Gore Refuses to Hear GOP Statement on GW

So, how do you feel about the worldwide treaties that banned various CFCs?


I must say, it really does seem that your problem is that you're starting from an a priori belief that "government is bad" and that true freedom only comes from unfettered capitalism. (Decades of brainwashing by the elite who really benefit has proved quite effective).

Thus, soon as a problem comes along for which unfettered capitalism has no answer, which appears to have no solution other than government intervention, the cognitive dissonance forces you and your ilk to try to do everything possible to deny that the problem exists, in order to try to preserve your illusion of "freedom".

Okay, so we know your political views force you to deny man-made global warming. But how about, for the sake of argument, we consider what we should do if the IPCC report were accurate. What action would you suggest we should take, if CO2 emissions were known to be heating the world up? Just ignore it and carry on, hoping to be saved by running out of oil?

 

Taxing carbon is stupid. Do I pay per breath? The biggest users (powerplants, government) would write their own loopholes anyways.

And I don't care if global warming is true, it is NOT the only reason we need to make the alternatives cheaper than the fossil based energy.

We need to do this either by subsidizing alternatives or by allowing the cost of fossil fuels to rise to where they should be. If you add in our ME military expenses to the cost of gas (expenses REQUIRED to ensure its import), the alternatives would come quick. We subsidize gas without realizing it, hiding the true cost. You could in theory add in the cost of health problems associated with its use (higher asthma and etc. in those living in the city) or even the cost of GW mitigation, if you believe in that kind of thing.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Mar 23 2007, 03:46 PM) [snapback]410873[/snapback]</div>

Only if you've been drinking petrol. :lol:

I wish people wouldn't say things like that. It makes them either look stupid, or like they're trying to score a cheap point by lying.

Can't argue much with the rest of your post though.

 

Did you not just make another post somewher saying we should build nuclear reactors 200 new nuclar reactors? Is that not nuclear proliferation?

KMO- you got him on the CFC ban. That WAS a successful worldwide treaty, the scientist were right on that one. uhh, I don't know how I feel..

We will unfortunately need more and more nuclear energy in the coming decades I fear....

 

There's a potential catch with nuclear. Uranium is possibly as limited as oil - you'd have to start work on more reprocessing schemes and breeder reactors; at the minute we're not making the most of the uranium we have.

A quote from Wikipedia:

 

"true, we only have enough oil and fossil fuels for the next several hundred years."

Totally false. Oil is effectively gone in 5-20 years. It'll still be around but not in large enough amounts to be economically feasable. We have 200 years of coal....Assuming today's usage rates. Given the decline of oil and NG, this rate is likely to rise.

Yes I fear nuclear, but I don't think we'll be able to do with out. We may even have lots of wind/solar in 20 years, but we'll need nuclear for baseline generation, cargo and war ship power, and other uses where renewables fall short.

And yes this is proliferation. Nuclear weaponry is a side shoot of nuclear energy. It's nuclear, its spreading of its use, so its "nuclear proliferation".

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(KMO @ Mar 23 2007, 10:00 AM) [snapback]410892[/snapback]</div>

Only if you've been drinking petrol. :lol:

I wish people wouldn't say things like that. It makes them either look stupid, or like they're trying to score a cheap point by lying.

Can't argue much with the rest of your post though.
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The US has 300 million people. China has a billion more and India has 750 million more. People generate CO2 and methane by breathing and farting ... some more than others. Per capita, the US may not be doing the most damage if these numbers are added to our industrialized output. Then there's the support staff; i.e., farm animals eaten by the peeps. We know they put out a lot of greenhouse gasses too. So, who has the most livestock?

I know I don't want the government in control if there's a carbon bank. I like alternative energy incentives and raising gas prices.

 

Breathing does not increase total CO2. The carbon you emit comes from plants, or from animals that eat plants, and the plants took the CO2 from the atmosphere in the first place.

Farting can be a problem, as methane is more potent than CO2, and farting means you've converted CO2 to methane. But that's mainly cows. I read a news article today where someone has devised an anti-farting pill for cows.

 

dbermanmd:

If you're talking about Generation Investment Management, you're mistaken. GIM doesn't sell carbon credits, they purchase them as offsets, just like Gore does. Is there another company with which Gore is involved to which you refer?

Oh, do you mean the slight cooling caused by particulate pollution that was never the subject of scientific consensus and was subsequently mitigated by international pollution controls and emissions trading? Or is there another "global cooling of the 1970's" I'm forgetting about?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(KMO @ Mar 23 2007, 12:46 PM) [snapback]410974[/snapback]</div>

Of course the cow farts consist of carbon that came from the atmosphere in the first place too. Methane only lasts 7-10 years in the atmosphere before breaking down to CO2 and H20. While methane is more potent a GHG than CO2, there is much less of it, it doesn't last, and when sourced from cow farts is not a net addition anyway.

Weapons-grade material is a byproduct of the recycling of spent fuel in closed-cycle nuclear fuel systems which themselves solve the storage problem. All you really need is a trusted market for fuels to prevent weapons proliferation.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(KMO @ Mar 23 2007, 11:46 AM) [snapback]410974[/snapback]</div>

According to Wikipedia in a 2006 study by the USDA, an average person's respiration generates approximately 450 liters (roughly 900 grams) of carbon dioxide per day. Are you including the word total to insinuate no new CO2 is actually created? So, what happens to the carbon locked away in plants that aren't eaten by people or their animals? Isn't that "unused material" the basis of coal ... and burning it just release it's carbon back into the atmosphere, right? The same can be said for organic materials and oil. The basic elements are all locked away somewhere then.

900 grams of CO2 per person per day x 1.3 billion Chinese. Now that's a lot of CO2. Plus the average Chinese person appears to live a pretty physically strenuous life (lots of exhaling). Maybe 900 grams is a little on the low side for them. I'm not picking on China. They just have the largest population on earth. Wouldn't it be a hoot if the real link to the increased CO2 levels reported was the population explosion over the last half century? If the tipping point is really the population and not fossil fuels?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(McShemp @ Mar 24 2007, 05:05 AM) [snapback]411360[/snapback]</div>

Yes.

CO2 is released during plant decomposition. Some carbon goes into the soil, but even then soil can emit CO2. Some will eventually be locked away for a long time. I can't find any specific figures at the moment. It's certainly not the case that all the CO2 you breath out is CO2 that otherwise would have been locked away. I wish I had a percentage estimate, but I can't find one. I suspect very little is a net increase.

No it's not. Your Prius will emit 900g of CO2 if you drive 5 miles. Even if you accept the incorrect premise that all 900g is net increase, that's 1.2 million tonnes total per day for all the Chinese.

But a rough estimate of CO2 emission due to fossil fuel use for the USA is 54,000g per person per day, or 16 million tonnes total per day. So that's 13 times as much with 1/4 of the population. And I'm generously not counting how much Americans breathe, and ignoring the difference between recycled and new carbon.

Well, it's both. It's increased population alongside increased per-capita fuel use. We need to lower the population, or at least stop its increase, and lower per-person fuel consumption.

But why are you just speculating such nonsense? A few minutes with Internet research and a calculator shows your premise about breathing being the main problem is nonsensical, even apart from the incorrect assumption about it being totally new CO2. Try to think before wittering on. Did it never occur to you that if breathing was the main problem someone somewhere might have already figured that out, so we wouldn't be worrying about fossil fuels?

Maybe it shows a grain of truth in the "isn't it arrogant to assume we can affect nature" meme some use. Maybe we couldn't if we just lived and breathed, but if an individual is capable of spitting out 55kg of new CO2 a day rather than 1kg of recycled CO2 a day, that's a whole new ball game.

 

Okay, I've done a bit more research. I can't find any estimate of the net effect of human respiration higher than zero.

Basically, oil and coal, which are the locked away form of carbon from plants, are formed so incredibly slowly that the percentage of carbon from any plant that doesn't get put back into the carbon cycle in a fairly short term is as near to zero as to be not worth worrying about.

So that 1.2 million tonnes essentially disappears.

 

So ... the CO2 and other greenhouse gasses from people and animals is inconsequential. If the goal is to reduce CO2, planting trees and crops doesn't really count because the trees and crops are consumed or decay. That means the amount of carbon "locked away" must be increased somehow. What caused the rises and falls in CO2 displayed in the Vostok graph? How did mother nature lock away all that carbon we've been releasing by burning fossil fuels?

 

I'd agree, planting trees doesn't help much. It helps somewhat though, in the medium term - a growing tree takes in CO2, certainly. But the trick is then what to do with the tree. If you leave it growing, you're okay, or alternatively, you could use it for building - many suggest that's the ideal thing to do. Over the longer term, eventually the tree will die and release its CO2, but for now it will help somewhat. But still, the tree will take many years to soak up a significant amount of CO2; this whole carbon offsetting thing's a bit fishy in my opinion.

As to the Vostok graph, as I understand it, in that case it's mainly the ocean, and also soil, absorbing and reemitting CO2. Both act as amplifiers - as the temperature rises, they emit CO2, and as CO2 is emitted the temperature rises. You get a feedback effect, and the temperature+CO2 swings from one extreme to the other, like the hum when you hold a microphone up to a speaker. The total amount of CO2 in the biosphere isn't changing significantly though - it's just swinging between the water/soil and the atmosphere.

 

Here is a diagram of the carbon cycle. Note how the only one-way source is the anthropogenic portion:

 

Reforestation as a GW mitigation effort has more to do with reversing land use changes than with sequestering carbon -- the theory being that deforested land has a radiative forcing effect. Planting a single tree, then, is not a significant mitigation effort, but planting entire forests could be, so long as you're doing it such that you reverse what has been previously deforested, which means reclaiming farmland.