Posted on 03/04/2007 9:41:55 AM PST by Clive
More inconvenient truths
Planting trees won't save us, ethanol isn't cool, and rebuilding a city below sea level is insane
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
The more you research global warming, the more you realize we're being told things that don't add up.
Here's some examples.
"Green" celebrities often claim to reduce their carbon imprint to zero when flying around the world by buying "carbon offsets". One popular way of doing this is by planting trees.
Let's do the math. It takes 15 trees 40 to 50 years to absorb five tons of carbon.
A return flight from Toronto to Vancouver injects 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per passenger. Carbon dioxide takes 50 to 200 years to dissipate naturally.
Therefore, to absorb most of the carbon dioxide caused by one passenger taking one domestic round-trip flight across Canada in 2007, requires planting 15 trees today that won't complete the job until 2047-2057, assuming none is destroyed by fire, disease or insects. If they are, they'll release their carbon back into the atmosphere.
As Guy Dauncy and Patrick Mazza write in Stormy Weather, 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change, from which I took these figures: "(I)f we imagine that tree planting can be the solution to the world's climate problems, we may be making a massive miscalculation."
Flying is also just about the worst way to emit greenhouse gases. Taking one long flight can easily exceed a year's worth of car emissions. Plus, it injects the gas into the atmosphere at high altitude, heightening the greenhouse effect. The only way to be "carbon neutral" when flying is to get off the plane before it takes off.
Then there's Kyoto's "clean development mechanism" allowing developed countries to obtain "carbon credits" to emit more greenhouse gases by bankrolling projects to reduce them in developing nations. But we can't even be sure our foreign aid is reaching the people who most need it now. How can we possibly know these projects will ever happen, or do what we're told they'll do, particularly in corrupt dictatorships? Remember the widespread fraud in the UN's oil-for-food program in Iraq? Wait until Kyoto, a UN treaty, is fully operational.
We're told ethanol added to gasoline reduces greenhouse gases. Most ethanol in the U.S., the world's biggest emitter, comes from corn. It takes about 74 units of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuel energy to produce 100 units of ethanol energy. You also lose the carbon dioxide absorption value of the corn. While ethanol added to gas produces a net of 30% less carbon dioxide emissions compared to plain gas, to plant enough corn to make this significant for global warming, would, as Robert Henson writes in The Rough Guide to Climate Change, require covering 15% of the world's agricultural land -- a country the size of India -- with nothing but corn, solely for ethanol. That would cause starvation.
There's also a war between proponents of "adaptation" and "mitigation" in addressing global warming.
Supporters of "adaptation" argue people living below sea level near any large body of water, especially the oceans, will always be vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding, tsunamis, with or without global warming. They want to start moving the most vulnerable populations inland. For them, rebuilding New Orleans where it is, is madness.
They also argue that since we cannot abandon fossil fuels overnight, we must invest in new technology to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide burning them emits. They note global warming has some positive effects -- for example, a longer growing season in Canada -- of which we must take advantage.
WORTHLESS AND SINISTER
Incredibly, some "environmentalists" who advocate "mitigation" -- focusing only on reducing emissions -- describe these strategies as worthless, even sinister, arguing they distract from the crisis.
Their logic is insane. Man-made greenhouse gases last up to thousands of years. No matter how fast we reduce them, their concentrations in the atmosphere will rise for decades, the earth's temperatures for centuries.
That's what the science says. If it's right, the only policy that makes sense is mitigation and adaptation. Unless you think ideology is more important than humanity.
bttt
"A return flight from Toronto to Vancouver injects 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per passenger."
Assuming the plane carries 100 people, thats 500 tons of emissions per flight. It is a wonder they can even get that plane off the ground!
42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
I would not jump too quickly to that conclusion. Check out the climate data for the US at this location. Look at about 50 locations focusing on small towns if you can. Jot down the direction of the trend line. I think you will be surprised.
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/data/ushcn/ushcn.jsp
Once you have done that go to Steve McIntyre's site
www.climateaudit.org
and explore the Siberian influence on Global Warming. I think you will find the whole exercise worthwhile.
To balance the skeptics out you can visit
www.realclimate.org
These tend to be sites where they discuss data in non-hyperbolic ways.
Good luck.
Thanks for the links. I looked at some charts the other day that show we're coming out of a Little Ice Age. To me, that must mean we're warming up...and not by our own hand, either.
Your error is to use "per passenger" data from the airlines who carry over 100 people per flight. If you use your own private jet, with 6-10 passengers, the per-passenger emissions are much higher.
2. Most of the production of CO2 is from natural sources, man-made CO2 is less than 10%.
You are right regarding the balance, except for the fact that we are digging up carbon from the ground where it was probably produced from CO2 gas many centuries earlier (but see above).
I failed to add "sarcasm" to the post. My bad.
> Just keep in mind that trees wick moisture out of the ground. Massive tree planting would lead to ecological disaster. <
Definitely a top candidate for retarded post of the year.
Lots of these articles today. Could it be the tide is turning? Once again, Al's on the wrong side of history.
So you know all about this? Please tell me more. Am always willing to learn.
Haven't called someone retarded since I was 12.
Another way would be to convert all passenger jets to hydrogen fuel. Burning hydrogen produces only water. While water vapor is a so-called greenhouse gas, the emission of water vapor from jets is usually called a contrail, a condensation trail. It is a long threadlike cloud.Contrails and other cirrus clouds consist almost exclusively of ice crystals and generally exist or originate in areas of ambient temperature less than -36°C. In most formations and orientations, these ice crystals reflect light far more effectively in the infrared (terrestrial radiation) than in the visible (solar radiation) and consequently warm the earth. These clouds occur far more frequently than you might realize; thin cirrus often appears almost transparent to the human eye. Most stratus clouds by contrast cool the earth.And clouds reflect sunlight, cooling the Earth.
Actually, I have no objection to a warming Earth, even though my property here will end up inundated after a few thousand years.
Converting all air travel to hydrogen fuel would be a way of jump-starting the "Hydrogen Economy" and its requisite atomic energy production capacity.
Then anyone who wanted to drive a hydrogen car would just have to live near an airport.
I look at the idiocy of the "Global Warming" nonsense the way I regard my wife's requests to build a project or reconditiion a room ... "Well, okay, but I'll have to pick up a few new tools ..."
I like you am no expert buyt I do work with numbers and statistics and charts a lot. I know how to read them and how you can distort them. What is intriguing in these charts is that what you see is a gradual warming over 100s of years and that warming is relatively benign in terms of severe weather conditions. Please note that I am not saying that this long cycle warming is not happening. The debate boils down to -- if it is long cycle then the Sun (plus changes in orbits, inclinations and magnetic fields) is likely the primary cause but if it is short cycle then we may be having a non-trivial impact. The debate over Mann's hockey stick looking charts is really about the short cycle. It is here that the temperature records of the last 100 years come into play. AGW or anthropogenic global warming should be visible in this record. The data for the US suggests that it is not. What puzzles me in much of the debate on the more sophisticated sites is that much of the real data is masked through various aggregation procedures and once you disaggregate it - like the US temperature record - the effects disappear.
Equally puzzling is the nastiness of the debate among the scientists.
"Equally puzzling is the nastiness of the debate among the scientists."
Well, that all boils down to grant money and private-sector funding. Everyone's protecting their piece of the funding pie.
Same with the bad/bogus science on second hand smoke, trans-fats, oatmeal and cholesterol levels and cats being allowed to live in the house...or not. ;)
Good point, for the Algore, celebrity and politician type that's probably correct.
But, the article says 'Therefore, to absorb most of the carbon dioxide caused by one passenger taking one domestic round-trip flight across Canada in 2007, requires planting 15 trees today that won't complete the job until 2047-2057'
So, the authors is referring to a commercial flight in one paragraph, while stating the 'carbon footprint' (I hate that term) of a private jet in another.
I do think most of the hype about global warming is BS, but the author tries to make it sound like flying commercial uses more fuel that driving, which is wrong.
I went to your recommended site and checked out State College PA. Clearly a warming trend, especially in the 1950's, with a decline in the 60's-80's, and another increase since then, especially steep in 2000. Curious about that pattern, I used Google Earth to find the location of the reporting station. Looks like Old Main at Penn State. So the temperature was low when it was out in a field with no buildings around it, went up in the 50's as they built buildings around it, declined as the newly planted trees grew to shade it, then went up steeply when they did a lot of construction around it - rebuilding the road out front with a huge pedestrian plaza, updated the underground steam heat system, cutting out diseased trees. Yep, lots of Global Warming going on there. Thanks for the link!
Al Gore Jr.'s carbon offsets are stock he purchased in his very own carbon offset company.
Nice work if you can get it.
Cava, Cleeve? ;)
...good post! I've also followed material written by people who study recently more frequent solar events. They say that such activity has also contributed to warming trends.
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