Global Warming - How Valid and Serious?

[noirua]

An interesting read here. Whilst I've long been convinced that we'll end up burning everything we can, it seems there may not be as much coal as is commonly assumed.

In short, it seems that coal is subject to the exact same "reserves never revised to account for production" problem as oil. Also that many coal reserves are "disappearing" as the resource is sterilised through other land uses, because it wasn't really there in the first place and so on.

Also, it seems that China is adding as much coal-fired power generation every season as Australia has built over the past 50 years. The "good" news though is they seem in danger of running out of coal to fire it with.

Actually, that may not be so good when you think about the non-climate consequences of resource shortages (war).

http://www.davidstrahan.com/blog/?p=116

Shortage of coal, no way. South Australia has enough sub-bitumous coal to power Australia for more than the next thousand years. As new technology gradually comes onstream, much of it from Germany, the amount of lignite well exceeds all the other coal resources put together, and that, will alone see the World through to the next Millennium.

 

[wayneL]

are we not like two irish carriage drivers - driving along the same narrow muddy dirt track, buffetting each other - taking every opportunity to splash mud on the other -
yet in the end going along the SAME road, and in the SAME direction. ?

Yeah but, I've been training, to be sure to be sure.

Begorrah!!

 

[2020hindsight]

I'm planning on hiring this for the occasion - comes with supplies
Original Budweiser Clydesdale Commercial

Important to teach the kids ofcourse ...
Teach the kids

and atmospheric dangers by the dozen
Budweiser commercial - Atmospheric Dangers

well this bloke gets confused - takes his mind off his gas monitoring - and look where he ends up !! not adviseable. - not that I fully follow the plot lol - by I think it's good to get all sorts of messages through to teenagers .....
a) care for the planet, and
b) safe sex
probably in that order

Unsafe Sex

 

[2020hindsight]

I think it's good to get all sorts of messages through to teenagers .....
a) care for the planet, ...

To be honest , my daughter is the best advocate I know for "care for the planet" - think they get it at school a bit these days - some schools anyway - sponsoring her own kid in Africa in World Vision - and just itching to go work in an orphanage in Ghana

 

[2020hindsight]

The important thing is to avoid Italian arguments - because they just go round in circles

PS you'll get the ghist of this after the first 20 seconds lol.

Ben Hur

 

[Smurf1976]

Shortage of coal, no way. South Australia has enough sub-bitumous coal to power Australia for more than the next thousand years. As new technology gradually comes onstream, much of it from Germany, the amount of lignite well exceeds all the other coal resources put together, and that, will alone see the World through to the next Millennium.

I think you've missed the point of the article. That there's plenty of coal is a view that has been widely accepted for a very long time.

But it's a bit like saying the earth is flat. If it's been the idea for a long enough time then it must be right.

Same with coal. We're all taking for granted that there's plenty. And yet NOBODY seems to be able to answer the question of how much there is simply because so many countries, including China (by far the world's largest coal producer) provide data that is almost certainly incorrect.

A lot of coal in the ground for sure. But how much is actually able to be mined? That's the real point being made. I don't have precise figures at hand but I know it comes to in the order of 10% of known coal being mineable for both Victoria and Tasmania. If those two states are any indication of the global situation then that's 90% of coal resources effectively useless.

There's coal within an hour's walk of both Sydney and Hobart city centres. Both have historically mined some but long since abandoned the operation. Likewise there's lignite in the suburbs of Melbourne though it's never been commercially mined to my knowledge. There are houses built on top of abandoned mines in the UK - but there's still plenty of coal there that is counted in official data.

What are the odds of any of these producing coal in the future? Pretty low IMO and they can't be the only examples worldwide. So the mineable reserves are what, exactly? Nobody's really sure...

 

[Smurf1976]

http://www.media.tas.gov.au/release.php?id=22883

Looks like we're trying to give the Americans a bit of a hint as to how it's done with renewable energy. Probably won't change any policies but might bring a bit of business.

Roaring 40's is a wind energy joint venture (50/50) between Hydro Tasmania and China Light & Power. It has activities in Tasmania, South Australia, China and India.

Note that the link is a political media release and not from Roaring 40's, HT or CLP but it's farily accurate nonetheless.

 

[2020hindsight]

Looks like we're trying to give the Americans a bit of a hint as to how it's done with renewable energy. Probably won't change any policies but might bring a bit of business.

Roaring 40's is a wind energy joint venture (50/50) between Hydro Tasmania and China Light & Power. It has activities in Tasmania, South Australia, China and India.

In addition Hydro Tasmania produces 50 per cent of Australia’s renewable energy

congratulations Smurf

btw, and fwiw, CLP is HK based

 

[wayneL]

Gotta love the English sense of humour:

 

[numbercruncher]

On a positive note a Market crash/recession is going to work wonders for our ailing Enviroment! Might usher in a wind of change, kick start the economy with a renewable rollout revolution!

 

[Smurf1976]

On a positive note a Market crash/recession is going to work wonders for our ailing Enviroment! Might usher in a wind of change, kick start the economy with a renewable rollout revolution!

This might shock you a bit but I'm thinking the exact opposite. I noticed long ago that concern about the environment peaks as the economic cycle peaks and drops from there.

There was a lot of concern about the greenhouse effect (as it was known at the time) in the late 1980's. Come the recession and it became a political impossibility to even consider anything that cost coal industry jobs or increased energy prices no matter what the long term benefits. It was only recently that public concern over the issue returned to those levels.

Likewise there was the fight over Wesley Vale pulp mill in 1989. By the mid-1990's and still in recession or near enough to it the general feeling in Tas had changed to that of just pursue something, anything, that creates jobs. It even came to packed out public meetings with a farily broad representation from teenagers through to grandparents and former premiers. And the focus was simple - how are we going to create employment.

I don't recall anyone mentioning the environment. There were those who saw tourism, the Hydro, agriculture, manufacturing, call centres and so on as the solution. But nobody said anything about greenhouse emissions, flooded valleys or pollution.

And the responses were fairly consistent. If it's going to employ me, my children or indeed anyone then go ahead and do it. If I can help get it started in some way then I'll do whatever you need. We need jobs...

I've been pretty closely involved with the whole environment versus development thing for my entire adult life. A natural consequence of living where the world's first Green political party was created and having an interest in the energy developments which started it all. But my main observation is simple. People do care about the environment - until they see rising unemployment figures on the front page of the paper. And from that point on they want development no matter what the consequence.

If we do get a serious global recession then I'd say there's a fairly high chance that Kyoto is simply forgotten. At least it will be if a new coal-fired power station brings construction jobs.

 

[Rafa]

If we do get a serious global recession then I'd say there's a fairly high chance that Kyoto is simply forgotten. At least it will be if a new coal-fired power station brings construction jobs.

whilst kyoto may be forgotten, the simple fact our only focus would have to be putting food on the table, rather then buying a plasma tv for each room in the house, has got to be good for the environment...!

 

[Smurf1976]

It looks like the "rain hole" has started early in Tas this year. Basically no inflows to the storages at all. Meanwhile Queensland has floods.

This lack of rain for a few months in the first part of the year in Tas is becoming alarmingly predictable to the point where even those who stand to lose are acknowledging that it seems to be permanent.

Meanwhile some nuclear plants in the US may have to shut due to drought there. Trouble is, the "fix" for that will be burning more fossil fuels. Just like the "fix" for the drought in Tas is burning more coal in Vic and especially NSW to offset lower hydro-electric output.

And China has blackouts now. A power shortfall equivalent to the entire consumption of Qld or Vic in just one part of China and plenty of troubles in the rest of the country too. Why? Because they aren't mining and transporting the coal quickly enough and are, I'm told, down to about one week's supply left. And the solution? Well they'll just mine faster, get more trains and more trucks...

 

[--B--]

another interesting article challenging the science behind the much vaunted UN IPCC reports and the 'consensus' that some believe exists...

Why 'Global Warming' is Not a Global Crisis
Special to the Hawaii Reporter
By Christopher Monckton, 1/22/2008 8:06:23 AM I earned my Nobel Peace Prize by making the United Nations fix a deliberate error in its latest climate assessment. After the scientists had finalized the draft, UN bureaucrats inserted a new table, but with four decimal points right-shifted. The bureaucrats had multiplied tenfold the true contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise. Were they trying to support Al Gore’s fantasy that these two ice-sheets would imminently cause sea level to rise 20ft, displacing tens of millions worldwide? How do we know the UN’s error was deliberate? The table, as it first appeared, said the units for sea-level rise were being changed. But the table was new. There was nothing to change from. I wrote to the UN that this misconduct was unacceptable. Two days later, the bureaucracy corrected, relabeled and moved the table, and quietly posted the new version on its Web site. The two ice sheets will contribute, between them, over 100 years, just two and a half inches to sea-level rise. Gore had exaggerated a hundredfold; the UN tenfold. Hawaii is not about to disappear beneath the waves.
The High Court in London recently ordered the British Government to correct nine of the 36 serious errors in Al Gore’s climate movie before innocent pupils were exposed to it. It was Gore who, in 1994, announced that Mars was covered in canals full of water. This notion had been disproved before his birth. It was Gore who recently spent $4 million of the profits from his sci-fi comedy horror movie on a luxury condo just feet from the supposedly rising ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco. No surprise that he and the mad scientists with whom he has close financial and political links are under investigation for racketeering -- peddling a false prospectus to investors in his “green” investment corporation by distorting climate science even after the UK judge’s ruling.
It is not so well known that the UN’s climate reports are also error-packed and misleading.
To begin with, the UN denies that global temperatures were warmer than today in the medieval warm period. It overlooks the dozens of peer-reviewed papers that establish this fact, and continues to rely on the bogus and now-discredited “hockey-stick” graph by which its previous assessment in 2001 had tried to rewrite history.
It was also warmer than today in Roman times, and in the Minoan warm period or Holocene climate optimum, when temperatures were warmer than today for 2000 years in the Bronze Age, firing the emergence of great civilizations worldwide. In each of the four previous interglacial periods, temperatures were 10F warmer than today’s. For most of the past half billion years, temperatures were nearly always 12.5F warmer than the present. So the warming that has now stopped (there has been no statistically significant warming since 1998) was well within the natural variability of the climate.
The only chapters in the UN’s 1,600-page ramblings that are worth close analysis are those which consider “climate sensitivity” -- how big is the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature? The scientific debate centers not, as the Greens try to suggest, on whether adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause warmer weather (it will), but instead on how much warmer the weather will be. So the only variable that truly matters in this debate is lambda -- the “climate sensitivity parameter.” Here are just some of the UN’s errors and exaggerations in calculating lambda.
First and foremost, the UN’s crafty definition of lambda allows it to overlook the fact that the oceans -- 1,100 times denser than the atmosphere at the surface, and many times denser still at depth -- soak up a good proportion of any additional radiant energy in the atmosphere (see papers by Lyman et al., 2006; Schwartz, 2007). The oceans cancel a great deal of “global warming,” because the next Ice Age will arrive long before the oceans lose their capacity to take up heat from the atmosphere.
Next, the UN has unwisely repealed the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation, the fundamental astrophysical law that relates changes in radiant energy to changes in temperature. The entire debate is about exactly that matter. Yet in 1,600 pages the UN does not mention this crucial equation once. Result: the UN’s “no-feedbacks” value of lambda is way too high. As an eminent physics professor pointed out to me recently, if the UN were correct, global surface temperature would now be 20F higher than it is.
It gets worse. The UN’s computer models predict that in the tropics the rate of increase in temperature five miles above the surface will be three times the rate of increase down here. But 50 years of atmospheric measurement, first by balloon-borne radiosondes and then by satellites, show that the air above the tropics is not merely failing to warm at three times the surface rate: for 25 years it has been cooling. The absence of the tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot” indicates that the computer models -- expensive guesswork -- on which the UN’s rickety case is founded are, in a fundamental way, misunderstanding the way the atmosphere behaves (Douglass & Knox, 2004; Douglass et al., 2007).
On top of the “radiative forcings” from greenhouse gases, the UN says the mere fact of temperature change will cause more change still, through what it calls “feedbacks.” The UN has hiked the feedback multiplier by more than 52 percent since its 1995 report, without quite saying why. Shaviv (2006) and Schwartz (2007) calculate that the sum total of all feedbacks is either nil or very small; Wentz et al. (2007) report that the UN has missed out two-thirds of the cooling effect of evaporation in its assessment of the water-vapor feedback; Spencer (2007) finds that the cloud albedo feedback, which the UN says is strongly positive, is in fact negative; Ahlbeck (2004, 2005) says the CO2 feedback has been enormously exaggerated.
I have mentioned a dozen scientific papers. I could have mentioned hundreds more that challenge the UN “consensus.” There has never been and can never be a scientific consensus on climate change. Lorenz (1963), in the landmark climate paper that founded chaos theory, stated and proved his famous theorem that the long-run evolution of mathematically chaotic objects like the climate cannot be predicted unless one knows the initial state of the object to a degree of precision that is in practice unattainable. Whenever you hear anyone recite the propaganda mantra “The Science Is Settled,” laugh at his redneck scientific illiteracy. The science can never be settled.
Schulte (2008: in press) reviewed 539 papers on “global climate change” in the scientific journals. Only one paper mentioned that “global warming” might be catastrophic, and even that paper offered not a shred of evidence for the supposed apocalypse.
Bottom line: a recent peer-reviewed paper (Lindzen, December 2007) says all the UN’s climate sensitivity estimates should be divided by three. We don’t have a climate problem. The correct policy to deal with a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Don’t let your legislators in Hawaii waste time on this non-problem. The real problem of the 21st century will not be “global warming” but resource depletion, starting with oil. Let your lawmakers do some real work, and get to grips with that.

http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?9c8600a9-6750-45cb-b7ee-c8ca6b6d3a75

 

[noirua]

Biofuel demand is pushing up the cost of food.
This pushes up inflation.
Inflation causes Governments to increase interest rates.
Increasing interest rates reduces World growth.
Then follows turmoil as we have seen.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2007/RES1017A.htm

 

[Dextrum]

Re: FCL and others

My view is that the focus in 2008 will be on agribusiness and the increased demand for meat and grain in the Indian and Chinese continents. Those agribusinesses such as FCL ABB and GNC are well placed to capitalise on this demand.

FCL is probably now reconsidering its intended sale of its stake in AAC and I consider FCL for this reason is a good mid term buy target and undervalued. It has in the past 18 months had private equity concerns reviewing its books as the focus of PE will change to agristocks over 2008.

 

[numbercruncher]

I read in todays Gold Coast bulletin that a French designed car that runs on compressed Air go's into production this european Summer, cost 6 to 7 thousand dollars ( three seater) ! Takes a few minutes to refill with air at a refill station or 3.5hrs via the inbuilt compressor.

I believe the race is fully on to have these types of vehicles rolling off the line, GM is supposed to have an Electric out 2010.

Found the makers website ...

http://www.theaircar.com/

ps. Its damn ugly, but Id buy one !

 

[Smurf1976]

Conmpressed air, hydrogen, batteries.

All of these are ways of using electricity without being physically connected to the grid. But electricity is nonetheless what the car ultimately runs on.

Hence my often repeated point about the need to move towards a near totally renewable electricity supply. Forget distributed this and 20% that if you want an actual solution. What we need is a paradigm shift from coal and gas to something clean and sustainable for all electricity.

 

[numbercruncher]

I totally agree Smurf! Wind, Solar, Wave, Hydro etc all have a huge part in our future, cant wait.


few more facts about the soon to be released Air Car ...

Consumption is less than one Euro per 100Km (Approx 0.75 Euro, according to use, i.e. about a tenth that of a petrol car). This makes it an attractive prospect for any driver, professional or not.
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As no combustion takes place, there is no pollution. Its mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car (200 a 300 Km or 10 hours of driving), a factor which makes a perfect choice in cities where the 80% of motorists drive at less than 60Km.
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Refilling the car will, once the market develops, take place at adapted petrol stations to administer compressed air. In 2 or 3 minutes, and at a cost of approximately 1.5 Euros, the car will be ready to go another 200-300 kilometres.

As an viable alternative, the car carries a small compressor which can be connected to the mains (220V or 380V) and refill the tank in 3-4 hours.
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Due to the absence of combustion and, consequently, of residues, changing the oil (1 litre of vegetable oil) is necessary only every 50,000 Km.
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The temperature of the clean air expelled by the exhaust pipe is between 0 - 15 degrees below zero, which makes it suitable for use by the internal air conditioning system with no need for gases or loss of power.

 

[Smurf1976]

Smurf's going to throw another tin of petrol on the fire and see what happens.

So, on one side we have an industry, tourism, that actually produces nothing, that lives off the fat of a wealthy society and which, for dollars earned, comes at a massive cost in carbon. And, on the other, a power plant that might have helped secure a cleaner energy future.

I had nothing to do with this, it's from the Sydney Morning Herald. All I'll say is that I've done the sums, a long time ago, and never did believe that tourism offered a sustainable economic base due not only to it's non-productive status, but due to the oil situation for which we have no answer in the context of aviation.

That said, and this might surprise a few, I actually was never too keen on that dam for a number of reasons including conservation. I'm still not keen on it, but I will be if we can't get proper proof that geothermal's a goer by 2012.

3, 2, 1... here comes the barrel of petrol aimed straight at the fire...

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/...n/2007/12/17/1197740178873.html?page=fullpage