{"id":2902,"date":"2015-07-13T21:23:50","date_gmt":"2015-07-13T21:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/?p=2902"},"modified":"2015-07-13T22:07:23","modified_gmt":"2015-07-13T22:07:23","slug":"climate-change-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/2015\/07\/13\/climate-change-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Climate change…<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We hear two warring parties…<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Party 1: Humans are evil, we are killing the planet, technology is bad, population is bad, we should all die and barring that we should all become Amish.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Party 2: Global warming?\u00a0 What global warming?\u00a0 Co2 is good for you, it’s good for the economy, energy drives the economy.\u00a0 Coal and oil is the economy.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t buy either camps story.\u00a0 Global warming is real, it isn’t caused by humans but it is exacerbated by humans.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The planet recovered from a seven mile asteroid strike 65 million years ago, it will recover from us.\u00a0 The planet isn’t the same as it was prior to the asteroid strike 65 million years ago, it won’t be the same as it was after us.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The planet started out life with a primarily carbon dioxide atmosphere.\u00a0 99.5% of that carbon dioxide has been sequestered and is now buried as limestone and hydrocarbons.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Plants need carbon dioxide.\u00a0 Carbon dioxide and water form the raw ingredients for synthesizing all the carbohydrates we love to eat.\u00a0 Plants also need nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and in very small amounts, sulphur, boron, copper, manganese, molybdenum, iron, zinc, and chloride.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Up to three or four times the current atmospheric level, most plants grow much faster with increased carbon dioxide levels.\u00a0 That’s good news and it’s bad news.\u00a0 It’s good news because as the rate of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere increases, so will the rate of carbon dioxide sequestration by plants.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The bad news?\u00a0 Faster growing plants absorb fewer minerals from the soil, many of which the plants don’t need and just absorb as a by-product of osmosis which carries minerals they do need and water up their roots.\u00a0 That’s not real bad news from the plants, but it is for animals which depend upon these nutrients the plants absorb.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So do I think putting more carbon dioxide into the air is a good thing?\u00a0 In the short term no.\u00a0 In 500 million years or so it might be a good thing because as the planet warms and it’s natural response is to decrease carbon dioxide, at least it has been over the last 3-1\/2 billion years, it will reach a point in about half a billion years where the carbon dioxide level is too low for plants to survive.\u00a0 If we’re still around in half a billion years and we help by adding carbon dioxide, then it’s going to become very hot.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 All that said, the Bible makes it clear that Earth was made for us humans.\u00a0 And… it tells us to be fruitful and multiply.\u00a0 It seems like we got the latter part of that command but not the former so much.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So I don’t buy the whole humans are evil and killing the planet bit.\u00a0 I do believe that being more fruitful involves among other things, getting along with each other and using technologies in ways that are in harmony with the planet and not opposed to it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 With respect to the run-away greenhouse theory, I would ask this simple question, if this were possible, since the Earth started with an atmosphere almost entirely of carbon dioxide, why didn’t it stay this way?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Because the theory is bunk.\u00a0 The reason Venus has such a huge amount of carbon dioxide isn’t because of a run-away, it’s because Venus being closer to the Sun lost most of it’s hydrogen to interstellar space and probably had less of it to begin with as volatiles tend to be in short supply nearer the sun, and thus ability to make water in large quantities.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Water, which is necessary to both life and plate tectonics (it acts as a lubricant), being largely absent on Venus, resulted in no life to sequester carbon dioxide in the oceans that didn’t exist, and no plate tectonics to sub-duct calcium carbonate from the non-existent oceans under the non-existent plates to be transformed in to hydrocarbons.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As the sun continues to heat up, in a billion years or so we will lose most of our hydrogen into space, and the Earth will become like Venus.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What is going to happen if we put too much carbon dioxide into the air is that it’s going to become uncomfortable for us and more cold climate species will die.\u00a0 Maybe we will make it hot enough for our own survival to become difficult to impossible.\u00a0 But once we are gone, the Earth will eventually re-establish equilibrium and new species will evolve to fill the niches created by the current extinctions.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So I do believe that continued transformation from an economy based upon burning hydrocarbons is in our best interest as well as the interests of many species with which we share the planet.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That said, I see a lot of good things happening in this regard.\u00a0 Denmark recently generated more than it’s entire national consumption in wind energy and actually sold surplus to Germany and some other neighboring countries.\u00a0 This proves that what utilities keep saying, that the grid can’t withstand more than 20% or so renewables, is just bunk.\u00a0 This level has been exceeded in Germany and the Netherlands as well.\u00a0 They key in those countries has been geographical diversity, and we have much more geography to diversify over than any of them.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some downer news, Lockheed Martin has pushed out the date for their fusion prototype to be ready from 2017 to 2025, guess they must have got the funding they were looking for.\u00a0 Sad to see this as I was not only looking forward to a new energy source but also for a big part of the military-industrial complex to have something productive and good to do rather than their usual destructive and evil doings.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Climate change… \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We hear two warring parties… \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Party 1: Humans are evil, we are killing the planet, technology is bad, population is bad, we should all die and barring that we should all become Amish. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Party … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","wpautop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/~nanook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}