Ice Age - A few of you would be interested in this

[jmc]

Forests last decades, whose to says the acid rain that fell many years ago isn't still in the soil?

Climax evergreen forests render the soil highly acidic. Such acidic soil exists whether there is a source of "acid rain" or not. For the north eastern US, the pattern was:

• 1800s........................Chop down the evergreen forests (forestry you know)
  late1800-mid1900.....plant crops and orchards, seed lakes with non-native fishes (great fishing you know)
  mid1900....................Replant evergreen forests. (Need the wood products you know)
  bit later ....................Fishes die!
  bit later ....................Scream "ACID RAIN"

I do agree with the desire to stop using high sulfer coal, but then I would vastly prefer to use no coal at all. Lets Polywell!

One problem with that theory, Scandinavia has vast swathes of native pine forests and it too had a sudden depletion of fish in it lakes following the 80's.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/72p ... pdf?page=1

[jmc]

Seedload:

Humans inhabit and farm vast swathes of land, were are having a meassurable influence on the chemical composition of our atmosphere. Hundreds of new chemicals which have never existed before are now pouring into the ecosystem. It would be extremely surprising if we weren't impacting the planet and altering it in some way.

If you cut down forrests you get dessertification. Poorly thought out irrigation schemes can lead to salting of the land. Introduction of invasive species such as rabbits have caused disater in Australia.

I just don't know what your trying to say by your comment.

Ofcourse not everything that goes bad is down to climate change and if we didn't farm anywhere we'd have famine. But there's a good case for saying if you don't understand how something works, like abn ecosystem, don't perturb it in a big way unless you have to. Often we have to, but that doesn't reduce the merit of minimizing the degree to which we perturb systems which we rely on but don't understand while studuying them and trying to understand them at the same time.

[jmc]

1)BTW if you are going to go the burden of proof route we might as well kill off BFRs. I mean some bacteria floating in the air could get mutated and kill off all the fruit flies. Or destroy the human race.

2)What we need to do is preemptively kill off 99% of the humans on the planet to be sure nothing bad happens. I have some old designs for mass crematoria that need just a little updating. Any of you guys have any expertise in furnace design?

1)That's ridiculous, the chances of that are next to zero. This is a complete straw man argument. The argument for CO2 causing climate change, or SO2 damaging ecosystems from acid rain, or CFCs damaging the ozone layer is far more probable and plausible. If you don't understand that then you have no concept of probability or risk assessment, and considering your an engineer I find that highly unlikely.

2) Again risk assessment, if you value human life then killing off 99% of the population is not a desirable outcome, and it is not remotely comparable to using slightly less efficient refrigerants to protect the ozone layer. Or inserting scrubber in coal power stations in case the acid rain wipes out all the fish in some lakes. Or switching to nuclear energy or subsidising solar power to protect against the risk of catastrophic climate change while guarding against inevitable future fuel shortages at the same time.

[MSimon]

jmc,

Yes. There are no zero risk activities. -

And yes. I value human life.

I'm prone to unannounced sarcasm. It gets the "conversation" going. :-)

However, there are zero risk people out there and there are some who want to kill off the human race. I put up a link a while back documenting some "murder Greens" who proposed that.

In fact I'm against our new President's plan to kill off coal plants before we have a lower cost replacement. It will cause some deaths. Maybe not many. It would be too many for me.

[djolds1]

However, there are zero risk people out there and there are some who want to kill off the human race. I put up a link a while back documenting some "murder Greens" who proposed that.

All I ask is that the Voluntary Human Extinction Movementpeople lead by example.

In fact I'm against our new President's plan to kill off coal plants before we have a lower cost replacement. It will cause some deaths. Maybe not many. It would be too many for me.

Cold kills far more than heat does.

[seedload]

Seedload:

Humans inhabit and farm vast swathes of land, were are having a meassurable influence on the chemical composition of our atmosphere. Hundreds of new chemicals which have never existed before are now pouring into the ecosystem. It would be extremely surprising if we weren't impacting the planet and altering it in some way.

If you cut down forrests you get dessertification. Poorly thought out irrigation schemes can lead to salting of the land. Introduction of invasive species such as rabbits have caused disater in Australia.

I just don't know what your trying to say by your comment.

Ofcourse not everything that goes bad is down to climate change and if we didn't farm anywhere we'd have famine. But there's a good case for saying if you don't understand how something works, like abn ecosystem, don't perturb it in a big way unless you have to. Often we have to, but that doesn't reduce the merit of minimizing the degree to which we perturb systems which we rely on but don't understand while studuying them and trying to understand them at the same time.

For the record, the finger painting comment was kinda a joke.

My point was just that maybe we are over-reacting a bit. Maybe being a little bit speculative. Maybe some are prone to exaggeration and are tempted to believe that the sky is falling. Maybe the sky doesn't fall that often.

Read your own post. We farm VAST SWATHS of land. Chemicals are POURING into our ecosystem. DISASTER in Australia. HUNDREDS of chemicals causing and contributing to CLIMATE CHANGE. Are these really correct descriptions of what is happening? On a global scale? You aren't talking about creating a toxic pond. You are talking about changing the climate of our planet. You question whether I am nieve enough to think that we are not doing this. I question whether you really think we can.

Talking about disaster is the way to sell a news story, an argument, a grant proposal, and recently even a scientific paper. Don't predict vast swaths of disaster pouring into our lives and you probably won't get anywhere. Don't appeal to the emotional side of people and you won't be heard. Be stupid enough to champion the status quo and you are characterized as heartless and blind. Talk about "change" and you are da' man.

CO2 is not going to make temperatures go up by 15 degrees. The sky is not falling. The oceans are not about to rise to sink Florida and NYC in the next 50 years. People need to chill out on that stuff.

The ecosystem is not fragile. It is resilient! You look at the history of the planet and you see fragility?

I don't think you need to predict disaster to have a good reason to clean things up. Cars stink - I mean literally smell. I don't like the look of an oil covered lake. I enjoy air that doesn't smell of smog. Frogs are cool. Things like that are good enough reasons to hope for a cleaner energy future.

Our nation is about to embark on the most badly advised, economically risky endeavor in our history. I think the target is all wrong (wind and solar). I think the reasons are a bunch of hype (climate change is essentially a myth). I do not respect the heros (Gore and Obama). I do not feel that we truly understand how much energy we will need and want in the future.

If I were king or the world, I would build tons of nukes. I would put R&D money into better nukes, into energy storage technology for transportation, and I would research fusion on all fronts. Electrical distribution would be a priority. The current plan of wind solar and geothermal is weak IMHO.

[seedload]

Seedload. That's an amazingly right-brained speculation. As somebody who is almost retardedly left-brained, I can assure you.

The notion that everyone you disagree with must be irrational is as irrational as the assumption that we can fix everything.

The discussions here used to be science-based. The dialog has gone rapidly south. Can we get past the "I suspect you have a bias, so that must be why you're wrong" level of debate?

Mike

Mike, I respectfully disagree on the point of bias not being a part of the debate. Bias has been purposefully added to the debate.

I just read a good book by someone I don't agree with. The subject was how Bush won the last election. The speculation in the book included the fact that Bush used "fear" to win. Specifically fear of terror. The facts support this very strongly. The "fear" tactic used by Bush's campaign was exagerated and was an unfair representation of the level of risk. Our cities were not going to be nuked tomorrow, but it sure sounded like they might be. Using fear to bias the argument was a strong part of what the campaign did. A HUGE PART. And it was fundamentally dishonest.

Similarly, the Gore led efforts to make us believe that our cities are sinking and that our lakes are drying and that our ice is melting because we are dumping all these giant quantities of CO2 into our air are fundamentally dishonest and intentionally overstated with the purposeful intention of adding fear to the argument. Bias! It is part of it. It was added on purpose.

[Mike Holmes]

MSimon,

Uh... you win the point that the "murder greens" are insane. All four of em. Not that anyone here proposed that killing humans was the solution to polution... so I'm not sure who you won that point against.

Mike (and JMC): pollution is still bad. We ought to try to get rid of it as part of our energy solutions.
MSimon: Oh, so you think we ought to kill off the human race. You nuts!

If you were a debater in school, then you would know that you just lost big points. OK, call it a side point here - the murder greens are nuts. Fine. Can we concentrate on the relative merits of the coal plan in question?

I brought up burden of proof, and it's been abused since I did it. I just erased two paragraphs explaining the concept in the hope that, since y'all are smart folks, you'll shape up and quit making ridiculous assertions on both sides of the debate.

JMC, when it's the individual vs the state, even where a public trust like the environment is concerned, the burden of proof lies with society to prove that there is some damage being done. The EPA already requires statements of impact just for the plants to have license to operate. If we believe that there is damage done in excess of those statements, then it's incumbent upon us to prove that there is damage.

And that's what you've been debating just fine. Acid rain, AGW, desertification.

On that last one, long-term climate change has been bringing about desertification for eons - it's hard to say if "deforestation" has contributed to this. What's a better argument is that bad agricultural techniques cause damage, even to agricultural land. See the dust bowl, and the wonderful climatological theory that was "The Rain Follows the Plow" (which MSimon can gloat over as a progressive idea meant to push people west to deal with overcrowding in eastern cities).

Funny how development used to be a liberal idea, and how it's become a conservative one somehow. Note that there was a change in the 70s, from dems pushing their labor promoting politics to environment, when the environmental movement first started raising doubts about continued sustainability. Funny that it was Teddy Roosevelt who started the environmental conservation movement... both a Republican, and a progressive...

So... is it that when a Democrat promotes development that benefits the common man, it's bad, but if a Republican promotes development in the name of big business that it's good? Economics aside for a moment, isn't impact simply impact? Doesn't the dust bowl prove that development can be bad for the economy in the long run? If done less than responsibly?

Like most polarizing debates in the US, people don't want to admit that we've already found the comfortable common ground. Everyone wants to negotiate to debating outside of that common ground. Take socialism, for instance. The US has been a socialist nation since, oh, anti-trust legislation was first enacted. Does anyone on the right want to argue that we ought not regulate the markets at least to the point of eliminating market damaging monopolies? If not, then the question is not whether regulation, but just how much and what sort.

The same with the environment. It's agreed that it's a public trust, and that it may not be abused. The only question is what the actual dangers are, not whether or not we need to be on the lookout for damage. Nobody here is for allowing businesses 100% free reign to pollute, and nobody here is for destroying business entirely (much less humanity), to defend the environment.

As for the proposed policy, the question is not whether or not the coal business will be damaged by the maneuver in question, but how much, how fast, and whether the benefits are worth it.

Here's an argument that I could make for the policy (though generally I'm for not enacting the policy in question): It might do the coal business more good than harm. A problem with such industries is that, because of their corporate nature, they tend to be hide-bound and change-resistant. Even if they become aware that their industry is in trouble in the long run, corporations tend to live for the bottom line this quarter. Why worry that the industry will die thirty years from now, if you're going to be retired by then?

The point being that if you make it economically sensible to convert to new technology, you can make that business more profitable in the long run by giving them a long tail run-up to implementation. Rather than crisis crash-implementation.

Consider that if we'd been more agressive with pushing auto-makers into creating more fuel-efficient cars, that they might not be in the jam they're in right now. Now they're begging for hand-outs on top of the economic incentives that were, in fact, offered to upgade technology.

Any large organization can be shortsighted, government, or GM. I think you can make energy policy decisions that both benefit us through improved environment, and simultaneously make for more profitable business in the long-run. Teddy Rosevelt would agree...

Mike

[Mike Holmes]

At the risk of double posting, I'm responding to a cross-post by Seedload...

Well, the problem with the argument made by Bush isn't that it was dishonest, but that it's wrong. The intention doesn't matter as to the truthfullness. That is, people both well intentioned, and ill, can both be wrong. And they can both be right. Knowing their intent doesn't prove the facts one way or another. Only analysis does.

Al Gore isn't a scientist, nor has he ever claimed to be. He refers to other scientists' work. Now those scientists might be "bought" somehow. But the way to prove this is to prove that their methods are bad.

Motive is not enough to endict. EVERY scientist has the motive to obtain grant money by coming up with an angle that seems compelling. From that POV you'd have to say that you can't trust anything from any scientist. Nor could you trust any business by that argument - after all, they're all trying to bilk us, right?

Enlightened self-interest does not automatically make somebody a fraud. Attack their work to discover if they are, don't make assumptions based on their associations or past ideology. Because even if you don't like their ideology, they might just be right. What we want is the truth, right? Not just to win the argument? Right?

Mike

[jmc]

The point being that if you make it economically sensible to convert to new technology, you can make that business more profitable in the long run by giving them a long tail run-up to implementation. Rather than crisis crash-implementation.

I agree with that statement and indeed most of the post. But to be honest I think if you look at the kind of policies most governments have actually undertaken to reduce green house emmissions and most other emmission it has taken the shape of the former as opposed to the latter.

Most policies are to facilitate phasing one thing in and another thing out.

The main reason people like Al Gore use crisis language is to get anything done at all. Never underestimate the laziness of industry to engage in major structural development. You have to really push them with legislation or send them a definite message that doing this will increase profits or they'll leave it on the back burner and focus on more immediate issues.

[KitemanSA]

One problem with that theory, Scandinavia has vast swathes of native pine forests and it too had a sudden depletion of fish in it lakes following the 80's.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/72p ... pdf?page=1

Right, but coal use in the US preceded reforestation, but the fish die-off happened after it. Thus "cause and no effect" preceded "not cause and effect". Issue still undefined.

No, I don't want high sulfer coal, or any other pollution spewing mechanism to run amok. But the REAL trade off is between a small number of savages (ok, "children of the earth") living in total technology void balance with nature, or civilized peoples minimizing the adverse effects of their great numbers by efficient application of technology to their problems. I prefer the latter, since I doubt I would survive the former.

[MSimon]

The main reason people like Al Gore use crisis language is to get anything done at all. Never underestimate the laziness of industry to engage in major structural development. You have to really push them with legislation or send them a definite message that doing this will increase profits or they'll leave it on the back burner and focus on more immediate issues.

Actually I think you are in error. Look at how drug distribution persists despite government efforts. Why? Profits. It is a very powerful force. Of course one of the things involved is low cost of entry into the business. So you have to balance capital costs with the cost of persisting with your current set up.

However, if the profit from change is great, enough capital will be found.

So really. The best thing government can do (without wrecking the economy) is research that will lower the capital cost of change.

But you know there are lots of people who think government guns will correct what they see as imbalances. The law of unintended consequences always intrudes into such schemes.

What is the advantage of letting things proceed at their normal rate? Production has a big incentive to reduce its costs to increase its market penetration. Mandates dilute that signal. They also divert capital from more productive uses.

But there are always people in a hurry. And they see government guns as a short cut. What they fail to realize is that it is a short cut to tyranny.

*

If BFRs reduce the cost of electrical generation by a factor of 2X and the capital cost is low how long will it take to replace coal fired plants? That is why the technology holds such promise.

[jmc]

1)My point was just that maybe we are over-reacting a bit. Maybe being a little bit speculative. Maybe some are prone to exaggeration and are tempted to believe that the sky is falling. Maybe the sky doesn't fall that often.

Read your own post. We farm VAST SWATHS of land. Chemicals are POURING into our ecosystem. DISASTER in Australia. HUNDREDS of chemicals causing and contributing to CLIMATE CHANGE. Are these really correct descriptions of what is happening? On a global scale? You aren't talking about creating a toxic pond. You are talking about changing the climate of our planet. You question whether I am nieve enough to think that we are not doing this. I question whether you really think we can.

CO2 is not going to make temperatures go up by 15 degrees. The sky is not falling. The oceans are not about to rise to sink Florida and NYC in the next 50 years. People need to chill out on that stuff.

The ecosystem is not fragile. It is resilient! You look at the history of the planet and you see fragility?

I don't think you need to predict disaster to have a good reason to clean things up. Cars stink - I mean literally smell. I don't like the look of an oil covered lake. I enjoy air that doesn't smell of smog. Frogs are cool. Things like that are good enough reasons to hope for a cleaner energy future.

Our nation is about to embark on the most badly advised, economically risky endeavor in our history. I think the target is all wrong (wind and solar). I think the reasons are a bunch of hype (climate change is essentially a myth). I do not respect the heros (Gore and Obama). I do not feel that we truly understand how much energy we will need and want in the future.

If I were king or the world, I would build tons of nukes. I would put R&D money into better nukes, into energy storage technology for transportation, and I would research fusion on all fronts. Electrical distribution would be a priority. The current plan of wind solar and geothermal is weak IMHO.

1) I think when the earth is at stake its worth speculating on worst case scenarios, uinvestigating what kind of threat the pose (as climatologists and ecologists do) and investigate if there are implementable solutions to avoid the threat.

The ministry of defence and foreign offices in many countries spends their time assessing potential threats, the generals acertain worse case scenarios and put together plans for response long before there is any certainty that they will actually happen. Meanwhile the diplomats go to the embasies of potential trouble spots and try to defuse the threat to prevent, say, a war from materialising the same is the case for the outbreak of disease and many other aspects of policy making.

When a potential threat is lurking in the future you prepare for it in the present even if your not fully sure that the worst case scenario will manifest itself. In terms of climate change, as I said before maybe it won't be that bad, but maybe it will and I'd rather not play Russian roulette with the Earth.

2) On the resiliance/fragility of the ecosystem. The ecosystem is fragile when it comes to sudden damage. But resiliant in terms of recovery. While the ecosystem as a whole can always recover, the species that inhabit it at any given time are fragile. The average life expectancy of a species is less than a million years. Right now we are wiping them out faster than they can evolve.

To the question will humanity leave a lasting scar on the planets ecological diversity?

Absolutely not! If your prepared to wait around for a few million years it'll be back to business as usual no matter what we do. But I don't want to wait around for a few million years and have future generation of human beings a few thousand years down the line cursing the legacy my generation left them.

I have read my own post and I don't believe it is an overstatement, human beings are affecting the majority of the Earth's surface, if I can't use vast swathes to describe the majority of the Earth's surface, I don't know what I can use those word to describe. Regarding HUNDREDS of chemicals, if anything that's an understatement, the ammount of new chemicals we release that are unfamilar to nature is far greater than hundreds and is probably closer to millions. Most of them don't have a hugely negative effect but it only takes a few to cause extinctions to species of animals and plants across the board.

If you look at the geological record its filled with extinction events, its filled with rapid instances of global climate change. Parts of the planet that were once on land are now below the sea, parts of the sea are now on land. Icecaps have come and gone, meteorites and volcanic activity have caused massive changes in our atmosphere and lead to exctinction events.


Do I think that human civilisation can cause something that has never happened before in geological history?

Ofcourse not.

Could human activity trigger a series of events that have occured in the past which have resulted in previous global disasters?

Yes. Climate change is natural in the grand scheme of things, but it is linked to extinctions. And human civilisation is frail. The Roman empire collapsed into the dark ages, the Sumerians population was devasted by salting of the land. Mayans: wiped out. These are things that really happened and they could happen again. There are places at the bottom of the Black Sea that show signs of human habitation, I bet those people also thought sea levels could never rise on such a scale, Britain was once linked by land to mainland Europe. Climate choas will hit us eventually (probably building most of our cities right next to the sea was a bad move in retrospect, but good for commerce) if only due to natural causes but there's no point in engaging in activities which could hasten the process.

And yes when I look at the history of the planet I do see fragility. During the Permian Period 90% of all multicellular species were wiped out.




P.S. I agree with you on nuclear energy. Future generation may look back to the 1980's and see the scaling down of the nuclear industry as the worst mistake we ever made. Solar power might do it though, especially this new technology of thin film deposition.

[jmc]

In fact I'm against our new President's plan to kill off coal plants before we have a lower cost replacement. It will cause some deaths. Maybe not many. It would be too many for me.

Depends... if taxation on coal power companies was used to subsidise the most vulnerable in society from going cold in the winter, it wouldn't cause any deaths at all. If would just make electricity a little more expensive for rich people.

[Mike Holmes]

I totally agree on the reasearch being a better way to spend the capital. Once the solutions are available, economic change will follow naturally. I think that in the long run, overall, research dollars are a good investment (the ones that fail produce good negative data, and the ones that succeed come up with benefits that pay for the failures).

The problem with the parallel to drug enforcement is that, as you're aware, trying to cut of supply doesn't damage the suppliers economically much at all. In fact it likely profits them far more than it damages them. So the problem is that we're actually creating economic incentive.

Sure there are unintended side effects from meddling. There are also unintended side effects that occur from deregulation or from simply adopting a policy of letting things take their "natural" course. The "invisible hand of the market" is like the weather. It provides us the rain we need to be profitable, but sometimes, just sometimes, it floods us out. On balance it's a good thing.

Government intervention has some rate of problems that it causes, sure. And I'm sure you'll argue that it's greater than just letting things take their natural course. But it makes sense to consider them on a case-by-case basis.

I could get into some examples of very successful programs, but I'm afraid of veering off of the subject. But how about the Manhattan Project for a government project that has had some amazing benefits. Not to mention some side-effects. Isn't promoting research in certain areas "meddling" too?

As for people being in a rush, the biggest rush is to get more money now. And because of that, and the corporate structure, as many bad decisions are made by corporations to increase short-term profits as are made by people rushing to have government do things. This is because corporations are essentially headless beings (being a drone that works for one myself). Managers report to higher managers and directors. These report to VPs, who report to the CEO. The CEO reports to the board of directors. And the board of directors reports to... who? The "Shareholders."

So... it's democracy where the expected action is that you'll always vote yourself more money. Wasn't it you who were saying that such democracies were problematic?

As somebody once quipped, "If murder were legalized, would you go out and kill people? Corporations would, if it meant they could turn a profit."

We're all members in a society, like it or not, and we have to trust each other to some extent. That's why we have a government that we arm to defend us (you know, common defense). Again, nobody is arguing that we all ought to just arm ourselves, get rid of the military, and enforce whatever law we think fit today? Right? And, yes, that means that we have to trust corporations within reason as well.

So claiming that all government intervention always causes worse problems than it solves is really non-sensical. Sure, fine, conservative can mean a policy of generally doing less. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't analyze each proposal on it's merits. Mary Shelly warned us that technology can make monsters, and she's right. Does that mean we should abandon technology, however? Because we're human, and fallible? How about we just try to do as well as possible? Both in government and business.

Mike