What global warming will mean to you

[billvon 3,111]

>But, ending pollution will end our way of life.

Agreed.

>Decreasing it substantially will end our way of life. And, it'll shorten our life, too.

Nonsense. Electricity produced by natural gas will cook your burger as well as electricity from coal. An SUV with a hybrid drive will haul your butt to work as well as one that has a pure gas engine. A solar array on your house will reduce your electric bill and cost less than a new washer/dryer set. A natural gas cogenerator can heat your water _and_ zero out your electric bill. None of those will "end your way of life."

>And, we do not know if it will do anything to stop global warming. That is the issue.

Which is like saying that you don't know if stopping your heroin usage will prolong your life, so there's no reason to stop. After all, you could be killed by a bus tomorrow, and no one can prove heroin will kill you.

[Keith 0]

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Decreasing it substantially will end our way of life. And, it'll shorten our life, too.

How do you know that? Sounds like the same supposition the environmentalists are being accused of.

edited 'cause I quoted the wrong quote

Keith

Don't Fuck with me Keith - J. Mandeville

[Amazon 7]

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EAT ME!!!!!!!!!

But but.. Sean dear. I thouhgt you were happily married.. I was kinda hoping to"save" Keith.. he looks very edible

[sdgregory 0]

The natural gas supply is equally as limited as the oil supply. Natural gas pockets tend to be in pockets above the cerrigan (sp?) that is the gooey mess that becomes oil.

And to convert all the power plants in the world to Natural Gas would cost a bloody fortune. Not to mention all the recovery boilers that work off coal and wood.

To give up fossil feuls would require a bigger change than you can possibly imagine. It is more than just transportation and electricity that would have to convert.It would require changes in design in every aspect of the energy generating proccess. Sootblowers, water lances, boiler systems, recovery systems. Now let's add automotives, boating, aeronautics, cranes, tractors, etc. . . . the list is endless. And you still have the problem of a limited energy supply with natural gas.

Many companies are working on changes. And for those who try to throw out those corporate conspiracies, get a clue. You have no idea how many companies are out there trying to make things work with cleaner emissions, cleaner feuls, and better non-fuel motors. There are all kinds of problems with the design process that occur. It is not as simple as changing froma florescent to a halligen bulb by changing a couple of pieces of hardware and a bulb. There are all kinds of physics and engineering problems that must be overcome, especially to do it so that it is relialbe, user friendly, and easily fixable. Also, what may work with a Honda Civic, most likely won't work with a Kenworth W9. And it certainly will not work with an F-18 or a Super Otter. And the chances of that working with a power plant are even slimmer yet.

There are many engineers out there that take an oath to do what is right for the environment and the consumer. They work their butts off trying to solve these problems that so many think are so easy but for the wicked evil government and its support of fat cat oil barons.

If you think it is so easy then you do it. Show us how it is done. Don't just spout off at the mouth.

[sdgregory 0]

Oh I am very happily married.

But, well, okay . . . I am ashamed.



I could not make up a good excuse.

[Keith 0]

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I was kinda hoping to"save" Keith.. he looks very edible

Oh Jeanne, you're just sayin' that 'cause you want in my pants

Keith

Don't Fuck with me Keith - J. Mandeville

[nathaniel 0]

if anyone's still reading this thread, a few days ago I found this great article about some of NASA's research on this subject...if you can get past the ramblings on the first page about glaciers there's a lot of plain-sense explanations to a lot of the questions asked here.

from page 7

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“Last winter was so cold! I don’t notice any global warming!” Global warming is ubiquitous,
but its magnitude so far is only about 1°F. Day-to-day weather fluctuations are of order 10°F. Even averaged over a season this natural (year-to-year) variability is about 2°F, so global warming does not make every season warmer than a few decades ago. However, global warming already makes the probability of a warmer than “normal” season about 60%, rather than the 30% that prevailed in 1950-1980 [Plate XV in Carl Sagan’s Universe, Cambridge Univ.
Press, 282 pp., 1997].

“I read that satellites measure global cooling, not warming.” That was the story a few years ago, but as the satellite record has lengthened and been studied more carefully it has shifted to warming. The discrepancy with surface measurements is disappearing. The primary issue now is: “how fast is the warming?”

“The surface warming is mainly urban ‘heat island’ effects near weather stations.” Not so. As predicted, the largest warming is found in remote regions such as central Asia and Alaska. The largest areas of surface warming are over the ocean, far from urban locations [see maps at http://www.giss.nasa.gov/data/update/gistemp]. Temperature profiles in the solid earth, at hundreds of boreholes around the world, imply a warming of the continental surfaces between 0.5 and 1°C in the past century.

“The warming of the past century is just a natural ‘rebound’ from the ‘little ice age’.” Any rebound from the European little ice age, which peaked in 1650-1750, would have been largely complete by the 20th century. Indeed, the natural long-term climate trend is to a colder climate.

“Isn’t human-made global warming saving us from the next ice age?” Yes, but the gases that we have added to the atmosphere are already far more than needed for that purpose.

“Climate variations are mainly due to solar variability.” The sun does flicker and the ‘little ice age’ may have been caused, at least in part, by reduced solar output. Best estimates are that the sun contributed about one quarter of global warming between 1850 and 2000. Climate forcing by greenhouse gases is now larger than that by the sun, and the greenhouse forcing is increasing monotonically while no significant long-term trend is expected for the sun. The sun may contribute to future climate change, but it is no longer the dominant player.

“Global warming will be negligible if the “iris effect”, suggested by Richard Lindzen, is valid.” This proposed negative climate feedback (in which it is supposed that tropical clouds adjust to allow more heat radiation to escape to space when the Earth gets warmer) has been discredited in specific tests against in situ and satellite data. More generally, any feedbacks that exist in the real world are included in the empirical measures of climate sensitivity provided by the history of the Earth. This history shows that the Earth's climate is sensitive to forcings, with a sensitivity similar to that of climate models.

nathaniel

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

[mikkey 0]

I think there is a problem with certain "assumptions" being believed to be absolute "truths" when it comes to Global Warming. There is growing movement of "skeptics" who attack this. The Green movement has been very successful in getting everybody to believe these "facts". There are highly qualified people out there who think:

a) That human activity has much less influence on global warming then most believe.
b) That the money spend on "fighting" global warming in the modern industrialised world would be better spent on cleaning waterways, reducing air pollution, clean up chemical dumps etc. - especially in developing countries (if we want to protect the environment most efficiently)


One of the more prominent "skeptics" Professor Lomborg wrote the following which makes you doubt if the money spent on implementing Kyoto is the most efficient way of protecting the environment:

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Global warming is important, environmentally, politically and economically. There is no doubt that
mankind has influenced and is still increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and that this will
increase temperature. I will not discuss all the scientific uncertainty, but basically accept the models
and predictions from the 2001 report of the UN Climate Panel (IPCC). Yet, we will need to separate
hyperbole from realities in order to choose our future optimally.
When the IPCC tells us that the world might warm some 5.8°C over the coming century, this is based
on an enormous variety of scenarios and models, where the IPCC has explicitly rejected making
predictions about the future, and instead gives us “computer-aided storytelling,” basing the development of crucial variables on initial choice and depicting normative scenarios “as one would hope they would emerge.”
Yet the high-end scenarios seem plainly unlikely. Reasonable analysis as we saw yesterday, suggest that renewables – and especially solar power – will be competitive or even outcompete fossil fuels by mid-century, and this means that carbon emissions are much more likely to follow the low emission scenarios, causing a warming of about 2-2.5°C.
Moreover, global warming will not decrease food production, it will probably not increase storminess or the frequency of hurricanes, [“there is no general agreement yet among models
concerning future changes in midlatitude storms (intensity and frequency) and variability,”
and “there is some evidence that shows only small changes in the frequency of tropical cyclones.” it will not increase the impact of malaria or indeed cause more deaths [Mathematical models, merely mapping out suitable temperature zones for mosquitoes show that global warming in the 2080s could increase the number of people potentially exposed to malaria by 2-4 percent (260-320 million people of 8 billion at
risk.) Yet, the IPCC points out that most of the additionally exposed would come from middle or high
income countries, where a well functioning health sector and developed infrastructure makes actual
malaria unlikely.
Thus, the global study of actual malaria transmission shows “remarkably few
changes, even under the most extreme scenarios.”

It is even unlikely that it will cause more flood
victims, because a much richer world will protect itself better. [The total cost of protection is fairly
low, estimated at 0.1 percent of GDP for most nations, though it might be as high as several percent for small island states.
However, global warming will have serious costs – the total cost is estimated at about $5 trillion.11
Such estimates are unavoidably uncertain but derive from models assessing the cost of global warming
to a wide variety of societal areas such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, energy, water supply,
infrastructure, hurricane damage, drought damage, coast protection, land loss caused by a rise in sea
level, loss of wetlands, forest loss, loss of species, loss of human life, pollution and migration.
The consequences of global warming will hit hardest on the developing countries, whereas the
industrialized countries may actually benefit from a warming lower than 2-3°C.12 The developing
countries are harder hit primarily because they are poor – giving them less adaptive capacity.
Despite our intuition that we naturally need to do something drastic about such a costly global
warming, we should not implement a cure that is actually more costly than the original affliction. Here,
economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut CO2 emissions radically, than
to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures.
The Bonn meeting was generally the implementation of the much more studied Kyoto Protocol,
which aims to cut carbon emissions to 5.2 percent below 1990-levels in 2010, or a reduction of almost
30 percent, compared to no-intervention.
The effect of Kyoto (and even more so Bonn) on the climate will be minuscule. All models agree that
the Kyoto Protocol will have surprisingly little impact. One model by a lead author of the 1996 IPCC
report shows us how an expected temperature increase of 2.1°C in 2100 will be diminished
by the protocol to an increase of 1.9°C. Or to put it more clearly, the temperature that we would have
experienced in 2094 we have now postponed to 2100. In essence, the Kyoto Protocol does not negate global warming but merely buys the world six years.

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When people look like ants - pull. When ants look like people - pray.

[jumpwally 0]

Thanx Bill,,I was going out to dinner and to get laid,,but now I read this ,,thanx Bill...wally

smile, be nice, enjoy life
FB # - 1083

[Amazon 7]

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Oh Jeanne, you're just sayin' that 'cause you want in my pants

Weeeeeeeeeellllllllllll if I must

• Quote

[billvon 3,111]

>The natural gas supply is equally as limited as the oil supply.

We can make natural gas from garbage, manure, and from direct chemical processes. We can't make oil.

>And to convert all the power plants in the world to Natural Gas would
> cost a bloody fortune.

Nonsense; all we have to do is not build any more coal plants and retire them when their useful life has ended. That way the transition happens gradually without any cost beyond the differential cost between natural gas and coal plants.

>To give up fossil feuls would require a bigger change than you can
>possibly imagine. It is more than just transportation and electricity
> that would have to convert.It would require changes in design in
> every aspect of the energy generating proccess. Sootblowers, water
> lances, boiler systems, recovery systems. Now let's add
> automotives, boating, aeronautics, cranes, tractors, etc. . . . the list
>is endless.

I'll give you a few more - plastics, asphalt and fertilizers. Some of those are the things we _really_ need oil for. We can use methane (natural gas) to drive our cars, make our power and heat our houses; we can't use it to make plastic. We should save it for things like that.

>You have no idea how many companies are out there trying to make
> things work with cleaner emissions, cleaner feuls, and better non
>-fuel motors.

There are some very good big companies out there doing just that. BP-Shell, Kyocera and Sharp are leaders in solar power. Toyota is a leader in efficient cars, and Ballard is making working fuel cells today. Honda has a production natural gas car that you can walk in and buy today. All the ingredients are there, we just have to want to do it.

>There are all kinds of physics and engineering problems that must
> be overcome, especially to do it so that it is relialbe, user friendly,
> and easily fixable. Also, what may work with a Honda Civic, most
> likely won't work with a Kenworth W9.

Ten years ago the line was "that won't work in cars." Pneumatic/hydraulic hybrids show a lot of promise for large vehicles.

>And it certainly will not work with an F-18 or a Super Otter.

http://www.tupolev.ru/English/Show.asp?SectionID=82
http://www.nal.usda.gov/ttic/tektran/data/000012/02/0000120284.html

> And the chances of that working with a power plant are even slimmer yet.

http://www.solaraccess.com/news/story?storyid=5157

>If you think it is so easy then you do it. Show us how it is done.
>Don't just spout off at the mouth.

I generate more power than I use, and I do it with commercially available parts. I generate enough to offset both all my power usage and my gasoline usage (at 14 kwhr/gallon conversion rate.) I'm slowly converting our drop zone to solar power; once that's up and running it will easily offset all my skydiving fuel usage. Keith's house is next on my list. I _am_ doing it; it's not even that hard. It just takes time and money.

[lawrocket 3]

Agreed. But there is the cost-benefit scenario. You are right - natural gas can do a lot. My barbecue grill is natural gas. I love it.

And, I'd actually think that nuclear power is about as clean of a source of power as we can get. Don't get me wrong, I drive a good car that's great with mileage. I keep the heat turned down and turn off lights and such.

Why? Economics. I'm a cheap sonavabitch, and any way I can find to save a little scratch is going to be utilized.

Still, I go back to so much of the environmental stuff in the 80's and 90's, when it was suggested that emissions should be lowered or ceased "no matter the cost." Well, that's a pretty big statement. And I look at cost-benefit. A solar array on my house? When I get a house, I plan to get one. Heck, I understand the power companies will pay me for excess power I produce. I could use the money I can get.

Some forms of environmentalism are cost-beneficial.

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[billvon 3,111]

>Why? Economics. I'm a cheap sonavabitch, and any way I can find to
>save a little scratch is going to be utilized.

And that's the way to make it happen. Solar buybacks, that allow people to sell power back to the utility at twice the cost they sell it. Efficiency standards like CAFE that give manufacturers an incentive to make efficient cars cheaper.

>Still, I go back to so much of the environmental stuff in the 80's and
> 90's, when it was suggested that emissions should be lowered or
> ceased "no matter the cost."

Sometimes that's true. If you have a power plant that's killing 500 people a year it MUST be cleaned up even if it's hideously expensive; human life isn't just a minor cost on a balance sheet. But most of the time, you can get very significant reductions for not much cost at all. The price of SULEV and PZEV cars is about the same as the normal emission level cars they are selling nowadays.

[VectorBoy 0]

Whats the problem? Don't you hear all of the jumpers complaining about being snowed in? I personaly like it hot, real hot. Skydive in shorts hot.

When I'm at work and I'm driving the big 490 MW natural gas fired Westinghouse I like to carry extra superheat temperature. I'm part of the 1100 club and want to start the 1200 club ( tube metal temp) just to be the first. I like it when its all hot and happy up in this place. So happy I put on my Fire God costume and go out on the turbine deck and do the Fire God dance. See below.

I'm really just an Alien sleeper agent here to tera form your world into a more livable planet for us.
Bill, did I spell tera-form correctly?

www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?do=post_attachment;postatt_id=10434;

www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?do=post_attachment;postatt_id=10435;guest=4675576

[kallend 2,146]

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>The natural gas supply is equally as limited as the oil supply.

We can make natural gas from garbage, manure, and from direct chemical processes. .

There seems to be a plentiful supply in jump-planes too.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.