Mass Plankton Die-Off

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Therapy

T... I have not seen enough to convince me that CO2 causes warming. Warming seems to cause CO2 increases to me ...

Both can be true, at differing times.

When the Earth comes out of an ice age, the warming is not initiated by CO2, but by changes in the Earth's orbit.

The warming causes the oceans to give up CO2. The CO2 amplifies the warming and mixes through the atmosphere, spreading warming throughout the planet.

So CO2 causes warming AND rising temperature causes CO2 rise.

[dacust]

Originally Posted by Therapy

Thanks for that.

I have not seen enough to convince me that CO2 causes warming. Warming seems to cause CO2 increases to me.

Yes, the pollution issue is certainly a big one. Much bigger than GW on my list. But then I own a plastic boat........

And when I get to get on it I breathe out a lot more CO2 than when I type here.

A big point from my way of thinking is this:

The changes most scientists propose are only the changes that make sense from a pollution and energy conservation standpoint, anyway. Looking for alternative energy sources to replace oil usage. Reducing emissions of various chemicals that have the potential (or are known) to cause harm.

When I have read the actual papers from people I judge to be proper scientists, they all caution that of course, we have to take the economy into account and only do what is practical.

Since we don't know the impact of humans on global warming, and we don't really know the extent of warming, if any, doesn't it still make sense to do those things we can do practicably that will help us in other ways, as well?

And, yes, I have seen all the quotes saying we have to abandon cars, trains, electricity and baby food. But those are not from the published papers of reputable scientists. (Unless they are out-of-context quotes.)

Someone in an earlier post said something like "We humans cannot change the situation". I say that's almost right. More like "We humans will probably never get together to try to change things until it's too late." To me, this is a case of: We can't guarantee success, but we can guarantee failure. If none of us try, we fail. If some of us try, we might, just might, succeed. Maybe we can improve the lot of our species just a little.

-dan

[knothead]

Can biochar help save the world? (2) | Fiona Harvey - China Dialogue

"To produce biochar on an industrial scale, traditional methods of charcoal production would be impractical. Instead, researchers are looking to pyrolysis -- a form of controlled thermal decomposition of organic material in the absence of oxygen, at heat that can reach 500° to 600° degrees Celsius.
Using pyrolysis also allows the capture of the syngas and the tarry liquid byproducts, both of which can be used as fuel to generate electricity or for the heating process.
The amount of biochar to be produced depends on accelerating or slowing down the pyrolysis process: fast methods produce 20% biochar and 20% syngas, with 60% bio-oil, while slow methods produce about 50% char and far smaller quantities of oil. "It's much easier to do slow pyrolysis as well," notes Adrian Higson of the United Kingdom's National Non-Food Crops Centre (NNFCC). "And cheaper." As modern pyrolysis plants can be run entirely from the syngas, the output is between three and nine times the energy input required, according to the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD).
What to use to make the char? Tearing down forests to turn into charcoal would be insane in climate-change terms. But there is plenty of other material. Agriculture produces large amounts of plant and animal waste -- straw, husks, dung. Even human waste -- sewage sludge, or some forms of household rubbish -- could be used.
And using waste products creates a double carbon saving: if left to rot, they produce methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. But the difficulty is in gathering the waste -- and making it economic to do so. Farmers will require some persuasion that the trouble of conserving and cooking their waste to a charcoal makes financial sense, and they may need new machinery to do so. At a municipal waste level, the problem will be sorting the organic waste, which can be turned to char, from the rest of the rubbish -- and proving that this is cheaper and more beneficial than merely burying it.
The IGSD suggests a way of marrying small-scale and industrial methods for producing the char, that if refined could enable the economically viable production of biochar in urban, rural and even poor regions. It suggests three possible systems. The first is a centralised scheme, whereby all waste biomass in a given region would be brought to a central plant for processing; the second is a decentralised system in which each farmer or a small group of farmers would have their own fairly low-tech pyrolysis kiln.
The third system proposes a mobile alternative, in which a vehicle equipped with a pyrolyser -- powered using syngas -- would visit small farms, returning the biochar to the farmers to use, while collecting the bio-oil to be transported to a refinery and turned into liquid biofuel for vehicles. As an example, the IGSD cites Brazil's sugar cane industry, in which the tops of the canes, normally burned in the field, and the bagasse -- the residue from sugar production -- could be turned efficiently into biochar. It estimates that of the 460 megatonne annual sugar cane harvest, as much as 230 megatonnes could be available for pyrolysis.
A clutch of companies is now working on these problems, and seeking to commercialise biochar as a medicine for both climate and soil, and as an energy source."

Charcoal burning conversion kits, which are really wood gas generators, enjoyed a brief civilian and military niche market in England, Germany, Australia, the United States, and other countries up to and during World War II. Wood gas generators were used to power taxis in Korea as late as 1970.
A charcoal burner actually burns the gases produced by heated wood. The burner is a two part system: a closed chamber with chunks of wood in it, and a charcoal burner to heat the closed chamber and make the wood generate gases by a process called pyrolysis.
Flammable gases produced by pyrolysis are then routed to a carburetor of sorts, mixed with air, and burned in the engine’s combustion chambers. Once the wood in the closed chamber has produced gases and turned to charcoal, it is transferred to the charcoal burner to heat the next load of wood. Some charcoal-fueled cars were designed to be started on gasoline, and would then be switched to charcoal once the vehicle was underway.

Charcoal Powered Cars: They were Smokin’ « The Ayson Chronicles: A Life Online

[S&S]

Originally Posted by dacust

Someone in an earlier post said something like "We humans cannot change the situation". I say that's almost right. More like "We humans will probably never get together to try to change things until it's too late." To me, this is a case of: We can't guarantee success, but we can guarantee failure. If none of us try, we fail. If some of us try, we might, just might, succeed. Maybe we can improve the lot of our species just a little.

-dan

Well, we don't even know whether we're even instrumental in "success" or "failure" or even have a good definition of what those are in this context.

So, what are we supposd to try in this context?

Reducing pollution, toxic runoff etc. are good things relating to their contexts, but as as to global warming/cooling, what's success and what's failure? Especially since we can expect the climate to change over time regardless of our activities? Even if we add a little to the trend or don't, the climate won't remain static.

[S&S]

Originally Posted by knothead

Can biochar help save the world? (2) | Fiona Harvey - China Dialogue

Wow, I did that as a 6th grade science fair project, a lot of years ago.

Destructive distillation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[dacust]

Originally Posted by S&S

Well, we don't even know whether we're even instrumental in "success" or "failure" or even have a good definition of what those are in this context.

So, what are we supposd to try in this context?

Reducing pollution, toxic runoff etc. are good things relating to their contexts, but as as to global warming/cooling, what's success and what's failure? Especially since we can expect the climate to change over time regardless of our activities? Even if we add a little to the trend or don't, the climate won't remain static.

The scientists speculate that the pollution and some toxins are related to global warming. If it makes sense to reduce pollution and toxins anyway, why not? If, in the future, we find that global warming is, indeed, a problem, we may have gotten lucky and done something to lessen it's impact.

And of course, the climate won't remain static. No one said without humans there would be no climate change. They say that the warming may be more with human input.

-dan

[beowulfborealis]

We have known about this for some time. I talked to many marine biologists at UCSB's Marine Science Institute about this. This reduction in biomass of phytoplankton is also happening to most marine species. Nobody knows why, but the Pacific Ocean in the Southern California area around the Channel Islands has been getting cooler, and the entire biomass of all species seems to have declined about 40% in the past half century. Having been a fisherman and surfer, I can ditto the data. I watched many marine species decline during that time. I remember how easy calico bass were to catch in the 1970s. Now you hardly see them at all. I also remember how the water seemed warmer back then, and now most people wear wet suits when the surf Santa Barbara breaks. I remember how every spring there used to be a nice yellowtail bite at the Coronado Islands off Mexico in April. It was like clockwork. I talked to the captain of the fishing boat Shogun a few years ago and he told me there hasn't been a spawning run at those islands (and bite) in years.

My guess would be increased radiation from the sun in the ultraviolet spectrum or something of that nature. Perhaps even changes in space weather. I don't think industrial CO2 could account for this. The first three feet of ocean has 80% of the life in it, but is also prone to DNA damage in that top layer of water since the filtering effect of the particulate matter and light scattering is minimal. It took life hundreds of millions of years to adapt to life on land probably because there wasn't enough oxygen in the atmosphere to block the DNA damaging UV light, but life exsisted happily in the oceans since the Precambrian and beyond. But then, I listen to AM Coast to Coast radio too.

[roverhi]

Global warming is way better than the opposite weather phenomonon. Just think of the chaos would ensue if everything above about 40 degrees latitude was buried under a mile of ice.

[Therapy]

Originally Posted by GordMay

Both can be true, at differing times.

When the Earth comes out of an ice age, the warming is not initiated by CO2, but by changes in the Earth's orbit.

The warming causes the oceans to give up CO2. The CO2 amplifies the warming and mixes through the atmosphere, spreading warming throughout the planet.

So CO2 causes warming AND rising temperature causes CO2 rise.

CO2 doesn't do squat as a "warming" gas.

Is it the key? I still don't think so. But that is just me.

Since methane is many times more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas on an equal mass basis, this result does not bode well for the future radiative forcing of climate as portrayed by state-of-the-art climate models. Other CO2 enrichment studies of rice have produced just the opposite result, however, suggesting we do not have a full and complete understanding of this phenomenon. [See, for example, Schrope et al. (1999) and Kruger and Frenzel (2003).] More research will be needed to better define this important issue.

Water vapor anyone?

Let's fund more research.
I would like a gr(ee)ant for a sail to rice growing areas.

[Therapy]

See, there is just too much BS in all this.

What it means
The fact that Martrat et al. discovered that the entire Holocene to date "shows a stable SST trend similar to those in previous interstadial stages, tending toward progressively cooler climate conditions," suggests, in their words, that "the next bifurcation of the climate system may appear as an extremely intense cooling if the future natural climate is going to develop as an analog of some of the preceding warm periods." Since this has indeed been the pattern in the past, there is no reason not to expect it to recur in the future, unless the overdue-glaciation hypothesis of Ruddiman et al. is correct, which suggests that even if the world's climate alarmists are correct in imputing great strength to the greenhouse effect of CO2, we ought not interfere with that phenomenon, as it may be what is keeping us from experiencing a far worse fate than anything the world's climate alarmists have yet imagined.


Ps. I prefer beer to spirits. I don't know why, I just do. Maybe because there is the ability to have more sips per hour before passing out. Is there a substitute for beer that doesn't take up as much storage space? Like concentrated or something.

[anotherT34C]

Originally Posted by dacust

The scientists speculate that the pollution and some toxins are related to global warming.

No, it's physics, not speculation. CO2 must reflect infrared. It can't not.

[anotherT34C]

Originally Posted by Therapy

CO2 doesn't do squat as a "warming" gas.

"Squat" relative to what exactly? How exactly are you quantifying "squat"?

Since methane is many times more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas on an equal mass basis,

relevance?

this result does not bode well for the future radiative forcing of climate as portrayed by state-of-the-art climate models.

How?

Other CO2 enrichment studies of rice have produced just the opposite result, however, suggesting we do not have a full and complete understanding of this phenomenon. [See, for example, Schrope et al. (1999) and Kruger and Frenzel (2003).] More research will be needed to better define this important issue.

Can you cite the journals, please? And explain your thesis more clearly?

Water vapor anyone?

Again, relevance? Can you explain exactly what you mean by this?

[markpierce]

Originally Posted by Therapy

I prefer beer to spirits. I don't know why, I just do. Maybe because there is the ability to have more sips per hour before passing out. Is there a substitute for beer that doesn't take up as much storage space? Like concentrated or something.

Maybe try booze diluted with sea water and/or fresh water from the tank.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Therapy

... Is there a substitute for beer that doesn't take up as much storage space? Like concentrated or something.

Wine?

[mintyspilot]

Originally Posted by anotherT34C

Can you cite the journals, please? And explain your thesis more clearly?

CO2 Science (Shrope at al)

CO2 Science (Kruger et al)

Both contain citations to the original journals