{"id":218421,"date":"2010-01-13T04:13:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-13T09:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1752027331714385066.post-9203406682641254140"},"modified":"2010-01-13T04:13:14","modified_gmt":"2010-01-13T09:13:14","slug":"carbon-dioxide-optimization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/218421","title":{"rendered":"Carbon Dioxide Optimization"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is a pretty good review of carbon dioxide and its role in the climate of Earth.  Now that the political version of climate science has been exposed as largely bogus, a lot of the contradictory voices are swiftly getting published and gaining an audience.<\/span><\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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A lot of this we already know but the clear take-home message is that the geological record supports CO2 levels at 1000 ppm as likely the best overall level for supporting our ecosystem.  It may turn out that the ongoing recovery from the ice age is actually promoting a return to that effective level.  We have many centuries to go yet.<\/span><\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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What is been buried is the curious hypothesis that rising CO2 is driving global warming.  It simply is not.  There might be a contribution, but we cannot even show that.  Right now the folks here have satisfied themselves that such contribution is clearly negligible.<\/span><\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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The climate certainly varies and often surprises.  We presently have been riding through a peak cosmic ray flux which argued this early fall for a miserable winter.  Thus we could predict a miserable winter.   So far we have been having a miserable winter that certainly is not disappointing our predictions.  <\/span><\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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Steven D.Levitt<\/span><\/b>and Stephen J. Dubner: The green gadflys<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
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Posted:<\/span><\/i><\/span>January 07, 2010, 10:30 AM by NP Editor<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Stephen J. Dubner<\/span><\/a>,Steven D.<\/span>Levitt<\/span><\/b><\/a>,Freakonomics<\/span><\/a><\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
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http:\/\/network.nationalpost.com\/np\/blogs\/fullcomment\/archive\/2010\/01\/07\/steven-d-levitt-and-stephen-j-dubner-the-green-gadflys.aspx<\/a><\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
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Not so many years ago, schoolchildren were taught that carbon dioxide is the naturally occurring lifeblood of plants, just as oxygen is ours. Today, children are more likely to think of carbon dioxide as a poison. That\u2019s because the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased substantially over the past 100 years, from about 280 parts per million to 380.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
But what people don\u2019t know, say the scientists at Intellectual Ventures labs in Bellevue, Wash., is that the carbon dioxide level some 80 million years ago \u2014 back when our mammalian ancestors were evolving \u2014 was at least 1,000 parts per million. In fact, that is the concentration of carbon dioxide you regularly breathe if you work in a new energy-efficient office building, for that is the level established by the engineering group that sets standards for heating and ventilation systems.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
So not only is carbon dioxide plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon dioxide levels don\u2019t necessarily mirror human activity. Nor does atmospheric carbon dioxide necessarily warm the earth: Ice-cap evidence shows that over the past several hundred thousand years, carbon dioxide levels have risen after a rise in temperature, not the other way around.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Meet Ken Caldeira, a soft-spoken man with a boyish face and a halo of curly hair. He runs an ecology lab at Stanford<\/st1:placename> University<\/st1:placetype><\/st1:place> for the Carnegie Institution. Caldeira is among the most respected climate scientists in the world, his research cited approvingly by the most fervent environmentalists. He and a co-author coined the phrase \u201cocean acidification,\u201d the process by which the seas absorb so much carbon dioxide that corals and other shallow-water organisms are threatened. He also contributes research to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for sounding the alarm on global warming.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
If you met Caldeira at a party, you would likely place him in the fervent-environmentalist camp himself. He was a philosophy major in college, for goodness\u2019 sake, and his very name \u2014 a variant of caldera, the crater-like rim of a volcano\u2014 aligns him with the natural world. In his youth (he is 53 now), he was a hard-charging environmental activist and all-around peacenik.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Caldeira is thoroughly convinced that human activity is responsible for some global warming and is pessimistic about how future climate will affect humankind. He believes that \u201cwe are being incredibly foolish emitting carbon dioxide\u201d as we currently do.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight. For starters, as greenhouse gases go, it\u2019s not particularly efficient. \u201cA doubling of carbon dioxide traps less than 2% of the outgoing radiation emitted by the earth,\u201d he says. Furthermore, atmospheric carbon dioxide is governed by the law of diminishing returns: Each gigaton added to the air has less radiative impact than the previous one.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Caldeira mentions a study he undertook that considered the impact of higher carbon dioxide levels on plant life. While plants get their water from the soil, they get their food \u2014 carbon dioxide, that is \u2014 from the air. An increase in carbon dioxide means that plants require less water to grow.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Caldeira\u2019s study showed that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide while holding steady all other inputs\u2014 water, nutrients and so forth\u2014 yields a 70% increase in plant growth, an obvious boon to agricultural productivity.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why most commercial hydroponic green houses have supplemental carbon dioxide,\u201d a colleague says. \u201cAnd they typically run at 1,400 parts per million.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
\u201cTwenty thousand years ago,\u201d Caldeira says, \u201ccarbon dioxide levels were lower, sea level was lower \u2014 and trees were in a near state of asphyxiation for lack of carbon dioxide. There\u2019s nothing special about today\u2019s carbon dioxide level, or today\u2019s sea level, or today\u2019s temperature. What damages us are rapid rates of change. Overall, more carbon dioxide is probably a good thing for the biosphere \u2014 it\u2019s just that it\u2019s increasing too fast.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
The gentlemen of Intellectual Ventures abound with further examples of global warming memes that are all wrong.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Rising sea levels, for instance, \u201caren\u2019t being driven primarily by glaciers melting,\u201d Lowell<\/st1:place><\/st1:city> Wood says, no matter how useful that image may be for environmental activists. The truth is far less sexy. \u201cIt is driven mostly by water-warming \u2014 literally, the thermal expansion of ocean water as it warms up.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Sea levels are rising, Wood says \u2014 and have been for roughly 12,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. The oceans are about 425 feet higher today, but the bulk of that rise occurred in the first thousand years. In the past century, the seas have risen less than eight inches.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
As to the future: Rather than the catastrophic 30-foot rise some people have predicted over the next century \u2014 goodbye, Florida<\/st1:place><\/st1:state>! \u2014 Wood notes that the most authoritative literature on the subject suggests a rise of about one and a half feet by 2100. That\u2019s much less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations. \u201cSo it\u2019s a little bit difficult,\u201d he says, \u201cto understand what the purported crisis is about.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Caldeira, with something of a pained look on his face, mentions a most surprising environmental scourge: trees. Yes, trees. As much as Caldeira personally lives the green life \u2014 his Stanford office is cooled by a misting water chamber rather than air conditioning \u2014 his research has found that planting trees in certain locations actually exacerbates warming because comparatively dark leaves absorb more incoming sunlight than, say, grassy plains, sandy deserts or snow-covered expanses.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Then there\u2019s this little-discussed fact about global warming: While the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
In the darkened conference room, Intellectual Ventures co-founder Nathan Myhrvold cues up an overhead slide that summarizes IV\u2019s views of the current slate of proposed global warming solutions. The slide says:<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
    \n
  • Too little<\/o:p><\/i><\/li>\n
  • Too late<\/o:p><\/i><\/li>\n
  • Too optimistic<\/o:p><\/i><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
    Too little means that typical conservation efforts simply won\u2019t make much of a difference. \u201cIf you believe there\u2019s a problem worth solving,\u201d Myhrvold says, \u201cthen these solutions won\u2019t be enough to solve it. Wind power and most other alternative energy things are cute, but they don\u2019t scale to a sufficient degree. At this point, wind farms are a government subsidy scheme, fundamentally.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
    What about the beloved Prius and other low-emission vehicles? \u201cThey\u2019re great,\u201d he says, \u201cexcept that transportation is just not that big of a sector.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
    Also, coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide, especially for developing countries. Myhrvold argues that cap-and-trade agreements, whereby coal emissions are limited by quota and cost, can\u2019t help much, in part because it is already \u2026<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
    Too late. The half-life of atmospheric carbon dioxide is roughly one hundred years, and some of it remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years. So even if humankind immediately stopped burning all fossil fuel, the existing carbon dioxide would remain in the atmosphere for several generations. Pretend the United States<\/st1:country-region> (and perhaps Europe<\/st1:place>) miraculously converted overnight and became zero-carbon societies. Then pretend they persuaded China<\/st1:country-region> (and perhaps India<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>) to demolish every coal-burning power plant and diesel truck. As far as atmospheric carbon dioxide is concerned, it might not matter all that much. And by the way, that zero-carbon society you were dreamily thinking about is way \u2026<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
    Too optimistic. \u201cA lot of the things that people say would be a good thing probably aren\u2019t,\u201d Myhrvold says. As an example, he points to solar power. \u201cThe problem with solar cells is that they\u2019re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12% gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat \u2014 which contributes to global warming.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
    Although a widespread conversion to solar power might seem appealing, the reality is tricky. The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal-burning and other power plants would create a huge long-term \u201cwarming debt,\u201d as Myhrvold calls it. \u201cEventually, we\u2019d have a great carbon-free energy infrastructure but only after making emissions and global warming worse every year until we\u2019re done building out the solar plants, which could take 30 to 50 years.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

    From<\/span><\/i>SuperFreakonomicsby Steven D.Levitt<\/span><\/b>and Stephen J. Dubner. Copyright \u00a9 2009 by Steven D.Levitt<\/span><\/b>and Stephen J. Dubner. Published with arrangement by HarperCollinsCanada<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

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    This is a pretty good review of carbon dioxide and its role in the climate of Earth.  Now that the political version of climate science has been exposed as largely bogus, a lot of the contradictory voices are swiftly getting published and gaining an audience. A lot of this we already know but the clear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}