetting an equlibruim that works over much longer time scales.
Fourthly, if you would like to tell me about these mystical 'climate cycles', feel free, but I reserve the right to call 'completely stupid' people who go on about them without the slightest idea of existing knowledge.
And finally, look at a map of the US in the createceous.
That isn't actually true; coal-derived methanol was the original choice of fuel for the internal combustion engine. However, at that time, there was a lost of light-hydrocarbon waste (gasoline) coming out of heating-oil refineries, which was basically free, so this got the nod.
The point of a calculator is to take the drudgery out, yes. However, in order to use a calculator usefully, you have to have some understanding of what you are doing and what sort of answer you expect to get. If you don't kinow how to do it by hand (i.e. you have no idea how the conversion should look), then you'll never know if the answer the calculator gives you is correct.
I've seen this whan marking papers before, you can sometimes even work out which button the student accidentally pressed. This is a fast way to get on the wrong side of an examiner; after all, the thing you are always looking for is understanding and comprehension.
Yes, the fight scenes in the movies wouldn't be the same if both participants spend most of the time groping through their pockets for more AA batteries..
It the old 'commons' thing..
Look at it like this: Try dropping an ant down a mineshaft, then a rat, and then an elephant. The ant walks away, the rat breaks a few bones and the elephant becomes strawberry jam. It's similar with cars; the bigger a car gets, the worse off it becomes in collisions with things of equal or greater size.
So, the safest thing is for everyone to drive a small car. However, if this were the case, then any individual who bought a bigger car would be safest of all; so as long as no other factor is considered, individuals will try and 'out-size' one another to the detriment of overall safety.
The problem is, most SUV owners are not like you.. using one to drive a single child to school, for instance. And when it snows, why is it the SUV drivers that seem to have the most trouble?
Here's the thing, though: I have a Peugeot 406 HDi Estate. Now, it only seats 5 adults in comfort, and you probably wouldn't want to try camping in it, but apart from that it can do anything you mentioned - except at 50 odd miles per gallon. One thing you certainly want in the US is the introduction of CityDiesel together with the latest generation of common-rail diesel engines. They bear as much resembalance to a 1970s-80s diesel as an XBox to an Atari 2600, and you might find the low end torque a bit better for towing. Plus you double your fuel economy, more or less, for no sacrifice whatsoever - if you think modern diesels are sluggish, you've got another thing coming..
Kyoto would have had essentially no effect on getting oil for the US - I'm not sure where you get this from. Replacing petrol engines with CRD's as above, and replacing coal fired electric plants with Nuclear would dramatically cut US CO2 emissions (~30-50%), whilst making electricity cheaper, making people spend less on fuel and reducing most forms of pollution. No doubt the coal industry lobby would be upset, though.
How about something even simpler: Put a big duty on fuel, lowering sales taxes at the same time. You can drop all of these CAFE standards, and simply let consumers suddenly start choosing on the basis of fuel economy.
This is essentially the European approach, and it's why I drive a 50mpg diesel. No complicated rules/regulations, no complicated monitoring for compliance, just market forces (Expensive fuel->economical cars). This is probably the reason why there is so much opposition.. it might actually work.
Near as I can tell, the phenomenon (if it exists at all) is so buried within greater natural, well-understood cyclic climate variations
You know, here's the problem: As a trained geologist, I know a fair amount about normal climate variation; and the modern temperature trend does completely buck the expected natural trend at this time. But if I'm wrong on this, please explain how, because I'm getting sick of being told in vague terms about 'Natural cycles' by people who have no clue as to what those cycles are.
G-W is like religion; you'll never change anyone's mind by arguing the facts
See above; I desparately want to know what these facts *are*. I find that it's the global warming 'skeptics' who refuse to state facts and present models. And your post bears this out yet again - you are claiming a lot of things about climatology without even trying to back it up; bad data and models, inherant bias, political bias, etc - where's the data?
Well, for the average 2-car household, having an electric runaround for short, local journeys and a diesel for longer runs would probably work out fine..
Well, if you are a mouse, we can cure your cancer easily..
There are problems of scaling; tumors in humans are typically much bigger than those in mice, and a mouse will die of old age before a tumor returns anyway.
But we can always hope.. Cancer survival rates are improving as new treatments come along.
Oil does not (by and large) come from dead animals - the most usual source rocks come from times when algal blooms (of much the same type as discussed in this article) happened over a stagnant bottom, so their dead remains accumulated. When the resultant source rock gets buried to a few km and hence heated to over 100C or more, the organic molecules react with water alto present in the rocks to produce hydrocarbon oils; this reaction leads to a volume change (more), which cracks the source rock and allows the oil out. If this migrating oil finds an enclosed, sealed geological structure (Such as an anticline with a layer of sandstone to hold the oil topped with a layer of salt to contain it), it will accumulate to form an oil field.
In essence, it IS biodiesel except that a large chunk of the processing is already done by nature.
The theories of inorganic petroleum formation (See Thomas Gold, Gasresources.net, 'Ukranian Theory', etc) are geologically and geochemically incorrect, and lack any supporting evidence. But some people have siezed on them for ideological reasons..
I suspect that the study is in fact one of (for instance) intensively farmed sunflower/soyabean/other plant oil. In which case the energy returns don't tend to be very good.
Algal biodiesel has a big advantage in that something like half the dry weight of the algae is fatty acids, making them far more energeticlly efficient. And you don't need pesticides, you don't spill fertilizer everywhere (Recycling is easy..), you can use salt water, and so on. The studies simply cannot be compared.
The other BIG thing to consider is that this process works well out in deserts, unlike crop based approaches which take up farmland we need for food.
That the existing oil company "dinosaurs" won't take too kindly to any upstart muscling in on their nice lucrative fiefdom... do not be surprised if they buy up the upstarts and sit on the technology.
So.. they could grow biodiesel-algae in the US (With tax breaks from the government, no doubt), process it locally and sell it to a large, nearby market with essentially no big risks, OR they could undergo the highly speculative and risky process of finding new oil fields, in corrupt and unstable 3rd world countries where 90% of the revenue vanishes to corruption and the local government, and they are always just a revolution away from hyaving their holdings nationalised.
Yeah, I can see why they would prefer the second option.
Seriously, if this proves economical, I would expect the oil companies to actually start using it - they currently have huge piles of cash sitting around and no where near enough conventional oil prospects to spend it on.
I would expect tritium would behave more or less like hydrogen once in the environment, form salts, etc.
Name three naturally occuring hydrides.. (no, there are none..) Actually, in the environment Tritium mixes fairly quickly with the ocean; even if we assume (on decadal timescales) that only the top 100m of the ocean is mixed, that is a LOT of dilution.
Well, I'd advise you also remove all of the potassium, carbon and hydrogen from your body, they all have extant radioactive isotopes. And no X-rays, of course. And no smoke detector in your house...
"This page cannot be found"
Well, I suppose it's kind-of philosophical
Well, mining may be a bit expensive, apart from concentrations of some iron-paritioning elements (i.e. Iridium). It will be mainly silicate rock, and we have plenty of that on earth.
However.. if we could steer this thing into a stable Earth orbit (Geosynchrinous would be ideal), then we have suddenly created a very big space station indeed; just tunnel in.. Given enough voltiles, there would be enough volume and mass to create a more or less self sustaining system. The real value is the fact that you now have a source of mass in space - you could harvest a million tonnes of iron, for instance, for building further craft or satellites, without having to pay to get the stuff into orbit.