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SamH
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An illustration of what?
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Ridgerunner
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People use what they have most readily to hand, what is most economical, or whatever their governments mandate. Brazil, for example, grows a lot of sugar cane, and can make ethanol cheaply, and it’s heavily subsidized besides. However, since Brazil is discovering a lot of petroleum reserves, that might not last. As to those other countries, I can’t say why they mandate alcohol fuel. But they sure aren’t getting it from growing corn in Sweden, Britain, Belgium and Norway, and can’t be getting much from corn crops in Spain or Italy.
Regardless, in the U.S., petroleum products are cheaper and it appears the U.S. has a great deal of it. Personally, I don’t favor the corn ethanol program. It’s a remnant of an old ill-conceived “energy independence” drive that’s no longer needed, if it ever was. Having said that, it’s true that “distiller’s grain” from corn ethanol plants has largely replaced the more expensive soybean meal in cattle and hog feed. You don’t really need corn for cattle or hogs. For poultry, you do. Actually, you don’t need any kind of grain for cattle. For hogs, you need some kind of grain, but it doesn’t have to be corn.
Soybeans are going to continue to be a problem because the demand for them in the Far East is staggering, with 40% of the crop going to China alone. So in a sense, you might say that the corn ethanol program is also a subsidy to hog and cattle producers. Not necessary for cattle, but probably necessary for hogs. Corn itself, you see, is very low in protein as a percentage, but distiller’s grain is high in it…about the same as soybean meal. The distilling takes out the starches and sugars, but not the protein.
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Luigi_Daniele
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Corn (at least out here) has gone from $100/ton to nearly $300/ton.
This affects every user of corn: humans and animals. Prices for animals have risen accordingly. Corn growers=happy; corn users=not so much. Also, corn prices have a ripple effect, increasing wheat prices, for example.
We have enough oil for over 100 years, by some estimates. So what’s the rush? Gasahol is a plain bad idea.
This affects every user of corn: humans and animals. Prices for animals have risen accordingly. Corn growers=happy; corn users=not so much. Also, corn prices have a ripple effect, increasing wheat prices, for example.
We have enough oil for over 100 years, by some estimates. So what’s the rush? Gasahol is a plain bad idea.
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pnewton
Guest
Thanks for the heads up. I am going to take out some comet insurance first thing in the morning.
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pnewton
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That is the **one **thing all of us here at CAF excel at!
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pnewton
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I personally am pro nuclear/electric. Yes, I know the dangers, but I also know that all energy has some downside. Oil, gas and coal, are in limited quanties. Gas is the best alternative and burns cleanest. Wind and hydro are limited, but they need to be fully utilized. Geothermal and tidal are under-utilized. Nuclear is the one option that has unlimited potential for energy (at least it is measured in centuries and millenia) though it is dangerous. I think the risk,… no the certainty that accidents will happen is worth the trade off to the environment.
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lynnvinc
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Well, you’re right, and it is warmer. And there is more precipitation (rain or snow, depending on the particular temps and time of year) up in the northern latitudes, causing greater flooding – which is exactly the pattern expected by scientists. However, the other half of the coin is that with the warmer atmosphere holding up more water vapor – having desiccated the soil, crops, and trees, increasing wildfire risk – there is much more drought, esp in the lower latitudes. And when it does eventually precipitate there is a greater risk it will come down in a deluge flooding the very land that it has caused to be drought-stricken, causing mudslides. And depending on various weather factors, it can precipitate over the oceans more than over the lands, leaving the land drought-sticken.
Just because the global average temp is slowly edging up over the decades, does not mean that weather patterns will be uniform the world over and without temporal variations. And just because we get a strongly negative arctic oscillation bringing very frigid arctic blasts down south more frequently (some latest science is linking this increased frequency to GW), doesn’t mean it will uniformly kill of the citrus fruits (and my winter garden) in the the Rio Grande Valley, S. California, and Florida all at the same time.
It’s more like Russian roulette – GW just increases the risk factors of droughts, floods, and strongly negative arctic oscillations hitting a subtropical area, and
a killing freeze has not come to us in the RGV this year, as it did some years back, tho we are still in the midst of a terrible drought.It’s like we’re playing Russian roulette with our children’s future. But being addicted to the sport, we just can’t stop, no matter how much we profess to love our children.
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lynnvinc
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You’d be surprised to know that a growing number of very dedicated environmentalists are becoming pro-nuclear, some whom I admire very much.
My concerns start with the Native American and other peoples (like tribal peoples of Niger in Africa) who are suffering from the extremely ill-effects of uranium mining – which could be done in a more environmentally friendly, less harmful to people’s health and welfare way… but isn’t. Then there is the issue of, “is it really less carbon intensive.” There is a tremendous amount of (name removed by moderator)ut that goes into the mining, processing, plant building and maintaining. It is also an extremely expensive form of energy.
OTOH, when up north, we had a ComEd guy some to our parish environmental committee meeting around 1995, and we brainstormed about our 75% nuclear power (25% coal – they need coal “peaking plants” for peak hours). A lot of their nuclear power goes to waste during the night then there is very low demand. When I mentioned electric vehicles, the ComEd guy got really excited and said, if a good number of people were plugging EVs into the grid at night, they’d be able to cut their rates in half.
We also spoke about having the excess night energy pump water up into a reservoir, then during the day and peaking hours, release that water to generate hydro-electric power. That too would lower their rates, and reduce the need for the coal peaking plants.
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pnewton
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I am not all that surprised. There simply are not an unlimited amount of options. Most of the pop environmentalism is either anti this or anti that, or the are pro stuff that has only a limited application. If we are to think in terms of billions of people for centuries, most of the popular eco-friendly trends will never work.
This of course does not mean that we should not fully utilize what we can to the extent we reasonably can. We might be surprised just what becomes economical (or acceptable) when gasonline hits the double digits and more as oil becomes scarce.
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Paddy_Walker
Guest
thats a good idea. but comet insurance doesn’t actually stop comets.
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buffalo
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- What if it is the sun causing the cycle? What should we do in this case?
- Since the atmosphere is self adjusting by expanding and contracting do we need to do anything at all?
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lynnvinc
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The sun, of course, also has an impact and is part of the problem. For the past 15 years it has been in a deep solar minimum (of its irradiance), which has counteracted the warming caused by the increasing greenhouse effect, to which we humans have been contributing. So the net effect is that global average temps have not increased significantly over this past 15 years (but they did not go down to 1960s levels, which would have been expected if our increasing GHGs were not having an impact).
However, these solar cycles only last about 11 or so years, and now it seems to be climbing out of the minimum and going to the maximum, so it is likely that our increasing greenhouse effect will piggy-back on this increasing solar irradiance to increase the warming for some 11 years or so. The graphic of these 2 effects would sort of look like a staircase – flat while in solar minimum, and climbing upward why in solar maximum.
There isn’t much we can do re the solar irradiance & I’m a bit leary of geo-engineering. However, we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions thru energy & resource conservation and efficiency and going on alt energy with feasible. Nearly all measures either save money short or long run or have no costs, and do not lower living standards or productivity. So it behooves us as people concerned about life to do what we can.
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Erich
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What’s your “steam footprint”?
Al Gore likes to say that mankind puts 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day. What he probably doesn’t know is that mother nature puts 24,000 times that amount of our main greenhouse gas – water vapor – into the atmosphere every day, and removes about the same amount every day. While this does not ‘prove’ that global warming is not man-made, it shows that weather systems have by far the greatest control over the Earth’s greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor and clouds.
In fact, according to the IPCC, water vapor accounts for 36-72 percent of the greenhouse effect. Fog, haze and clouds are all water vapor… and any warming causes a positive feedback loop as higher temperatures result in more water vapor, which results in higher temperatures, and so on and so on.
On the other hand, CO2 – a by-product of cellular respiration for the planet’s entire existence – only accounts for 9-26 percent of the greenhouse effect. Plants love it, and grow much larger with more of it! Compare this picture of the Tetons and the Snake River, taken in 1942:
with this picture, taken in 2011:
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Dawnia
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It went from Global Warming to Climate Change and now the latest terminology is Climate Instability.
Not sure how changing the name every couple years is going to do much other then get people to think of it more as a marketing gimack than a real issue.
Not sure how changing the name every couple years is going to do much other then get people to think of it more as a marketing gimack than a real issue.
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SamH
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Hardly.
sonoma.edu/users/v/vegalu/eschatology_files/flares.pdf
2003 X-Flare Largest Solar Flare ever recorded. A new scale of measurement had to be derived. 2003 was the peak year for solar flares in the past 40 years, there’s not much point in comparing current numbers to earlier than the 1960s because science didn’t have the ability to make an accurate count before that. 2008 and 2009 were the eb of the 11 cycle, 2010 onward shows growing solar activity greater than anything in the past 40 years.
esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/The_biggest_solar_X-ray_flare_ever_is_classified_as_X28
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Ridgerunner
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I don’t know about this. It appears there is a periodic coincidence of relatively cool water temperatures in the eastern Pacific and relatively warm temperatures in the western Atlantic which, when it happens, causes a strong high pressure area to linger over the upper Midwest and southern plains. That causes unusually wet weather north of it, but drought underneath it. It happened in the 1950s, in the 1930s and it’s happening now. This one was predicted. The one in the 1930s and the one in the 1950s both lasted nearly five years. (Who hasn’t seen photos of the Dust Bowl?) Hope this one is shorter, but there’s no guarantee it will be.
When it does end, the MMGW folks will have to come up with a MMGW reason why it ended, and they surely will.
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lynnvinc
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CO2, CH4, NOx, CFCs are climate forcings; H2O is a feedback. That’s because CO2 molecules stay in the atmosphere a lot longer, a portion can last for 100,000 years. H2O molecules only stay up a few days. For further explanation, see: skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm
Up to a point, and C3 weeds do better, overtaking C4 crops. Plus CO2 is causing ocean acidification, and at high levels can cause rice floret sterility. Because it causes plants to be less nutritious, crop loss to insect damage is a lot greater. Also higher CO2 levels causes certain crops to become toxic.
Furthermore, while CO2 does have some slight benefit in increasing crops up to a point (not as much as they had earlier imagined), mainly in northern latitudes, the effects of global warming by 2050 will be causing a steep decline in crop productivity.
I wrote a paper about all this, and here are some of my references:
- Cline, W. R. 2007. Global Warming and Agriculture. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
- Cruz, R. V., H. Harasawa, M. Lal, S. Wu, Y. Anokhin, B. Punsalmaa, Y. Honda, M. Jafari, C. Li, and N. Huu Ninh. 2007. “Asia.” Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contributions of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. M. L. Parry, O. F. Canziani, J. P. Palutikof, P. J. van der Linden, and C. E. Hanson (eds.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 469-506.
- Doney, S. C., V. J. Fabry, R. A. Feely, and J. Kleypas. 2009. Ocean Acidification: The Other CO2 Problem. Annual Review of Marine Sciences 1: 169-192.
- Hoegh-Guldberg, O., P. J. Mumby, A. J. Hooten, R. S. Steneck, and E. G. P. Greenfield, C. D. Harvell, P. F. Sale, A. J. Edwards, K. Caldeira, N. Knowlton, C. M. Eakin, R. Iglesias-Prieto, N. Muthiga, R. H. Bradbury, A. Dubi, M. E. Hatziolos. 2007. Coral reefs under rapid climate change and ocean acidification. Science 318(5857): 1737-1742.
- Högy, P., H. Wieser, P. Köhler, K. Schwadorf , J. Breuer, J. Franzaring, R. Muntifering and A. Fangmeier. 2009. “Effects of elevated CO2 on grain yield and quality of wheat: results from a 3-year free-air CO2 enrichment experiment.” Plant Biology 11: 60-69.
- Hunter, M. D. 2001. “Effects of Elevated Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Insect-Plant Interactions.” Agricultural and Forest Entomology 3: 153-159.
- Lobell, D. B., W. Schlenker, and J. Costa-Roberts. 2011. “Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980.” Science 333(6042): 616-620.
- Long, S. P., E. A. Ainsworth, A. D. B. Leakey, J. Nösberger, D. R. Ort. 2006. “Food for Thought: Lower-Than-Expected Crop Yield Stimulation with Rising CO2 Concentrations.” Science 312(5782): 1918-1921.
- Munday, P. L., D. L. Dixson, M. I. McCormick, M. Meekan, M. C. O. Ferrari, and D. P. Chivers. 2010. “Replenishment of fish populations is threatened by ocean acidification.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(29):12930-12934.
- Oh, N-H., and D. D. Richter, Jr. 2004. “Soil acidification induced by elevated atmospheric CO2” Global Change Biology 10.11: 1936-1946.
- Oschlies, A., K. Schulz, U. Riebesell, and A. Schmittner. 2008. “Simulated 21st century’s in oceanic suboxia by CO2-enhanced biotic carbon export” Global Biochemical Cycles 22: 1-10.
- Rogers, A. D., and D. d’A. Laffoley. 2011. International Earth System Expert Workshop on Ocean Stresses and Impacts. Summary Report. International Program on the State of the Ocean. Oxford. stateoftheocean.org/pdfs/1906_IPSO-LONG.pdf.
- Schlenker, W., and M. Roberts. 2009. “Nonlinear Temperature Effects Indicate Severe Damages to U.S. Crop Yields under Climate Change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 106(37): 15594-15598.
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lynnvinc
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You’re referring to the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is a natural “sloshing” of ocean-air cool/warm patterns. The climate is very complex, which is why it took them so long – up to 1995 – before they could tease out the climate change “signal” from the background “noise” of other natural climate phenomena. And since 1995 the science has become very robust on ACC; there is no serious doubt about it now…at least in climate science circles.
The public, of course, will go on kicking and screaming against the very notion of ACC, bec what it boils down to is when it comes to a choice between their living high on the wasteful hog and their children’s future, well, they come first and the children be damned.
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lynnvinc
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However it did reach a very deep low 2006 thru 2009, and quite frankly you would have expected the climate to have returned to the 1960s levels, if ACC were not a factor, but it did not:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/1_Hansen2012TSI.jpg
**Here is an 11-year average smoothed curve of both solar irradiance and climate change – note how they diverge from 1980 on. **
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Solar_vs_Temp_basic.gif
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Ridgerunner
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It is my understanding that the persistent high pressure over the midwest and the resulting drought is not simply the El Nino/La Nina cycle in the Pacific, but a confluence of cool-down in the eastern Pacific and warming in the west Atlantic temperature cycle. It will be interesting to see whether this time it will be worse, better or the same as those in the 1950s and the 1930s. But it is a cyclic phenomenon.
Not all scientists agree with GW and among those who do, not all are persuaded that it’s MMGW. We have seen those citations pro and con on here endlessly.
Who, exactly, are the “wasteful hogs”? Who, exactly, do you want to deprive of heat for their homes? What, precisely, do you want to do about transportation of goods?
- Status