A Lid for the Can of Worms. Good Heavens, We'll Freeze to Death! 41

[ornerynorsk]

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/09/09/arctic-sea-ice-up-60-percent-in-2013/

Take that, Mr. Gore.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[rconnor]

Volcanoes are part of the carbon cycle; it just takes much, much longer to “restore” the carbon (to magma) than it does to emit it.

So by beej67’s logic, every natural and anthropogenic action is carbon neutral, outside of sending matter into space (assuming he’s putting the control volume around the planet). So chop and burn away, it will just replace itself!

 

[GregLocock]

So what timescale do you select as an appropriate one? I'm guessing several decades.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[ornerynorsk]

Thanks for that Compositepro. Don't mean to be trolling here, but my opinion exactly, I'm glad someone else came out and said it. I do believe most forms of "carbon sequestration" are going to be negative return, just like the ethanol debacle.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[cranky108]

There maybe a good result of the ethanol thing, in that it does reduce some smog components. But as a fuel, it is over priced, compaired to gasoline.

I also remember saying something about looking into all fuels, not just the favored few. Each has a place, and each excells at something the other don't. And by using mulitible fuels, it reduces the impact of shortages on any one.

A good example is wood. By me cutting down dead trees around my home, I lower the impact of a fire, and the wood heats my house, and not ends up in a land fill. I don't heat all my home with wood, but enough to reduce the usage of other fuels. However if saw mills were cheeper, and there was a market, I could also cut those trees for lumber.

My next step is to look into planting new trees, in areas where the trees died. But that may not work as the trees died from something.

 

[beej67]

The hell?

Plastic made from atmospheric carbon is somehow "carbon neutral" and fuel made from atmospheric carbon isn't?

Wood is fuel made from atmospheric carbon.

All those guys trying to make algae biofuels for their carbon-neutral-ness are no more carbon neutral than burning wood. It's the same thing. Actually, burning wood is much much better because it takes energy to make the algae biofuel (or fancy plastic) but it takes zero energy to grow a tree. Not only does it take zero energy, it absorbs energy from the very same energy balance equations all those atmospheric chemists are claiming support global warming. There's an 'albedo' term, remember? Yeah. There's the 'conservation of energy,' remember?

Wood is completely perfectly neutral. And not on some kind of insanely geologic time scale, it's perfectly neutral over the length of time it takes to grow a tree, which is much less than my lifetime. You guys are doing some serious back flips to get out of that one.

If the atmo chemists were correct, and the ONLY thing warming the earth was anthropogenic CO2, then we could stop global warming tomorrow by generating all our energy from burning wood, and replanting all harvested wood with more wood to be burned in the future. Completely carbon neutral over a reasonable time scale. If the atmo chemists are correct, the ONLY thing that causes warming is the burning of carbon that used to be interned deep in the earth in some manner. Not wood.

If that's un-intuitive, it should perhaps highlight the errors fundamental to the "CO2 boogeyman" case.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com